“A Book of Questions, a.d. 1880.” Two lectures delivered by Rev. William J. Skillman at Sioux Falls, 1887-1889.

Hardcover cloth composition book, 8.25 x 7 inches. Slightly shaken with rubbing to extremities, including shallow loss at the spine ends; mild age toning, Very Good+ overall.

Two lectures transcribed in handsome calligraphy with manuscript pagination: “Truth is King: Lecture Delivered before the Sioux Falls University, February 11th, 1887” (28pp), and “What Shall Our Public Schools Teach? Sioux Falls, January 3d, 1889” (41pp). No attribution within the manuscript; authorship deduced from reports in the Argus-Leader (Feb 10, 1887, p4). Full of misspellings and the careful but amateur calligraphy of a youthful, and almost certainly female, hand, the manuscript was possibly made by one of Skillman’s daughters as a gift. Frequently quotable soundbites are the source of bemusement, but Skillman’s ideas and opinions ultimately feel unworthy of the reverently transcribed object of beauty through which they've survived.

Dressed up in fine letters that suggest the words they spell must be important, Skillman’s bumbling addresses feel like the familiar echo chamber of pundits who talk much and say little, and rhetoric from leaders that generates emotion but not ideas, and certainly not solutions. They present the anxieties of a man with nominal authority, complaining about a world he sees moving away from Christian values and natural power structures, threatened by popular media and publicly funded education. Delivered in Sioux Falls in 1887 and 1889, just before the Dakota Territory transitioned to statehood, the context resonates with perceived threats to political and social norms in a changing American landscape.

Sioux Falls University was a Baptist college founded in 1872 to provide assertively Christian education. Aptly written for his collegiate audience, “Truth is King” criticizes popular media, including “penny dreadfuls” and writing by women, whom he calls “crude scribbler(s).” One anecdote involves cringy Irish dialect and demeaning a woman in a bookstore for her taste in literature. Skillman particularly takes issue with newspapers, which he considers to promote moral decay:

To be talked about is the spice of life, apparently, to their poor drugged souls, and a fairly heavenly solace to their miserable animalism. And so it is hence that we have well-dressed people every now and then making heroes of murderers, marrying assassins, anarchists, and what not, getting divorces to be married and marrying to get divorced – and the mischief supreme of all this is, that we have to be told of it every day, and our children told of it, as if we were all aching to hear about it. Pity, pity, our poor, dirty souls if we are… It has come to pass that we really cannot get an account – a reputable account, according to our need, of the doings of the day, of the price of goods, for instance, of the arrival of trains, or cannot learn where we can buy a horse or rent a house without having this veritable slime of Sodom thrust under our noses… (17-18)

The second address, “What Shall Our Public Schools Teach?” explores the civic imperatives and justification for funding public education. Skillman first suggests that having a literate electorate is desirable, thus justifying the use of public funds for education; but he’s not sure about equal education. It’s one of the many places where his anxiety is not so subtly construed. He argues it is unfair to tax the public to educate children to a certain standard above their natural station, and that it is even a disservice, as those of lower classes and capacities “their education outrunning their abilities and opportunities.” He seems to favor a delineation between who can elect officials versus who can become one:

Is the state bound to make all her citizens capable of holding any office within her gift – bound to train every boy to be president? Or, rather is she simply bound to give all her citizens the means of becoming intelligent voters? Either voters, or, at least, the mothers and sisters and wives of voters? For it may not be altogether safe yet to give women the suffrage. (viii-ix).

It might be a moot point, anyway: “In as much as the public school is provided at public cost and maintained by the state, it will assuredly fail.” Even with literacy, which he supposes one might consider essential to an “intelligent voter,” he reconsiders, “Questionable, indeed, is it, seeing the political stuff men commonly read, whether the power to read is an all-around blessing.” He does have nice things to say about manual training.

Skillman’s closing remarks begin, “What shall our public schools teach then? Two things I affirm. The fundamentals, or the ‘Three R’s,’ and then everything that will make these more sure, more winsome, if possible, that will enlarge, emphasize and enforce them.” Skillman’s trouble counting is emblematic of his unchecked rhetoric—to which one might apply his own words:

It loaded up, or rather loaded down, the mind with material as if, actually, that were the main thing to do—treating the mind as if it were a veritable beast of burden, a patient ass or an obstreperous ass, as the case might be, depending upon whether it kicked or not under the treatment, and if it kicked to be whalloped or be labored back into a properly subdued condition.(xxiv-xxv)

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William J. Skillman (1835-1909) was born in Somerset, NJ, and graduated from the New Jersey Theological Seminary of the Dutch Reformed Church in New Brunswick. He was pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Sioux Falls from 1883 to 1894, when he relocated to Philadelphia. His wife was a teacher. They had nine children. He is primarily noted for his genealogical work, The Skillman's of American and Their Kin, which traced his family to the colonial era. (Ref. Genealogical Society of New Jersey Guide to the Collection of William Jones Skillman).

His doings in Sioux Falls were occasionally reported in the Argus-Leader, including ongoing tiffs with the paper itself: “Rev. Wm. Skillman, Mrs. T. A. Robinson and the Enforcement league which they control have called one of the editors of this paper a traitor, have refused him admission to their meetings, have stricken his name from their membership rolls, and have prayed God to blight his powers and wither his brains, but they still retain as an active member a well-known saloonkeeper. Thus do the righteous detect and thwart the wicked machinations of the enemy” (2/19/1890). None of his lectures appear to have been published.