Knowlton Biography, Chapter 2
Another "Freethinker" post
Two: A Backward Scholar
I used to go to school just two months in the summer, and two in the winter, but was a backward scholar until 15 or 16 years of age, when I began to make some proficiency in English grammar and arithmetic; but I am not half taught in common spelling-book lessons up to this day…I was a tall, spiddle-shanked boy. My height is one inch short of six feet, and I never weighed but about 135 pounds. I do not recollect as I ever performed any smart of roguish tricks while in my teens, though I used to play a very good game at checkers, and was accounted odd.
As a boy, Charles Knowlton was completely uninterested in school. He later claimed he’d never studied history or geography, and had never read a single book of fiction. Charles went to school for about nine weeks in the winter and another eleven weeks in the summer. School terms were short because there was a lot of work for children like Charles to do, helping their families on the farm. And because a large part of early American education happened at home and at church.
Stephen and Comfort Knowlton were deeply religious, which was typical for Massachusetts Yankees in the early 1800s. The Knowltons were descended from British Puritans who had established the Massachusetts Bay Colony two centuries earlier, and they raised their sons to be good, god-fearing Calvinists. Like nearly all children in the Bay State, where orthodox Congregationalism was the State Religion until 1833, Charles learned to read and write using the bible and the Westminster Catechism. The Catechism was the official rule-book of his community’s religion, and like all good Templeton children, Charles memorized it. The Catechism not only explained the world in religious terms, it called on the faithful to obey their political leaders, who it said were taking orders from God. “Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake,” the Catechism ordered. And it spelled out penalties for disobedience: “if any man obey not our word…note that man, and have no company with him…A man that is an heretick after the first and second admonition, reject.” When Charles Knowlton later outgrew the Catechism and was declared that heretical man, many of the faithful obediently rejected him.
The Catechism also described a strangely lop-sided separation of church and state, where the church was to be protected from the state but not vice versa. “Civil magistrates,” it said, were not allowed to interfere with religion. However, “as nursing fathers,” it was the government’s “duty…to protect the church.” This protection included insuring that “no person be suffered, either upon pretence of religion or infidelity, to offer indignity”—to make fun of the church or its ministers. Government should use its power to prosecute and punish “infidels,” to insure that religious leaders were able to operate “without molestation or disturbance.” Later in his life, Charles Knowlton admitted that as a boy he’d believed the Catechism. So it’s interesting how thoroughly he went on to challenge every one of its admonitions.
Recalling his childhood, Charles said he had little interest in history and literature. As elements of the Humanities, these were studied along with ancient languages and theology by rich boys at private colleges such as Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth. Many of those boys went on to become ministers, since early American colleges were also seminaries. As a Yankee farm boy, Charles never had the opportunity to attend one of these elite institutions. And the ministers who graduated from elite schools were rarely his friends, and often went out of their way to make Charles’s life difficult. Both these facts may have influenced Knowlton’s interests during his youth, as well as the way he later remembered his education.
It’s interesting that Charles says he never studied geography, because the subject was much more politically charged in an age when the founders of the nation a generation earlier had been surveyors. When Charles was a boy, explorers like Lewis and Clark were still out discovering the West, and the bestselling book on geography—and it was a bestseller—was a volume written by the leading orthodox minister and conspiracy theorist of the early America, Reverend Jedediah Morse. Morse was an ultra-conservative Calvinist who claimed that a European secret society called the “Illuminati” was preparing to take over America, and that lovers of France such as Thomas Jefferson were in cahoots with them. Whether Reverend Morse’s obsessions put young Charles off studying geography is impossible to know. But it doesn’t appear Charles ever went farther than about two hundred miles from where he was born—so he didn’t miss geography.
Later in life, as a mostly self-taught freethinker, Charles Knowlton naturally preferred to remember more practical educational interests, and to focus on his own role in educating himself. But Knowlton’s formal education was complete enough that in 1818 he got a teaching job in Alstead, New Hampshire, where he worked for the four months of the winter and summer terms. Alstead is a remote village on a high, broad hilltop in southern New Hampshire, about fifty miles north of Templeton. It’s remembered mainly as the birthplace and home of Samuel Thomson, an herbalist who was the most successful nineteenth-century challenger of traditional medicine. Although there’s no evidence that Knowlton and Thomson ever met, Charles was in Alstead at precisely the time when Thomson was gaining a national following, and years later Charles later wrote an article that suggests he was well acquainted with Thomsonian practices. And as we’ll see, the eighteen-year old Charles had every reason to be interested in Samuel Thomson’s alternative medicines.
The summer after he taught school in Alstead, Charles studied Latin with Dr. Charles Adams in nearby Keene, New Hampshire. Unlike Knowlton, Dr. Adams was from a professional family, the son of a successful physician. Adams was seven years older than Charles, and had received an undergraduate education at Dartmouth before studying medicine at America’s first medical school, at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Before he’d returned to Keene to practice medicine, Adams had been a “demonstrator of anatomy” at Harvard. The idea that physicians could learn anatomy by observing dissections rather than by reading classical texts was new and radical. Dissection was very controversial, but many of New England’s new medical schools wanted to teach it. Adams was subsequently offered faculty positions at Dartmouth and at Pittsfield, Massachusetts; but he turned them down and continued his practice in Keene. How much influence the successful, twenty-five year old physician had on Charles is unclear, but Charles became a medical student not long after his stay with Adams, and he believed so strongly in the importance of learning anatomy by dissecting that he was jailed for stealing corpses. Coincidentally, both of the schools that had offered Dr. Adams jobs later conferred medical degrees on Knowlton.
After his stay with Adams in Keene, Charles briefly attended New Salem Academy in the fall of 1819. The Academy was a private, liberal-arts oriented prep-school, and Charles may have paid its one dollar, twenty-five cent term fee out of his earnings as a schoolteacher. He taught school again in Templeton and in nearby Gardner during the summer and winter of 1820-21. But by then, Charles had already decided to become a doctor.