The education of culture: the lyceum impulse in the Old Dominion

Abstract

This study uses primary evidence from antebellum Virginia to examine closely the profound contribution the lyceum made to Southern culture. Previous scholarship has given short shrift to the southern lyceum. Even though ravages of the Civil War destroyed many records and libraries in the South, the evidence for a strong lyceum is convincing in Virginia. The primary evidence demonstrates that the state was a fertile ground for the growth of young men who were active in civic and public discourse. Clearly, people in the South¿both in the large city and the small burg¿were interested in learning, debating, and the art of oratory. The study considers lyceums in the western part of the state, where lyceums retained the characteristics of the more grassroots form of the movement without traveling eloquent speakers. Also important are the many lyceum-spirited organizations established exclusively for younger men, often found housed at colleges, to aid them in their educational and literary development and to train them to be leaders within their society. On the Southside of the state, lyceums are found which tend to reflect the same characteristics often found in northern organization. This study examines the lyceum in Virginia as a first step in reassessing the southern lyceum as a whole. The lyceum was a vital part of southern education, and it took hold in significant ways in southern culture due primarily to the South's insatiable appetite for oratorical spectacle and love of eloquence. The existence of healthy lyceums in the South also speaks to the force of epideictic rhetoric in the society and the role it plays in building culture. Southern ideas, southern values, and southern beliefs were shored up in the epideictic rhetoric of these men in their attempt to establish these ideas against the huge tide of ideas and literature pouring from the North into their culture. Not surprisingly, lyceum speeches became a major component of the literature of the antebellum South. The southern lyceum became the site for education of young and old, the propagation of culture, and the creation of a surviving literature of a people.