The US schools in the early nineteenth century were much influenced by the British education system

They continued to teach using the leading British textbooks in rhetoric (composition) and grammar, such as those of Lowth and Murray

They also promoted the study of English literature

Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper did not publish until the mid nineteenth century

Most well-known American authors, such as Longfellow, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Whitman, and Twain, were not even born by 1800