Table of Contents

1. Overview
2. The Child’s World and Image
3. Wampanoag Education and Oral Tradition
4. New England Primer
5. Indian Primer
6. Catechism
7. Logick Primer
8. Corporal Punishment
9. Children’s Conversion Narratives
10. The Schoolhouse
11. Harvard Indian College
12. Wheelock’s Indian School

The New England Primer

Education and salvation were inextricably linked in the minds of New England Puritans.  Whereas other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Englishmen viewed children as more innocent than adults, Puritans saw children as equally sinful and even more depraved because children lacked proper socialization (Cooke 420; Stannard 1975: 13).  Educational materials such as the New England Primer did more than teach children to read and write:  they taught children how to save their souls.(1)  The message these books contained was not one of uplift or angels singing in the halls of celestial heavens, but rather the only possible means to escape the fiery horror of hell, whose tortures they described in lavish and loving detail (Ford 3).

The New England Primer was the most popular children’s book in New England.  The Primer was the Puritans answer to the Catholic unification of alphabet and creed found in the Enschedé Abecedarium and the enormously popular Book of Hours (2) (Ford 8).  The first Puritan attempt at their own educational manual was Benjamin Harris’s Protestant Tutor (1679) (3), which sold for eight pence and contained many selections later found in New-England Primer, including the roman letters, the Syllabarium, the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, the Ten Commandments, the John Rogers biography and verses, words from two to seven syllables, the Proper Names, and a catechism (Ford 34-35).  Although the book was popular among Puritans, its anti-Papal rhetoric was less pleasing to the Catholic monarch James II, and consequently he had Harris imprisoned (Ford 28-30).  Upon his release, Harris took refuge in New England, and printed a cheaper, abridged form of the Tutor on American soil and aptly renamed it The New England Primer. No copies of this edition remain, as they were literally read to pieces (Ford 38-39).  The first remaining edition of New England Primer is the one from 1727, selections of which are included in the archive.  For at least one hundred years the New England Primer was the schoolbook of choice in Puritan New England, and during the subsequent century it continued to be reprinted frequently.  As late as 1849, it was estimated that 100,000 copies had been sold in the preceding twelve years (Ford 45).

The New England Primer is a fascinating record not only of Puritan perceptions of educational and religious philosophy, but also of the changes in New England religion over time.  Each edition updated aspects of the primer, most noticeably the treatment of the monarchy and the illustrated alphabet.  Although sometimes trivial, these changes sometimes reflect major social upheavals.  For example, editions from before after the First Great Awakening (1735-1740s) have radically different versions of the illustrated alphabet:  although both begin with “In Adam’s Fall/ We sinned all,” the 1727 edition combines Biblical and Monarchal concepts with ones that feature cats, dogs, and the like.  In contrast the 1762 edition has eliminated these more light-hearted references, and replaced them with more serious and apocalyptic Biblical figures and events.  Such changes are helpful for placing the Indian Primer (1720, 1747) and Mayhew’s vision of childhood in Indian Converts in their proper historical context. Like the 1727 New England Primer, these books stand poised upon the apocalyptic precipice of the First Great Awakening, the apocalyptic and enthusiastic religious movement that swept New England in the 1730s and 1740s.  It is worth considering whether the primers and Mayhew’s text are best understood as predecessors or participants in this important ideological shift.  The desire to educate children to become Americans, rather than Englishmen is also reflected in changes in the Primer during the eighteenth-century.  In early editions, the frontispiece portrait, alphabet, and dedications all contain attempts to connect the book and children’s sense of self to the monarchy;  however, these allusion gradually disappear in later editions.  Indeed, by the end of the American Revolution references to the King and Queen had been replaced by allusions to George Washington, John Hancock, and other more appropriately “patriotic” figures (Ford 63, 104).  Although some scholars have argued that children in Puritan New England were treated as small adults (Zuckerman 73;  Demos, 139;  Stannard 1975:  10), the New England Primer and “Pious Children” section of Mayhew’s Indian Converts provide an important corrective to this perspective.  Although it is unlikely that the American public today would deem either of these tracts appropriate reading material for their children, the books were tailored to meet the special, and changing, needs of Puritan youths.  Likewise, these works reveal a distinctly Puritan way of caring for and about the youngest members of their society (4).

Notes

Items Related to New England Primer in the Archive

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