The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

At the end of the Civil War, Protestants largely agreed that there was to be no sectarian teaching in the public schools, but nonsectarian Protestantism in the form of Bible reading would be central to the curriculum. Protestants reasoned that the public schools were, as the New York Times put it in 1875, “the nursery of the Republic,” and the Bible contained what the school reformer Horace Mann had called “universal” religious values critical to an education that would instill character and morality, producing sober, industrious, and righteous citizens. At the same time, since the First Amendment guaranteed freedom of religion and forbade the establishment of any particular religion, Protestants decided that the doctrines of no particular church would be taught in public schools and public funds would not go to support private religious schools.