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Maury’s father, having observed that his own father had been too stern with his children, treated his large family with considerable indulgence; yet he was strict as to their religious training in the home and gathered the children together morning and night each day to read the Psalter antiphonally. In this way Matthew became so familiar with the Psalms of David that years afterwards he could give a quotation and cite chapter and verse as though he had the Bible before him. This early religious influence later colored all Maury’s thinking and writing to a very marked degree. His mother, who was known as a woman of great decision of character, endowed her son with this same quality which is so essential to greatness; while her husband passed on to Matthew much of his amiability and ingenuousness for which he was greatly liked throughout the neighborhood.

Maury received his elementary education in an “Old Field” school, where the seats were made of split logs with peg legs, where there were no blackboards and but few books, and where the pupils studied their lessons aloud. This method of study probably led to the custom of “singing geography”, the pupils being ranged round the room to chant geographical facts. Whether Maury was thus inducted into the mysteries of that science which his researches were afterwards so greatly to enrich is not known, for the only schoolbook that he makes reference to in his letters is the famous Webster’s “Blueback Speller”, which he says was the first book that was ever placed in his hands.