Teaching the Republican Child: Three Antebellum Stories about Law, Schooling, and the Construction of American Families

The stories of Sarah, Lewis, and Thomas, like other stories, can be told in many ways. They also have multiple meanings. My renditions of the tales highlight how law has helped define the family in critical struggles between families and school officials over what and how to teach the children of the republic. They are thus stories about how law became a way to express, contest, and legitimate the new educational order.

In the process, they suggest how the American resort to legal means also constructed crucial elements in the identities of students, parents, and teachers. Equally important, considering these tales about the "three R's" of race, religion, and the rod as precedents of legal experience helps us understand how and why widely publicized legal contests like these broadcast rules and phrases that helped define the place of the young in antebellum society. In that way; these cases were building blocks in the creation of an American law of education and helped determine the relative authority of families and schools over the intergenerational transmission of values and skills. Depicted in such terms, these three courtroom stories also demonstrate the centrality of rights consciousness in all discussions of education, family, and law.