organized far more often than that. Certainly that was the case with Litchfield Female Academy. Although the school did not offer dancing lessons, student diaries and journals are punctuated with references to “pretty agreeable” balls, “very agreeable” balls, “school balls” composed of students only, and “public balls,” where scholars mingled with select townsmen and -women.44
The point of dancing was not simply to school the body in grace but also to put the graceful body in the service of polite society. If student balls were rehearsals, public balls were auditions. Students were judged on their dancing and on the number of partners they attracted. But observers also took note of their dress, mien, conversation, and charm. Scattered accounts from diaries, letters, and memoirs suggest that young women were ranked more on appearance; young men, on their social skills. In both cases, the stakes were high. Most obviously, balls served as very public vehicles for initiating courtship. They also served as a proving ground for polite society. As a middle-aged woman quipped after watching the “heels fly this way and that” at a Litchfield ball, “This is solemn business.” Or, in the words of her companion, a law student seeking the admiration of Litchfield’s loveliest belles and the respect of its best families, balls “could make toil of pleasure as the old man said when he buried his wife.”45
Like mastery of the body, mastery of the politesse that made balls such serious business was a formal part of academy educations. Especially around the turn of the nineteenth century, academies and seminaries took pains to assure parents and patrons that they could train citizens who were as well mannered as they were virtuous. Schools promised to police sloppy table manners, hush loud laughter, and calm boisterous behavior. But they also pledged to inculcate the sort of manners appropriate to a harmoniously hierarchical social order. Prominent among the “rules” that students at Litchfield Academy copied every year, for example, was a definition of politeness that directed “Every real Lady” to “treat her superior with due reverence” and her “companions with politeness.” According to the trustees of New Hampshire’s Atkinson Academy, precisely because politeness formed the “basis of honour & happiness to individuals, the foundation of harmony to society & felicity to nations,” students must extend respect to superiors, friendship to equals, and courtesy to inferiors. At Leicester Academy, students were required to leave their heads uncovered when a tutor was present in the yard, even though they might be older than the tutor. Looking back on the practice some fifty years after the fact, John Pierce, who had served as an assistant preceptor in the 1790s, conceded that the practice probably seemed “extreme” to those who had grown up a generation or two later. But surely, he insisted, this rather stuffy past was preferable to the present, in which all forms of deference had fallen by the wayside.46 Pierce understood that the outmoded rules of his youth had ensured order within the academy and beyond it. They prescribed clear channels of deference for students whose age or family background might otherwise allow them to claim precedence over instructors and schoolmasters just as they primed students to assume their proper social place after graduation.
The codification of etiquette also underscored the explicitly social ends of an academy education. Far from cultivating intellect for its own sake, academies groomed young men and women to take their places on a larger stage, one that began immediately outside the academy yard. Consider, for example, the cautions, prohibitions, and exhortations for student behavior on the streets. On their way to and from school, students were to refrain from “uncouth noises and gestures.” They were to keep to the public roads and not trample across private property. They must not be “rude to any Person” and should extend themselves by “paying a handsome compliment to the passing stranger or citizen, by pulling off the hat or otherwise, as propriety & genteel conduct may require.” They were in short, to “manifest, by [their] whole deportment, respect for the quiet of the place,” and thereby “win the respect of the residents” for themselves and their teachers.47 The imperative to maintain good-neighbor status accounted for much of this concern. No academy could afford to have its students associated with rowdiness or impropriety by the surrounding community. But more than town-gown diplomacy was in play.
Admonitions about students’ public behavior, read alongside contemporary descriptions of students and reminiscences about academy life, reveal a selfconscious sense of young women and men on display. Especially in provincial towns and villages, where local academies were associated with brilliant careers and sparkling sociability, students constituted a special—and especially observed—group. This was as true in church as it was in the street or in the ballroom. Students at many academies attended church as members of a group, with the academy “family” sitting alongside the congregation’s other, natal families. Numbers alone would have rendered them conspicuous. But some students sought seats that afforded them maximum visibility. In Litchfield, for example, Sarah Pierce’s decorous young ladies preferred a “select” group of benches up front, where they were both free from immediate adult supervision and visible to the rest of the congregation. One student recalled that when “out girls” (farmers’ daughters who lived “out” as “help” in village families) arrived at church early to commandeer the choice pews, a surreptitious battle of “pinching, pin pricking, and punching” ensued until the “school girls” could reclaim their turf the following week. Some seventy miles north in Massachusetts, male students from the Monson Academy were consigned to rear pews. But they nevertheless imagined themselves to be visible, at least to those who mattered most. Decades after leaving the academy, Charles Hammond could still summon to his mind’s eye the “dioramic procession of the fathers and magnates of the town” as they promenaded with their families past the scholars to seats at the very front of the church. The front seats of the old-fashioned, three-sided pews were occupied by the heads of households, who sat with their backs to the minister, facing their wives and children. But in Hammond’s telling, the notables kept their eyes “always directed toward us”—the academy students. As he “watched them in turn,” Hammond judged them to be exemplars of “personal gravity.”48 In this fantasy of mutual recognition, the “fathers and magnates” served as a mirror into the future, allowing Hammond to anticipate his own “personal gravity.”
Not all the fantasies spun by this sort of visibility were so uplifting, especially where young women were concerned. Poised on the brink of courtship, female students often figured as objects of sexual desire. This was certainly the case in Litchfield. There is no doubt that Sarah Pierce, a devout Christian and a shrewd politician, held her charges to the strictest standards of decorum. Yet the proximity of Tapping Reeve’s law school meant that the young women faced a steady stream of potential suitors, to say nothing of men who were less interested in securing wives than in testing their own appeal. The charged atmosphere that resulted reverberates through student diaries and letters and into late nineteenth-century memoirs of life in “olden times.” Recalling his arrival in Litchfield as a new law student, Edward Mansfield wrote that one of the “first objects that struck [his] eyes” was a procession of “school girls.” Some fifty years later, he could still recall the scene: He stood atop a hill, looking down onto a parade of “gaily dressed” ladies who passed beneath “lofty elms,” moving in time to the music of a “flute and a flageolet.” He was entranced. In subsequent months, he confessed, “one of [his] temptations” was to time his walk in order to “meet the girls, who … were often seen taking their daily walk.” This fascination with the town’s concentration of eligible “girls” was more than the nostalgia of an old man who found a wife among Pierce’s students. The “private journals” of John P. Brace, who taught at the school in the 1810s, are shot through with erotic tension. Frankly assessing his students’ charms, Brace vacillated between swaggering proclamations that were he not a teacher he could triumph as a beau and nagging fears that he would never measure up to the ladies’ exacting expectations. And a law student, George Younglove Cutler, filled up a journal with comments about the appearance and dress of Litchfield’s belles that he illustrated and then circulated among male and female friends. It was no secret among his intimates, then, that Miss Hart appeared “most horribly fashionable in her accouterments,” that Miss Talmadge was “certainly elegant,” and that when Miss Munson dressed with fewer ruffles, her shoulders appeared “infinitely more to advantage
