The Sunday School Movement

The tradition of Sunday schools, while familiar in the early twenty-first century as places where the
children of churchgoing families are taught the tenets of their faith, was not part of the popular lexicon
prior to the late 1700s. Once organized, however, Sunday schools quickly grew in popularity and
influence, spreading literacy and moral values while also providing evangelical Christianity with young
converts. The strength of the Sunday school movement inspired some of the greatest minds of the age—
among them the economist Adam Smith (1723–1790), the philosopher Thomas Malthus (1766–1836),
and the Methodist theologian John Wesley (1703–1791)—to note its virtues in promoting popular
education generally.

Although the first actual Sunday school was established by Hannah Ball in Buckinghamshire, England, in
1769, the systematization of faith-based education for children is credited to one of one of Ball's
countrymen. As publisher and editor of the Gloucester Journal, Robert Raikes (1736–1811) viewed with
concern the many poor children living in England's slums who found their way into crime. "The world
marches forth on the feet of small children," the editor was known to proclaim in the pages of his
newspaper. As the parents of these children were forced by necessity into factory jobs, Raikes realized
that the task of instilling positive moral values in these children must be taken up by others.

Working with a local pastor, Raikes established a Sunday school for the poor and orphaned in July 1780.

Promoted in his newspaper, Raikes's school soon had hundreds of students. At first only boys attended,
but within a year, girls were also invited. As word of his work spread, Sunday schools soon appeared in
other communities throughout England. By 1800, 200,000 children were enrolled in English Sunday
schools, and the number had risen to 1,250,000 by 1830. By 1850, approximately two million British
children attended weekly religious classes (Laqueur 1976, p. 44).

Because facilities were not available in most English parish churches, the first Sunday school classes were
held either in the homes of paid teachers or in rented rooms. Some were free while others charged a
modest tuition, although promising but needy students often gained a financial sponsor from the upper
classes. The instruction included reading, rudimentary mathematics, and catechesis; it usually lasted four
or five hours each week. For many children, Sunday school was the only education they would ever
receive.

The Movement Comes to America

Like other aspects of British culture, the Sunday school movement quickly jumped the Atlantic.

While the Sunday instruction of children was probably ongoing in the New England colonies by 1670, the
first school modeled on Raikes's system was begun by William Elliott in Accomac County, Virginia, in the
mid-1780s. The philanthropic Elliott hosted the children of poor white families in his home for Bible
study, and also established a second school for slaves. The instruction of slaves became a unique
outgrowth of the Sunday school movement in the United States as Elliott's efforts inspired others in the
antebellum South, such as the Methodist bishop Francis Asbury (1745–1816), to establish schools for
black slaves. White adults also benefited from the Sunday school system by either learning basic skills
from their children or attending the schools themselves.

Many supporters of Sunday schools came from the reform-minded upper classes. Many hoped to instill
discipline, a work ethic, and literacy in the working-class families that now crowded into the cities as a
result of industrialization.

Teachers, both men and women, also dedicated themselves to this task. James M. Garnett, a Sunday-
school teacher in Virginia, reportedly encouraged his young students to "become more dutiful and
affectionate children; more kind and loving brothers and sisters; more friendly and benevolent to your
companions … and more devoted to the constant discharge of all your duties in relation to both this
word and the next" (Maryland Gazette and Political Intelligencer, July 12, 1821). As Raikes had also
reported, the crime rate among young people who attended a Sunday school dropped significantly,
improving the safety of the community at large. Remarking on the effects of the first session of a Sunday
school established in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1817, one correspondent reported in the Daily
National Intelligencer that "this experiment," in which "the improvement of the scholars was generally
great, and in some instances astonishing," demonstrates "conclusively that these schools may be
rendered as useful in our small towns, as in our large cities" (November 26, 1817).

Part of the success of the Sunday school movement was its voluntary nature.

Young participants, some of whom worked long hours in factories and lived in squalor, cherished their
half-day of focused study. The Rev. J. Fisk may have been only slightly overdramatizing the situation in his
speech before the Vermont Sunday School Union in the winter of 1827 when he recalled one boy,
"whose parents were too poor to provide him with shoes, who was found by his teacher on one snowy
Sabbath in autumn, sewing old rags upon his feet, 'because,' said he, with tears in his eyes, 'I cannot stay
away from the Sabbath School' " (Vermont Watchman and State Gazette, December 4, 1827). Referring
to the pervasive state of "unbelief and error" that the Rev. Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), a leader of the
Second Great Awakening, had famously confronted over a half-century before in his "Waste Places of
New England" sermon, Henry Clay Trumbull contended in 1888 that "America has been practically saved
to Christianity and the religion of the Bible by the Sunday-school" (Trumbull 1888, p. 122).

Educating the Urban Poor

Fuelled by the country's growing nationalistic fervor, the Sunday school movement of the early 1800s
established its deepest roots in America's most established towns and cities.

In Boston; Baltimore; Hartford, Connecticut; Charleston, South Carolina; and New York City independent
schools were soon replaced by schools organized and monitored by societies and unions. One of the
first, the First Day School Society, was established in Philadelphia in 1791 for the purpose of providing for
the education of impoverished girls. In 1824 the American Sunday School Union (ASSU) was formed. The
first National Sunday School Convention convened in Philadelphia in 1832, with 15 states represented
among its 220 delegates (Brown 1901, p. 71). The efforts of organizing bodies such as the ASSU were
reinforced by the many books and periodicals that soon appeared to guide both students and teachers:
The Baptist Teacher, Sunday School Journal, Sunday School World, Sunday School Helper, Earnest Worker,
and the Philadelphia-based and nationally circulating Sunday School Times. Bible societies, which sprang
up during the late 1800s to facilitate international Christian outreach, often set as their first task
obtaining copies of the Holy Bible for every Sunday school student who desired one and showed
dedication to its study.

To create a uniform common curriculum for American Sunday schools, the National Sunday School
Convention adopted the International Uniform Lesson in 1872. This curriculum did not find favor with all
schools, however, and soon there were other similar lesson systems available, such as the International
Graded Series (also known as the Closely Graded Lessons), and the Group Graded Lessons (also known
as the Departmental Graded Lessons), which provided teachers with age-appropriate curricula.

Although the Sunday school movement rode the positive spirit of social reform characteristic of the
Industrial Revolution, the movement also had its detractors. Raikes was hailed for his achievement, but
those in class-conscious England who were concerned by the nation's upwardly mobile middle class also
expressed concern as to whether a literate and intellectually stimulated lower class would be satisfied
with their so-called proper station in life. Some U.S. churches also regarded the secular origins of Sunday
schools with the same suspicion as Bible societies, tract societies, temperance societies, the Masonic
order, and other similar groups. For Christian reformers such as Alexander Campbell (1788–1866), this
secularism posed a different kind of threat: it opposed his effort to encourage all Christians, whatever
their denomination, to unite under one single creed based in the New Testament. In January of 1827
Campbell warned in the pages of his periodical The Christian Baptist: "If children are taught to read in a
Sunday school, their pockets must be filled with religious tracts, the object of which is either directly or
indirectly to bring them under the domination of some creed or sect."

Sunday Schools and the Civil War

In the United States, the Sunday school movement travelled along with the tides of migration to points
west and south, and within four years of its founding the ASSU had shepherded the spread of Sunday
schools across twenty-eight states. In addition to producing Christian literature attractive to younger
children, the organization also sent missionaries into the Mississippi Valley, one of which, Stephen
Paxson, traveled by horseback throughout the region, organizing more than 1,300 Sunday schools. The
distribution of Sunday schools between the North and the South, however, was uneven in the years
leading up to the Civil War. As the Massachusetts statesman, Charles Sumner (1811–1874), reported
while arguing for the admission of Kansas to the Union as a free state in June of 1860: "In the Free States
the Sunday-school libraries are 1,713, and contain 474,241 volumes; in the Slave States they are 275, and
contain 68,080 volumes" (Sumner 1872, p. 42).

After America became fractured by the Civil War, the effects of the Sunday school movement reached
the battle lines. Among the many male Sunday school teachers to enlist in the service of their country
was an Ohio Baptist, Thomas Shaw, who fought for the Union Army. Called "one of the most pious and
devoted [of] Christians" by the memoirist Rev. James B. Rogers, Shaw, "as a poor young man, an orphan,"
… "was greatly loved for his simple, fervent piety. He was a devoted and faithful Sunday School teacher"
and "his influence in the regiment was most blessed. He had more spiritual power over the men than
almost any chaplain; held prayer-meetings and exhorted his fellow soldiers to come to Jesus and follow
him." Noting Shaw's death on the battlefield, Rogers added that "among both officers and men there is
the savor of the true Christian salt. The fact may encourage those who … have mourned over the
ungodliness that too much prevails in the patriot army" (Rogers 1863, p. 242). In his Army Life in a Black
Regiment, Thomas Wentworth Higgin-son also attested to the dedication on the part of many soldiers to
provide education among the Negro troops, noting in one entry: "This afternoon our good quartermaster
establishes a Sunday-school for our little colony of [ black] 'contrabands,' now numbering seventy"
(Higginson 1870, p. 119).

Although the Sunday school movement had reached its zenith by the 1840s, its after-effects
reverberated throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Noting the
power of organized morals-based education to instill "the democratic sentiment" of compassion in even
the youngest future citizens, the Pennsylvania congressman William D. Kelley (1814–1890), a Quaker,
stated in a speech before the House of Representatives in 1863, "Once in seven days comes the Sabbath;
and from hillside and valley, from the lanes and alleys, as well as from the broad streets of the city, the
children gather in the church and Sunday School: there they learn that Christianity enforces while it
refines … ; thus the religious sentiment adds its great power to the political" (Kelley 1863, p. 24).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Arlo Ayres, A History of Religious Education in Recent Times. New York, NY: Abingdon Press,
1901.
Campbell, Alexander. Christian Baptist, January 1827.

Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), November 26, 1817.

Garnett, James M. "Address to a Sunday School in Essex County, Virginia, on Distributing Bibles to the
Scholars." Maryland Gazette and Political Intelligencer, Issue 28, July 12, 1821.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Army Life in a Black Regiment. Boston, MA: Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870.

Kelley, William Darrah. The Conscription. Also Speeches of the Hon. W. D. Kelley of Pennsylvania, in the
House of Representatives. Philadelphia, PA: privately printed, 1863.

Laqueur, Thomas Walter. Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976.

Rice, Edwin Wilbur. The Sunday School Movement 1780–1917, and the American Sunday-School Union.
New York, NY: Arno Press, 1971.

Rogers, Rev. James B. War Pictures: Experiences and Observations of a Chaplain in the U.S. Army, in the
War of the Southern Rebellion. Chicago: Church & Goodman, 1863.

Sumner, Charles. Works of Charles Sumner, vol. 5. Boston, MA: Lee & Shepard, 1872.

Trumbull, Henry Clay. The Sunday-School: Its Origins, Mission, Methods, and Auxiliaries. Philadelphia,
John D. Wattles, 1888.

Vermont Watchman and State Gazette (Montpelier, VT), issue 1102, December 4, 1827.
Pamela L. Kester