One thing that I have always bridled at was how people who call themselves "Living Historians" and teachers alike have grossly misrepresented mid-nineteenth century Americans as a bunch of illiterate buffoons. This betrays a terrible dearth in their own research and understanding of the period mindset. It is true that the percentage of the populous who graduated college in 1850 amounts to a mere fraction of the statistical amount of people who graduate today but this should in no way allow anyone to discount their ability to read and write.
I was looking over the US Census for 1850 and this post won't do justice to the information I am digesting at the moment but (at the request of a friend), I pulled some interesting facts on literacy in the US during that time. America had an excellent public school system since early in its history (until the NEA and political quotas ruined that). This accounted for the astonishingly high literacy among the average citizens.
After pulling California's 1850 statistics, I found that there were 92,597 Americans listed with a literacy rate at over 94%. (5235 people polled were illiterate). This is something to consider the next time you try to represent a person of the period as not even able to write his/her name...chances were that they could.
I found more information on literacy in other states by the time of the 1850 census and the results were about the same. I deducted the population of slaves counted in the Southern States because they were not evaluated for literacy. However, the rest of the population represents that of white people, black "Freedmen", along with other racial minorities and/or foreigners. Below is the amount of non-slave residents & citizens along with the recorded amount of literacy.
* (Slaves not counted)
New York (3.097 million) 96.8% literacy
Virginia (949,133 people*) 93.26% literacy
Pennsylvania (2.312 million) 96.7% literacy
Arkansas (162,797 people*) 89.58% literacy
Texas (154,431 people*) 93.14% literacy
Ohio (1.980 million) 96.7% literacy
Missouri (594,622 people*) 93.81% literacy
Although there are well known cases such as Albert Richardson's (1868) accounts of places like rural Arkansas where he reported the people to "suffer terribly from ignorance" due to the lack of schools, this should be regarded as noteworthy because the majority of the population did not. Bayard Taylor's (1850) memoirs noted during his travels through Mexico that the local people were fascinated by the fact that literacy was so prevalent among the ranks of average Americans.
This is why I have little tolerance for morons who depict the average westerner to be a blithering idiot when doing their so-called "living history" impressions. Not to say that there weren't idiots then as there are now, but I feel that we often times lose touch with the ideal that people 150+ years ago pretty much pondered the same themes while going about his or her typically mundane day in a manner not dissimilar from how we go about ours today.
*Note, For more information on the topic, see article IX of the 1850 Census for each of the corresponding states.
-Dave