Qualified teachers long remained scarce, and many counties employed almost any person professing an ability to teach if he gave evidence of good moral character, a criterion regarded as important as academic preparation. Perhaps a high percentage of the teachers, like those of Harrison County, could be described as “generally men of good moral character but not…men of high literary acquirements.”2 By 1840 several counties had begun to employ women as teachers of small children.
Schools of West Virginia did not differ substantially from those in other parts of the United States. Most of them emphasized reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic. Worn copies of the Bible and the New Testament served for textbooks in many classrooms. Both teachers and parents believed in rigid discipline, and the ability to keep order and maintain respect was considered the mark of a good teacher.
District Free Schools. Prospects for free schools brightened in 1829, when the General Assembly provided for the division of counties into school districts and the establishment of a free school in each district. Unfortunately, the legislation was permissive rather than mandatory, and few counties cared to tax themselves for free schools. The first West Virginia county to attempt the plan was Monroe, which established a free school at Sinks Grove in 1829, but it abandoned the system in 1836. Influential men still believed that free schools simply saddled “the liberal and just” with the burden of educating the children of the “parsimonious and niggardly.”3
An address by Governor David Campbell to the legislature in 1839 detailing widespread illiteracy and revelations of the census of 1840 that the problem was actually increasing galvanized advocates of free public schools into action. They held a series of educational conventions, the most important of which were at Clarksburg, Lexington, and Richmond.
The Clarksburg Convention, held September 7 and 8, 1841, attracted 114 persons, most of them from northern West Virginia. George Hay Lee, an eminent barrister of Clarksburg, served as chairman. The gathering drew wide support from political, religious, social, and journalistic leaders. Fourteen members were at the time or would soon become state legislators. Prominent newspapermen in attendance included Benjamin Bassel of the Clarksburg Scion of Democracy and Enos W. Newton, who founded the Charleston Kanawha Republican less than three months later.
Alexander Campbell and Henry Ruffner delivered two of the major addresses to the convention. Blending Jeffersonian liberalism and Christian idealism, Campbell called for an educational system based upon a “common Christianity” and stressing piety and morality. He branded the principles underlying the Literary Fund humiliating and proclaimed that “we do not want poor schools for poor scholars, or gratuitous instruction for paupers; but we want schools for all at the expense of all.”4 Ruffner, a prominent Presbyterian minister and educator, proposed public education financed through a general property tax and administered by a state superintendent. The convention urged rich as well as poor to support the free school movement as essential to the preservation of American democracy and appealed to the legislature to establish district free schools “good enough for the rich” in order that “they may be fit for the poor.”5
The Clarksburg Convention stirred interest in free schools as never before. West Virginians watched closely the conventions held in Lexington and Richmond later that year. The Richmond Convention, dominated by Thomas Ritchie, editor of the Richmond Enquirer, rejected Ruffner's plea for a general property tax and the creation of state normal schools for the training of teachers, but it endorsed free public schools for all white children of school age and support for academies and colleges. Western leaders feared that inclusion of academies and colleges might divert attention from the pressing need for elementary schools, but they conceded that the agitation would at least keep the free school issue alive.
Responding to mounting public clamor, the legislature in 1846 provided methods whereby the counties might institute the district free school plan either through action of the county courts or petition of their citizens. The lawmakers did not mandate the plan, however, and left financing at the county level. Kanawha County adopted the district free school plan in 1847, Jefferson and Ohio soon followed suit, and at least six others were contemplating it when the Civil War came.
Most West Virginians, unfortunately, remained apathetic toward education. The thousands of petitions addressed to the legislature emphasized material interests, such as roads, bridges, ferry franchises, tax relief, and other mundane matters, and relatively few mentioned education. Moreover, some Virginians took advantage of statistics on crime, illiteracy, and economic fluctuations in the northern states, including New York and Massachusetts, to reflect favorably upon conditions in their own state and to foster a deadening complacency that counteracted efforts at reform.
Academies. Education for most West Virginians ended with the common school. Only the middle and upper classes could afford attendance at academies, with their tuition and costs, for many students, of boarding and lodging away from home. Motivated by patriotic and religious ideals, founders of academies believed that middle class virtues and moral principles constituted the underpinning of the American republic. They did not subscribe to a social leveling theory of education, and they believed that the republic itself would be in jeopardy if the middle classes sank to the status of the poor. Education should assure political, social, and economic opportunity; uphold property rights and class distinctions; provide enlightened leadership; and produce knowledgeable and responsible citizens.
Although academies served youths with diverse interests, many emphasized the training of ministers. Protestant churches, particularly Presbyterian and Episcopalian, were active in their establishment. Outstanding clerical leaders included Alexander Campbell, the founder and benefactor of Buffalo Academy at Bethany; Henry Ruffner, the chief promoter and first instructor at Mercer Academy at Charleston; John McElhenney of Lewisburg Academy; Gordon Battelle of Northwestern Academy at Parkersburg; Alexander Martin of Preston Academy at Kingwood and later first president of West Virginia University; and Dr. Henry Foote of Romney Academy.
Between the founding of Shepherdstown Academy about 1784 and the Civil War, some sixty-five academies were established in West Virginia. The first ones were mostly in the eastern and northern parts of the state at such places as Shepherdstown, Martinsburg, Charles Town, Romney, Morgantown, Clarksburg, Wheeling, West Liberty, and Wellsburg. Stable academies in the more thinly populated southern sections included Mercer, Lewisburg, Marshall at Huntington, and Union at Alderson.
Except for granting charters, authorizing lotteries for fund-raising, and extending occasional aid from the Literary Fund, the legislature of Virginia gave little support to academies. Randolph Academy, founded at Clarksburg in 1787, was an important exception. The legislature anticipated that in time it would become the state-supported college for the Allegheny section of the state, just as the College of William and Mary served the Tidewater and Piedmont and Transylvania Seminary served the Kentucky area. Despite its distinguished board of trustees and diversion of part of the surveyors' fees from several counties to its use, Randolph Academy never fulfilled its promise, and by 1830 its days were numbered.
Most academies offered English grammar, ancient languages, history, natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and mathematics, and several added practical subjects such as geography, surveying, navigation, and astronomy. The Wheeling Lancastrian Academy, founded in 1814 and later renamed Linsly Institute, made use of a monitorial system on the premise that more effective teaching could be combined with economies in operation. Financed by a bequest from Noah Linsly, it may have been the first private institution chartered in a slave state for the education of the poor.
Higher Education. With their stress upon the availability of education for all children, many West Virginians were downright hostile toward expenditure of state money for higher education, which they considered elitist. Few West Virginia youths attended either the University of Virginia or Virginia Military Institute, the nearest state institutions to them. Those from northern counties generally preferred Dickinson College at Carlisle or