"The Light of Science and Religion": Women's Education, the Language of Conquest, and Emerging Midwestern Identities on the Illinois Frontier, 1830–1850

Abstract

"The Light of Science and Religion"Women's Education, the Language of Conquest, and Emerging Midwestern Identities on the Illinois Frontier, 1830–1850 Jenny Barker-Devine (bio) In 1832, the frontier community of Jacksonville, Illinois, was "little better than a group of log cabins" amid the open prairie. For a small group of women recently removed from New England and the Mid-Atlantic, however, the burgeoning village was the site of "some important revolution." United by a conviction that women's education was "intimately connected with the best interests of our country," they founded the Ladies Association for Educating Females (LAEF) to create networks for teachers and distribute scholarships to young women. In 1834, LAEF secretary Caroline Wilder Baldwin imparted the urgency of their mission when she estimated that approximately 40,000 new teachers were needed to instruct the 1.4 million children bereft of schools in the western states. She pressed members to "take possession, and labor till we have a nation of educated mothers and well-qualified teachers; till the cloud of mental darkness which now hangs over us is rolled away, and the light of science and religion shines in unbroken splendor."1 Baldwin's framing of women's education as an issue of national significance was characteristic of White, Protestant, Yankee women who built educational institutions in Illinois during the 1830s. Motivated by Protestant theologies that characterized the American frontier as a dissolute, howling wilderness, women utilized a shared language of conquest to facilitate personal relationships and professional networks. Women educators believed they could transform communities and thereby shape the social and political destiny of the Midwest and the nation. By 1850, however, tensions with eastern women over finances and authority over education in the West led women in Illinois to develop new, midwestern identities. [End Page 37] The story of LAEF exemplifies the complex intersections of settler colonialism, gender, geography, education, and personal relationships. In his 2018 historiographic essay on this period in Illinois, historian John Craig Hammond calls for more focused community studies, arguing that the Mississippi River Valley is best understood "as a series of local struggles that were part of a larger imperial conflict for supremacy on the North American continent." When reconsidered as a borderlands, Illinois emerges as "a place of intense conflict and cooperation involving a multitude of peoples, nations, and conflicting imperial and local visions of settlement and development." In the early nineteenth century, Yankees embraced this contentious view of the Midwest, regarding it as a subregion of a larger American West that was an empty wilderness without Protestant churches and schools to safeguard against savagery. The only solution was an orderly settlement wherein regional values related to propriety, education, thrift, and free labor prevailed over those of upland Southerners.2 Jacksonville, Illinois, like many communities in the Old Northwest, faced immediate local struggles based on larger imperial conflicts. Before 1840, most White migrants into Illinois came from the South, bringing with them politics that favored rapid westward expansion and limited government. In 1825, southern Democrats named the town in honor of Andrew Jackson, their recently defeated, slave-holding presidential candidate. In 1828, John Ellis, a New England-born Presbyterian missionary, selected the village as the site for Illinois College (IC), the first baccalaureate institution in the state. Seeing the college as a vehicle for economic progress, local residents initially supported the enterprise. Ellis was further aided by the socalled Yale Band, a group of newly ordained Congregational ministers. They invited Edward Beecher, the son of the Reverend Lyman Beecher, and the younger brother of educator Catharine Beecher, to serve as first president. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, regional differences fueled town and gown tensions over religion, student behavior, curriculum, and abolition. Nevertheless, nearly two hundred years later, the IC website still celebrates the school's founders who "firmly imbued the new College with New England traditions and academic foundations."3 During the early nineteenth century, those academic foundations proved contentious. Public schools failed to materialize across the Old Northwest because state legislatures fiercely debated educational policy along partisan lines. Southerners tended to oppose state-controlled educational systems, while Yankees believed a public investment in educational institutions prepared [End...