What was the per cent literacy in 1776?

Answer 1

While I have not yet found specific citations for 1776, the general excitement over the publication and widespread distribution of the Declaration of Independence is indicative of a generally well-educated and thoughtful, i.e. literate, populace. That document is written in what would be considered very high diction today, yet it enjoyed wide readership and answering commentary. Contemporary writing, and sale of same, by Thomas Paine and others corroborates the conclusion that the colonists were indeed very literate. To further bracket the time, let's look both before and after 1776: A partial and somewhat poetic answer comes to us from John Adams who, while writing about schools in 1765, said, "... The consequences of these establishments [local schools] we see and feel every day. A native of America who cannot read and write is as rare ... as a comet or an earthquake." Moving forward a comparable time, 11 years, we find the writings of the federalists and the anti-federalists discussing the proposed U.S. Constitution which had been submitted to the states for ratification in 1787: These articles, now encompassed in books, one aptly titled The Federalist Papers by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay which supported adoption of the new Constitution as it was; and the other, edited by Ralph Ketcham, called The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates, urging caution about the new Constitution and lamenting its lack of a Bill of Rights, both contain articles which originally appeared in local newspapers in the young states. Thus, as was pointed out by at least one professor recently when his second-year law students complained that the books were "too hard" for them, these articles were written for the "average farmer" at the time of their first publication.