William Holmes McGuffey

American educator

• Born: September 23, 1800
• Birthplace: Washington County, Pennsylvania
• Died: May 4, 1873
• Place of death: Charlottesville, Virginia

A college president, professor, and Presbyterian clergyman in the Ohio Valley, McGuffey compiled the most famous series of school textbooks in American history. His six Eclectic Readers sold more than 122 million copies between 1836 and 1920, and impressed upon young Americans the virtues of individual morality, thrift, hard work, and sobriety.

Early Life

Born on his mother’s family farm, William Holmes McGuffey was the second child and the eldest son of Alexander and Anna Holmes McGuffey. His mother had seven children before she died in 1829. His grandfather William McGuffey (1742-1836) and grandmother Ann McKittrick (1747-1826) had emigrated from Wigtown, Gallowayshire, Scotland, in 1774, sailing on the stormy Atlantic for thirteen weeks before landing in Philadelphia. His father was only seven years old when the family came to America, on the eve of the Revolutionary War. After a short stay in the city, the McGuffeys moved due west to carve out a farm in York County on the edge of the Appalachian mountains, which was their wartime home.

Like thousands of other Scottish immigrants, who traditionally disliked the British, the elder William McGuffey enlisted in the Pennsylvania regiments and served under General George Washington until the defeat of General Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781. In 1789, the family moved to the western edge of Pennsylvania, settling along Wheeling Creek in Washington County, south of Pittsburgh. Living among English and Scotch-Irish immigrants, the war veteran became known as “Scotch Billy.” His son Alexander, nicknamed “Sandy,” became a skilled frontiersman with his rifle, and with a friend, Duncan McArthur, became a scout and soldier in the Indian wars of the 1790’s. They marched with General Anthony Wayne to drive the Indians out of the Ohio Territory.

After returning from the Miami Valley, Alexander married Anna Holmes in 1797, and they lived with her family in Pennsylvania, where three children were born: Jane (in 1799); William Holmes (in 1800); and Henry (in 1802). When Ohio entered the Union in 1803, Alexander moved his family directly north from West Alexander and across the Pennsylvania state line into Trumbull (modern Mahoning) County, near Youngstown, Ohio, where he had erected a windowless log cabin. There, four more daughters and one son, Alexander, Jr., were born. As the oldest boy, William worked long hours on the Ohio farm to support the growing family. After he had left home, his mother died there at the age of fifty-three in 1829. Two years later, his father was remarried, to Mary Dickey, and in 1836, after the birth of three more daughters, he moved his family and father back to the Keystone state, where “Scotch Billy” died at the age of ninety-four.

McGuffey’s early education began in the family’s log cabin, where his mother taught her children the three R’s. Local “subscription schools,” generally taught by a young man or minister, provided further education. Like Abraham Lincoln in western Kentucky amid similar wilderness conditions, young McGuffey borrowed books from neighbors, memorized portions of the Bible and sermons, read before the fireplace, and taught his younger brothers and sisters. His father crafted an adjustable wooden candlestand that provided better light for his love of learning. Before his fourteenth birthday, “Master McGuffey” advertised opening his own school at West Union (modern Calcutta, Ohio), with a four-month term starting in September, 1814; forty-eight pupils paid two dollars each for his instruction.

McGuffey attended the Reverend William Wick’s boarding school in Youngstown for a year or two, then took his high school level studies at the Old Stone Academy in Greersburg (modern Darlington), Pennsylvania, under the tutoring of Presbyterian minister and principal Thomas E. Hughs. From Greersburg he acquired sufficient command of classical languages for admission in 1820 to Washington College in Washington, Pennsylvania, near his birthplace. He found lodging with the head of the school and daily walked six miles to and from the college with President Andrew Wylie.

McGuffey majored in philosophy and languages, learning Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. During his senior year, with most of his classwork completed, McGuffey accepted a teaching position near Paris, Kentucky, for 1825-1826. On a visit to Lexington, the first president of Miami University, Robert Hamilton Bishop, happened to meet McGuffey and promptly offered him a professorship in languages at the Oxford, Ohio, land-grant college, at a salary of six hundred dollars per year. He accepted, and Washington College graduated him with honors at the end of the school year.

McGuffey began his ten-year career at Miami University at the age of twenty-six in the fall of 1826. The new professor impressed observers with his penetrating blue eyes, swarthy complexion, and dark hair. His rugged features were characteristically Scottish, and his height was average.

McGuffey’s younger brother, Alexander Hamilton McGuffey (1816-1896), rode to Oxford with McGuffey and attended the village school before enrolling in William’s language classes. At fifteen, Alexander entered Washington College, and he was graduated in 1836; that fall, he became a professor of languages at Woodward College in Cincinnati. He studied law at the Cincinnati Law School and was admitted to the Ohio bar as a lawyer in 1839.

During his first year on the faculty, William met Harriet Spining, a daughter of Judge Isaac Spining of Dayton, Ohio, when she was visiting her brother, Charles, a merchant in Oxford. They were married at her family home on April 3, 1827, and lived in a boardinghouse until McGuffey bought a four-acre corner lot with a frame house across the street from the college campus. By 1833, he had built a two-story, six-room red brick house onto the frame house to create the finest house in town. (It was sold to Miami University in 1958 and has been the McGuffey Museum since 1963.)

Four McGuffey children were born there: Mary Haines (in 1830), who married Dr. Walker Stewart of Dayton; Henrietta (in 1832), who married the Reverend Andrew D. Hepburn; William Holmes (in 1834), who lived only two weeks; and Charles Spining (in 1835). A fifth child, Edward Mansfield (born in 1838), was born in Cincinnati and died in Athens.

Life’s Work

McGuffey’s career encompassed teaching at four colleges, serving as president of two, preaching as an ordained Presbyterian minister, lecturing on educational topics, fighting for state common school systems in Ohio and Virginia, and compiling the first volumes of the famous McGuffey Eclectic Readers (1836-1837).

To meet the need for textbooks for the rising number of tax-supported public schools in the Mississippi Valley, the publishing house of Truman and Smith in Cincinnati began issuing common school books during the 1830’s. In April, 1833, McGuffey entered into a contract with the firm to develop a series of texts—a primer, four readers, and a speller to rival Noah Webster’s. Drawing on his knowledge of languages (he had mastered seven), and with the help of his wife and neighborhood children, he selected and graded reading materials by testing them with pupils gathered around a revolving octagonal table. The first and second readers were published in 1836, the third and fourth followed in 1837, and the McGuffey speller appeared in 1838. Dr. William E. Smith of Miami University wrote the most concise summary of the contents of the original editions and revisions:

The First Reader introduced children to the code of ethics which ran through the four Readers—promptness, truthfulness, kindness, and honesty.… For the Second Reader, he chose stories about the heavens and the earth beneath, stories about table manners, fear of God, and behavior toward parents, teachers, and the poor.… The Third Reader, published in 1837, was much like other third readers of the time. Method and content were more formal than in the Second Reader. Rules were introduced for oral reading. Its fifty-seven lessons were made up of such stories as “The Moss-Covered Bucket,” “The Dying Boy,” and “George’s Feast”—stories that readers never forgot.… The objective of McGuffey’s Fourth Reader (1837) was “reading aloud with sense, clearness, and appreciation.” This Reader, introducing good prose and poetry, completed the Eclectic Series. McGuffey frequently used selections from the Bible and apologized for not using more.

In 1838, the Readers were improved and enlarged. In 1844 the Rhetorical Guide by Alexander Hamilton McGuffey was placed on the market. It became the Fifth Reader in the Eclectic Series.… Later selections in the Fourth and Fifth were put in the Sixth Reader.… The late Dean Harvey C. Minnich and others have estimated that, on an average, each Reader was used by ten pupils before it was worn out or laid aside. Except the Bible, no other book or set of books has influenced the American mind so much.

McGuffey’s contract for the original set allowed him a royalty of 10 percent on sales up to a limit of one thousand dollars. Beyond that the story is that the publisher annually sent him a barrel of smoked hams. Eventually, in the Civil War years, the publisher, then a millionaire, had the company grant McGuffey an annuity until his death.

In August, 1836, McGuffey resigned from Miami to accept the presidency of the revived Cincinnati College. His publisher was in Cincinnati, his brother Alexander had accepted a professorship at Woodward College, and Cincinnatians promised financial support. The panic of 1837, however, ruined the school, and in 1839 McGuffey accepted the presidency of Ohio University at fifteen hundred dollars a year. Friction with landowners and with students led to his resignation in 1843, and he returned from Athens to Cincinnati to teach at Woodward College. In 1845, elected to the chair of moral philosophy and political economy at the University of Virginia, McGuffey moved to Charlottesville, where he taught until his death in 1873. His wife, Harriet, died in 1850, and the next year he married Laura Howard; their child, Anna, died in Charlottesville at the age of five.

Significance

The tremendous impact of McGuffey’s readers upon American youth in more than 150 years, with more than 135 million copies in print, ranged even wider and deeper than numbers indicate. At least three generations of nineteenth century citizens were indoctrinated by the moral truths and personal values learned from literary selections of the Eclectic Readers. As a Presbyterian minister and as a professor, McGuffey perpetuated the Calvinistic virtues of hard work, thrift, and sobriety, commonly referred to as the Protestant ethic, through his extracts from English and American literature. His textbooks inculcated the character traits that upheld the ideal family, community, and nation. Honesty, industry, diligence, obedience, piety, and frugality were applauded; the evil consequences were clearly noted for those who ignored these lessons. Public schools soon shared in character-building along with the family and church.

McGuffey and his readers taught native and foreign-born Americans how to read and pronounce English words, how to read aloud and to speak effectively, and how to write and spell correctly. During the century of great immigration and an age when the written word predominated as the method of communication via newspapers, books, and magazines, the readers perpetuated the English language in the United States.

Admirers of McGuffey have long delighted in extolling the virtues of his textbooks as a Western product that brought enlightenment to rural and frontier folk; since 1960, scholars of history and sociology have declared that his lessons instilled the very virtues that industrial and urban societies needed among the working class in shops and factories of modern America. Critics of American common schools suggest that his textbooks served the rising middle classes but ignored the needs and traditions of the immigrants, the poor, and minorities in the pluralistic American culture.

Bibliography

Crawford, Benjamin F. William Holmes McGuffey: Schoolmaster of the Nation. Delaware, Ohio: Carnegie Church Press, 1963. A short 105-page book that summarizes much of other authors’ findings on McGuffey. Crawford’s best contribution is his title for the book.

Gorn, Elliott J., ed. The McGuffey Readers: Selections from the 1879 Edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998. An anthology of more than eighty selections from the six-volume 1879 edition. The selections are organized around twelve topics, including history, literature, virtues, vices, character, worth ethic, and citizenship. Includes an introduction by Gorn providing information about McGuffey’s life, and his readers, lessons, and audience.

Lindberg, Stanley W. The Annotated McGuffey: Selections from the McGuffey Eclectic Readers, 1836-1920. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976. A splendid sampling of the entire collection of materials in the readers with a brief but significant introduction describing the publisher’s expertise, which the editor declares had much to do with the success of the series. Lindberg details how fortunate was the use of the word “eclectic” in the name of the series and how cleverly the publisher got the textbooks installed in the Confederate schools during the Civil War, where they captured the market thereafter.

Minnich, Harvey C. William Holmes McGuffey and His Readers. New York: American Book, 1936. Written by the dean of the School of Education of Miami University, this remains the best comprehensive McGuffey biography.

Ruggles, Alice McGuffey. The Story of the McGuffeys. New York: American Book, 1950. Written by the granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton McGuffey, who wished to relate the human side of the authors of the readers, this is a very readable, nonscholarly narrative of her distinguished relatives. Published by the same company that had printed the readers, this volume will be found in more libraries than any of the other biographies cited here.

Smith, William E. About the McGuffeys: William Holmes McGuffey and Alexander H. McGuffey. Oxford, Ohio: Cullen Printing, 1963. As historian and dean of the Graduate School of Miami and director of the McGuffey Museum Library, Smith worked with Harvey Minnich to honor McGuffey by founding the National Federation of McGuffey Societies. This twenty-eight-page booklet is the best introduction to the teamwork of the McGuffey brothers in the production of the readers. Smith also deftly describes the content of the various readers, the primer and speller, and the later revisions.

Sullivan, Dolores P. William Holmes McGuffey: Schoolmaster to the Nation. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994. The first comprehensive biography of McGuffey since Minnich’s (see above) book in 1963. Includes previously unpublished letters to McGuffey’s family in Youngstown, Ohio.

Westerhoff, John. McGuffey and His Readers: Piety, Morality and Education in Nineteenth Century America. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1978. Harvard Divinity School professor John Westerhoff provides a reassessment of the religious worldview undergirding the teaching McGuffey incorporated in his readers. A very readable volume that contains many other original writings of McGuffey that were not related to the textbooks.