In 1800, French immigrant and entrepreneur Eleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours estimated that only four in a thousand Americans were illiterate. Written as a defense of the Constitution, “The Federalist Papers” would likely challenge and even baffle many college students today, but in 1787 and 1788, these essays were aimed at the common reader. In 1774, Jacob Duché, chaplain of the Continental Congress whose later pleas for peace with Britain branded him a traitor, wrote that of his fellow Americans, “almost every man is a reader.”
This high level of fluency in reading and writing resulted from a free-market hodgepodge of schools and academies and from a fervent desire among parents to see that their children received an education. The great majority of these pupils first learned to read and cipher at home and received a further dose of learning in a local school.
