“I know histhry isn’t thrue, Hinnissy, because it ain’t like what I see ivry day in Halsted Street. If any wan comes along with a histhry iv Greece or Rome that’ll show me th’ people fightin’, gettin’ dhrunk, makin’ love, gettin’ married, owin’ th’ grocery man an’ bein’ without hard coal, I’ll believe they was a Greece or Rome, but not befur.” — Dunne, Finley Peter, OBSERVATIONS BY MR. DOOLEY, New York, 1902
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Yale College HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1672
Elihu Yale started a spice business which, through corrupt dealings in India, would flourish. Eventually, in 1701, he would respond from England to a funding request for a school in Connecticut, by sending along at various times various cartons of books, volumes which when retailed would provide the substantial sum of £800 for the erection of a building. That school would in 1717 relocate from Old Saybrook to New Haven and choose to rename itself Yale College in recognition of Mr. Yale’s generosity in sending along those cartons of books of significant value.
Robert Morison published the initial scientific study of a single plant group (the carrot family). PLANTS
NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
Yale College “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1701
October 9, Sunday: The Saybrook Collegiate School was chartered in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Elihu Yale, a success story type of guy who hadn’t been to the American colony for some time and in fact never would return, donated some £800 worth of his books, in various cartons in various shipments, toward this 3rd school, which eventually would be known as Yale College, an additional venue for the training of ministers and magistrates for New England.1 Harvard College and Yale together would be conceived as reform models for Cambridge and Oxford Universities in old England.2
1. Elihu Yale’s epitaph at Wrexham, in County Denbigh, bordering on Cheshire, England reflects the general scandal of his administration as Governor in the Madras Presidency of the East India Company, an administration which became so notorious for embezzlement that he would be forced quite out of India: “Much good, some ill, he did; so hope all’s even.” 2. This Elihu Yale who gave the school a name really didn’t have all that much to do with the institution. He merely passed along to it some cartons of books that turned out to have a significant, but not overwhelmingly grand, cash value. Yale’s first scholarships, its first endowed professorship, and its library endowment would be based on less innocent money than the money Yale had earned in India through his graft and craft and greediness: money from the slave trade. The college would chisel the names of slavetraders, as “Worthies,” on its tower. It would use the names of slavemasters when naming some of its colleges. In 1831, when there was a proposal to establish in New Haven a separate college for black scholars, Yale would argue that even harboring such students in the same town would be “incompatible with the prosperity, if not the existence” of Yale. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1716
Jonathan Edwards entered upon his studies at Yale College, just shy of his 13th birthday.
READ A BIOGRAPHY
DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.
Yale College “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1717
Vinny Bourne graduated at Trinity College, Cambridge.
A college in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, “Saybrook Collegiate School,” relocated to New Haven and renamed itself Yale College in recognition of former Indian spice trader Mr. Elihu Yale’s generosity in having sent along from England cartons of books of significant value.
LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Yale College HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1720
Jonathan Edwards graduated from Yale College and began the study of Theology.
THEOLOGY SCHOOLS READ A BIOGRAPHY
THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Yale College HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1724
The Reverend Jonathan Edwards entered upon a 2-year Tutorship at Yale College.
The bulk of his work in Natural Theology would be completed before he would go off to Northampton to assist his grandfather, the Reverend Soloman Stoddard, in the ministry there in 1726: • “Of Insects” Part of the “Spider Papers” 1st published by Serano Dwight in his LIFE OF PRESIDENT EDWARDS, Edwards gives the background of how he became interested in the life and characteristics of the “flying” spider.
• “Of Atoms” 1st published in THE LIFE OF PRESIDENT EDWARDS, by Serano Dwight. He argued for God’s existence because of the existence of “solid matter.”
• “Beauty of the World” and “Wisdom in the Contrivance of the World” These are part of Edwards’s writings on “Natural Philosophy.” Edwards returned time and time again to the fact that it is God, and his Grace and Glory that are the only reason for creation and all the beauty contained in it.
• “Of Being” Written as both a defense of the Revivals in colonial New England, and a warning of false profession and religion, THE RELIGIOUS AFFECTIONS ranks as one of the most powerful works ever written. It has been said that, “if one can read Religious Affections, and still be convinced they belong to Christ, they most assuredly must be.” Edwards’s objective was to distinguish between true and false religion by showing the marks of a saving work of the Holy Spirit in men. In his preface, he stressed the importance of using “our utmost endeavours clearly to discern ... wherin true religion does consist” because “till this be done, it may be expected that great revivings of religion will be but of short continuance.”
• “The Mind” A series of entries made at various times, “The Mind” is a collection of thoughts on no longer extant manuscripts. Serano Dwight originally published “The Mind” in 1829. This series of articles presumably constituted the outlines of a book that Edwards wanted to publish that was to be entitled “The Natural History of the Mental or Internal World.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1746
Ezra Stiles graduated from Yale College. (While at Yale, Stiles had become involved in electrical experiments after a parlor apparatus was sent there, by Benjamin Franklin.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
His bachelor’s sheepskin is still on deposit at Yale Library: HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1749
Ezra Stiles was licensed to preach and became a tutor at Yale College.
Gideon Hawley graduated from Yale.
When the Reverend Elihu Spencer, a 1746 graduate of Yale, attempted to establish a mission to the Six Nations at the town of Oquaga on the Susquehanna River near what is now Windsor, New York, his missionary attempt failed.
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Yale College HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1772
Timothy Dwight offered, at his Yale College graduation, an address “On the History, Eloquence, and Poetry of the Bible,” in which the new minister proclaimed that the BIBLE was literature, differing from other literature in being the very highest.
THEOLOGY SCHOOLS Oh, Reverend Dwight, what a can of worms you open! If the BIBLE is literature, is it only literature? –does it not differ from other literature other than being the highest? –is it the very highest possible, or, swallow your tongue, may there be a higher literature which is yet to be understood? What is to prevent someone from coming along and offering a literature that is also the very highest, so that it constitutes competition for the BIBLE? HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1773
8th day of 4th month: During this year the Reverend Samuel Hopkins of the 1st Congregational Church in Newport and President Ezra Stiles of Yale College were urging that freed Africans be resettled in West Africa. The Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends issued a query: Are friends clear of Importing, Buying or any way purchasing disposing or holding of Mankind as Slaves, And are all those who have been held in a State of Slavery discharged therefrom. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE SLAVERY EMANCIPATION HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1774
September: 14-year-old Noah Webster, Jr. rode horseback to New Haven to matriculate at Yale College.
CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
Yale College “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1777
May 26, Monday: Oliver Goldsmith’s pastoral THE DESERTED VILLAGE (in memory of his deceased brother). THE DESERTED VILLAGE
While Noah Webster, Jr. was entering the Junior year of his college studies, invasion of the port city of New Haven by the British military holding the ports of Boston, Newport, and New-York came to be a real possibility. British General Burgoyne’s army was advancing down the Hudson River. For this reason, at the end of May the entire Junior class of Yale College began its studies far inland in Glastonbury, Connecticut with the depressed and depressing Reverend Joseph Buckminster, D.D. as their tutor: Sin is an abominable thing, which God’s soul hates and it is no less offensive in his children than in others. Was there no such thing as sin in the world, suffering would be a stranger.
Fall: The Reverend Ezra Stiles was elected president of Yale College.
Studying under the perpetually depressed and depressing Yale tutor, the Reverend Joseph Buckminster, D.D., in the hick town of Glastonbury, could not have been particularly intriguing. Despite the fact that as a student he was exempt from military service, Noah Webster, Jr. enlisted as a private in his father Captain Noah Webster, Sr.’s Hartford militia unit, on its way to resist the army of British General Burgoyne (the militia unit would not take part in any actual altercations).
GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1778
March: The Reverend Ezra Stiles accepted the post of president of Yale College.
June 14, Sunday: In President of Yale College Ezra Stiles’s diary, we find a reference to several students doing well in debating. Noah Webster, Jr. was among them.
The Reverend Gilbert White of Selborne sighed in his journal, “White butter-flies unnumerable: woe to the cabbages!” HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1780
December 30, Saturday: Concord enabled 10 of its citizen soldiers to serve for 9 months with the Continental Army at Fishkill.
TABLE OF REVOLUTIONARY CAMPAIGNS3
AMOUN WHEN REQUIRED MEN TIME WHERE EMPLOYED BOUNTY T
June 5, 1780 19 6 months Continental Army 1000 16000
These [the above] men were hired by the same committee. They were intended to march to Albany to prevent the incursions of the Indians, but counter orders were issued and they went to Rhode Island. Cyprian How was Colonel; ———— Bancroft of Dunstable, Lieutenant-Colonel; ———— Stone, of Ashby, Major; Abraham Andrews, Captain; Silas Walker and Eli Conant, Lieutenants. Bedford furnished eight; Acton, eleven; Lincoln, twelve; Carlisle, nine.
June 22, 1780 19 3 months Rhode Island 17090
December 2, 1780 16 3 years Continental Army Hired in Classes
These [the above] men were to serve three years or during the war. The town decided, after con- siderable debate, by a vote of 53 to 42, to hire them in classes. The Selectmen, James Barrett, Esq., Jonas Heywood, Esq., Mr. Isaac Hubbard, Mr. Samuel Hosmer, Col. Nathan Barrett, and Mr. Job Brooks were chosen to divide the town into as many classes as there were men to hire, according to wealth. The town voted to “proceed against” any who should neglect to pay their proportion in the several classes; each one of which hired a man at as low a rate as possible. The men’s names were Charles Adams, Richard Hayden, Jonathan Wright, Joseph Dudley, Isaac Hall, Lot Lamson, Francis Baker, Joseph Adams, Benjamin Barron, William Tenneclef, Richard Hobby, Leonard Whitney, Samuel Farrar, John Stratten, Daniel McGregor, and Jonathan Fiske. Bedford furnished eight; Acton, ten; Lincoln, ten; Carlisle, six. They were mustered by Capt. Joseph Hosmer.
December 28, 1780 10 9 months Continental Army, Fishkill
At Yale College, a pencil sketch was made of President Ezra Stiles.
3. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study. On July 16, 1859 he would correct a date mistake buried in the body of the text.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1783
Abiel Holmes graduated from Yale College and answered a call to preach in South Carolina.
May 8, Thursday: The earliest known public reference (so far as we presently know4) to Thomas Jefferson’s role as the draftsman of the Declaration of Independence would be a pamphlet version distributed in New England5 of a sermon of this date by the Reverend President Ezra Stiles of Yale College before the Connecticut General
Assembly. In this sermon, although Stiles attributed the fine sentiments of the document to all Americans, he also took note of Jefferson’s “signal act” of having drafted it on behalf of the Continental Congress. It had been Jefferson, according to the Reverend, no historian, who had “poured the soul of the continent into the monumental act of Independence.” The style of this brief reference seems suggestive of emphasis being placed upon a known but disregarded piece of information, rather than announcement of a novel piece of information.
4. Detweiler, “The Changing Reputation of the Declaration of Independence,” 560; Boyd, et al., eds., THE PAPERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON, XV, 241n. 5. The sermon would subsequently be issued as a pamphlet: THE UNITED STATES ELEVATED TO GLORY AND HONOR. A SERMON PREACHED BEFORE HIS EXCELLENCY JONATHAN TRUMBULL,... AND THE HONORABLE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT... MAY 8TH, 1783 (New Haven CT: Thomas and Samuel Green, 1783; Worcester MA: Isaiah Thomas, 1785). HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1785
September 15, Thursday: Abiel Holmes, who had returned from the Midway Congregational Church in Georgia to New England for this ceremony, was ordained in the chapel at Yale College. It was the Reverend President Stiles, who would become Mr. Holmes’s father-in-law, who offered the ordaining prayer. Mr. Holmes having signified his acceptance of the call, in August following (1784) commenced preaching among them, and being only a licentiate, in the following year, September 15, 1785, was, upon the request of the church, ordained in the chapel at Yale College, Rev. Levi Hart preaching the ordination sermon, from Galatians I:10, Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles offering the ordaining prayer, Rev. Dr. Williams giving the charge, and Rev. Warham Williams the right hand of fellowship.
D.D. D.D. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1789
September 15, Tuesday: The Foreign Affairs Department of the federal administrative branch of the US government would be known henceforward as the US Department of State. A “Great Seal of the United States” was forwarded by the federal legislative branch and entrusted to the custody of the Secretary of State.
James Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey, the second to last child in a family of a dozen children. His father, Judge William Cooper, had served in the administrations of both President George Washington and President John Adams. His mother, Elizabeth Fenimore, had originated in a Quaker family. He would grow up in a town founded by his father in central New York state, Cooperstown. His early education would be in a private school in Albany. He would spend three years at Yale College as a Latin scholar and then be expelled in consequence of a junior-year prank — whereupon he would seek a career in the merchant marine. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1796
Benjamin Silliman, Sr. graduated from Yale College. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1802
Sylvestre François Lacroix revised his TRAITÉ DU CALCUL DIFFÉRENTIEL ET DU CALCUL INTÉGRAL to a shortened version for classroom use (the shortened version, TRAITÉ ÉLÉMENTAIRE DE CALCUL DIFFERÉNTIEL ET DU CALCUL INTÉGRAL, would be published in nine editions before 1882).
Benjamin Silliman, Sr. was appointed professor of Chemistry and Natural History at Yale College.
Samuel Hoar graduated from Harvard College. An assignment he prepared, “A Stereographic Projection of the Sphere, and Astronomical Calculations” (21 x 28 in.), is still on file there:
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1807
Thomas Smith Grimké, one of Sarah Moore Grimké and Angelina Emily Grimké’s brothers, returned from Yale College as a convert to the Reverend Timothy Dwight’s brand of revivalism. His father, Judge John Fauchereau Grimké, insisted, however, that instead of studying for the ministry and making of himself an evangelist, his son read for the law.
James Ellsworth De Kay matriculated at Yale (he would repeat his junior year and then fail to graduate). HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1809
After being expelled from Yale College as the result of a junior-year prank, James Cooper had entered the merchant marines and gone on to become a midshipman in the United States Navy. At this point, however, his father died, bequeathing him a sum that would enable him henceforward to adopt the lifestyle of a gentleman of means and leisure.
WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF
Yale College “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
Joseph Emerson Worcester went on from Phillips’s Academy to Yale College, where, at the age of 25, he would again be vastly older than other matriculants. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1810
At the age of 16, William Cullen Bryant entered the sophomore class of Williams College. Because of financial problems and also in hopes of being able to attend Yale College, he would withdraw without graduating. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1811
Ralph Emerson graduated from Yale College, delivering the Valedictory Oration, “Energy of Character.”
Joseph Emerson Worcester graduated from Yale College and began to teach at a private academy in Salem, Massachusetts. One of his pupils would be Nathaniel Hathorne [sic].
August 26, Monday: British forces took Batavia (Djakarta) while the Dutch defenders retreated to Semarang.
A Catskill jury convicted Amos Eaton of forgery in connection with a foreclosed property and packed him off to a life sentence at New York’s Newgate Prison, in Greenwich Village. The prisoner would continually maintain his utter innocence and, during the following four years, would be teaching botany to the prison agent’s son John Torrey (who would afterward become a botanist). This prisoner would also, from prison, be publishing a manuscript on mineralogy. BOTANIZING
Upon his release, Eaton would be spending a year at Yale College, studying botany, chemistry, and mineralogy under Professor Benjamin Silliman, Sr. and Eli Ives.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2 day 26 of 8 Mo// The day has passed much as usual. In the evening we called to see Elizabeth Coggeshall a little while HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1812
James Ellsworth De Kay left Yale College without a degree.
After an apprenticeship to a printer, Leonard Withington entered Yale as a sophomore. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1814
Ralph Emerson graduated from Andover Theological Seminary. He would become a tutor at Yale College.
Leonard Withington graduated from Yale. While in college he had served as one of the five editors of the fortnightly Atheneum. His play “Rustic Love: A Dialogue, in Two Acts, Written for Exhibition at the Public Commencement of Yale College in 1814” was performed at the commencement (in this play, which had to do with hypocrisy, the virtues of a country family are almost destroyed by a con artist posing as a fashionable gentleman). During his college education, he had determined that he would become a minister, and to that end he would study with President Dwight and with his own pastor, the Reverend Dr. Codman, and also study for a few months at Andover Theological Seminary. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1817
Ebenezer Bailey graduated from Yale College. He would teach school while studying for the law, and then accept a job as a tutor in Virginia.
January 10, Friday: The head and torso of the statue known then as “younger Memnon” arrived at Rosetta in the Nile delta.
The Reverend Timothy Dwight who had written about his visits to New England, and in particular, about his visit to Concord, by this point was president of Yale College, and was dying. At the turn of the nineteenth century the indefatigable regional traveler Timothy Dwight, who never mentioned Walden Pond, declared that “from the plains of Concord will henceforth be dated a change in human affairs” (TRAVELS IN NEW-ENGLAND AND NEW-YORK, ed. Barbara Miller Solomon [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969], I: 280). This unshakable faith in the centrality of the Concord battle to the historical and spiritual landscape of Concord is reflected in Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” and again in Thoreau’s WEEK but parodied in WALDEN’s dismissal of Fourth of July celebrations (WALDEN, pages 160-61) and its mock- heroic account of the battle of the ants (“there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this” [WALDEN, page 230]). Thoreau knew very well, as did Emerson when he saluted Concord’s “embattled farmers” (with just a faint trace of condescension, however?) that “the fight in Concord history” was mythically the great exemplum of American military valor generally. Whereas WEEK memorializes the Concord battle in a conventional way, WALDEN sets the tone for a counter-cultural definition of what counts as local sacred space. He said to Benjamin Silliman, Sr., Yale’s professor of Chemistry:
I do not seem to have any directions, except as to publication of books.
Professor Silliman has testified to us that he responded to this deathbed declaration with the question:
What manuscripts shall be published?
Whereupon the Reverend Dwight indicated that:
I should wish these travels of mine.
(Which is, of course, how it is that we have the above material as rendered in THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION by Lawrence Buell.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1818
Edward Hitchcock resigned as principal of Deerfield Academy. He discontinued publication of his COUNTRY ALMANAC and entered Yale College’s theological seminary.
Orra White Hitchcock’s colored drawing “A View of the Falls on the Connecticut River at Gill, Mass.” appeared in Portfolio Magazine (Philadelphia).
At the beginning of this year, in New Haven, Connecticut, Benjamin Silliman, Sr. began a journal he named the American Journal of Science and Arts, the earliest scientific periodical. (Professor Silliman of Yale College would himself edit the journal for the next 26 years, and it would outlast all its competitors. This would become the American Journal of Science, which is now limited to papers on geology.) For many years this journal would be referred to simply as Silliman’s Journal: THE SCIENCE OF 1818
Some have spoken slightingly of the Indians, as a race possessing so little skill and wit, so low in the scale of humanity, and so brutish that they hardly deserved to be remembered,–using only the terms “miserable,” “wretched,” “pitiful,” and the like. In writing their histories of this country they have so hastily disposed of this refuse of humanity (as they might have called it) which littered and defiled the shore and the interior. But even the indigenous animals are inexhaustibly interesting to us. How much more, then, the indigenous man of America! If wild men, so much more like ourselves than they are unlike, have inhabited these shores before us, we wish to know particularly what manner of men they were, how they lived here, their relation to nature, their arts and their customs, their fancies and superstitions. They paddled over these waters, they wandered in these woods, and they had their fancies and beliefs connected with the sea and the forest, which concern us quite as much as the fables of Oriental nations do. It frequently happens that the historian, though he professes more humanity than the trapper, mountain man, or gold-digger, who shoots one as a wild beast, really exhibits and practices a similar inhumanity to him, wielding a pen instead of a rifle. One tells you with more contempt than pity that the Indian had no religion, holding up both hands, and this to all the shallow-brained and bigoted seems to mean something important, but it is commonly a distinction without a difference. Pray, how much more religion has the historian? If Henry Ward Beecher knows so much more about God than another, if he has made some discovery of truth in this direction, I would thank him to publish it in Silliman’s Journal, with as few flourishes as possible. It is the spirit of humanity, that which animates both so-called savages and civilized nations, working through a man, and not the man expressing himself, that interests us most. The thought of a so-called savage tribe is generally far more just than that of a single civilized man. …
Fall: Walter Colton matriculated at Yale College. There he would be awarded the Berkeleyan Prize for the best Latin translation. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1819
Yale College awarded to Stephen Elliott an honorary degree of Doctor of Law.
From this year until 1824, Stephen Elliott’s nephew William Elliott served as intendant for Beaufort. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1820
Edward Hitchcock graduated from Yale College’s theological seminary.
David Mack (III) matriculated at Williams College (at some point he would switch over to Yale).
According to Arthur B. Darling’s “Outline of the History of the State Church, 1691-1848” in POLITICAL CHANGES IN MASSACHUSETTS, 1824-1848 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1925): “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
From 1691 until 1780, Puritans ran the established commonwealth church. This intimate tie between church and state government lasted after Independence from Great Britain. In early post-Revolution years 1780-1799 legal battles were fought over what the rights and duties of religious dissenters were in regards particularly to mandated tithing to the state church. Although the repeated decision was that nonsubscribers to the official state religion DID in law have the duty of paying tithes -in the forms of taxes and penalties- to the state for the maintenance and support of the church, statutory neglect by the government was the norm from 1799 until the new constitution of the state was adopted in 1820. The new constitution did not clear up the issue of state church collections from the state’s revenue, however: all it did substantially was eliminate the test of religious affiliation for office. Unitarians and Universalists were the major sects in power over the state church during the 1820s and 1830s. Both groups took advantage of the system to acquire church buildings and properties for their individual denominations. In reaction, Trinitarians and Congregationalists formed voluntary organizations throughout the state. Reasons for them doing this can be better understood by recognizing the fact that by 1848 -even after the “end” of the state church- the Unitarians had taken over over 120 church sites by means made legal by the state church system. Back to the 1820s and 1830s, however. The Unitarians gained firm control of Harvard College, amidst vicious political combat. Orthodox Congregationalist response was the founding of Andover. In 1833, the state church was disestablished; legally enforced tithing was abolished; and voluntary organization in the state recognized religion was made universal. This entire series of incidents served to sever all intimate ties between the Unitarian and the Congregational churches in Massachusetts, according to Darling. (pages 22-4) (James E. Stout, March 15, 1986)
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1822
Walter Colton delivered the valedictory poem for his graduating class at Yale College. He would enter the Andover Theological Seminary. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1823
September: Noah Webster received an LL.D. from Yale College.
David Mack (III) graduated at the age of 19 from Yale. He would study law with an uncle, Elisha Mack of Salem, Massachusetts, and at Yale Law School, and then practice law successfully for several years in Andover, Massachusetts until overcome by conscience at the advocate’s need to “make the worse appear the better course.” (Sticking close to the truth while teaching the young would prove ever so much more congenial!) HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1824
Fall: F.A.P. Barnard matriculated at the age of 15 at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. He would be at the head of his class in mathematics and the exact sciences. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1825
This is Yale in this year, as engraved by John Warner Barber:
NEW HAVEN, CONN. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1826
Pietro Bachi found work in the United States as a teacher of Italian and Spanish at Harvard College, at a salary of $500 per year.
Benjamin Peirce, Senior became Harvard’s librarian.
Doctor John White Webster compiled A MANUAL OF CHEMISTRY.
Richard Hildreth graduated from Harvard and would teach school for one year, at the Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts, before deciding to follow the example of Sir Walter Scott and pursue a career in law and literature.
In about this year Nathaniel Baker arrived at the age of 80 and sold his portion of the Baker farm to Amos Baker’s son James Baker.
Elizur Wright, Junior graduated at Yale College and went to teach in a school at Groton. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1827
William Andrus Alcott graduated from the medical training of Yale College and became a physician.
In this year or the following one, Reuben Crandall, having graduated from Yale, also became a physician.
May: In Brooklyn, Connecticut, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May organized the first ever convention “to improve and bless the Common Schools.”
At this convention attended by over 100 persons he learned of an experiment being conducted in a small town in western Massachusetts about 50 miles (one day’s stagecoach travel) to the north, Cheshire. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
The experimental school in Cheshire, Massachusetts was being run by a rural master named Amos Bronson Alcott. The schoolmaster had renamed Primary School #1 as “The Cheshire Pestalozzian School” in honor of the educational theories of the Swiss innovator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and the school’s motto he selected was “Education’s all.”
I shall institute a new order of human culture. Infancy I shall invest with a glory — a spirituality, which the disciples of Jesus, deeply as they entered into his spirit, and caught the life of his mind, have failed to bring forth in their records of his sayings and life.
May learned of this experiment from a not entirely impartial source, Bronson’s cousin William Alcott, who was just in this year graduating in medicine from Yale College. May wrote to Bronson “urgently to visit me.” THE ALCOTT FAMILY HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1828
James Fenimore Cooper had grown up in Cooperstown, 150 miles north of New-York. At 14 he had entered Yale College but had been expelled for having blown up another student’s door and for training a donkey to sit in a professor’s chair, and had then served as a midshipman in the US Navy.
Although a sizeable inheritance enabled him to live for a time as a country gentleman, this money had spent itself and so in 1820 he had turned to fiction. He was already known for the LEATHERSTOCKING TALES and for a sea novel and was living abroad on the proceeds when NOTIONS OF THE AMERICANS PICKED UP BY A TRAVELLING BACHELOR appeared in this year. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE
Cooper used as his narrator an unnamed Englishman, and his text simulated a series of letters, dated 1824, from this observer to friends at a gentleman’s club. The letters described the Englishman’s alleged journey through America in the company of an American acquaintance named Cadwallader. The essays responded to foreign accounts of America in circulation in London and Paris: “It will be seen that much use has been made of the opinions and information of a native American. Without some such counsellor, the facts of this book could never have been collected. There is, perhaps, no Christian country on earth in which a foreigner is so liable to fall into errors as in the United States of America. The institutions, the state of society, and even the impulses of the people, are in some measure new and peculiar. The European, under such circumstances, has a great deal to unlearn before he can begin to learn correctly.” Cooper presaged Alexis de Tocqueville’s and Gustave de Beaumont’s observations of the differences between the behavior of single and married women, though he felt certain that the freedoms enjoyed by single women were not as broad as the French might suppose. He painted America a “paradise for women” because here women, although they tended to be both plainer and more crude than their European counterparts, were spared the hard labor and the assaults which were their lot in Europe. Despite the gallantries and courtesies shown to women in America, they definitely were in need of being accompanied by chaperones. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
The Milldam6 Company businessmen’s association was organized by Daniel Shattuck, Cyrus Stow, Ephraim Merriam, Abel Moore, John Keyes, and Nehemiah Ball, with a capital stock of $20,000.00. The company bought the land on both sides of the Concord mill dam where there had previously been a native village’s communal fishing weir. (The name of that village is not of record. The pond had been south of the present street with the stream draining north into the Concord River, and it had been into this pond that the British troops had hastily dumped Concord’s military supplies. As Henry Thoreau would note on one of his surveys, the stream had been diverted into Concord’s storm drains.) Draining the pond, they widened the road by 20 feet and sold lots for business buildings. The tanyard on the north side of the milldam, and the smithy at the corner of Walden Street, would be replaced by retail stores.
Possibly as part of the businessmen’s agreement which created the “Milldam” district of downtown Concord in this year, John Thoreau, Senior gave up operation of the mill, milldam, race, and pond on Mill Brook, which he had been operating since 1823.
April 21, 1852: … Was that a large shad bush where fathers mill used to be.? There is quite a water fall beyond. where the old dam was Where the rapids commence at the outlet of the pond, the water is 6. Please note that in referring to this area as the “Milldam,” Concord merchants were copying a famous name of Boston, which already had a district referred to as “The Milldam.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
singularly creased as it rushes to the fall CONCORD ZOOM MAP
In Acton, Mr. Perham had once acted as postmaster but then for some reason this had been discontinued and there had not been a Post Office for some time. In this year a Post Office was re-established, and Silas Jones would be serving as postmaster.
At this point Dr. Bela Gardner, who had been in Acton since 1823, removed to Vermont.
Henry Durant of Acton graduated at Yale College. He would become a tutor there while pursuing theological studies. According to Theodore Rawson Crane’s THE COLLEGES AND THE PUBLIC, 1787-1862, pages 83-99 (NY: Columbia, 1963), the “Yale Report of 1828” amounted to a defense of the educational tradition of the “superior education,” which is to say, education in superiority itself, education which included plenty of Greek and plenty of Latin, and an attack on the looser, less status-conscious, form of education that was being introduced among other places at the University of Vermont.
William Ingraham Kip switched from Rutgers College to Yale College.
F.A.P. Barnard graduated from Yale, standing 2d in the honor list, and became a teacher in the Hartford Grammar School. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1830
F.A.P. Barnard became a tutor at Yale College. At that time each sub-senior class was divided into groups each of which recited all lessons to one tutor, and Barnard, whose specialty was mathematics, would inaugurate a reform in which there were tutors for each speciality.
The Reverend Ralph Emerson was awarded the honorary degree of DD by Yale.
The Reverend Joseph Emerson’s 1818 LECTURES UPON THE MILLENNIUM was republished by Philip Shaw of Boston. As soon as Christ returns he is going to chose among us, and some of us will get to rule the earth on his behalf. Since it is going to be such a really neato thingie, to be a ruler of this whole planet and all the human sinners on it, and since Christ is obviously going to elect those of us who kept the faith during his extended absence, it makes a whole lot of sense for you to accept my good advice, and sacrifice now and keep the faith. This is a really great deal! –Those of you who are smart enough to heed my sage advice are gonna get your reward, big time.
Summer: Sam Houston got married with Tiana Rogers in a Cherokee ceremony.
John E. Cook was born in a well-to-do family of Haddam CT. After being expelled from Yale on account of an indiscretion, he would become a law clerk in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and in 1855 would become a member of Charles Lenhart’s guerrilla force operated out of Lawrence in the Kansas Territory. He would make himself into an excellent shot. He would be dispatched by John Brown to Harpers Ferry more than a year before the raid to work out the details on the ground, and would secure employment in the area as a lock tender on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, as a schoolteacher, and as a bookseller. He would marry a Chambersburg PA woman, Mary V. Kennedy, on April 18, 1859. After escaping by climbing into a tree and watching the fight after Brown had sent him out to collect weapons, and after evading capture for some months, against the advice of his comrades he would become reckless in his search for food, and be captured on October 25, 1859 HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
eight miles from Chambersburg PA. As an incessant and compulsive communicator he had always been considered by the Brown operatives to be indiscreet, and in a confession which would be published as a pamphlet at Charles Town in the middle of November 1859 for the benefit of Samuel C. Young, a man who had been crippled for life in the fighting at Harper’s Ferry, Cook would detail for his captors all his movements — from the point of his 1st meeting with Brown after the battle of Black Jack in June 1856 until after his capture. At the last moment Cook would seek to save his neck by representing that he had been deceived through false promises. For this revelation Cook would be severely censured at the time, being termed “Judas” by the friends of Brown. Despite his confession and despite his brother-in-law A.P. Willard being the governor of Indiana, he would in the end hang for the treason and murder at Harpers Ferry, one of the last to be taken to the gallows, on December 16th. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1831
Benjamin Silliman, Sr., a professor at Yale College, established its Trumbull Gallery, the first art gallery at an educational institution in America. In exchange for an annuity, John Trumbull deposited his best works at this gallery.
William Ingraham Kip graduated from Yale College. Briefly, he would study law.
In this year a proposal was being made, to establish in New Haven a separate college for black scholars. What an embarrassment! Yale would argue that harboring such students in the same town would be “incompatible with the prosperity, if not the existence” of Yale, — and they would successfully prevent that new institution from being formed and successfully prevent those black youths from receiving a higher education.7
7. The Reverend Timothy Dwight, when he was head of Yale, would argue that a man “who receives slaves from his parents by inheritance, certainly deserves no censure for holding them.” Fully a tenth of the graduates of Yale would be proslavery, which is approximately double the percentage that obtained among Harvard grads or Princeton grads. Larry Tise has tried to make a case, in his 1987 book PROSLAVERY, that Yale was more important than any other college or university in the 19th Century in turning out major proslavery clergymen and, in effect, helping to make proslavery a national and not a purely sectional ideology. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1833
Marshall Merriam, son of a Concord farmer, graduated from Yale College.
Samuel Ringgold Ward, having grown up on the streets of New-York, became a teacher in a school for black children in Newtown, Long Island.
He had the great honor to become the replacement for a previous escaped-slave teacher, “Jim Pembroke,” who was moving on, to New Haven, Connecticut (where he would be allowed to audit classes at Yale College and would become a pastor at the Temple Street Congregational Church — and would become very well known later in life as the Reverend Doctor James W.C. Pennington DD): I grew up in the city of New York as do the children of poor parents in large cities too frequently. I was placed at a public school in Mulberry Street, taught by Mr. C.C. Andrew, and subsequently by Mr. Adams, a Quaker gentleman, from both of whom I received great kindness. Dr. A. Libolt, my last preceptor in that school, placed me under lasting obligations. Poverty compelled me to work, but inclination led me to study; hence I was enabled, in spite of poverty, to make some progress in necessary learning. Added to poverty, however, in the case of a black lad in that city, is the ever-present, ever-crushing Negro-hate, which hedges up his path, discourages his efforts, damps his ardour, blasts his hopes, and embitters his spirits. Some white persons wonder at and condemn the tone in which some of us blacks speak of our oppressors. Such persons talk as if they knew but little of human nature, and less of Negro HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
character, else they would wonder rather that, what with slavery and Negro-hate, the mass of us are not either depressed into idiocy or excited into demons. What class of whites, except the Quakers, ever spoke of their oppressors or wrongdoers as mildly as we do? This peculiarly American spirit (which Englishmen easily enough imbibe, after they have resided a few days in the United States) was ever at my elbow. As a servant, it denied me a seat at the table with my white fellow servants; in the sports of childhood and youth, it was ever disparagingly reminding me of my colour and origin; along the streets it ever pursued, ever ridiculed, ever abused me. If I sought redress, the very complexion I wore was pointed out as the best reason for my seeking it in vain; if I desired to turn to account a little learning, in the way of earning a living by it, the idea of employing a black clerk was preposterous — too absurd to be seriously entertained. I never knew but one coloured clerk in a mercantile house. Mr. W.L. Jeffers was lowest clerk in a house well known in Broad Street, New York; but he never was advanced a single grade, while numerous white lads have since passed up by him, and over him, to be members of the firm. Poor Jeffers, till the day of his death, was but one remove above the porter. So, if I sought a trade, white apprentices would leave if I were admitted; and when I went to the house of God, as it was called, I found all the Negro-hating usages and sentiments of general society there encouraged and embodied in the Negro pew, and in the disallowing Negroes to commune until all the whites, however poor, low, and degraded, had done. I know of more than one coloured person driven to the total denial of all religion, by the religious barbarism of white New Yorkers and other Northern champions of the slaveholder. However, at the age of sixteen I found a friend in George Atkinson Ward, Esq., from whom I received encouragement to persevere, in spite of Negro-hate. In 1833 I became a clerk of Thomas L. Jennings, Esq., one of the most worthy of the coloured race; subsequently my brother and I served David Ruggles, Esq., then of New York, late of Northampton, Massachusetts, now no more. In 1833 it pleased God to answer the prayers of my parents, in my conversion. My attention being turned to the ministry, I was advised and recommended by the late Rev. G. Hogarth, of Brooklyn, to the teachership of a school for coloured children, established by the munificence of the late Peter Remsen, Esq., of New Town, N.Y. The most distinctive thing I can say of myself, in this my first attempt at the profession of a pedagogue, is HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
that I succeeded Mr., now the Rev. Dr., Pennington.
November 12, Tuesday: Alyeksandr Porfiryevich Borodin was born in St. Petersburg, an illegitimate son of Prince Luka Stepanovich Gedianov (Gedianishvili) by Avdotya Konstantinovna Antonova, daughter of a soldier from Narva. According to common practice the infant was registered as the son of one of the Prince’s serfs, Porfiry Ionovich Borodin.
This would be the night of the birth of meteor astronomy. With David Henry Thoreau 16 years old and John Shepard Keyes 12 years old, a spectacular meteor shower during the wee smalls of the early morning hours was witnessed by numerous observers at various places on the eastern seaboard of the North American continent. For four hours the pre-dawn sky was lit with meteors. We don’t know that Henry himself saw it; presumably he was asleep, although there were newspaper reports that many people were awakened by the flashes of light cast on the walls of dark bedrooms by the fireballs, and in the towns many people were awakened by the shouts and cries of neighbors. Keyes would report that: I slept in a chamber with an easterly window and happening by some unusual circumstance to be waked very early perhaps by the flashes of light I laid in bed for an hour or two watching and trying to count the bright streams of fire that shot so incessantly and madly across the sky. At last thoroughly roused by the sight I got up and pulling the bed clothes over my shoulders sat at the window till the day light hid the display. In my ignorance of the cause I almost concluded that the stars set or went out like that every morning and wondered I had never been told of it or seen it before. On coming down to breakfast I told the family that I saw hundreds of shooting stars that morning and was soundly taken to task for exaggeration, and scolded so that I held my tongue about it. But in a day or two when the accounts were in all the papers and everybodys mouth, I had an even worse scolding for not calling up the others to see the sight. It was grand splendid and magnificent beyond any thing I have ever seen since. The only picture I have ever seen that at all comes up to the scene is the one in the bulky volume of the one hundred memorable events of the first century of the U.S. It literally for all that hour or two rained stars with their long trails of sparks rocket like, in all directions across the heavens, mainly starting from a point in front of my window, and varying in sheer directions and colors to any HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
extent. J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The United States Telegraph of Washington DC suggested that “The strong southern wind of yesterday may have brought a body of electrified air, which, by the coldness of the morning, was caused to discharge its contents towards the earth.” The Charleston Courier suggested that the sun had caused gases to be released from plants recently killed by frost. These gases, the most abundant of which was believed to be hydrogen, “became ignited by electricity or phosphoric particles in the air.” Yale College’s professor of natural philosophy, Denison Olmstead, however, in collecting and collating these various reports, would note that the apparent point of origin for these thousands upon thousands of streaks, regardless of the point of observation, had been a stationary radiant position in the neck of the constellation Leo. (This is why we now term them the Leonids, meaning “children of Leo.”) A historian of Philadelphia would write the following description of the event: The meteors of the 13th of November, 1833, were the most remarkable ever witnessed. A beholder says, he was sitting alone in a well lighted apartment at 4 AM., when he suddenly saw through the window a shower of sparks falling past it on the outside. He supposed the house was on fire, and rushing to the door, to his extreme amazement, he found the entire atmosphere filled with flakes of fire, (for they fully resembled flakes of snow of a stellated or radiated form) of a pale rose red, seemingly of an inch diameter, falling in a vertical direction, as thick as he ever saw snow! Intermingled with the smaller stars, were a larger kind, equal to one in a hundred of the others, of an intense sapphire blue, seemingly of three to four inches diameter. This shower continued up to broad day light. They were seen all over the United States, and have been variously described, but all agreeing that they surpassed all other known cases. SKY EVENT HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
A woodcut of the times, which would be recycled in color as below in Edmund Weiss’s 1892 volume BILDER- ATLAS DER STERNENWELT, displays the sublime falling-star spectacle as it had been experienced above the magnificent sublime gloom and drifting sublime vapors of the Niagara Falls.8
The Reverend William Miller and his followers interpreted these falling stars as a sure sign of The End. MILLENNIALISM
This display would lead to the first formulation of a theory on the origin of meteors. ...a tempest of falling stars broke over the Earth.... The sky was scored in every direction with shining tracks and illuminated with majestic fireballs. At Boston, the frequency of meteors was estimated to be about half that of flakes of snow in an average snowstorm. Their numbers ... were quite beyond counting; but as it waned, a reckoning was attempted, from which it was computed, on the basis of that much-diminished rate, that 240,000 must have been visible during the nine hours they continued to fall.
8. Whether such a Leonid meteor shower is spectacular or not varies from year to year and from region to region. The best one of this century has come and gone in 1966, with up to 100,000 meteors an hour having been visible. The last chance of this millennium to see a potentially enticing Leonid will come in 1999, but to view this during the hours of darkness you will need to travel to Europe. If you miss it you’ll need to wait another century or more for the next one expected to be spectacular, at least until the year 2098 and perhaps until the year 2131. Yep, it just ain’t fair. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
This Leonid storm was of course observed on the Great Plains by a number of bands of Dakota and appears in any number of “winter counts” painted on animal skin. Von Del Chamberlain of the Smithsonian has tabulated the astronomical references in 50 such Dakota records and found that 45 of the 50 made reference to the meteor shower of 1833/1834. The journal of Alexander M. Stephen records a meeting with Old Djasjini of the Hopi group on December 11, 1892. Old Djasjini is recorded as having said “How old am I? Fifty, maybe a hundred years, I can not tell. When I was a boy of so big (eight or ten years) there was a great comet in the sky and at night all the above was full of shooting stars — ah! that was a very long time ago, maybe a hundred years, maybe more.” During the probable lifetime of Old Djasjini there had been two such events which we know of, the great Leonid storm of 1833 followed by the sungrazing comet 1843 I. The Pawnee remember a Pahokatawa was of the opinion that when meteors were seen falling in great numbers it was not a sign that the world would end. Thus when the Pawnee witnessed the Leonid shower of 1833, when “the stars fell upon the earth,” they were able to say to one another “Remember Pahokatawa” and overcome their fear. SKY EVENT
In this year, as in 1866 and in 1966, observers might see “waterfalls” of shooting stars flowing down all sides of their sky. There might well on occasion be more than 8,000 flashes per minute.
The Leonids of this year generated numerous accounts of meteors that made a swishing noise, meteors that made a whooshing noise — and one that “resembled the noise of a child’s pop-gun.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1836
J. Gardner Davis, son of a Concord trader, graduated from Yale College. He would become a minister. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1839
Christopher Dunkin was awarded an Honorary MA degree by Yale College.
August 5, Friday: Ebenezer Bailey had just relocated his school for boys from Roxbury to Lynn, Massachusetts, and his alma mater, Yale College had just awarded him the Master of Arts degree, when on this day he died in Lynn. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1841
Richard Blackett’s BEATING AGAINST THE BARRIERS contains on pages 22-26 an essay on the Reverend James W.C. Pennington, one of the African Americans involved in the La Amistad affair. A fugitive slave artisan from Maryland, Pennington was also a leading opponent of the American Colonization Society and (though
Yale College prohibited him from formally enrolling in its divinity school or borrowing books from the library) a Yale-trained minister.
(This was the year in which the Reverend James W.C. Pennington’s TEXT-BOOK OF THE ORIGINS AND HISTORY &C. &C. OF THE COLORED PEOPLE was being published in Hartford CT by the printer L. Skinner.)
The incident of the La Amistad, as Blackett shows, allowed the Reverend James W.C. Pennington the opportunity to promote two of his foremost aims: the redemption of Africa through missionary activity, and active resistance against discrimination in the North. Pennington envisioned these blacks as becoming the leaders of a missionary station in West Africa. In 1841, five of the rebels and delegates from six states met at Pennington’s church in Hartford CT to found the Union Missionary Society — but this would result in conflict HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
with Lewis Tappan and the other major group assisting the rebels, the Mendian Committee. In 1846 the Reverend Pennington’s Union Missionary Society would merge with the Committee for West Indian Missions and the Western Evangelical Missionary Society to form the American Missionary Association.
In this year, also, Lewis Tappan realized that since he was regularly needing to extend credit in order to make a sale, he needed to be able to evaluate the trustworthiness of his customer as a creditor. He began keeping records on his customers’ characters and credit-worthiness. Eventually he would exploit his abolitionist connections among businessmen, in order to create a network of businesses who kept such records, to offer as a fee service to the commercial community up-to-date and comprehensive credit information about their potential customers. Some would regard such records-keeping as an invasion of privacy, but by 1844 Tappan’s Mercantile Agency would have 280 clients. It would open branch offices in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Tappan would in 1849 transfer the operation of his agency to his chief clerk, Benjamin Douglass, and by 1851, there would be some 2,000 full-time correspondents reporting from across the USA. In 1858, Douglass would transfer the company to his brother-in-law Robert Graham Dun, and in 1933 R.G. Dun & Company would merge with its main rival, Bradstreet, to form the largest credit reporting entity in the world, which would come to be known as Dun & Bradstreet. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1842
With the assistance of his son Benjamin Silliman, Jr., Professor Benjamin Silliman, Sr. founded the laboratory which would become the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1845
In the segregation phase of ethnic cleansing, of the 100 black voters on Manhattan Island, 1 in 10 lived in the district known as Seneca Village which eventually would be seized by Frederick Law Olmsted in order to enact his grand Central Park as a “surpassingly beautiful pleasure grounds [for the] refreshment and recreation” of the real citizens of the area.
Although during this year Frederick Law Olmsted put in a semester at Yale College, study turned out to be too much like work, and he therefore abandoned academia to operate as a gentleman farmer, first in Connecticut and then on Staten Island. For his pears he would win a silver spoon! At some point during this period of his life he would see fit to denounce American outhouses as offensive to refined sensitivities: “troublesome, unhealthy, indelicate, and ugly,” and would attempt a Gothic summer-house thingie featuring on the one side a view of his garden but on the other a two-hole or four-hole necessary. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1853
Benjamin Silliman, Sr. became emeritus at Yale College, passing the chair in chemistry on to his son Benjamin Silliman, Jr. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1856
Professor James Dwight Dana of Yale College declared that: The whole plan of creation had evident reference to Man as the end and crown of the animal kingdom, and ... progression from the lower to the higher races.... The earlier races were of lower types.... The development of the plan of creation ... was in accordance with the law of ... progress from the simple to the complex, from comprehensive unity to multiplicity through successive individualizations.
Dana clearly did not consider that the obvious self-serving and self-congratulatory nature of this nonscientific belief system was a reason for self-doubt. That his belief system was self-serving was obviously to him merely some sort of quaint coincidence! (Well, but he was a Yalie, and a Louis Agassiz colleague.) Stephen Jay Gould, page 105: “James Dwight Dana viewed the entire geological history of the earth and life as one long, coherent, and heroic story with a moral — a tale of inexorable progress, expressed in both physical and biological history, and leading, inevitably and purposefully, to God’s final goal of a species imbued with sufficient consciousness to glorify His name and works.” During this year Charles Darwin began to write down his ideas about descent with modification. He wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker in regard to the providentialist idea that Nature exemplified God’s benevolence toward His creatures:
What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of nature! HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
Darwin ... revered William Paley during his youth. In a courageous act of intellectual parricide, he then overthrew his previous mentor — not merely by becoming an evolutionist, but by constructing a particular version of evolutionary theory maximally disruptive of Paley’s system and deepest beliefs.... Where did Darwin get such a radical version of evolution? Surely not from the birds and bees, the twigs and trees. Nature helped, but intellectual revolutions must also have ideological bases. Scholars ... agree that two Scottish economists of the generation just before Darwin played a dominant role: Thomas Robert Malthus and the great Adam Smith himself. From Malthus, Darwin received the key insight that growth in population, if unchecked, will outrun any increase in the food supply. A struggle for existence must therefore arise, leading by natural selection to survival of the fittest (to cite all three conventional Darwinian aphorisms in a single sentence). Darwin states that this insight from Malthus supplied the last piece that enabled him to complete the theory of natural selection in 1838 (though he did not publish his views for twenty-one years). Adam Smith’s influence was more indirect, but also more pervasive. We know that the Scottish economists interested Darwin greatly and that, during the crucial months of 1838, while he assembled the pieces soon to be capped by his Malthusian insight, he was studying the thought of Adam Smith. The theory of natural selection is uncannily similar to the chief doctrine of laissez-faire economics. (In our academic jargon, we would say that the two theories are “isomorphic” — that is, structurally similar point for point, even though the subject matter differs.) To achieve the goal of a maximally ordered economy in the laissez-faire system, you do not regulate from above by passing explicit laws for order. You do something that, at first glance, seems utterly opposed to your goal: You simply allow individuals to struggle in an unfettered way for personal profit. In this struggle, the inefficient are weeded out and the best balance each other to form an equilibrium to everyone’s benefit. Darwin’s system works in exactly the same manner, only more relentlessly. No regulation comes from on high; no divine watchmaker superintends the work of his creation. Individuals are struggling for reproductive success, the natural analog of profit. No other mechanism is at work, nothing “higher” or more exalted. Yet the result is adaptation and balance — and the cost is hecatomb after hecatomb after hecatomb.... For Malthus, Paley actually cites the key line that inspired Darwin’s synthesis in 1838 (but in the context of a passage on civil vs. natural evils). Paley writes: The order of generation proceeds by something like a geometrical progression. The increase of provision, under circumstances even the most advantageous, can only assume the form of an arithmetic series. Whence it follows, that the population will always overtake the provision, will pass beyond the line of plenty, and will continue to increase till checked by the difficulty of procuring subsistence. (At this point, Paley adds a footnote: “See this subject stated in a late treatise upon population” — obviously Malthus.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
[NOTE: Compare and contrast this with Henry Thoreau’s horror at what he found himself thinking, about nature, late at night in the train station in Worcester!!]
Hecatomb9 upon hecatomb, leading only to holocaust!10
But — by the time the ORIGIN OF SPECIES appeared in 1859, he had decided to excise its worst passages about how incompatible the natural facts of parasitism, cruelty, and waste were with any concept of a caring and all- observant deity.11
Later, Darwin would write in his AUTOBIOGRAPHY that: In order to pass the B.A. examination, it was, also, necessary to get up Paley’s EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY, and his MORAL PHILOSOPHY.... The logic of this book and as I may add of his NATURAL T HEOLOGY gave me as much delight as did Euclid. The careful study of these works, without attempting to learn any part by rote, was the only part of the Academical Course which, as I then felt and as I still believe, was of the least use to me in the education of my mind. I did not at that time trouble myself about Paley’s premises; and taking these on trust I was charmed and convinced of the long line of argumentation. THE SCIENCE OF 1856
9. A hecatomb was the slaughter of 100 oxen, and thus by extension any large slaughter perpetrated in the expectation of a consequent divine benefit, or, rather, in order to reduce current levels of anxiety with regard to what would be to come. 10. An offering in which the entire offering is to be consumed by the flames, leaving nothing to be shared among its priests. 11. Stanley Edgar Hyman, THE TANGLED BANK, New York, 1962, page 38. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1857
Dr. Josiah Clark Nott left his medical practice in Mobile, Alabama and relocated to New Orleans to become chairman of the anatomy department of the medical school of the University of Louisiana.
Dr. Nott’s, George Robins Gliddon’s, and Louis Ferdinand Alfred Maury’s INDIGENOUS RACES OF THE EARTH; OR, NEW CHAPTERS OF ETHNOLOGICAL INQUIRY; INCLUDING MONOGRAPHS ON SPECIAL DEPARTMENTS. THE SCIENCE OF 1857
Completion of publication (begun in the previous year) of Henry Hotze’s translation of Joseph Arthur, comte de Gobineau’s ESSAI SUR L’INEGALITÉ DES RACES HUMAINES, titled THE MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY OF RACES. Dr. Nott contributed an appendix “containing a Summary of the Latest Scientific Facts bearing upon the Question of Unity or Plurality of Species.” Each race of the human species, each one appropriate to each of the continents, had been created by God separately, as the same species but as a separate act of creation — and therefore these separate creations each appropriate to itself were not to be mingled except through human sinful interference with what obviously was God’s Plan For the World. The proper role of the white was to be master, the proper role of the black to be servant. It was the way they were created and it was the way things should be. It is what God requires of us, that we be racist (however, in this year a light mulatto, Richard Henry Green, was graduating at Yale College).12
Publication of Professor Louis Agassiz’s CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES 12. Young Green may have been “passing” — there was of course no place to register a race identification on Yale’s forms, no image of him is available, he did not have any great difficulty in obtaining suitable employment, he married into a Vermont family commonly regarded as white, and we see in census records that he as well as his wife and children were presumed white. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
OF AMERICA began at this point, with the Boston firm of Little, Brown, & Company, in four quarto volumes, the most notable volume of which is the 2d, on the embryology of the turtle. The Concord library would come to own this, and from it Thoreau would copy in 1858 into his 2d commonplace book. ACALEPHS IN GENERAL CTENOPHORAE DISCOPHORAE HYDROIDAE HOMOLOGIES OF THE RADIATA
An utterly curious event occurred in 1857, in an utterly curious place, that will require some preamble. I have mentioned that all his life Professor Agassiz insisted regardless of any evidence brought before him that each species must be a separate and distinct “thought of God” –and that God must be repeatedly rethinking organic life in a series of independent and special creations without hereditary continuity– each time life on HDT WHAT? INDEX
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earth is destroyed by some natural cataclysm. Now the United States was building up toward a civil war over
Louis Agassiz using his head at Stanford the issue of human slavery and Agassiz published his ESSAY ON CLASSIFICATION, a “succinct and fervent” ESSAY ON CLASSIFICATION
treatise on his theory of special creationism, the pseudoscientific account which gave his foul politics the authority of reality itself, conveniently legitimating, among other things he desired, this peculiar institution. Now, as one of the curiosities of history, although it had been Alexander von Humboldt who had helped this bigot Agassiz get the chair in natural history at the University of Neuchâtel, it was also von Humboldt who persuaded the King of Prussia –of all people, of all places– to proclaim during this very year that:
A slave who steps on Prussian soil is free. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1859
June: In New Haven, Connecticut, Yale College awarded its 1st PhD.
Nathaniel Hawthorne moved his family from Italy to England to finish the writing of THE MARBLE FAUN.
Horace Mann, Sr. uttered perhaps his most famous words to Antioch College’s graduating class, two months before his own death: “be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
During the dry months of June, July, and August, the “Big Stink” of the Thames River at London would continue. In an attempt to diminish the stench, some 478 tons of chloride of lime, and some 4,280 tons of chalk lime, were thrown into the sewers of the city, at great expense, but this would result in no appreciable diminution of the problem. Plans were begun to accumulate a great quantity of perchloride of iron, to use during the summer of the following year. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1862
Professor James Dwight Dana of Yale College, in offering his MANUAL OF GEOLOGY in this year, felt obliged to denigrate the new theory of descent with modification — despite the fact that he had not as yet perused the copy of THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES with which he had been presented by his friend Charles Darwin.
He explained privately that he had not had time to consider his correspondent’s various arguments about evolution because “my head has all it can now do in my college duties,” a remark which of course amounted to a jibe at the fact that Darwin was merely an independent scholar, rather than an accredited and accomplished academician such as himself. Darwin would respond by personal letter, that he wished his friend had read his book because he might thereby “have been here or there staggered.” ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
Despite being a careful scientist, this American thinker had such an investment in the Providence of Deity, such a conceptual lock based on his understanding of the white man’s place and role in God’s Creation, that he would not until the mid-1870s be forced to succumb to the evidences of Darwinian evolution. To put the matter plainly, Yale Professor Dana had, like his fellow the benighted Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz, been a committed Platonist, and a Providentialist, as well as a racist self-privileger — and this Platonism, this Providentialism, and this racist self-privileging were dying a painfully hard and slow death: Dana viewed the entire geological history of the earth and life as one long, coherent, and heroic story with a moral — a tale of inexorable progress, expressed in both physical and biological history, and leading, inevitably and purposefully, to God’s final goal of a species imbued with sufficient consciousness to glorify His name and works. EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1865
July 26, Tuesday: From a sermon delivered by the Reverend Horace Bushnell of Hartford, Connecticut at the Commemorative Celebration at Yale College, in honor of alumni who had served in the Civil War: ... In this blood our unity is cemented and forever sanctified ... Had it not been for this common bleeding of the States in their common cause, it is doubtful whether our Constitution could have ever been carried.... We had not bled enough, as yet, to merge our colonial distinctions and make us a proper nation. Our battles had not been upon a scale to thoroughly mass our feeling, or gulf us in a common cause and life. We [must] not ... extirpate the form and leave the fact. The whole black code must go.... HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1872
A new record for New-York real estate was reached when Anthony J. Drexel, a Philadelphia banker, pays $348 a square foot for a building at 23 Wall Street, on the southeast corner of Broad.
Bishop William Ingraham Kip’s NEW YORK SOCIETY IN THE OLDEN TIME (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons). He received the degree of LL.D. from Yale College. OLDEN TIMES IN NEW YORK HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1874
A noticeably black student, Edward Bouchet, graduated from Yale College.13
13. This was actually not quite so much a precedent as has been made out, for in fact another student of color, Richard Henry Green, had been graduated by this institution in 1857 (it is not now clear whether that young man, a light mulatto, had been “passing” — there was of course no place to register a race identification on Yale’s forms, no image of him is available, he did not have any great difficulty in obtaining suitable employment, he married into a Vermont family commonly regarded as white, and we see in census records that he as well as his wife and children were presumed white). HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1968
January: While still attending Yale University with a major in history, George W. Bush completed the Air Force officer qualification test in New Haven, Connecticut.When given an opportunity on his application forms to volunteer
to go overseas, the adventurous young man would check the box next to DO NOT VOLUNTEER.
“When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.” — Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) The Devil and the Good Lord (1951), act 1 HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
May 27, Monday: Yale University student George W. Bush was 12 days away from losing his valuable 2S student deferment from the draft and Americans were dying in combat in Vietnam at the rate of 350 per week. He interviewed with Texas Air National Guard Commander Colonel Walter B. “Buck” Staudt and despite the fact that he had scored only 25% on a pilot aptitude test, was instantly recommended, over a long long waiting list of eager young college men, for a direct commission to 2d Lieutenant to undergo pilot training. (Some people, unduly cynical, attribute this preferment to the fact that his daddy was a congressman.) On this day he took one step forward and enlisted in the Air National Guard at Ellington Air Force Base near Houston, Texas. Wearing the uniform of this elite stateside national guard unit flying obsolete aircraft was a practical guarantee that he would never be sent against his will into harm’s way.
Immediately the enlistment ceremony needed to be repeated for the benefit of photographers, so that Texas Air National Guard Commander Colonel Walter B. “Buck” Staudt could be seen to personally hand this important young man his documents.
“When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.” — Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) The Devil and the Good Lord (1951), act 1
June: George W. Bush graduated from Yale University. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
1969
After deciding to admit women as undergraduates, Yale University changed its rules to allow swimmers in the University pool to attire themselves in swimsuits, rather than being required to swim nude! HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
2007
February 8, Thursday: According to the Chronicle of Higher Education: Yale U. Will Take Down Portrait Assailed as Racist Yale University will remove a portrait of its earliest major benefactor, Elihu Yale, that depicts him being waited on by a black servant wearing a metal collar, after years of controversy over the painting, which some critics see as a bigoted image at the center of power on the Yale campus. The portrait has hung for a century in the room where the university’s governing board meets. According to the Yale Daily News, a student newspaper, the controversial portrait will be replaced with one showing Elihu Yale alone. The university’s decision is a rare step in academe, many of whose oldest institutions were founded, financed, or led by slave owners or people involved in the slave trade. Last year, Brown University released a report on the slave connections of its founders that said Brown should acknowledge its ties to slavery, build a memorial on the campus, and establish a center on slavery and justice — but not to pay reparations or to apologize. At Yale, three graduate students released a study in 2001 that documented how many of the university’s benefactors profited from the slave trade, and financed some of Yale’s oldest scholarships and professorships. The study noted that eight of Yale’s 12 residential colleges were named for slave owners. The irony is that Elihu Yale himself owned no slaves, according to HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
Yale officials.
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Yale College HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: May 2, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX
YALE COLLEGE YALE COLLEGE
Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with