Greenleaf's Exercise Book from South School in Newburyport, MA 1792-1793

Not every essay can be a blockbuster one, but even if these three are not, they give us precious insight into one aspect of Greenleaf's early years. These essays describe Greenleaf's 18-page penmanship booklet, with each page separately dated (from Oct 31, 1792 to sometime at the end of 1792), when Greenleaf was a student at "South School" in Newburyport, MA. Almost each page of the 5" X 8" booklet has eight or nine "lines" of identical print on it, where young Simon Greenleaf was obviously repeating sentences he was told to write. In his autobiographical letter to his son James, dated Jan. 5, 1838, Greenleaf talked about his time at South School as a time for learning his "strokes and Os." In late 1790 his parents had removed to New Gloucester, ME but had left Simon in the care of his grandparents in Newburyport, where he remained until Jan. 23, 1795 (he turned 11 on Dec. 5, 1794). The purpose of these essays is to review this little booklet page by page. Actually, the pages in the booklet are numbered, beginning with page 1. We are missing pages 1-2 and 15-16; thus we begin with page 3.

To The Text

1. Page 3. At the bottom is printed, in block print (it could be a stencil): "SIMON GREENLEAF OCT 31st 1792"

In the eight lines of the page (the page isn't "lined," but there are eight lines of print), we have only one sentence: "One Vice is more expensive than ten Virtues." This precise quotation occurs in a 1821 book entitled The Young Man's Best Companion, but it also appeared before that time, usually in the form, "One Vice is more expensive than many Virtues." In the first few lines, Greenleaf had almost run out of space when he got to the word "Virtues," though he had corrected it by the last exemplar. Sort of like those "Plan Ahea...." signs you have seen. The content of the statement is striking. Here is Greenleaf, learning his penmanship at age 8, but imbibing the New England moralistic way. This is different from the Bay Psalm Book of Puritan days, where he might have learned "A" as "In Adam's Fall, We Sinned All." Here we are in a world of virtues and vices, of pithy sayings and sage advice for living. No theological sword of Damocles hangs over the head, though certainly young Master Greenleaf would understand that an essential element of life was the building of character.

Books inculcating hundreds of moral precepts were readily available in early America. However, I don't know precisely when this proverbial statement would first have been uttered or preserved. It appears in George Dillwyn's (1736-1821) 1815 Occasional Reflections, Offered for the Use of Schools, p 17 in the "many" form. I think Dillwyn probably deserves an essay or two....

2. Page 4. Here we have the lesson for Nov. 1, 1792. The line written eight times by the youthful Greenleaf was "Quench not the spirt; pray without ceasing," two short verses from I Thess. 5. In each example save one the "ceasing" was written in very small letters. H wrote the "s" of the "ceasing" in the large flourishing "s" that is so familiar from the Declaration of Independence. I wish I knew the system of penmanship that he was learning. It is in cursive writing, and the letters are each very well-formed.

3. Page 5. Dated Nov. 6, 1792, we have the following line written eight times. "A good Conscience is the best Estate." Then, in the remaining part of the line he wrote his name and the date or the numbers from 1 to 15. I wonder what the convention was at the time about capitalizing nouns. Which ones were capitalized (the "spirit", for example, wasn't capitalized on p. 2, but "Vice" and "Virtues" were capitalized on p. 1) and which were in lower case? And, when did the convention enter to put most nouns in lower case? Again, we see the moralisms of the time. The only quotation of this sentence online comes from an 1825 work by William Penn. In that work, he says that John Mason (1503-1566) an English diplomat, privy counselor and spy, uttered those words in his despair during his retirement.

4. Page 6, dated Nov. 8, 1792, is simply his writing of numbers, beginning with the number 10. The "ones" have hooks or slanted lines at the top, the four goes below the line, as do the sevens and nines. He has written "10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 110," etc. depending on how much room he has on each line.

5. Page 7, dated Nov. 13, 1792, with the aphorism "Content is the Poors Riches," is followed by capitalized, and sometimes lower-case letters, from A to H, written cursively. This quotation is probably meant to be taken from Act III, Scene 3 of Shakespeare's Othello: "Poor and content is rich and rich enough/ But riches fineless [i.e., endless; boundless] is as poor as winter/ To him that ever fears he shall be poor." So, perhaps they had an "abbreviated" Shakespeare someplace from which this sentence was derived. Shakespeare's sentiment is probably too much to be understood by those who are 8-9 years old; you kind of wonder what they understood when they were writing these aphorisms cursively.

The next essay continues our tour of this booklet.

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