[EthanHeilman]

>"it is generally accepted that literacy rates in the United States were quite high before compulsory schooling was mandated starting in the 1840's."

This is why I wrote "Public Education or something like it". We need education systems for literacy, however it does not to be compulsory or public if nearly everyone uses it and can afford it. It seems unlikely that these two conditions (affordable and widely used) would be met in our present society without public funding of education.

Note that in that article you link to they say that Southern Whites in the 1860s had a "56.4%" literacy rate.