Partnership for posterity

This documentary edition includes 478 letters or parts of letters written by William Maclure and Marie Duclos Fretageot to each other between the years 1820 and 1833. William Maclure (1763-1840), a naturalized American of Scottish ancestry, accumulated a sizable fortune in the mercantile trade and devoted much of his life to educational reforms based on the methods of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Madame Marie Louise Duclos Fretageot (1783-1833), a French woman, ran a girls boarding school in Philadelphia before returning in 1819 to France, where she was introduced to Maclure. He planned to have her learn the Pestalozzian system of teaching in order to establish a girls school. From this meeting evolved a partnership that endured for the next fourteen years until Madame's death in 1833. During these years, however, Madame and Maclure actually spent just a little more than three years together. This separation required a continuing correspondence, which constitutes the main text of this volume. . This collection not only traces a remarkable partnership, but also contains information pertaining to life in the American "West," reformers and reform movements, and political events in the