Compulsory Education: From Dr. Hupp’s Oratory to Wheeling’s Call to Reach Every Child
Nearly one year after Wheeling’s Black citizens honored Dr. John C. Hupp for supporting their children’s education, a local newspaper called upon West Virginia to make education compulsory. Read together, the two articles reveal an emerging conviction: public education was not merely an opportunity to offer, but a responsibility the community had to fulfill.
On November 25, 1873, The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer published an extraordinary account under the playful headline “A Doctor Caned.”
The “caning” was not a punishment. Wheeling’s Black citizens had gathered in the office of Dr. John C. Hupp to present him with a gold-headed cane. The inscription read:
“Presented to Dr. J. C. Hupp by the colored citizens of Wheeling.”
The gift recognized Hupp’s advocacy before the Wheeling Board of Education for better accommodations at the city’s Colored School. Reverend W. S. Wilson, pastor of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, delivered the presentation and praised the doctor’s efforts to secure improved educational facilities for Black children.
Dr. Hupp responded with one of the most remarkable public statements about education recorded in nineteenth-century Wheeling.
Then, on October 30, 1874—less than one year later—the Intelligencer published an editorial titled “Compulsory Education.” It argued that West Virginia should require children to receive an education and that the public’s substantial investment in schools should reach every child.
There is no evidence that the 1874 editorial was written in direct response to Hupp’s address. Nevertheless, the two pieces form a compelling historical conversation. Hupp supplied the moral argument for universal education. The later editorial considered how that principle might be transformed into public policy.
“Education is the bulwark of our nation”
Hupp began his 1873 response by thanking Wheeling’s Black citizens for recognizing his recent efforts to obtain for their children “the privileges and advantages of a Free School Education.”
He then offered an expansive defense of public education:
“Education, broad, sound, and correct is the price of liberty—Education forms the man—Education is the bulwark of our nation.”
Hupp did not measure the strength of a community by its wealth, military power or imposing architecture. Instead, he declared:
“The real wealth of our country consists, not in the sums of money paid into its treasury—that its real strength consists, not in fleets and armies—that its real glory consists, not in the splendid palace, the lofty spire, or the towering dome; but in the intelligence and morality, the comforts and happiness of its citizens.”
This was more than ceremonial praise offered upon receiving an award. Hupp was presenting education as the foundation of republican government. A society could possess money, armies, churches and impressive public buildings, he argued, yet remain weak if its people were denied knowledge.
He warned that if intelligence were withheld from the nation’s children, the republican institutions of which Americans were so proud might come “tottering, crushing, thunder[ing] into irretrievable ruins.”
The language was dramatic because Hupp believed the stakes were enormous. Education was not simply preparation for employment. It was preparation for citizenship and the preservation of democracy itself.
From “public concern” to public policy
One sentence in Hupp’s speech provides the strongest bridge to the 1874 editorial. Looking toward the future, he said that children would soon become the people responsible for supporting or overturning the nation’s institutions. He therefore argued:
“Their children are public property, and their superintendence should be a public concern.”
The phrase “public property” sounds jarring to modern ears and should be understood within the civic language of the nineteenth century. Hupp was not suggesting that government literally owned children. He was arguing that their education affected the future of the entire community and therefore could not be treated as an exclusively private matter.
Nearly a year later, the “Compulsory Education” editorial made essentially the same argument in the language of taxation, attendance and legislation.
West Virginia, the newspaper observed, was spending heavily to support its young public school system. The state expected to distribute approximately $214,791 among its 54 counties during the current school year, while the counties themselves would spend considerably more.
With schoolhouses constructed and teachers employed at public expense, the editorial declared:
“Such an expenditure should reach every child in the State. No boy or girl of schoolable age should be left uneducated.”
Hupp had described education as a public concern. The editorial asked what government should do when thousands of children remained outside the schools that the public had paid to operate.
Thousands of Wheeling children outside the classroom
Using the state census, the editorial estimated that Wheeling had nearly 10,000 children of school age. Yet the most recent report from Superintendent Williams showed only about 3,000 enrolled in the public schools.
The newspaper allowed that approximately 3,000 additional children might have attended private or denominational schools. Even with that allowance, it believed that more than 3,000 Wheeling children were receiving little or no education.
The numbers were approximate, but the disparity troubled the editors. Wheeling had school buildings and teachers, yet those public resources were not reaching all the city’s children.
The editorial blamed several conditions. Some parents who had received little education themselves allegedly failed to understand its importance. Other families sent their children to work at an early age, sometimes because their earnings were necessary to the household’s survival.
The newspaper’s language occasionally reflected the harsh judgments of its era, but the underlying conflict was real. For many working-class families, school attendance could mean the loss of income needed for food, rent and clothing.
This was precisely why Hupp’s earlier statement mattered. If education was truly a “public concern,” then the community could not merely blame struggling families. It also had to remove the obstacles that kept children from school.
“Lay the levy”
Hupp understood that a public commitment to education required public money.
In his 1873 address, he celebrated West Virginia voters for supporting taxation for free schools. With characteristic flourish, he recalled their message:
“‘Lay the Levy’—was the utterance of the people, thundered from Kanawha to Hancock, and reverberated from the western Panhandle to the eastern Panhandle.”
Hupp treated the school levy as a public declaration of values. The people were not simply authorizing a tax. They were affirming that education was important enough to support collectively.
The 1874 editorial began from that same premise. If the people had accepted taxation to build schools and employ teachers, then leaving thousands of children uneducated represented both a human failure and an inefficient use of public funds.
The editors believed compulsory attendance offered a possible solution.
A proposed model from New York
The editorial described a new compulsory education law scheduled to take effect in New York.
Under that law, parents and guardians were expected to provide children with instruction in spelling, reading, writing, English grammar and arithmetic. Children between eight and fourteen were to receive at least fourteen weeks of instruction each year, including eight consecutive weeks.
Public school, private school and instruction at home could satisfy the requirement.
The legislation also addressed child labor. Children under fourteen could not be employed during public-school hours unless they had received the required period of instruction.
Employers who violated the law could be fined, and school officials were authorized to investigate the employment of children.
Importantly, the law recognized one significant economic barrier. If a family could not afford textbooks, school officials were required to provide them.
The measure also contained fines, truancy enforcement and provisions for police involvement. Those features remind us that compulsory education could operate in two very different ways. It could protect a child’s right to learn, but it could also impose punishment upon poor families without adequately addressing the conditions that caused children to miss school.
The most humane reading of the editorial, especially when placed beside Hupp’s speech, is not simply that government should force children into classrooms. It is that government must assume responsibility for making education genuinely accessible.
Wheeling’s Colored School had already demonstrated the principle
For Wheeling’s Black community, the principle of publicly supported education was not theoretical.
The Wheeling Board of Education established the city’s public Colored School in the fall of 1866, only a year after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. It was created by the Board and financed through the public school system.
Dr. Hupp did not found the Colored School. By the time he received the cane in 1873, the school had already existed for seven years.
His importance rests upon what he actually did: he became a prominent white ally who used his position and influence before the Board of Education to advocate for better conditions for Black children.
The school’s first teacher was John W. West, a Black educator who helped build the institution from within the community. The school participated in the Freedmen’s Bureau’s system of educational reporting, transmitting information about its operation to federal officials in Washington.
A May 1867 Freedmen’s Bureau report recorded:
“At Wheeling we found a good School House well fitted up, and a good School, taught by Mr. West a colored man.”
The report further stated that money raised through Wheeling’s city school tax had been “fairly divided with the colored people.” Those funds had paid for the schoolhouse and continued to cover the school’s expenses.
In April 1867, John W. West wrote to Freedmen’s Bureau school superintendent John Kimball recommending his brother Robert for a teaching position. Later that year, the Wheeling Board of Education hired Robert West, bringing the two Black brothers together as instructors in the same public school.
This history is essential because it places Hupp’s advocacy in its proper setting. He did not create the school or bestow education upon Wheeling’s Black community. John and Robert West were already performing the daily work of teaching. Black parents and community leaders were already defending their children’s interests.
Hupp used his influence to support a cause that Black educators and families had been advancing since the school’s establishment.
Why Wheeling’s Black citizens honored Hupp
The resolutions adopted by Wheeling’s Black citizens explained why Hupp received the cane.
They acknowledged that their children had “hitherto labored under great disadvantages” because of the poor arrangement of the schoolhouse. They credited the subsequent improvements largely to Hupp’s “unflinching stand” before the Board of Education.
One resolution declared that Hupp deserved “the sincere thanks of every man, woman and child of color in this city.”
Another carefully explained that the community did not claim Hupp and his associates as its “special friends.” Instead, it honored them as principled citizens who supported:
“Equal Rights and Justice to all.”
That distinction is important. The cane did not represent dependence. It represented recognition and political partnership. Wheeling’s Black residents were publicly identifying an ally who had used his civic standing to support their demand for fair treatment.
An “empire of learning”—within a segregated system
Perhaps the most ambitious passage in Hupp’s speech imagined an educational system open to everyone:
“We see the empire of learning opening to all conditions of life, without distinction of race, or color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Those were extraordinary words in 1873.
Yet they were spoken within a state whose 1872 Constitution required that white and Black children not be taught in the same school. Hupp’s “empire of learning” remained divided by law.
Likewise, when the 1874 editorial demanded that “every child” receive an education, it did not mean that every child would attend the same school. Nor did compulsory attendance guarantee equal buildings, instructional materials, courses or opportunities.
Wheeling’s Colored School therefore embodied both progress and limitation.
It was progress because the Board of Education had recognized a public responsibility to educate Black children with tax revenue. John and Robert West held professional positions within a municipal school system only a short time after the end of slavery.
It was limited because Black children remained separated by law and because public inclusion did not automatically produce educational equality.
The history of Black education in Wheeling would repeatedly confront that contradiction: a public system that accepted responsibility for Black students while frequently denying them the resources and opportunities available to white students.
When oratory becomes obligation
Hupp ended his speech with an image of education spreading far beyond a single schoolhouse:
“Education will gush forth in healing, healthful and moralizing streams, and flow on and on, until throughout all West Virginia, and the wide world, no dark corner shall remain.”
The language was aspirational. The following year’s editorial was more practical. It considered attendance requirements, child labor restrictions, textbooks, enforcement and the responsibilities of parents, employers and school officials.
Together, the articles show two stages in the development of public education.
First came the declaration that education was essential to liberty, citizenship and human advancement.
Then came the more difficult question: What laws, funding and public actions would be necessary to deliver that education to every child?
For Wheeling’s Black community, the work had begun in 1866 with the creation of the public Colored School. It continued through the leadership of John W. West, the hiring of Robert West, the advocacy of Black parents and community organizations, and the allyship of figures such as Dr. Hupp.
The 1873 cane honored one victory in that continuing struggle. The 1874 editorial expanded the conversation from providing schools to ensuring attendance.
Neither moment completed the work. Segregation remained. Inequality remained. Poverty and child labor continued to limit educational opportunity.
But both articles advanced a principle that would shape the generations to come:
Education was not a favor. It was not simply a private advantage. It was a public responsibility—and the promise of public education could not be fulfilled until it reached every child.
-T
Historical Sources
“A Doctor Caned,” The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, November 25, 1873. View the original newspaper page.
“Compulsory Education,” The Wheeling Intelligencer, October 30, 1874. View the original newspaper page.
Freedmen’s Bureau monthly report concerning Colored Schools, May 1, 1867, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Freedmen’s Bureau Transcription Project.
National Park Service, historical context for West Virginia’s segregated educational system, West Virginia Schools for the Colored Deaf and Blind.
Historical terminology is retained when quoting period documents or identifying historically named institutions.
