Decline of the Partnership of Church and State

Abstract

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the frontier was rapidly closing across North America and native peoples—who included, in Canada, the mixed-race Métis—were no longer beyond the borders of advancing “civilization” but increasingly surrounded by it. The population of the United States west of the Mississippi rose from seven to more than 11 million during the 1870s. In the Dakota Territory, for example, there had been twice as many Indians as whites in 1870, but a decade later the Indians were outnumbered by more than six to one. “More area came under the plow in the half-century following the Civil War than had been broken in all of the years since the landing at Jamestown.”¹ This changed the context within which schooling was provided, but not, for some decades, either the purpose or the dominant role, in pursuing public as well as charitable goals, of Christian religious organizations.