Making College Colonial: the Transformation of English

Home , Connecticut Hall, Edmund Woolley, James Duport, Josiah Hardy, Nathaniel Eaton, William Tennent

MAKING COLLEGE COLONIAL: THE TRANSFORMATION OF ENGLISH

CULTURE IN HIGHER EDUCATION IN PRE-REVOLUTIONARY AMERICA

A dissertation submitted

to Kent State University in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the

degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Stephanie C. Jannenga

December 2020

Except for previously published materials

Dissertation written by

Stephanie C. Jannenga

B.S., Grand Valley State University, 2008

M.A., Central Michigan University, 2010

Ph.D., Kent State University, 2020

Approved by

Kim Gruenwald______, Director, Doctoral Dissertation Committee

Leonne Hudson______, Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee

Natasha Levinson______

Timothy D. Hall______

Accepted by

Kevin Adams______, Chair, Department of History

Mandy Munro-Stasiuk______, Interim Dean, College of Arts and Sciences TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... III II. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... V III. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

HIGHER EDUCATION HISTORIOGRAPHY ...... 2 ENLIGHTENMENT HISTORIOGRAPHY ...... 7 HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE CULTURAL CONTINUITY-DISCONTINUITY DEBATE ...... 10 SOURCES ...... 20 DEFINITIONS ...... 21 CHAPTER OVERVIEW ...... 22 CONCLUSION ...... 24 IV. CHAPTER 1: COLLEGIATE FOUNDATIONS ...... 26

THE ENTERPRISING GENERATIONS ...... 28 First Steps and Motivations ...... 28 Trials and Misfortunes ...... 35 Growth and Development ...... 42 THE AWAKENED GENERATIONS ...... 48 Educational Responses to the Great Awakening ...... 49 Obstacles and Setbacks...... 56 Profiting from Perseverance ...... 62 THE ASPIRATIONAL GENERATIONS ...... 67 Bringing Higher Education to the Underserved ...... 69 Struggles and Hardships...... 77 Creating Lasting Institutions ...... 82 CONCLUSION ...... 90 V. CHAPTER 2: A COLONIAL AMERICAN EDUCATION ...... 92

CURRICULA ...... 93 Religious Education ...... 95 Enlightenment Education ...... 101 Historical Education ...... 109 COLONIAL EDUCATORS ...... 115 Instructor Presidents ...... 116 Professors ...... 122 CONCLUSION ...... 130 VI. CHAPTER 3: THE COLLEGIATE WAY: STUDENT LIFE AT THE COLONIAL COLLEGES ...... 133

STUDENT HOUSING ...... 134 SCHEDULES, RULES, AND PUNISHMENTS ...... 146 RECREATION ...... 160 CONCLUSION ...... 170 VII. CHAPTER 4: THE ENGLISH EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE ...... 173

THE COLONISTS ...... 175 ENGLISH EDUCATIONAL CONCERNS ...... 180 Living Abroad ...... 181 The University Curriculum in England...... 187 Religious Education ...... 188 Enlightenment Education ...... 196 Historical Education ...... 204

iii CONCLUSION ...... 213 VII. CHAPTER 5: HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC...... 216

COLLEGE-BUILDING IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC ...... 220 THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN THE COLLEGES OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC ...... 222 THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN THE CURRICULUM OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC ...... 229 HISTORY AND VIRTUE IN THE COLLEGES OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC ...... 238 CONCLUSION ...... 249 IX. CONCLUSION ...... 253 X. BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 263

PRIMARY SOURCES ...... 263 Manuscript Sources ...... 263 Published Sources ...... 265 SECONDARY SOURCES ...... 271 Books ...... 271 Articles and Book Chapters ...... 278

iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Foremost, I would like to thank my parents, Terry and Christine Jannenga, for supporting my desire to purse my graduate degrees. I am sure that when I finished my bachelor’s degree both of you thought you were done moving kids to campus, listening to anxious late-night phone calls, and accepting pleas to “please read my draft!” Yet, here we are; I now have a master’s degree, four years of experience teaching community college, and a PhD because you encouraged me to never settle and believed in me. I love you so much and can never thank either of you enough!

I also wish to thank the members of my dissertation committee. To my advisor, Dr. Kim

Gruenwald, thank you for accepting me as an advisee despite the fact that you did not always understand why I found the history of colleges so interesting. You have helped me create a better dissertation by questioning my assumptions and arguments. To Dr. Leonne Hudson, thank you for always having something good to say about my writing even when there was much about which to be critical. Thank you, Dr. Natasha Levinson, for providing me with an outside perspective on my dissertation; I sometimes forget that those of us in the history field tend to think in ways that are not always clear to others. To Dr. Timothy Hall, thank you for writing a letter of recommendation for me so that I could have the opportunity to study at Kent State and for agreeing to be on my dissertation committee after having already advised me as a master’s student. Thank you, Dr. Clare Stacey, for moderating my defense so smoothly via Zoom. Last, but not least, I want to thank my dissertation reader, Dr. Thomas Sosnowski, for teaching me

French (Merci!), helping me better understand the European perspective, and pushing me to present my work when I did not think I was ready. You were right, I was ready!

v INTRODUCTION

After God had carried us safe to New-England, and wee had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livli-hood, rear’d convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the Civill Government: One of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance Learning, and perpetuate it to Posterity.1

When the Puritans who arrived in Massachusetts Bay in 1630 disembarked from the

Arabella, their foremost priorities were housing, work, worship, government, and education. It took them a mere six years after their arrival to establish the first higher education institution in colonial America: Harvard College. To prioritize a privilege such as higher education, at a time when the simple act of surviving from one year to the next was uncertain, means that the education of their young men was of utmost importance to the English migrants.2 While those who established Harvard were Puritans, they were not the only English colonists to place a priority on higher education. Further south, in the colony of Virginia, colonial support for a college for Anglicans led to the establishment of the College of William & Mary in 1693.

Following in the footsteps of these two institutions, the colonists went on to establish seven more colonial colleges before the beginning of the Revolutionary War; that amounts to the founding of nine colleges in a little over 130 years. With these statistics in mind, it is obvious that education was important to the colonists, but why did they feel the need to establish these colleges at all?

As Englishmen, purportedly proud of their heritage, it would make sense for them to send their

1 New England’s First Fruits (London: Printed by R.O. and G.D. for Henry Overton and are to be sold at his Shop in Popes-head-Alley, 1643), 23. 2 The higher education of men is the primary focus of this dissertation because women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were, essentially, socially barred from higher education by virtue of their sex.

1 sons home to England to enroll at either the University of Oxford or the University of

Cambridge. Although the voyage to England was often expensive and could be dangerous, many colonists overlooked these issues to send their sons to the esteemed English institutions.

Convenience and cost alone, therefore, cannot justify the existence of the colonial colleges. This dissertation argues that the colonists chose to establish nine higher education institutions of their own because the education which one could receive in the motherland no longer met the religious, curricular, pedagogical, or lifestyle desires they had for their young men; furthermore, it engages the larger cultural continuity versus cultural change debate by positing that the colonists’ decision to have their children educated in the colonies rather than in England was intentional and serves as a sign of their cultural transformation. In making said decision, the colonists had ensured that the cultural differences between English and colonial society would continue to flourish.

Higher Education Historiography

Although education is far from a fledgling field in American historiography, the specific study of higher education institutions during the colonial period has received less attention from historians than the study of more modern institutions. Most works published on higher education in the United States have been constructed in one of three ways: an institution-level study, which tells the history of a single college; an era-specific study, such as an entire volume devoted to the history of collegiate learning during the eighteenth century; or, an all-encompassing survey of higher education which covers the history of all collegiate institutions founded between 1636 and some point in the twentieth century. Although this dissertation is an era-specific study, in particular, the study of higher education during the colonial period along with the early years of

2 the early republic, historical works belonging to all three constructions have influenced and informed the writing of it.

Institutional histories have played an important role in the historiography of colonial

American higher education because they have offered the most detail-rich information about their respective institutions outside of the archives. The first institutional histories of the colonial colleges, written as early as 1702, read like personal accounts rather than historical analyses of the institutions whose stories they tell. Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, for example, included the first history of Harvard College, but Mather was not nearly as concerned with historical facts as he was with disseminating his biblical message. The early histories of the

College of William & Mary, Yale College, the College of New Jersey, and Dartmouth College followed in 1727, 1766, 1764, and 1771 respectively. Despite their lack of historical analysis, these early histories do help to show how those involved with the establishment and growth of the colleges viewed their efforts. By the twentieth century, institutional histories had turned to making more specific arguments about each of the colleges, such as when Samuel Eliot Morison, a Harvard alumnus and professor, argued for the secularization of Harvard College in his four works. Morison became the go-to expert for all subsequent historians of Harvard. As a result, rather than going to the source material, many historians who came after Morison simply looked to his works for information about Harvard’s history. This had the potential to be problematic because Morison made statements in his work which do not exactly line up with the primary sources. In one of the latest institutional histories of a colonial college, Princeton and the Republic, 1768-1822, Mark A. Noll spotlighted the decline of religion and concurrent rise of moral and natural philosophy at the College of New Jersey from the late colonial period through the early republic. He argued that Stanhope Smith’s efforts to continue John Witherspoon’s legacy of bringing together Presbyterian faith and the theories of the

Scottish Enlightenment under the umbrella of a republican curriculum failed because his push to

3 integrate more modern scientific theory into higher education threatened the religious beliefs he was simultaneously trying to uphold. Thus, while institutional histories are limited in scope to the story of one college, they allow historians the freedom to pursue a broad array of themes.3

The era-specific histories of the twentieth century focused on religion, scholasticism, and the Americanization and politicization of colonial higher education while utilizing a compare- and-contrast style largely unavailable to historians of institutional histories. In one of the most significant and long-cited era-specific histories of higher education, The Founding of American

Colleges and Universities Before the Civil War, Donald G. Tewksbury argued that historians had too often tried to place the origins and character of colleges in America outside of their clearly denominational interests. Tewksbury arrived at this argument through a comparison of the antebellum colleges, and ultimately concluded that, “the American college was founded to meet the ‘spiritual necessities’ of a new continent. It was designed primarily as a ‘nursery of ministers,’ and was fostered as a ‘child of the church.’”4 By 1935, only three years after publication of Tewksbury’s book, James J. Walsh’s Education of the Founding Fathers of the

Republic swapped the theme of religion for scholasticism and argued that it was the primary method of teaching employed by the professors at the colonial colleges. As a result of this,

Walsh explained, the generation of men who signed the Declaration of Independence and formed

3 Cotton Mather, “The History of Harvard College,” in Magnalia Christi Americana (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1702); Henry Hartwell, James Blair, Edward Chilton, The Present State of Virginia and the College (London: John Wyat, 1727); Thomas Clap, The Annals or History of Yale College (New Haven: John Hotchkiss and B. Mecom, 1766); Samuel Blair, An Account of the College of New Jersey (Woodbridge, NJ: James Parker, 1764), Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935); Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936); Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936); Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1936); Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 1768-1822: The Search for a Christian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 4 Donald G. Tewkesbury, The Founding of American Colleges and Universities Before the Civil War (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1932), 55.

4 the U.S. Constitution thought more deeply and more thoroughly through the problems of human life and their relation to happiness than any other. Turning to a broader theme in 1970, Lawrence

A. Cremin’s American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 argued that higher education during the colonial period took on a “perceptible American cast.”5 A little more than a decade after Cremin’s work argued about the Americanization of colonial education, David W.

Robson’s Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution, zeroed in on the political aspect of that Americanization to argue that America’s college educators instilled republican political principles into their teaching. As a result of such a political education,

Robson explained, many students went on to become engaged in political activities both during and after the Revolution. In the twenty-first century, J. David Hoeveler’s Creating the American

Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges still focused on the politicization of higher education but went further than Robson by arguing that it was not only political principles taught within the curriculum, but the entire “cultural language” of colonial education, which led students to become revolutionaries. Era-specific histories, therefore, have contributed to the historiography of higher education by revealing connections between happenings at the colleges and some of the larger aspects of colonial culture.6

While still utilizing the compare-and-contrast style of the era-specific histories, historical surveys have highlighted the themes of necessity, religion, secularization, the Enlightenment, and student demography. The colonial section of Frederick Rudolph’s famous 1962 survey The

5 Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience: 1607-1783 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 510. 6 Tewkesbury, The Founding of American Colleges and Universities Before the Civil War; James J. Walsh, Education of the Founding Fathers of the Republic: Scholasticism in the Colonial Colleges, A Neglected Chapter in the History of American Education (New York: Fordham University Press, 1935); Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783; David W. Robson, Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985); J. David Hoeveler, Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges (New York: Roman and Littlefield, 2002).

5 American College and University: A History argued that higher education was a necessity for colonial society. The tandem themes of religion and secularization, particularly the turning away from the religious for the secular, were the focus of George M. Marsden’s The Soul of the

American University in 1993. He used the relationship between religion and education during the colonial period to demonstrate that, as time passed, America’s modern universities had turned away from this model and toward a secularized form of higher education promoted by those educators and administrators he labeled “liberal Protestants.” Roger L. Geiger’s twenty-first century survey, The History of American Higher Education, which argued that the three higher education aims of knowledge, careers, and culture shaped and were shapers of America’s colleges, included chapters on colonial education which focused on the Enlightenment and student demography. In his first chapter, he argued that the Enlightenment was beginning to penetrate the early colleges, but it was not a “triumphal doctrine” because it added to instead of replaced the established curriculum. In the second chapter, Geiger explained that while college students represented a very small part of the colonial population, about one percent of young white males, their reasons for going to college and their eventual careers varied widely. Despite the restricted amount of space that most historical surveys have allotted to the colonial colleges,

Rudolph, Marsden, and Geiger’s works have still managed to add to the field.7

The extant historiography of colonial higher education includes everything from works written by historians primarily concerned with telling the most glowing story of their chosen institution to works which concentrate on the decline or increase of a certain element at a number

7 Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1990); George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Roger L. Geiger, The History of American Higher Education: Learning from the Founding to World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), Nook E-book.

6 of colleges, such as Christianity or political activity. Despite the wide variety of histories written, there is still a place for more discussion of colonial higher education. This dissertation, while categorically an era-specific history, borrows the detail-richness and topic variety of the institutional histories and blends them with the compare-and-contrast style of the era-specific histories and historical surveys of higher education. Its aim is to use the history of higher education to show that in the push and pull between continuity and discontinuity in colonial

America, change was ultimately the stronger force.

Enlightenment Historiography

One of the major components of the study of higher education in the eighteenth century, as well as of this dissertation, is the Enlightenment. The extent, as well as the very existence, of the Enlightenment in America, however, has been a reoccurring debate among historians for decades. In 1960, Daniel J. Boorstin proclaimed that the American Enlightenment was a myth and that the idea of the colonists taking part in the intellectual movement was a result of historians making “highly sophisticated oversimplifications.”8 He argued that just because colonial Americans existed at the same time as the English and French thinkers of the

Enlightenment did not mean that they took part in that intellectual world. The colonists’ provincial lives, he explained, were of more immediate concern than any grand principles being espoused by European philosophers. Sixteen years later, Henry F. May explained in his work,

The Enlightenment in America, that there was an American Enlightenment and argued that the best way to understand it was to acknowledge that it existed with Protestantism always in the background. In other words, the Enlightenment itself was a kind of religion because eighteenth

8 Daniel J. Boorstin, “The Myth of an American Enlightenment,” America and the Image of Europe: Reflections on American Thought (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1976), 65-66.

7 century thinkers never approached new ideas without taking into consideration their beliefs about the nature of the universe. From 1688 to 1787, this created a kind of “Moderate Enlightenment” in America, in which the majority of colonists attempted to balance order and rationality with the miracles and mysteries of Christianity, thereby keeping “a foot in each camp.”9

More recently, in 2014, John Dixon reevaluated May’s work in light of a revival of interest in the Enlightenment. Some current historians, Dixon explained, dismissed May’s work as old-fashioned and elitist, preferring to view the Enlightenment through the lens of social and cultural history rather than intellectual history. Two such historians were Nathalie Caron and

Naomi Wulf. They recommended that historians of early America become immersed in the most recent European historiography and study the Enlightenment in specific cultural and social contexts. Dixon viewed their approach as flawed, writing that it exposed the intellectual movement to mischaracterizations which are post-modernist and conservative in nature. He argued that intellectual history is essential to understanding the problems of the American

Enlightenment. While May explained that the Enlightenment flowed in one direction, from

Europe to America, Dixon explained that more recent scholarships has contended that knowledge travelled on horizontal circuits, back and forth across the Atlantic. Dixon also reevaluated May’s contention that Americans tried to follow a moderate path, which accommodated Protestant belief and Enlightenment thought, and argued instead that Protestants participated in the Enlightenment. The major problem which Dixon hoped newer scholarship on

9 Ibid., 71-72; Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), xiii-xiv, 42, 48, 54.

8 the Enlightenment would address and which May’s work did not was the pervasive idea that

Americans were, and are, practical people, not philosophers.10

Caroline Winterer’s 2016 work, American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the

Age of Reason, addressed many of the issues brought up in reevaluations of May’s The

Enlightenment in America. She began the book with an explanation of her dislike for the appellation “The Enlightenment,” which May and countless other historians have used to refer to the intellectual movement. The Enlightenment, she argued, was not some concreate event known to the people who lived through it, but a term applied by historians. Instead, Winterer explained, it was best to describe the movement as a series of “American enlightenments,” (note the lowercase “e”) to best reflect the multiple conversations Americans and Europeans were having in an attempt to become enlightened. These conversations, according to Winterer, served as the crux of the intellectual movement because they demonstrated that enlightened ideas did not follow the diffusionist theory from Europe to America, but bounced from the Europeans to the colonists and back again. For example, in a chapter devoted to enlightened ideas about slavery, she explained that while the colonists initially received explanations for the difference in black and white skin color from European works, it was the colonists who, through on-the-ground experiments with enslaved Africans, were able to explain why those explanations, e.g. “black juices” flowing underneath black skin, were incorrect and sent their discoveries back to Europe, where new theories based on that evidence could be formed and sent back to the colonies. Last, in opposition to May’s contention that the Enlightenment existed with Protestantism always in the background, Winterer argued that in their search for enlightenment many eighteenth-century

10 John M. Dixon, “Henry F. May and the Revival of American Enlightenment: Problems and Possibilities for Intellectual and Social History,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 2 (April 2014): 263-264, 274- 275.

9 thinkers came to accept that religions outside of Christianity could be explored and understood as fully-developed belief systems rather than dismissed outright as pagan or devil worship. In separating religion from its Euro-centric Christian focus, Winterer explained, enlightened thinkers had made religion a subject of universal discussion.11

Scholarship concerning the American Enlightenment over the last sixty years, therefore, has gone from an outright denial of the Enlightenment existing in America to the argument that many enlightenments, rather than a single Enlightenment, took place in America. The role of religion in the intellectual movement has also undergone somewhat of a transformation, with

May arguing that Protestantism was behind every aspect of the Enlightenment to Winterer arguing that religions all around the world received a boost from their inclusion in the discussions of individuals who sought to become enlightened. In terms of this dissertation and its focus on how the colonists’ various Christian denominations effected the teaching of

Enlightenment ideas in the colonies versus England, the arguments of May appear the most convincing.

Historiography of the Cultural Continuity-Discontinuity Debate

While the historiographies of colonial higher education and the Enlightenment are integral to the context of this dissertation, they are not the only historiographies of importance.

This study, after all, is also about how English culture in the colonies underwent a transformation into American culture. Although some historians might argue that English cultural change in the colonies was a foregone conclusion, other historians have argued that the culture of colonial

America was simply a continuance of the culture of the English motherland. A historiography of

11 Caroline Winterer, American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 4-5, 7, 11-12, 150-152, 178, 195.

10 cultural continuity versus cultural discontinuity, therefore, helps to provide context for the present study.

James Horn became part of the culture debate in the late twentieth century when he argued in his work Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth Century

Chesapeake that the English society which emerged in Virginia and Maryland was shaped more by its cultural continuities with England than by the colonial environment. Horn divided his work into three sections: the first described the societies and characteristics of the Englishmen and women from the Vale of Berkeley and Kent who later moved to the Chesapeake, the second described the settlement of the Chesapeake, and the third compared and contrasted English society in the mother country with its counterpart in the colonies. He explained that one of the important continuities between the Old and New World experience was the role of the local community in the daily life of the colonists. For example, much like in England, neighbors and friends in the colonies could be depended on more reliably than distant kin. In addition to this continuity, Horn made the point that Englishmen who settled in the Chesapeake often lived lives no better than those they had left behind. The poor, for example, encountered another kind of poverty across the Atlantic. Likewise, most settlers, especially those who lived during the second half of the century, had a standard of living not unlike the lowest levels of homeowners in

England. Last, he explained the continuity between the religious lives of the English and the colonists. Most Chesapeake settlers, Horn argued, had taken up a form of “village Anglicanism,” which simplified church rituals but preached the same message. The idea of English culture in the colonies undergoing change, therefore, was not so very obvious to Horn.12

12 James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1994), 244-247; 292-295; 407-411; 418.

11 Brendan McConville added to the cultural continuity argument of Horn in his 2006 work

The King’s Three Faces, in which he asserted that colonial America was a royalized society in which the people were “in love with king and country.”13 The political culture of the colonists, according to McConville, was monarchial and imperial not proto-republican and proto- nationalist. One example that he used to support this argument was the colonists’ celebration of

Pope’s Day, a sort of colonial version of Guy Fawkes’ Day, in which participants paraded “pope carts” through the streets with effigies of the Pope, Satan and, later on, the Stuart Pretender,

James Francis Edward. McConville contended that the colonists’ participation in such an anti-

Catholic display was evidence of their unity with the empire, and particularly with the Protestant monarch. Beyond politics, McConville also argued for a royalized colonial America due to the colonists’ consumption of British goods. Some of the goods which the colonists purchased were products that invoked the royals (such as essence of pearl to have teeth like the monarch’s), products with the royal seal, mass-produced images of the monarch, and fine cloth from London.

The colonists’ increased desire for these goods, according to McConville, was indicative of their love and affection for the royals and the British way of life. Such continuity with the culture of the motherland, however, could only exist for so long due to the onset of the Revolution. The colonists began to lose confidence in the king, McConville argued, because of his lack of action on their behalf following the Boston Tea Party, the Boston Port Bill, the Quebec Act, and the influx of more troops into the colonies. The death knell of royal America, therefore, occurred sometime in 1773 or 1774, which means that, according to McConville, the colonists made quite an abrupt turn from royalists to patriots.14

13 Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006), 11. 14 Ibid., 56-59; 119-122; 286-287.

12 On the other side of the cultural continuity-discontinuity debate is Jon Butler, who argued in his 2000 work Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 that colonial America underwent a two-fold transformation which resulted in a new, distinctly “American” society and culture. Butler focused each of his chapters on a different aspect of colonial America in which he saw change: “Peoples,” “Economy,” “Politics,” “Things Material,” and “Things Spiritual.” Far from agreeing with McConville’s characterization of colonial America as a royalized society, in love with king and country, Butler argued that colonists complained about the British empire for years and largely pursued their own local politics without turning to the Crown or Parliament for approval. On the religious, or “spiritual” front, as Butler described it, he contended that religion in colonial America had become varied to an almost unbelievable degree. The colonies, no doubt, had a number of adherents to the Church of England, but they also had

Congregationalists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Baptists, Lutherans, Reformed, Amish, Mennonites,

Moravians, Catholics, and Jews. In addition to those denominations, there were also a number of

New Light congregations formed after the Great Awakening and the varying religious beliefs of the colonies’ Native Americans and African Americans. Such religious diversity serves as evidence of the heterogeneity of colonial America in comparison to England. Unlike Horn and

McConville, Butler did bring up the topic of this dissertation, the colonial colleges, in his chapter

“Things Material.” Instead of focusing on any cultural changes at the colleges themselves, however, Butler made the argument that the colleges should be seen as one of the many different kinds of social organizations that both reinforced the changing material culture of the eighteenth- century and helped the colonists form a distinctive colonial identity.15

15 Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 125-130; 186-192; 170; 178.

13 Due to the fact that McConville published The King’s Three Faces six years after

Butler’s Becoming America, his introduction directly addresses Butler’s contention that the colonists had begun forming an American identity as early as the turn of the eighteenth century.

According to McConville, Butler and other historians who have argued that colonial cultural significantly diverged from English culture have been “reading back through the Revolution’s distorting lenses” and therefore anachronistically applied modern ideas about American culture to a historical place and time. In contrast, McConville argued, his work showcased the reality of a royalized America, in which the colonists had an almost preternatural attachment to the throne.

The idea that some colonists admired the monarch or the English way of life (which are two components of the Anglicization thesis for which McConville advocated), however, does not necessarily negate the existence of cultural differences between colonial America and England.

As proponents of cultural change have shown, the colonies contained an amalgam of people that simply did not exist in England. Colonial America was both religiously and ethnically diverse:

Puritan Englishmen, Reformed Dutchmen, Muslim Africans, and polytheistic Native Americans all lived there. In terms of provincial politics, many of the colonies’ white male freeholders had the ability to vote due to the abundance of property available to them in colonial America, and thus wielded a power which most of their English counterparts lacked. The colonies also developed their own material culture. Although not as wide ranging as British imports, the colonists interacted with locally crafted and constructed goods on a daily basis. With these facts in mind, it is harder to accept both McConville’s interpretation of colonial American culture and his characterization of historians who argue for cultural change as “reading … through distorted lenses.”16

16 Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture,

14 Despite Horn, McConville, and Butler’s works tackling the cultural continuity- discontinuity debate regarding colonial America, much of the substance of their respective books could not be more different. For instance, Adapting to a New World, according to Horn, arose from a desire to be able to answer to what extent English values, traditions, and attitudes shaped the settlement of the Chesapeake during the seventeenth century. McConville’s The King’s Three

Faces, however, centered on revealing the colonists’ commitment to only one aspect of English culture: monarchy. Butler’s Becoming America focused on answering two questions. First, how does one synthesize colonial American history after the dominance of the Puritans? Second, was

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s assessment of the American as one “who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds” correct? 17 The individual goals of these historians three works, therefore, were disparate in spite of their shared interest in contributing to the continuity-discontinuity debate.18

The sources which Horn, McConville, and Butler employed in their works range from the common to the obscure (such as McConville’s use of advertisements for teeth cleaning powder), yet each historian used them skillfully. Horn, for instance, utilized genealogical texts and passenger lists in his opening chapters to show from where the colonists originated, what types of occupations they held, and where in the Chesapeake they ultimately settled. In a similar effort to categorize the residents of the colonies, Butler used immigration and population records to establish that the colonial population was a diverse one. The differing cultural interpretations

2006), 3-7; John M. Murrin, “England and Colonial America: A Novel Theory of the American Revolution,” in Anglicizing America: Empire, Revolution, Republic. Ed. Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Andrew Shankman, and David J. Silverman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 11-16. 17 Butler, Becoming America, 7. 18 Horn, Adapting to a New World, vii; McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 6; Butler, Becoming America, 7.

15 which Horn and Butler arrived at, therefore, were likely due to the different regions on which they concentrated. To demonstrate how the colonists maintained cultural continuity with

England, Horn utilized many of the colonists’ own words. Court documents containing witness testimony, for example, showed how they recreated English societal norms in the Chesapeake.

McConville, however, utilized advertisements for English goods, as well as photos of the physical goods themselves, to demonstrate that the colonists were overwhelmingly concerned with keeping up with the culture they had left and showcasing their devotion to the monarch.

Regardless of the different sources Horn and McConville chose to focus on, they both came to the conclusion that the culture of the colonial Americans was decidedly English. Butler, meanwhile, used the colonists’ own words, such as the letter of a colonial pastor in which he explained the appalling behavior of British troops during the Seven Years’ War, but as evidence for his contention that the colonists were starting to become American. To demonstrate the opposite, i.e., that colonial America was a highly royalized society, McConville utilized the library collections of colonists. Among their favorite histories, he explained, were those about kings, kingdoms, and empires. It was largely the variety of sources which Horn, McConville, and

Butler consulted, therefore, that enabled them to come to different interpretations about colonial

American culture.

In addition to the differences in Horn, McConville, and Butler’s questions and sources, they placed the turning points in their works at different times in colonial history. Since Adapting to a New World only covered the seventeenth century, the turning point in Horn’s work naturally came the earliest. For the Chesapeake colonists, Horn explained, one of the most demonstrative actions they took to hold onto their English culture was their participation in Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. The rebellion, he argued, was not a revolt against the king or English rule itself. It was

16 an attempt on the colonists’ part to restore their traditional rights as Englishmen. By taking part in such an event, the colonists were doing the very same thing which villagers in England had been doing in their revolts, i.e., preserving their liberties. Despite Horn and McConville’s works both coming down on the side of cultural continuity, the turning point in the colonists’ commitment to English culture came a bit later in The King’s Three Faces. According to

McConville, the colonists’ preoccupation with monarchy steadily increased beginning in the

1730s, likely due to the accession of King George II. The Hanoverian king and his family, after all, provided the colonists with opportunities to hold celebrations in honor of the royals for over thirty years, including birthdays, declarations of war and peace, Pope’s Day, the appointments of royal governors, etc. On the other side of the debate, Butler’s Becoming America centered the transformation of colonial America between 1680 and 1770, thereby precluding most of the seventeenth century and many of the events in the 1770s which more or less led to the

Revolution. If any one event served as a turning point in that period it was the Seven Years War.

The 1754-1763 conflict, Butler explained, was meant to preserve the relationship between the colonies and Britain but, in an ironic twist, it more clearly laid bare how very different the two groups had become from one another. Taking into consideration the differing timelines in Horn and McConville’s works, it was of little surprise that they placed the turning points in English culture in the colonies at different times. The largely shared eighteenth century timeline in

McConville and Butler’s books, however, makes it difficult to understand how, after the Seven

Years War, McConville could continue to claim that the colonists remained royalists.19

The conclusions which Horn, McConville, and Butler came to in their works demonstrate that the continuity-discontinuity debate is far from over. All three were ostensibly studying the

19 Horn, Adapting to a New World, 376-379; McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 65-70; Butler, Becoming America, 127-129.

17 same culture, but they came to different conclusions. Even Horn and McConville, who agreed that there was cultural continuity had different ideas about the way in which it continued. At the end of Adapting to a New World, Horn concluded that the Chesapeake settlers, even at the end of the seventeenth century, were overwhelmingly English. Not only were they ethnically English, but so were their traditions, customs, and attitudes. Cultural continuity, he argued, played a greater role in shaping seventeenth-century Chesapeake society than the colonial environment in which the settlers lived. As the title of Horn’s work suggests, he acquiesced to the fact that that the colonists sometimes had to make adaptations to their new homeland but, in the end, he thought that they made the greatest effort to replicate the English way of life within those adaptations. Regardless of the fact that Adapting to a New World and The King’s Three Faces largely focused on different centuries, McConville likewise concluded that the colonists maintained a shared culture with England for most of the colonial period. It was only toward the end of that era, sometime in 1773 or 1774, he argued, that the colonists lost their confidence in, and subsequently their love for, the monarch. Prior to that point, McConville contended, a kind of cult of monarchy existed in the colonies in which the king could be all things to all people, from a divine-right monarch to an “extrainstitutional monarch at one with his meanest subjects.”20 Of the three works which have provided context for the continuity-discontinuity debate, only Butler’s Becoming America concluded that the colonists underwent societal and cultural transformations which resulted in an America that was relatively modern in many important ways. The emigration of Europeans, the forced relocation of Africans, and the conquest of Native Americans made the colonial population strikingly different from that of

England. A mix of imported and domestic goods developed strong domestic and export

20 McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 143.

18 economies which enabled the colonists to be powerful consumers and wield that power to their benefit. Politics became largely driven by the desires of the colonists. The evolution of a relatively autonomous material culture created new ways of living. Religious pluralism developed which remained unrivaled by any European nation. A distinctively American drive and optimism, Butler explained, had helped to underwrite that transformation. Even with their differing conclusions, Horn, McConville, and Butler’s works have further added to historians’ understanding of early America’s development.21

This study of higher education in colonial America contributes to the continuity- discontinuity debate by showing that the colonists’ decision to establish the colonial colleges was an intentional choice which all but ensured that future generations would continue to differentiate American culture from English culture. The founding of the colonial colleges not only enabled them to educate and train new ministers, learned leaders, educators, and thinkers for the successful maintenance of colonial society without having to rely on England, but to further develop their religious, political, educational, and lifestyle differences outside of the influence of England’s cultural environment. This dissertation did not begin as an attempt to tackle the cultural continuity-discontinuity debate, but rather as an attempt to answer what, at the time, seemed to be a relatively simple question: why did the colonists feel the need to establish colleges in the colonies? Over the course of the research it took to answer that question, however, it became apparent that this study could contribute to the larger historical debate surrounding colonial American culture. Instead of focusing on one region, as Horn’s book did, or on one particular aspect of culture, as McConville’s did, this dissertation approaches the topic more broadly, as Butler’s book did, i.e., by crossing regional borders and looking beyond

21 Horn, Adapting to a New World, 436-437; McConville, The King’s Three Faces, Butler, Becoming America, 226, 247-248.

19 politics. Unlike Butler, however, it focuses on one particular subsection of the colonial population: the educated. While such a small sector of the population might seem limiting in what it can reveal about colonial society as a whole, it has actually shown what the colonists seemed to value about their society and what they wished to perpetuate. The colleges’ curricular plans and educational texts, for instance, reveal that religious education was practically paramount. Knowledge of natural and moral philosophy were also of importance, as the works of educators such as John Winthrop and Samuel Johnson betray. The later publications of college alumni, like Jonathan Mayhew and John Adams, demonstrate that an understanding of history was key to understanding the world they lived in. Even the most seemingly mundane documents, like the rules for the dining room or the settlement of chambers, reveal that the colonists valued proper behavior and living in the collegiate way. Thus, since the colonial colleges were a microcosm of the larger colonial society, studying them has provided an additional understanding of the development of culture in colonial America.

Sources

A majority of the primary sources consulted for this dissertation come from the archives of the colleges and universities under consideration. Most of these documents are official in nature, i.e., charters, acts, and meeting minutes. Another large contingent of primary sources consulted for this dissertation include the manuscripts and published works of college administrators, faculty, and alumni such as Thomas Clap, Samuel Blair, James Manning, Eleazar

Wheelock, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and John and Ebenezer Pettigrew. Perhaps more than the official documents of the colleges, these primary sources provide insight into how the colleges operated and what the colleges

20 meant to both the men who ran them and the men who attended them. A smaller, but still important, number of primary sources include the periodicals of the period, such as

Williamsburg’s Virginia Gazette, Charleston’s City Gazette, and Lancaster’s Neue

Unpartheyische Zeitung. Much of the information in these periodicals helped to fill in gaps where the various institution’s records were scant or missing. Last, this dissertation also includes the consultation of primary sermons and historical works, which helped to provide context for what the professors and other instructors at the colonial and English colleges taught their students.

Definitions

Some of the terms used in this dissertation require explanation and clarification. For example, the term “college” is used throughout to refer to both the colleges in America and the universities in England. Although universities often consist of several constituent schools or colleges and colleges are singular bodies, for the purpose of this dissertation the American colloquialism “college” is used to refer to both kinds of institutions. On a related note, the colonial colleges are referred to in this dissertation using the names they were known by during the colonial era. Thus, while the College of New Jersey is now Princeton University, the College of Philadelphia is now the University of Pennsylvania, King’s College is now Columbia

University, the College of Rhode Island is now Brown University, and Queen’s College is now

Rutgers University, all five colleges are referred to using their former names.

Another term in need of definition is “pedagogy.” It refers to the methods and practices utilized by educators to impart knowledge to their students. Many professors and instructors in colonial America used pedagogical approaches which differed from those used in England, such

21 as the attempt to balance Enlightenment thought with Christian belief and the addition of modern

Whig histories to the collegiate curriculum. It is also worth noting that the use of the terms

England and English in this dissertation refer only to the constituent country of England and its people, not to Great Britain as a whole or to the constituent countries and people of Scotland and

Wales.

Chapter Overview

The first chapter, “Collegiate Foundations,” focuses on why the colonists of seventeenth and eighteenth-century colonial America established so many colleges, and why they did so in such a relatively short span of time. It argues that the colonists took such actions because of the explosion of religious change in their society. In the beginning, they needed schools to train ministers to replace the first generation of Puritans and Anglicans, but as the Great Awakening brought new denominations and split others, they needed schools to accommodate both sides.

Smaller, underserved communities, such as the Baptists, Dutch Reformed, and Native Americans aspired to do the same and soon followed suit. This chapter sets the stage for the entire dissertation by explaining why the colonists chose to found colleges of their own, how they went about doing so, and why they decided to found so many of them.

The next chapter, “A Colonial American Education,” discusses why colonists sent their children to colonial American institutions rather than English or continental European institutions. It contends that those colonists who kept their children in America did so because their idea of what constituted a proper collegiate education had changed from the traditional

European idea. The content and interpretation of religious, Enlightenment, and historical education in the colonies differed from what the English taught. In addition, the type of faculty

22 who instructed the students in the colonies, as well as how they went about their teaching, was quite different. This chapter builds upon chapter one by explaining how educators in the colonies created a pedagogy to meet the needs and desires of colonial students and parents.

Chapter three, “The Collegiate Way: Student Life at the Colonial Colleges,” explains what daily life was like for college students in the colonies. It asserts that colonial college officials attempted to foster the collegiate way of life for their students by providing on-campus housing, establishing schedules and rules for outside of the classroom, and ensuring student recreation remained within the bounds of what they deemed to be proper behavior. If their efforts were successful, they would graduate not only well-educated, but principled, young men. This chapter builds upon chapter two by showing that educators in the colonies were not only concerned with meeting the needs of students educationally but in creating a more protective environment than existed at English and European universities.

The fourth chapter, “English Educational Experiences,” focuses on the one-hundred colonists who traveled abroad to attend college in England. It argues that the English educational experience could be quite problematic and, therefore, did not appeal to the majority of colonial students and parents. The distance between the colonies and England was a problem because it made it difficult for parents to check on their children and makes sure that they focused on their studies. The religious, Enlightenment, and historical curriculum at England’s universities was also problematic because its content did not always align with what the colonists valued in a collegiate education. This chapter helps to reinforces the argument made in chapter two, which was that educators tailored the curriculum to colonial desires, by showcasing the problems inherent in the education provided in England. It also explains the many difficulties that colonists who lived abroad faced.

23 The last chapter, “Higher Education in the Early Republic,” looks at higher education in

America during the first two decades after the Revolutionary War to determine if the cultural transformation which brought about the establishment of the colonial colleges was a solitary occurrence or whether another massive change in culture, and particularly education, would occur following the independence of the United States. It concludes that the Revolution engendered a significant cultural change in America. The commitment to religious toleration, acceptance of more radical Enlightenment ideas, and conscious effort to produce a virtuous citizenry by the educators at the colleges of the early republic demonstrate that change.

Therefore, the discontinuity between English culture and American culture which began during the colonial period grew even wider as the colonies became the United States and Americans went on to establish more colleges of their own.

Conclusion

In a little over 130 years the colonists established nine colleges, spanning from New

England to the Chesapeake, because the higher education institutions in England no longer offered the kind of educational environment the majority desired for their youth. This was one of the results of the cultural divide between England and the colonies. On the religious front, they had colleges run according to Puritan, Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, and Baptist tenets, in addition to Anglican colleges. Pedagogically, many professors and instructors at the colonial institutions taught their students using approaches different from those used by their English counterparts. Also of importance was the effort made by colonial college officials to foster the collegiate way of life on campus. What is more, consideration of the educational experiences of colonists in England and of American youth during the early republic show how different

24 collegiate education in America had become from the norm in England. Ultimately, the colonists’ decision to open their own higher education institutions demonstrated not only their cultural differences from the English but ensured the continuation of their distinctive culture.

25 CHAPTER 1: COLLEGIATE FOUNDATIONS

As Englishmen arrived in the New World, a land which they viewed as an endless wilderness, it is understandable that their priorities included the attainment of sustenance through hunting and planting, the building of houses, the setting aside of appropriate places for worship, and the establishment of their local governments. As it turns out, however, the English settlers also prioritized the establishment of institutions of higher education. Between 1636 and 1769, the colonists established nine collegiate institutions: Harvard College, the College of William &

Mary, Yale College, the College of New Jersey, the College of Philadelphia, King’s College, the

College of Rhode Island, Queen’s College, and Dartmouth College. Although these colonial colleges paled in size compared to the universities of England, they provided students with opportunities which would have been unavailable to them in the Old World.

The chance to live and learn in a collegiate environment which matched one’s religious beliefs was only available in England if one was a member of the Anglican church. In the colonies, however, young men could choose to attend one of nine colleges belonging to five different Protestant denominations: Congregational, Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Dutch

Reformed. The establishment of the six non-Anglican colleges in the colonies, therefore, indicates an intentional departure from English culture. In addition, with only the University of

Oxford and the University of Cambridge to choose from in England, and those two institutions being a relatively close eighty-five miles apart from one another, young Englishmen seeking an

26 education often had to travel, and thereafter live, great distances from their families. The geographic spread of the colleges in the colonies, from New England to the Chesapeake, however, meant that students in search of a college education did not have too far to go from their home if they did not desire to do so.

To put the colonists’ educational achievement into perspective within the larger English world, young men who sought a higher education in England had only two choices until 1832:

Oxford and Cambridge, founded in approximately 1096 and 1209, respectively. In other words, it took the English in the motherland over 600 years after they established Cambridge to establish the University of Durham, yet the colonists founded nine colleges in the colonies in less than 140 years. The colonists established so many colleges, and in such a relatively short span of time, because of the explosion of religious change in North America. Religion and education went hand in hand at the time. While higher education was certainly a privilege for the young men who undertook it, the colonists considered it a necessary component of colonial life for the continuance of their churches. When the first generation of ministers passed, leaders of the

Congregational and Anglican churches took the initiative to establish colleges for the training of new ministers. The division of Old Lights and New Lights which followed the Great Awakening led religious leaders on both sides to establish colleges which followed the tenets of their respective denominations. Finally, spurred by the establishment of the first six colonial colleges, leaders among the Baptist and Dutch Reformed churches, and Congregationalist Reverend

Eleazar Wheelock, aspired to found colleges for their educationally underserved communities.

27 The Enterprising Generations

The first three colonial colleges arose out of the colonists’ desire to replace the first generations of colonial ministers with equally zealous and learned men. In taking on such an enterprise, the founders of Harvard College, the College of William & Mary, and Yale College were ensuring not only that the present generation of English colonists would have ministers to preach to them, as well as learned men to govern them, but that all future colonists, no matter their national origin, would also have the opportunity to place colonially-educated men at the helm of their society. These enterprising founders had made an intentional choice to depend upon themselves rather than rely on England, which helps show that they understood that their educational priorities and, by extension, their culture, were different from England’s. If they had seen no difference between their two cultures and their respective approaches to education, they would not have had a need to establish colleges in the colonies. After all, the distance to and price of an education abroad had not deterred some colonial parents from sending their sons to

England.

First Steps and Motivations

The General Court of Massachusetts took the lead in establishing the first college in the colonies: Harvard. On October 28,1636, the Court agreed to pay £400, broken up into two payments of £200, to establish a school that would provide training for new Puritan ministers.

Evidence of this mission appears in an anonymously written pamphlet, entitled New England’s

First Fruits, published in 1643. The pamphlet describes Massachusetts Bay’s physical and

28 religious environment in an attempt to publicize the success of the colony and entice more

Englishmen to come to America. This was a particularly opportune time to release the pamphlet, as the English Civil War caused religious and social upheaval in the mother country. Pertaining to the purpose of Harvard, the pamphlet states: “one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”1 Further evidence of the Puritan mission of the college appears in the first history of the college published by Cotton

Mather in his 1702 work, Magnalia Christi Americana. Mather explains that no Christians, not even the first Christians of the fourth century, were as quick to establish a school for the education of a succession of learned and able ministry than the Puritans of early New England.

He fervently believed that without the establishment of the college “darkness must have soon covered the land, and gross darkness the people.”2 Harvard itself was most assuredly meant to combat that darkness, but it was also meant to contribute to the larger plan which the Puritans had had in mind for their colony from before their arrival. The Puritans undertook the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in an attempt to establish a “Citty upon a Hill.” This phrase is a reference to the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus Christ instructed his followers to be a light in the world, and to place their light in a location where all could see it. The Puritan’s vision of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, therefore, was to make it a beacon of light. They utilized the

New World to put into action those religious reforms, such as doing away with ecclesiastical hierarchy and liturgical rituals, which they had been unable to in England, to show that they could work. Once they demonstrated the success of their efforts, they could then possibly bring

1 New England’s First Fruits (London: Printed by R.O. and G.D. for Henry Overton and are to be sold at his Shop in Popes-head-Alley, 1643), 23. 2 Cotton Mather, “The History of Harvard College,” in Magnalia Christi Americana, Volume II (Hartford, CT: Silas Andrus, 1820), 6.

29 those reforms back to England. The founding of Harvard in Cambridge was an integral part of achieving that aim.3

A little more than a year after agreeing to provide funds for the college, the court chose

Newtown over nearby Boston as the location of the institution mostly because the town was under the pastoral jurisdiction of Reverend Thomas Shepard. A popular Puritan preacher,

Reverend Shepherd had accomplished what few other ministers in Massachusetts had been able to do: he had kept Newtown free of the antinomian controversy. Although the colonial leaders of

Massachusetts were fearful of dissent of any kind, they specifically opposed those Puritans dissidents they branded antinomian. While Governor Winthrop did not believe that man could achieve salvation through good works, he did believe that good deeds were preparation for God’s election. Antinomians, however, believed in free grace theology, the idea that all God required for salvation was the covenant of grace and not the carrying out of good works. Such a theology was dangerous to the colony’s leaders as it led many a Puritan to question the wisdom and authority of Massachusetts’ colonial government. In an effort to quell such dissention from seeping into the next generation, the members of the General Court believed it would be best to establish the college within the ministerial boundaries of Reverend Shepard’s church. Following shortly on the heels of the establishing the college, the Court changed the name of Newtown to

Cambridge to honor the English town and university from which Reverend Shepard, as well as many of the colony’s leaders, had graduated.4

3 Nathaniel Shurtleff, ed., Records of Massachusetts, Vol. I: 1628-1641, (Boston: From the Press of William White, 1853), 183; James Axtell, The School Upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976), 3-4; In addition to Harvard, the Puritans met the educational needs of younger children with the establishment of Dame Schools to teach basic literacy for reading of the Bible. 4 Nathaniel Shurtleff, ed., Records of Massachusetts, Vol. I: 1628-1641, (Boston: From the Press of William White, 1853), 208; Richard S. Dunn, Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty of New England, 1630-

30 With the money to establish the college secured and a location in which to build it decided upon, one of the final decisions the Court had to make was what to name the institution.

A generous benefaction from Reverend John Harvard helped to determine the answer. A non- conformist English minister, Harvard was a graduate of Emmanuel College at the University of

Cambridge. Two years after his graduation in 1635 he emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay

Colony and took up residence in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston. There he gave sermons and became highly involved in the colony’s affairs, including the proposed college.

Harvard was, in fact, so determined to see the project’s success that he included in his will the bequeathing of approximately £800, which amounted to about half of his estate, and his entire

400-volume library to the college upon his death. Due to circumstances which were surely unforeseeable to Harvard himself, the college received this gift relatively soon, in 1638, only one year after his arrival in Massachusetts. In honor of Harvard’s benefaction, the General Court named the college, known up to this point as simply “New College,” Harvard on March 13,

1649.5

Just as the Massachusetts General Court was the catalyst for the founding of Harvard, the idea for the College of William & Mary started as a result of the Virginia General Assembly urging Reverend James Blair to sail to England to seek the support of King William III and

Queen Mary II for the establishment of an Anglican college in the colony.6 Unlike the situation

1717 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 18-20; Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), 182. 5 Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 210-221; Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1936), 7-9; Shurtleff, Records of Massachusetts, Vol. 1, 253. 6 The Virginia Company had begun to take steps as early as 1619 toward establishing an Anglican college in Henrico, including the appointment of Reverend Patrick Copland as rector in 1622, but the Powhatan Uprising led to the revocation of the company’s charter and the subsequent abandonment of college plans. Later attempts to found a college, particularly in 1660, also came to naught, largely thanks to Virginia’s death rate, rural settlement, and the inability of the governing elite to establish themselves across generations; Thad W. Tate, “The Colonial

31 in Massachusetts, however, it was it was largely thanks to Reverend Blair’s persistence, rather than the continued work of the assembly, that the college ever got off the ground. Initially, the king and queen refused to bequeath the funds for the college which Blair sought, but he did not give up his mission. Exactly one year to the day of Blair’s arrival in London, William and Mary agreed to bequeath to the college all of the necessary support. This support amounted to £200 in cash and £4,500 from the quit-rents of the colony toward the construction of the college’s first building, and another £200 per annum from the produce of Virginia and Maryland and £50 per annum from the Surveyor General’s income for the college’s endowment. In addition to monetary support, the English monarchs also gave 1000 acres on Pamunkey Neck and 1000 acres on Blackwater Swamp for the college campus. On February 8, 1693, King William III and

Queen Mary II officially granted their namesake college the only royal charter ever received in

America.7

The College of William & Mary’s establishment had a bit of a broader purpose: to train some young men for the Anglican ministry and educate other young men in the arts and sciences.

Students at William & Mary had the opportunity to study divinity, philosophy, languages, arts, and sciences. According to historian Thad W. Tate, the College of William & Mary’s dual purpose made it unique at the time. He explains that this twin emphasis was in line with the objectives of both Virginia’s social elite and the clergy. The elite believed that the future success of the colony depended upon improving educational opportunities for their sons, while the clergy deemed strengthening the role of the Church of England in Virginia as the essential component

College, 1693-1782,” in The College of William and Mary: A History, Volume I, ed. Susan H. Godson (Williamsburg, VA: King and Queen Press, 1993), 4-5. 7 Ibid., 12; Henry Hartwell, James Blair, and Edward Chilton, The Present State of Virginia and the College (London: J. Wyat, 1727), 69.

32 to ensuring the colony’s future prosperity. This differed from the situation at Harvard, where the training of future ministers was the primary goal of the college founders. It is likely that this difference between the two institutions is attributable to the fact that in Massachusetts the members of the clergy and the elite were largely one in the same, while in Virginia the elite and the clergy were distinct entities.8

The establishment of Yale College, unlike the establishments of Harvard and William &

Mary, did not begin at the behest of the colonial legislature, but rather out of the concerns of

Connecticut’s Puritan ministers. They feared that colonial youth enrolled at Harvard were receiving a religious education which deviated from orthodox Puritanism. These fears were not altogether unfounded, for when Reverend Increase Mather was president of Harvard he spent much of his time in Boston or in England and responsibility for running the college fell to two tutors, John Leverett and William Brattle. Under Leverett and Brattle’s quasi-administration the ecclesiastical lessons taught to the students at Harvard became much more liberal in nature, including the presentation of writings by Anglican authors. To prevent further apostasy from influencing their youth, a group of Puritan ministers led by Reverend James Pierpont proposed establishing an institution in which Puritan ministers held all of the control. They thought that by placing the college exclusively in the hands of ministers they would be ensuring that Puritanism at the school remained orthodox. Pierpont and nine of his fellow clergymen presented this idea to

8 Royal Charter of the College of William and Mary, 1693, Royal Charter Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA; Tate, “The Colonial College, 1693-1782,” in The College of William and Mary: A History, Vol. I, ed. Susan H Godson, 13.

33 the Connecticut General Assembly in October 1701 as the “Act for Liberty to Erect a Collegiate

School.” The assembly officially passed the act on either October 15 or 16.9

The college’s founders clearly laid out in their 1701 act that the purpose of their enterprise was to create a place “wherein Youth may be instructed in the Arts & Sciences who through the blessings of Almighty God may be fitted for Publick employment both in Church &

Civil State.”10 In addition, in the college charter, granted by the Connecticut government almost forty-five years after the first classes commenced, the trustees reiterated their commitment to educating the colony’s future ministers and civil leaders in the Puritan tradition. Of the college’s record, the trustees explained that at Yale they had “trained up many worthy Persons for the

Service of God in the State as well as In the Church.”11 To place those “many worthy Persons” into perspective, out of the 857 graduates of Yale between 1701 and 1744, half of them undertook a career in ministry.12

A generous benefaction from American-born merchant Elihu Yale aided the founders in establishing the Collegiate School and, in return, the trustees renamed the institution Yale

College. When the college was in its early stages, the only funds available to the founders for building their school was a £120 annual subvention pledged by the Connecticut General

Assembly and donations from well-to-do individuals. One of the first major donations of books arrived from Jeremiah Dummer, an English colonial agent. While Dummer donated eight-

9 Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 31-32; Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1936), 45-46; Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 6. 10 The Yale Corporation, Act for Liberty to Erect a Collegiate School, 1701 (New Haven: Published by the [Yale] University, 1976), 4. 11 The Yale Corporation, Charter of Yale College May [1745] (New Haven: Published by the [Yale] University, 1976), 8. 12 Kelley, Yale: A History, 123; George W. Pierson, A Yale Book of Numbers: Historical Statistics of the College and University 1701-1976 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 18.

34 hundred volumes to the college library, perhaps his greatest “donation” to the college was his suggestion that a “Mr. Yale” could possibly be a good source of funding for the school. Cotton

Mather and Dummer convinced Elihu Yale, the London-based President of the East India

Company, to make a donation to the school. Subsequently, in 1718 Yale sent over four-hundred books and some £200 worth of East India goods, which the trustees sold for almost £513, for the college’s use.13

Trials and Misfortunes

Despite the successful establishment of the first colleges, leaders at all three experienced various trials and tribulations while trying to fulfill their missions. The trustees at Harvard and

Yale, for instance, had to deal with administrators who failed to meet the standards expected of them. One such administrator was Nathaniel Eaton, who served as headmaster of Harvard

College starting in 1638. In spite of the praise he had received for his authorship of a Sabbatarian tract, as well as for his experience as a teacher in England, Mr. Eaton’s methods left something to be desired. Harvard student William Hubbard, for example, described Eaton as “fitter to have been an officer in the inquisition, or master of a house of correction, than an instructer [sic] of

Christian Youth.”14 Mr. Eaton purportedly beat those students who took the Lord’s name in vain or failed to recite their prayers correctly. Utilizing a switch as his implement of punishment,

Eaton often administered up to twenty or thirty lashings at once. Eaton’s harsh brand of corporal

13 George W. Pierson, A Yale Book of Numbers: Historical Statistics of the College and University 1701- 1976 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 24. 14 William Hubbard, A General History of New England: From the Discovery to MDCLXXX (Boston: Charles C. Little & James Brown, 1848), 247.

35 punishment failed to find favor with the Overseers, and so they summarily dismissed him from the institution in September 1639. Eaton got the last laugh when he embezzled some £1,000 from the school right before he escaped to New Hampshire.15

In an effort to give the college a fresh start, Harvard officials replaced the disgraced

Master Eaton with a new leader, Reverend Henry Dunster, and gave him a new title, President of the College, but he, too, brought the college into troubled waters. At first, President Dunster had accomplished much as the college’s new lead administrator: he oversaw the building of the college’s first structure, the expansion of Harvard Yard, and helped implement the change from a three-year to a four-year bachelor’s program. He also was quite popular among Harvard’s

Overseers and Corporation. Such accomplishments and popularity, however, did not save him from the wrath of the Corporation. Although the college charter granted by Governor Thomas

Dudley in 1650 did not specifically mention the Puritan religious nature of the Harvard, the response of the college bureaucrats to Dunster’s stepping away from some aspects of Puritan doctrine helps make that nature apparent. In 1654, the Corporation accused Dunster of departing from the “true faith,” i.e., the Puritan faith, due to the fact that he viewed the baptism of infants as an illegitimate form of baptism. He believed, like the supposedly radical Baptists of the time, that only adults should have the sacrament of baptism conferred on them. A man who held such beliefs could not remain the leader of a Puritan institution, so Dunster had only two choices:

15 Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College, 203-204, 234-235; C. Ramsey Fahs, “In the School of Tyrannus,” The Harvard Crimson, October 30, 2014, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/10/30/in- the-school-of/.

36 recant or resign. Compelled by his personal beliefs, Reverend Dunster pursued the second option. Once again, albeit for different reasons, Harvard had lost its lead administrator.16

Doctrinal differences between college officials and the lead administrator were also a problem at Yale during the tenure of Rector Timothy Cutler. Under Rector Cutler’s leadership at

Yale, like President Dunster’s at Harvard, the college had prospered in many different ways: the trustees decided upon the city of New Haven as the college’s permanent home, workers began construction of the Rector’s House using money contributed by the local parishes, Elihu Yale provided the college with a final gift of about £100 before his death, and Yale graduated one of its most famous colonial-era graduates: Jonathan Edwards, author of the famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Despite the stability Rector Cutler appeared to bring to Yale, he was personally becoming a Puritan apostate. His apostasy became known at the 1722 commencement when he ended the closing prayer with the words, “and let all the people say, amen.”17 This was language straight from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. To say that

Cutler’s proclamation caused an uproar would be an understatement. The trustees called him into a meeting the following day, where he and several ministers from nearby towns confessed that they doubted the validity of Puritan ordination and favored Anglican ordination. Reverend Cutler may have been, as Ezra Stiles recalled, a man “of commanding presence and dignity […and] a man of extensive reading in the academic sciences, divinity, and ecclesiastical history,” but the revelation of his heresy ensured that he would not be able to keep the role of rector. The Board of

16 Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), 298-312; The Charter of the President and Fellows of Harvard College, under the seal of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, and bearing the date May 31st, A. D. 1650. 17 “Letter of John Davenport and Stephen Buckingham, September 22, 1722,” in Documentary History of Yale University: Under the Original Charter of the Collegiate School of Connecticut, 1701-1745, Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1816), 227.

37 Trustees removed Cutler from the rectorate in September 1722. Despite resulting in the same outcome, Reverend Cutler’s renunciation of his ordination in favor of ordination in the Church of

England was worse than Reverend Dunster’s apostasy because it was dangerous. It called into question the authority of all Puritan ministers in New England, whereas Dunster’s heretical beliefs only really affected him.18

The troubles experienced by the students and faculty in the College of William & Mary’s early years, unlike those at Harvard and Yale, had nothing to do with religion, but they ended up hampering the college’s mission of producing learned clergymen, nonetheless. One of the first problems the college community faced was a lack of support from the royally appointed members of the early colonial government. In 1693 the governor of Virginia was Sir Edmund

Andros, a man more concerned with the power he held and the interests of the monarchy than the wellbeing of the colonists.19 His successor, Sir Francis Nicholson, also failed to endear himself to many Virginians, and their collective ire ultimately resulted in his dismissal from the office of governor in 1705. Pertaining to the college itself, President James Blair accused Governor

Nicholson of having “been the forwardest to threw abuses on the colledge.”20 Some of these abuses included Nicholson threatening the governors of the college with a writ of enquiry from the king, swearing to seize the college for the king’s use (i.e., for the secretary’s office, the clerk of the council’s office, the clerk of the House of Burgesses’ office, etc.), and hurrying the construction of the college at such a pace that the finished building was not up to the trustees’

18 Kelley, Yale: A History, 31-33. 19 Prior to this appointment, Andros had served as the governor of the Dominion of New England, an ill- conceived, and ultimately overthrown, amalgam of the colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey. 20 “Further Affidavit of James Blair, 1 May 1704,” Francis Nicholson Papers, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, Williamsburg, VA. (hereafter referred to as Francis Nicholson Papers)

38 standards.21 Evidence of the slipshod construction of the college at Nicholson’s insistence comes from an anonymously written memorandum on the faults in the building of the college from approximately 1703. The memorandum explains that one of the building’s chimneys was unusable due to a girder running through it, and that malfunctioning drains left stagnant water.

By putting their own needs and desires ahead of those of Virginia’s youth, the royal governors had, intentionally or not, stunted the growth of the college. To make matters even worse, on the night of October 29, 1705, the college building had the misfortune of becoming engulfed in flames. After community members extinguished the fire, only the building’s exterior walls remained standing.22

In addition to the lack of interest from the colonial governors resulting in disaster, the

College of William & Mary experienced problems with keeping enrollment up and progressing beyond its grammar school beginnings. In August 1705, the headmaster of the college, Reverend

Mongo Ingles, wrote a letter to Governor Nicholson explaining his intention to resign from his office for these very reasons. He complained that the removal of President Blair’s nephew from the school had led to the removal of six more students, which accounted for approximately one- third of the entire student body. Reverend Ingles also believed that the college, under the administration of President Blair, would never advance beyond its present state. Ingles wrote,

“there is not the least probability that ever the college will answer the design in the charter, while

21 Despite Nicholson’s bad reputation at William & Mary, he secured a legacy in Williamsburg via his leading role in making the town the new colonial capital and planning its baroque layout; Colonial Williamsburg: The Official Guide (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2014), 28-31. 22 Tate, “The Colonial College, 1693-1782,” in The College of William and Mary: A History, Vol. I, 24-29, 39-47; Natalie Zacek, “Francis Nicholson, (1655-1728),” Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, last modified February 20, 2014, https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Francis_Nicholson_1655-1728; Henry Hartwell, James Blair, and Edward Chilton, The Present State of Virginia and the College (London: John Wyat, 1727), 59; “Memorandum re: Several Faults in the Building of William and Mary Colledge, [ca. 1703-05],” Francis Nicholson Papers.

39 things continue as they are […] while it is only a grammar school, which has rendered the college so odious that it is look’t upon not as it is indeed a noble and excellent design, but a trick of Mr. Blair’s to enrich himself.”23 Reverend Ingles’ accusation that President Blair was using the college to line his own pockets is unlikely, as Blair’s marriage to Sarah Harrison of the prominent Virginia Harrisons almost twenty years prior provided him access to a significant line of wealth. Additionally, Blair reaped a considerable profit from his silent partnerships in his brother’s Williamsburg firm. Headmaster Ingles’ remarks concerning the college’s standing as

“only a grammar school,” however, were true. With no higher learning currently taking place at the college, William & Mary had no hope of producing young men ready for ordination in the

Anglican church.24

Even after Blair’s death and replacement as president, an inability to retain a full faculty and low enrollment plagued William & Mary. While Blair succeeded in expanding the college beyond its grammar and Indian school beginnings, the lack of a strong president and heightened tensions between the faculty and the college’s Board of Visitors over control of the college produced an environment in which no one was safe from swift removal. In fact, in 1758, the college hired Aberdeen-educated scientist William Small and Oxford-educated linguist Goronwy

Owen, as masters of natural philosophy and the grammar school, respectively. Despite the two professors’ academic prowess, however, both were gone from the college within six years. In

1760 the Overseers dismissed Owen from his position for instigating a fight between students

23 “Reverend Mongo Ingles to Nicholson, 8 August 1705,” Francis Nicholson Papers. 24 Thad Tate, “James Blair (ca. 1665-1743),” Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, last modified July 21, 2016, https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Blair_James_ca_1655-1743.

40 and town apprentices, and Small departed Virginia in 1764 for an eight-month leave to obtain scientific instruments and never returned.25

Along with the loss of faculty the College of William & Mary failed to keep up with its colonial counterparts in garnering large numbers of students. From the 1730s through the end of the colonial period the combined enrollment of the grammar school, school of philosophy, school of divinity, and the Indian school hovered around sixty students. Educational historian

Roger L. Geiger attributes the relatively low number of students at William & Mary to the fact that many elite families in colonial Virginia viewed college as only one of the options for their sons to attain a cultural education. In other words, college could provide colonial youth with the opportunity to mingle with members of high society, study language and philosophy, and enjoy art and music. So, too, however, did le grand tour. Since young Virginian men could obtain a cultural education in other ways, and often with much less work involved, fewer of them chose to attend college than their northern counterparts. In fact, this was the attitude many wealthy southerners had toward higher education and was likely responsible for William & Mary being the only college established in the southern colonies. Another explanation for the less than enthusiastic attitude many southern colonists had toward higher education comes from the argument of David Hackett Fischer in his work Albion’s Seed. Fischer argued that Virginia’s colonists were largely the descendants of two disparate groups in English society: Royalist elites and those belonging to the bottom of the middling ranks. Once in Virginia, these two groups functioned as gentry and indentured servants, with the latter serving the former in a society exemplified by staple agriculture and rural settlements. Taking such facts into account, it makes

25 Tate, “The Colonial College, 1693-1782,” in The College of William and Mary: A History, Vol. I, 94- 105.

41 even more sense why less of a desire for higher education existed in the south: the economy of the region simply did not require highly-educated individuals to function and the rural landscape meant there were fewer parishes needing learned Anglican ministers.26

Growth and Development

Harvard, William & Mary, and Yale were able to not only survive but begin to thrive during the colonial period thanks to the relative progressiveness of the Holyoke administration, the raising of academic standards, and the establishment of a permanent campus, respectively.

Harvard College progressed during the colonial period under the administration of President

Edward Holyoke (1737-1769). Described as “‘as orthodox a Calvinist as any man,’ yet ‘too much of a gentleman … to cram his principles down another man’s throat,’” Reverend

Holyoke’s tenure struck a balance between the extreme orthodoxy of Increase Mather and the evangelism of the Great Awakening.27 For instance, while President Holyoke was polite enough to entertain Reverend George Whitefield during his first visit to Harvard, he also took part in a testimony published in 1744, in which he and the faculty denounced Whitefield as a “deluder of the people” who filled their heads with “dangerous errors.” Holyoke, therefore, was open enough to hear what Whitefield had to say but not so open as to allow what he believed to be false preaching to proceed without rebuke.28

26 Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 38, 49. Nook E-book; David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 212-225; 227-232: 245- 246. 27 Quoted in Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936, 82. 28 Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936, 82-83, 85; Edward Holyoke, The Testimony of the President, Professors, Tutors and Hebrew Instructor of Harvard College in Cambridge, Against the Reverend Mr.

42 Another example of the progressiveness of Holyoke’s thirty-two year-long administration was the overhaul of teaching materials and methods. In addition to the replacement of Aristotle with Gravesande and the adoption of works suggested by Harvard graduates Hutchinson,

Mayhew, etc., college officials replaced the system of a tutor taking a class through all subjects in the curriculum with a specialized system in which one tutor provided all instruction in Latin, another in logic, metaphysics, and ethics, etc. This was also the period during which all religious instruction became the responsibility of the Hollis Professor of Divinity. These changes not only made the job of each instructor easier but benefited the students by placing their education in each subject in the most capable hands. Perhaps due in part to such changes in the colonial curriculum, enrollment at Harvard soared in 1761 to the point where the college’s halls could not house all of the students, leaving many to find accommodations in town. To remedy this issue, the college’s boards petitioned the General Court to provide them with the necessary funds to erect a new building. In January 1764 college officials dedicated the new building and, fittingly, named it Hollis Hall after the family which had provided funds for both the endowed professorship in Divinity and the endowed professorship in Mathematics and Natural

Philosophy. Taken together, the balanced sensibilities of President Holyoke, the curricular advancements in classroom materials, the faculty’s specialization in instruction, and skyrocketing enrollments helped Harvard College achieve the status of a thriving colonial institution.29

As with the appointment of President Holyoke at Harvard, the College of William &

Mary experienced a period of relative growth in 1769 with the arrival of a new college official:

George Whitefield, and His Conduct (Boston: Printed and sold by T. Fleet, at the Heart and Crown in Cornhill., 1744), 11, 13. 29 Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936, 89-91, 94.

43 royally appointed Governor of Virginia, Norborne Berkeley, Baron Botetourt. While a strong supporter of the imperial-leaning faculty due to his being a peer of the realm, Baron Botetourt earned respect from the provincial Board of Visitors as their rector and was extremely popular with the majority of Virginians. Boteourt’s steadying influence on the board helped to bring about a level of organization in the running of William & Mary which had hitherto been lacking.

Under this administration the faculty made advances to raise academic standards at the college which ranged from the very simple, such as the encouragement of students to attend classes at all times during which the college was in session, to the more advanced, such as the institution of the delivery of Latin declamations by the students after chapel services every other Thursday.

Baron Botetourt also contributed to the encouragement of academic rigor at the college by providing medals to serve as annual awards for the two best students in the School of

Philosophy. The positive effect this raising of educational standards had at the college is evidenced by the fact that the first two winners of the awards, Nathaniel Burwell and James

Madison, were also the first students to be granted baccalaureate degrees from William & Mary.

Although it ended up taking the College of William & Mary a much longer time to meet collegiate milestones than its northern counterparts, the college survived thanks to the commitment of leaders such as President Blair and Baron Botetourt, who were committed to seeing the colonies’ only southern college thrive.30

At Yale College, growth came not from the appointment of a particular administrator, but from the college officials’ final decision to establish New Haven as the permanent home of the institution. Although the college had graduated its first students in 1702, Yale was for all intents

30 Tate, “The Colonial College, 1693-1782,” in The College of William and Mary: A History, Vol. I, ed. Susan H Godson, 113; the James Madison referenced in this paragraph is the future Bishop James Madison, second cousin of the fourth president with whom he shares his name.

44 and purposes a college without a home some sixteen years later. Unlike the confinement of

Harvard to Cambridge or William & Mary to Williamsburg, Yale spread over several different cities within the colony of Connecticut. Despite the trustees originally agreeing upon Saybrook as the location of the college in 1701, the college’s first rector, Abraham Pierson, refused to move from his home in Killingworth and so classes took place near the rector’s home in that town. Upon Pierson’s death in 1707 and the appointment of Reverend Samuel Andrew of

Milford, members of the senior class transferred to Milford to receive instruction there while the lowerclassmen transferred to the originally agreed upon location of Saybrook. While students continued at Saybrook for the next seven years, many of the trustees were uneasy about the situation and preferred to move the college once again. Some of the locations tossed around at the time were New Haven, Hartford, and Wethersfield. In 1716 the trustees decided that those students who found the trip to Saybrook too difficult could attend classes in Wethersfield. Soon after this decision, however, Saybrook itself proved untenable as an outbreak of smallpox hit the town, and students had to flee to East Guilford.31

Fearful that the broken state of the college would continue in perpetuity, or worse, that the college would need to close, the trustees met at the beginning of the following school year and voted to set the permanent location of the college at New Haven. The city had won out over the other cities because the townspeople had promised £700 toward the construction of a college building if the trustees would agree to build it there. Despite the commencement of construction on the college building, and the holding of graduation exercises in New Haven in 1717, some of the trustees who had voted for other cities began to question if all of the votes tallied for New

31 Thomas Clap, The Annals, or History of Yale College, 1700-1766 (New Haven: Printed for John Hotchkiss and B. Mecom, 1766), 11-17.

45 Haven had been legally cast and entered a remonstrance to the Connecticut General Assembly.

While the assembly voted in 1718 that the college should be in New Haven, the dissenting trustees did not hold with the decision and instead encouraged those scholars who had been in residence at Wethersfield to return there. The matter remained unsettled until finally, in 1719, a combination of the re-election of pro-New Haven Governor Saltonstall and a forty pound- sterling grant from the General Assembly thwarted the dissenting trustee’s plans. With the attendance of lead dissenters Timothy Woodbridge and Thomas Buckingham at the annual trustee meeting on September 9, 1719 the battle for Yale’s official home was finally over. In having a singular campus in New Haven, college officials had discovered one of the major keys to Yale’s development. The concentration of all of the college’s students not only enabled faculty to teach students at the same level all at once but made it possible to have the students live together. In such an environment, college faculty and staff could better monitor student behavior and ensure that students were trying to live up to the strict orthodox standards of the college’s founders.32

***

Although the colonists founded Harvard College, the College of William & Mary, and

Yale College in different colonies and at different times, they all shared one goal: educating the colonies’ young men to become the next generation of ministers. At Harvard, the college’s founders sought to train ministers in the Puritan tradition. This intent is apparent in New

England’s First Fruits, in which the Puritans lamented the possibility of leaving the next generation with an illiterate ministry. The Puritan mission of Harvard is also clear in the removal

32 Ibid., 17-18; Kelley, Yale: A History, 23-28.

46 of President Dunster from the college upon the discovery of his apostasy. While Dunster was an accomplished leader, he could not continue to hold such a revered position once he refused to conform to the doctrine of the Puritan church. Harvard began to truly develop into a thriving institution under the administration of President Holyoke. Not only did he stand up for

Puritanism during the Great Awakening, but he implemented changes to class materials and methods which, while more progressive, still helped to produce future clergy in the Puritan tradition.

In Virginia, Reverend James Blair worked to open a college to provide the Church of

England with a “seminary of ministers.” Blair’s vision, however, was not his alone; many of

Virginia’s elite believed that the colony’s success depended on educating their young men for careers in the church. While William & Mary struggled to progress at the same rate as Harvard, the determination of men like Blair and Baron Botetourt led to successful ministerial careers for many William & Mary alumni, including the first Bishop of the Diocese of Virginia, James

Madison.

The founders of Yale, like those at Harvard, sought to educate young men for the Puritan ministry. The Connecticut ministers, however, had a slightly different vision for their college because they believed that the lessons at Harvard were not in line with orthodox Puritanism.

While a mixed board of ministers and laymen were responsible for making decisions at Harvard

College, Yale’s administration consisted entirely of ministers. Yale experienced its fair share of struggles, including the surprising proclamation from Rector Cutler that he questioned Puritan ordination, yet the remaining college officials kept their commitment to maintaining orthodoxy.

The decision to establish a permanent campus in New Haven, where students could live and

47 learn together, was a demonstration of that commitment. Ultimately, despite the difficulties the enterprising generations’ colleges went through, they developed into thriving institutions which produced ministers for the colonies after the first generation passed.

The Awakened Generations

The revival of religious fervor in colonial America known as the Great Awakening had a significant effect on the establishment of colleges in the middle colonies in the 1740s and 1750s.

Having split many churches between “New Lights,” who believed in spiritual rebirth and the importance of revivals, and “Old Lights,” who condemned revivals and preferred to remain focused on scripture and pious behavior, the Awakening became, as Patricia Bonomi has argued, a significant disruptor of colonial institutions. Even those New Lights who agreed that outward displays of spiritual conversion were perfectly acceptable, disagreed on what requirements should exist for entry into the ministry, thus splitting up some of the newly formed congregations. Churches, however, were not the only institutions affected. Harvard and Yale, which had been responsible for the education of many ministers, lost current and potential New

Light students because the schools’ leaders did not welcome revivalism. One of the results of the disruptions brought about by the Great Awakening was the establishment of the College of New

Jersey. Founded by New Light Presbyterians, the college was a vehicle for ensuring that their churches would live on after the passing of their founding congregants. It was not, however, only the New Lights who gained new institutions as a result of the Awakening. Perhaps understanding, as Thomas Kidd has argued, that the Awakening was the beginning of evangelicalism in America, non-sectarians and Anglicans established the College of Philadelphia

48 and King’s College in an effort to help stave off the threat of the New Lights’ monopolizing collegiate education in the middle colonies.33

Educational Responses to the Great Awakening

Reverend Jonathan Dickinson’s mission to establish the College of New Jersey occurred primarily as a result of an irreparable schism between the New Light and Old Light Presbyterians of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Tensions between Old and New Lights arose over two questions: whether there was a proper place for revivals in the church and what exactly the requirements should be for entry into the ministry. Unable to overcome their differences, New

Lights belonging to the Presbytery of New Brunswick and the Presbytery of New York separated from the Synod of Philadelphia, the only synod in the middle colonies at the time, to form a new synod called the Synod of New York in 1745. While members within the New York synod agreed that revivals were welcome forms of worship, there was still some disagreement over the proper path toward ordination. Reverend Dickinson, insistent that ordination should only come after the attainment of a college degree, began efforts to establish a college for New Lights in

New Jersey. Dickinson received a pledge of £185 toward the proposed college from a group of

Presbyterians and Anglicans from New York and New Jersey in 1745, but questions concerning control of the college ultimately led the Anglican members to drop out.34

33 Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 8-10, 131-133; Thomas Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), xiii-xix; While Bonomi and Kidd disagree on the role of the Awakening in brining on the Revolution, their respective arguments about institutional disruption and the beginning of evangelism are not mutually exclusive; Geiger, The History of Higher Education, 69-70. 34 John Maclean, History of the College of New Jersey, 1746-1854 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Co, 1877), 24-25; Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 66-68.

49 Dickinson and the remaining Presbyterian ministers, including Aaron Burr (the elder),

Ebenezer Pemberton, and John Pierson, soldiered on with the mission and sent a college charter to the Royal Governor of New Jersey, Lewis Morris, for approval. Despite the fact that the primary purpose of the college was to train young men for ministerial service in New Light

Presbyterian churches, the founders’ charter did not ban Christians from other denominations from enrolling. The trustees’ 1748 charter, based heavily on the lost founders’ charter of 1746, explicitly stated that all qualified students, regardless of religious denomination, had “free and equal liberty” to attend. Governor Morris refused to approve the charter, however, on account of both his Anglican faith and his belief that he did not actually have the power to approve such a document. While the New Lights’ dreams appeared dashed, they received another chance upon the death and subsequent replacement of Governor Morris. John Hamilton, President of the New

Jersey Provincial Council, and a much more liberal-minded man, became acting governor of the colony in May, and on October 22, 1746 he granted Dickinson and his fellow New Lights the charter they desired.35

The College of Philadelphia, too, arose in response to the Great Awakening, but in a much more circuitous way. Reverend George Whitefield, the major face of the Awakening, became involved with the establishment of a charity school in Philadelphia during one of his many preaching tours throughout colonial America. In early 1740, the vision for the school took physical shape with the beginning of construction on what Philadelphians thereafter referred to as the “New Building.” After about a year, construction on the New Building was complete and it served its purpose as a home base for Reverend Whitefield and other religious revivalists to

35 Maclean, History of the College of New Jersey, 1746-1854 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Co, 1877), 31-34, 44, 70; Samuel Blair, An Account of the College of New Jersey (Woodbridge, NJ: Printed by James Parker, 1764), 8.

50 preach and baptize their flock, but no action was taken on acquiring a teaching master and organizing the school. In 1749, after nine consecutive years of failure to establish the charity school, a group of wealthy Philadelphians purchased the New Building for the purpose of carrying out the educational vision of another exemplar of the colonial period: Benjamin

Franklin.36

Intent on bringing greater educational opportunities to his adopted town of Philadelphia,

Benjamin Franklin proposed the establishment of a “Publick Academy.” The idea for the school originated in a pamphlet Franklin published in 1749 entitled Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania. In the pamphlet Franklin called for students to “learn those things that are likely to be most useful and most ornamental. Regard being had to the several professions for which they are intended.”37 Franklin, therefore, desired a school in which education was provided for utilitarian purposes rather than for the achievement of any form of social status or cultural understanding. This vision greatly differed from the educational experiences available at

Harvard, William & Mary, Yale, and the College of New Jersey. At these elder institutions, students studied religion and some arts and sciences; instruction in such subjects did not provide the necessary preparation for youth intent on careers in business or medicine.38

As a Deist, Benjamin Franklin’s plan did not include a Christian educational component, but such non-sectarianism did not last for long. The purchase of Reverend Whitefield’s “New

36 Nigel Scotland, George Whitefield: The First Transatlantic Revivalist (Oxford: Lion Books, 2019), 115- 116. Hoopla E-books; Edward Potts Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740-1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940), 22-27. 37 Benjamin Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (Philadelphia: Printed in the Year MDCCXLIX), 11. 38 Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Holland, OH: Dreamscape Media, LLC, 2016), 67, Hoopla E-book; Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: The Penguin Press, 2003), 59, Nook E-book; Benjamin Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (Philadelphia: Printed in the Year MDCCXLIX), 11

51 Building” required the taking over of the trusts associated with it. The deed of sale from the

Trustees of the New Building required all of the original uses for the building to continue. This meant that Franklin’s academy had to include a charity school to teach “useful literature and the

Christian Religion” and allow the use of the building for itinerant ministers to preach to the city’s poor. Christianity continued to play a part at the academy once it became a college. With

Reverend William Smith at the helm as Provost for more than twenty years, the college took on an Anglican bent. Evidence of such Anglican leaning is apparent in the reaction to the personal appeals Provost Smith made in England for funding the college. Historian Edward Potts Cheyney argues that although Smith made appeals based on the non-sectarianism of the college, those who proved most interested in supporting the college were Anglicans because they believed that it would produce Anglican teachers and missionaries. Further evidence of the influence of

Anglicanism at the college is the fact that out of the nine colleges in the colonies the largest number of Anglican clergymen, eight, trained at the College of Philadelphia. Thus, while the institution initially helped advance the revivalism of the Great Awakening, it ended up functioning as an opponent of the New Lights once Anglican leadership took over.39

The founders of King’s College, unlike those who established the College of New Jersey, did not establish their institution because they wished to advance the New Light movement but to combat it. With New York being a royal colony, and the Church of England the official

39 “I began to doubt of Revelation itself…the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist” from Benjamin Franklin’s The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Holland, OH: Dreamscape Media, LLC, 2016), 38-39. Hoopla E-book; Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 56-58. Nook E-book; Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 35-36; Edmund Woolley and John Coates, “Indenture Transferring Land on the West Side of Fourth Street to the Trustees of the Academy and Charitable School of Philadelphia,” UPA 3 Archives General Collection of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740-1820, University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Frederick Mills, “Anglican Expansion in Colonial America 1761-1775,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Vol. 39, No. 3 (September 1970), 322.

52 church of the realm, many Anglicans in New York feared that the New Lights’ monopolization of collegiate education in the middle colonies could end up undermining the preservation of their own churches. They also believed that it was only right that the first college established in the colony should be under their direction. Not everyone who envisioned a college for New York, however, agreed.40

In what has come to be known as the “King’s College Controversy,” Anglicans and

Presbyterians fought over control of what would become King’s College. The New York General

Assembly took the first official step toward founding the college in 1746, when they called for a public lottery to raise funds for the college. By 1751 they had held two more lotteries, created a board of trustees, and raised a total of £3,443.18 for its establishment. However, which party was going to control the college itself was still up in the air. The two major antagonists in the controversy were college trustee William Livingston, a Presbyterian, and future first president of the college, Reverend Samuel Johnson, an Anglican. Initially, it appeared that Anglican control of the college was a forgone conclusion. After all, seven of the ten trustees were Anglicans,

Trinity Church had offered several acres of church property for the college campus, and the well- respected Reverend William Smith of Philadelphia had published a newspaper essay hinting that the Anglican New York governor should charter the college and Reverend Samuel Johnson should be made its first president.41

40 Geiger, The History of Higher Education in America, 69. 41 King’s College Lottery Trustees, “Report of Trustees appointed for Erecting a College in this Colony, 25 Nov, 1751,” Columbia College Papers, 1703-1964, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Columbia University, New York, New York (hereafter referred to as Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts); Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, 34-35.

53 The publication of a journal entitled the Independent Reflector in 1753 brought Anglican dominance into question. William Livingston and his Presbyterian associates explained that it was dangerous to give total control of a college, an institution which by its nature has a profound influence on the public, to a body of men belonging to one religious group. If one denomination was allowed to impose its beliefs on students who went into careers “on the Bench, at the Bar, in the Pulpit, and in the Senate” that would “unavoidably affect [the public’s] civil liberties and religious principles.”42 Rather than a college controlled by one denomination, Livingston proposed for New York a non-denominational college in which students were not taught church doctrine in the classroom and were free to attend church wherever they wished. No such institution existed in England or anywhere else in the colonies. Control of this institution, he believed, should rest with the New York legislature since it was the body in possession of the funds. Not the sort to back down from a challenge, Anglican clerics responded in kind with articles of their own defending Anglican control of the college in The New York Mercury. A flurry of articles written by the proponents of each side attacking their respective adversaries followed for several months thereafter. Out of all nine of the colonial colleges, King’s was the only one that had to deal with such troubles prior to its founding. Tiring of the back and forth between themselves and the Presbyterians, the Anglicans finally decided to use the gift of land bestowed by Trinity Church for the college’s use as part of an ultimatum. Either the trustees had to agree that the college president would be an Anglican and worship services would be based on the Anglican liturgy, or the land would revert back to Trinity Church’s possession. On May 16,

42 Ibid., 41.

54 1754, all of the trustees except for William Livingston voted to include the stipulations in their draft of the charter rather than lose the college land.43

In July 1754, Lieutenant Governor James De Lancey officially established the “College of the Province of New York in the City of New York in America…known by the name of

King’s College” by signing its charter in King George II’s stead. Despite the divisive rhetoric spewed by both Anglicans and Presbyterians during the controversy, the actual charter of King’s

College was a much more inclusive document. While the charter’s Anglican authors stipulated that the President of the College had to be a member of the Church of England, students of all

Protestant denominations were welcome to attend. In addition, of the twenty-four “Governors” of the college, membership included the city’s ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church, Lutheran

Church, and Presbyterian Church. These governors were not simply trustees by another name, for a board of trustees existed too, but a council of sorts which had the power to make decisions usually left to the college president alone. Among these decisions, the governors had the ability to decide which books the president, fellows, professors, and tutors could read and teach to students as well as the power to make laws, ordinances, and orders for the better government of the college, students, and ministers. By placing the choice of which class materials to utilize and the power to set down laws, especially for the college ministers, in the hands of a religiously diverse group of individuals, the founders of King’s College were essentially hampering their ability to produce a large number of Anglican clerics. Despite this issue, the college’s very existence was serving the founders’ original intention for establishing King’s, to stave off the

43 Ibid., 40-41, 49; Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 70-71.

55 threat of the New Light-led College of New Jersey, by providing New York’s youth with an

Anglican alternative.44

Obstacles and Setbacks

While the founders of all three of the colleges in the middle colonies had found success in establishing their respective schools, the administrators and faculty at each institution still faced issues which impeded their progress. The College of New Jersey, for instance, struggled to attain the necessary funds from the local populace for building the first college hall in Princeton. As a result, the college’s second president, Reverend Burr, and the trustees decided to send Reverends

Gilbert Tennent and Samuel Davies to Britain for a year to garner donations. Over their time spent abroad Tennent and Davies raised some £4,000 from the Presbyterians, Independents, and

Baptists among the English, Scottish, and Irish populations. Knowing their audiences as they did,

Tennent and Davies emphasized the College of New Jersey’s religious freedom to its English audience and its mission of training future Presbyterian ministers to its Scottish and Irish audiences.45 Over the three years which followed the trustees used the donated monies to fund the construction of the college hall: a sixty room, three-story tall building within which students received instruction, attended religious services, and lodged. When the hall was completed in the fall of 1756 it became the largest building of its kind in all of British North America. To thank

44 The Original Charter of Columbia College, in the City of New-York, October 31, 1754 (New York: Printed for Columbia College by E.B. Clayton, 1836), 3-7, 17-18; Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, 68. 45 By the mid-eighteenth century a de facto toleration of non-Anglicans existed in England so long as such dissenters practiced quietly, thus making open donations from English Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists to a Presbyterian institution which promised religious freedom acceptable.

56 Governor Jonathan Belcher for all of the other work he had done on behalf of the college, including his granting of the college’s second charter, the trustees wanted to name the building

Belcher Hall in his honor, but the governor refused. At Belcher’s suggestion, the trustees named the building Nassau Hall in honor of King William III, of the house of Orange-Nassau.46 The position of importance which Nassau Hall held at the College of New Jersey from the completion of its construction forward is perhaps made most apparent by the fact that the name

“Nassau Hall” became synonymous with the name of the college itself almost immediately.47

Finding the necessary funds to construct Nassau Hall, however, would prove to be a relatively simple obstacle to overcome compared to the difficulty of keeping a New Light heavyweight at the helm of the institution. After the sudden and unexpected death of President

Aaron Burr in 1757, the board of trustees attempted to bring aboard Reverend Jonathan Edwards, one of the early leaders of the Great Awakening, as the college’s next president. When President

Edwards arrived in New Jersey in January of 1758 he immediately got to work settling himself into his new role: he attended a meeting of the board of trustees, preached in the college hall, tested the senior class’ knowledge of divinity, and received a preventative inoculation for smallpox at the urging of the board of trustees. It was this last action which led to President

Edwards’ time in Princeton being of a significantly shorter span than anyone would have predicted. Rather than contracting a mild form of the disease which his body could fight off,

President Edwards contracted full-blown smallpox and, as a result, died on March 22. The college board waited eighteen months before offering the office of the president to Reverend

46 Governor Belcher chose to honor King William III because dissenters held him in high regard as a champion of religious freedom and political liberty; Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 50. 47 Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 69; Maclean, History of the College of New Jersey, 146-154.

57 Samuel Davies. Although Davies initially declined the offer, he eventually accepted and became president on July 26, 1759. In hindsight, the board should have continued with their initial instinct to wait just a bit longer. Practically following in his predecessors’ footsteps, President

Davies died suddenly in 1761 after having only served as president of the college for a little over a year. If not for the trustees’ commitment to providing a New Light option to the colonies’ youth, they may very well have closed their seemingly cursed school. Their perseverance, however, proved apt. A 1764 account of the College of New Jersey proclaims that many of the youth who came to the school with little religious background became men of great piety and went on to serve as ministers in honor of the “Supreme Bestower.”48

Setbacks in Philadelphia came not from funding or an unfortunate succession of presidential deaths, as at the College of New Jersey, but from the institution’s initial status as an academy and its failure to fulfil Franklin’s vision. The school which opened its doors to

Philadelphia’s youth on January 7, 1751 was an academy in both name and breadth; it did not begin to offer collegiate instruction for four more years. While proponents of the academy, especially Benjamin Franklin, had always intended to eventually open a college, the charter issued by Pennsylvania proprietor Thomas Penn in 1753 officially recognized the school as the

“Academy and Charitable School in the Province of Philadelphia.” With an enrollment of more than one hundred boys in its first year and philosophical instruction carried out by Francis Alison by 1753, the Philadelphia academy was extremely successful in attracting students to its grammar-school-esque institution, something which the older College of William & Mary had

48 Maclean, History of the College of New Jersey, 175, 273; Blair, An Account of the College of New Jersey, 17-18.

58 struggled to do. Despite this success, the academy did not quite turn out to be the kind of institution Franklin originally envisioned.49

In an effort to achieve unanimous approval of the academy’s constitution from the board of trustees, Franklin had to work in conjunction with Pennsylvania Attorney General Tench

Francis to draft the “Constitution of the Publick Academy in the City of Philadelphia.” This constitution laid out a school which was much more intellectually broad than the school which

Franklin had proposed. Franklin and Francis’ document called for students to learn the Latin,

Greek, French, German, and Spanish languages, the social sciences of history, geography and chronology, the arts of logic, rhetoric, and writing, and the sciences of algebra, natural philosophy, and mechanical philosophy. This expansion on Franklin’s initial proposal, however, makes sense; while Franklin was the intellectual founder of the Academy of Philadelphia, the school was not his alone. According to University of Pennsylvania historian Edward Potts

Cheyney, the academy was a “child of Philadelphia;” Franklin may have been the academy’s most prominent spokesman, but it was the needs of Philadelphians which necessitated its establishment.50

Unlike the multiple untimely deaths of presidents at the College of New Jersey or the

Academy of Philadelphia’s lower status and broader curriculum, King’s College ran successfully for it first nine years of existence thanks to the guidance of its first president, Samuel Johnson.

The Anglican minister’s advancing age, unfortunately, soon necessitated his replacement.

49 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, “1753 Charter,” UPA 3 Archives General Collection of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740-1820; Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 74-75 50 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, “Constitutions of the Publick Academy, in the City of Philadelphia, 1749,” UPA 3 Archives General Collection of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740-1820; Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 28.-

59 Reverend Myles Cooper, Johnson’s young and exuberant successor, however, lacked the self- discipline required of a college president and had ideas about education which shook up the heretofore smooth running of the college. Only twenty-seven years of age upon his assumption of the presidency, it is perhaps not surprising that Cooper often let the college’s Board of

Governors take the lead administratively while he dealt with the social aspects of the position, such as entertaining guests at the college or taking them out on the town for dinner. Despite his initial preference for socializing over governing, however, President Cooper implemented a major change during his tenure: a new “Plan of Education.” This plan removed mathematics and science from the curriculum, subjects which President Johnson had students devote two years of study to under his tenure, in favor of more Latin, Greek, grammar, and classics. This decision is at odds with the college’s creation of a medical faculty a short four years later. Continued study of science and mathematics would benefit future physicians, but President Cooper apparently thought otherwise. While President Cooper’s administration proved successful in many ways that

President Johnson’s had not, including fundraising that brought the college endowment to nearly

£17,000, his reputation became marred by the way he left office.51

In 1771, the Governors of King’s College awarded President Cooper a leave of absence so that he could journey to England to obtain a royal charter that would transform the college into a university. The Governors believed that receiving such a charter would “tend to the increasing and perpetuating of the Connection and Harmony between the Mother Country and

51 Robert McCaughey, Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 27; “Cooper, Dr. Myles Plan of Education in King’s College New York, March 1, 1763,” Columbia College Papers, 1703-1964, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts; Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, 128, 133, 135.

60 this Colony.”52 While Cooper was intent on raising his own status from that of the president of a single colonial college to the president of a university with separate campuses spread throughout the colony, what was perhaps most important about this venture was the effort to increase the harmony between England and New York due to its waning state. President Cooper was one of many Anglican ministers in the early 1770s who anonymously published a series of pamphlets claiming any form of resistance to the crown was treason. Patriot New Yorkers responded with a public letter warning the writers of the said pamphlets that “the injury you have done to your country can not admit of reparation. Fly for your lives, or anticipate your doom…”53 The letter was not an idle threat; around midnight on May 10, 1775, Cooper was driven, “half-dressed” from his home to the safety of a friend’s place by an armed mob of Patriots. The following morning, he boarded a British ship sailing for the motherland and never returned. While the

Board of Governors tried to continue operating the college under the guidance of acting- president Reverend Benjamin Moore, the campus became occupied by American troops in April

1776 and subsequently closed in 1777. Thus, the college established in the king’s honor and, in part, to cement Anglican control in the city, was ultimately brought to its knees by those citizens who no longer wished to be controlled by the English king or his church.54

52 King’s College, “Committee on Ways and Means, 18 Sept 1771,” Columbia College Papers, 1703-1964, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Columbia University, New York, New York. 53 Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, 153. 54 McCaughey, Stand, Columbia, 28; Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, 153-154.

61 Profiting from Perseverance

The College of New Jersey and the Academy of Philadelphia ultimately prospered during the colonial period thanks to the faculty’s commitment to revivalism and the determination of administrators to make the academy a college, respectively. With Nassau Hall completed in

1756, President Burr and the rest of the faculty of the College of New Jersey had even more time to concentrate their energies on providing the students with an educational environment that embraced the New Light belief in visible spiritual renewal. Evidence of the success of their efforts occurred in 1757 with the first religious revival at the college. According to a June 1757 letter written by Reverend Samuel Davies to a like-minded British friend, he had received word from college trustee Reverend Samuel Finley that all sixty of the students had become filled with the Holy Spirit to the point of weeping in April of that year. Observer Reverend William Tennent

Jr. said that he “never saw any in that case, who had more clear views of God, themselves, and their defects, their impotence, and misery” than the students.55 What was particularly important about this revival was that it came about after that the college had gone through a period in which many of the students exhibited extreme disobedience, but was not as a result of “alarming methods,” likely referring to corporeal punishment. The impetus behind the revival, according to some students, was the awakening of a fellow student to his guilt while on his sick bed. The boy’s talk of repentance led others to seek out forgiveness and healing from God. The college faculty’s nurturing of New Light revivalism had finally paid off and would continue to do so

55 Quoted in William Armstrong Dod’s History of the College of New Jersey, from its Commencement, A.D., 1746 to 1783 (Princeton: J.T. Robinson, 1844), 12.

62 throughout the colonial period, with nearly half of all College of New Jersey graduates becoming ministers.56

Administrators at the Academy of Philadelphia also persevered to achieve their goals, but rather than working on nurturing a religious environment as the faculty in New Jersey did, they worked to transform the academy into a college. The arrival in Philadelphia of Reverend

William Smith proved to be the major catalyst for this change. An Aberdeen-educated Scotsman,

Smith had become well known in intellectual circles for the publication of his educational treatise A General Idea of the College of Mirania. In Smith’s fictitious town of Mirania, those citizens bound for the learned professions of Divinity, Law, Medicine, Agriculture, and

Statecraft studied at the College, while those citizens bound for the mechanical professions studied at the Mechanic’s School. Smith argued that this division of education into two classes was necessary because certain types of knowledge, such as the learned languages, were needed for the continued study of the first class, but were a waste of time for the second class since they would have no occasion to use them. For the second class, Smith recommended “a tincture” of the sciences, except for arithmetic and mathematics. He also argued that any school which attempts to teach citizens of both classes in the same way, or only takes into account the needs of the first class and not the second, is defective. In 1753, at the time of Smith’s writing, the educators of almost all of the colleges in colonial America ran their schools this way, serving the first class and ignoring the second. In his eyes, therefore, the trustees of Harvard, William &

Mary, Yale, and the College of New Jersey were running defective schools. The only school that bucked this tradition was the Academy of Philadelphia, of which Smith was well aware. He

56 Ibid., 12-13; Maclean, History of the College of New Jersey, 155-156; “Table I: The Nine Colonial Colleges,” in Roger Geiger’s The History of American Higher Education, 113.

63 praised both the Academy and Benjamin Franklin in his discussion of Mirania’s Mechanic’s

School, stating that it was “so much like the English School in Philadelphia, first sketch'd out by the very ingenious and worthy Mr. Franklin, that a particular Account of it here is needless.”57

This nod to Franklin led to correspondence between the two men which ultimately resulted in the recruitment of Smith to the faculty of the Academy of Philadelphia.58

After six months of teaching philosophy, ethics, and rhetoric at the academy, Reverend

Smith and Academy Rector Francis Alison joined together to request that the trustees amend the academy’s charter so that they could award college degrees. Critical support for this change came from colonial proprietor Thomas Penn. In exchange for Penn supporting the establishment of the college, Smith agreed to work as an unofficial agent of the proprietors in Philadelphia.

Ultimately, the trustees scrapped the idea of an amendment to the original charter in favor of the writing of an entirely new charter. Despite its independent nature, the charter of 1755 is to this day referred to as an “additional,” or “supplementary” charter. Within this new charter two of the biggest changes which occurred in the transition from academy to college were the appointment of a “Provost” as the head of the new college, which would be William Smith, and the awarding of power to said Provost to grant students degrees of the same caliber as those awarded in the universities of Great Britain. This second change was important because it not only enabled

Philadelphia graduates to seek higher degrees but provided them with assurance that they had been appropriately prepared for further study. Together, Reverend Smith, Rector Alison, and the

57 William Smith, A General Idea of the College of Mirania (New York: Printed and sold by J. Parker and W. Weyman, 1753), 15. 58 Ibid., 13-16.

64 Trustees, had finally achieved Benjamin Franklin’s vision of a college for Philadelphia, even though it did turn out to be broader in scope and more Anglican than he would have liked.59

***

In response to the religious revivalism of the Great Awakening, New Light, non- sectarian, and Anglican leaders established colleges in the middle colonies for rather disparate reasons: some to educate those who embraced the revivalist movement, and others to stave off the threat to higher education posed by those very same revivalists. New Light Presbyterians in

New Jersey and New York were largely responsible for the establishment of the College of New

Jersey. The members of this camp, led by Reverend Jonathan Dickinson, believed that all ministers on the path to ordination should have a college education. However, Harvard and Yale, which had up to that point educated many of the colonies’ Presbyterian ministers, did not agree with New Light beliefs. The founding of the College of New Jersey ameliorated this issue by providing a college education in accordance with New Light tenets. However, establishing the college and keeping it running were not easy tasks. The college leaders’ solid commitment to revivalism and their faith in God, however, ultimately helped them to prosper.

The Academy (later College) of Philadelphia, originally intended by its intellectual founder, Benjamin Franklin, to be a non-sectarian institution ultimately served as both a proponent and an opponent of the Great Awakening. Thanks to the deeds associated with the

59 Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 43; William Coleman, “Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania Minute Books, volume 1, 1749-1768,” UPA 1.1 Trustees of the University Minutes, University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 18, 20; Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 75; “Additional Charter of the College, Academy, and Charity School of Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania,” William Smith Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

65 “New Building,” the academy had to run a charity school which instructed students in Christian

Knowledge with a revivalist bent. After some struggle to become the College of Philadelphia, however, it became distinctly Anglican due to the long tenure of its first provost, William Smith.

Under his administration, the Philadelphia institution helped combat the religious threat posed by the College of New Jersey by graduating the most students to became Anglican clergyman during the colonial period.

The Anglican supporters of King’s College pushed for its establishment in hopes of combatting the monopolization of education in the middle colonies by New Lights but ended up struggling to truly establish itself as an enduring institution until after the Revolutionary War.

They were initially successful in their venture while Reverend Samuel Johnson served as college president, but his replacement, Reverend Myles Cooper, ultimately led the college into an untenable situation. Adding to the problems with Cooper’s youth, inexperience, and changing of the curriculum, the years leading up to the Revolutionary War made many colonists disillusioned with the English and their institutions. This discontent forced Cooper to flee to England and the start of the war necessitated King’s College’s closing. While the founders of all three of the colleges founded in the middle colonies during this period established their respective institutions in response to the Great Awakening, only the College of New Jersey and the College of Philadelphia successfully overcame their troubles to provide the colonies with large numbers of Presbyterians and Anglican ministers.

66 The Aspirational Generations

Inspired by the establishment of the first six colonial colleges, leaders among the Baptist and Dutch Reformed churches, as well as Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, aspired to found colleges of their own for the educationally underserved members of their religious communities. This effort was aspirational not only because of the smaller size of the respective denominations, but because of the difficult period during which the founders attempted to establish the colleges.

Beginning in 1763, with the milieu of the nine-year-long French and Indian War fresh in the colonists’ minds, the British government decided to not only bar colonists from settling west of an established Proclamation Line, but began efforts to tax the colonists in order to build up

Britain’s depleted coffers. These actions resulted in a general feeling of discontent among many colonists, calls for retaliation against British policy, and eventually the outbreak of the

Revolutionary War. It was in the midst of such an environment that the founders of the College of Rhode Island, Queen’s, and Dartmouth faced the difficult task of not only convincing their fellow colonists of the need for three new colleges, but of parting with more of their money for the colleges’ establishments.

The Baptist leaders’ decision to focus some of their energies on founding a college seems perplexing considering they were one of the smaller and poorer Christian denomination in the colonies. However, there was a very real fear among those Baptists in power that if Baptist youth continued to attend the other colonial colleges they would convert to the beliefs of the institution

67 which they attended. The only possible solution was for the Baptists to found their own college, and so they proceeded to do just that in 1764.60

Despite the presence of the Dutch Reformed Church in the colonies dating back to the first Dutch worship service in New Amsterdam in 1628, church officials had made no effort to establish a college of their own in America. Ultimately, the Dutch American colonists pursued the establishment of a college of their own in the mid eighteenth century because of the small number of ministers migrating to America from the Netherlands and their inability to train and ordain ministers of their own. Founding their own college provided self-control for the colonial members of the Dutch Reformed Church.61

While Dartmouth was the last colonial college established before the Revolution, its religious roots were the same as the first, i.e. Puritan. What makes Dartmouth’s founding unique, however, is that Reverend Eleazar Wheelock started it to educate Native Americans in the

Puritan faith in the hopes that his graduates would become ministers among their own people.62

Although Baptist leaders, Dutch Reformed leaders, and Reverend Wheelock headed denominations, or subsections of denominations, which were much smaller in scale than their colonial counterparts, they aspired for their colleges to be just as influential among their congregants.63

60 Walter C. Bronson, The History of Brown University, 1764-1914 (Providence: Published by the University, 1914), 7. 61 William Demarest, A History of Rutgers College, 1766-1924 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers College Press, 1924), 5; Richard P. McCormick, Rutgers: A Bicentennial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1966), 2 62 For more on the history of Native American and European relations in New England, see chapter 1 of Colin G. Calloway’s The Indian History of an American Institution (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010). 63 Frederick Chase, A History of Dartmouth College and the Town of Hanover, New Hampshire, Vol. I (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1891), 32-33.

68 Bringing Higher Education to the Underserved

Chosen by the Philadelphia Baptist Association at only twenty-five years of age,

Reverend James Manning led the effort to establish the College of Rhode Island. On a mission to gauge the appropriateness of the city of Newport for a college in 1763, Reverend Manning made a motion to the Rhode Island General Assembly for the establishment of a seminary of literature under the direction of Baptists. Quickly following the passage of the motion, the Baptists drafted a petition for the college and a rough draft of the college charter and sent them to the Rhode

Island legislature. The Baptists’ charter enticed the assemblymen to favor it by explaining that a college would bring attention to the government which established it, and such attention would be to the advantage and honor of the Assembly. Also in the Baptists’ favor was the fact that

Rhode Island had no established church and the entire colony’s existence was due to Roger

Williams, a former Puritan turned Baptist enthusiast. While many in the Assembly greeted the petition and accompanying charter gleefully, others, such as Providence representative Daniel

Jenckes, questioned the draft charter’s handing of power over to a board of fellows which included eight Congregationalists and left only four seats open for Baptists. Much of the blame for this set-up was laid at the feet of Reverend Ezra Stiles, the Congregationalist minister of

Newport who had been asked by the Baptist Association to assist them in drafting their charter.

Reverend Stiles denied any wrongdoing, however, claiming he “gave you [the Baptists] timely warning to take care of yourselves, for that we had done so with regard to our society.”64 Such scrutiny of the draft led the Philadelphia Baptist Association to remove the charter from the

Assembly’s consideration and reconvene the drafting committee to come up with a new charter

64 “Materials for a History of the Baptists in Rhode Island, by Morgan Edwards, 1770,” in Collections of the Rhode Island Historical Society, Vol. VI (Providence: Printed by Knowles, Anthony & Co., 1867), 350.

69 in which power rested more squarely in the hands of Baptists. Presented before the Rhode Island

Assembly in January 1764, the legislators officially granted the college its charter on March 3,

1764.65

In contrast to the other colonial colleges, the Baptists did not explicitly establish the

College of Rhode Island to train ministers, although it would do just that, but especially to educate young men in the Baptist tradition no matter their ultimate career. Co-written by Rhode

Island Assemblyman William Ellery, Jr. and Reverend Ezra Stiles, both Congregationalists, and a committee of Baptist leaders, the 1764 charter stated the college’s purpose as “forming the rising generation to virtue, knowledge, and useful literature, and … preserving in the community a succession of men duly qualified for discharging the offices of life with usefulness and reputation.”66 The aforementioned “offices of life” could very well include the calling of Baptist ministry, but it was not the sole option. Unlike the Stiles-penned draft charter of 1763, the official 1764 charter appointed the same number of Baptists fellows as Congregationalists, declared that the president of the university was to always be a member of the Baptist denomination, and added five Baptist positions to the board of trustees. With such a predominantly Baptist administration in place, the goal of educating young men in the Baptist tradition was in capable hands.67

65 Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 97; “Materials for a History of the Baptists… ” Collections of the Rhode Island Historical Society, 349-350; “The Original Draught of the Charter of Rhode Island College, August 1763,” Rhode Island College Miscellaneous Papers, 1763-1804, John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island (hereafter referred to as Rhode Island College Miscellaneous Papers); Bronson, The History of Brown University, 14. 66 The Charter of Brown University with Amendments and Notes (Providence: Published by the University, 1945), 5. 67 Ibid.; Bronson, The History of Brown University, 16-17.

70 Like the Baptists, the underserved members of the Dutch Reformed Church in the colonies sought to establish a college of their own but, unlike the Baptists, those Dutch and

English colonists who founded Queen’s College did so specifically to train youth to become

Dutch Reformed ministers. Inextricably linked with the establishment of Queen’s College was the lack of organization of the Dutch Reformed Church in America. Prior to the establishment of the American branch, all Dutch Reformed churches were under the jurisdiction of the Classis of

Amsterdam. As part of this system, the Dutch Reformed churches in the colonies were entirely dependent on the Amsterdam Classis for clergy (so similar to the Anglican churches in the colonies and the dioceses in England) and had to have all disputes among themselves adjudicated by men some three-thousand miles away in the Netherlands. Aware of the problems inherent in this structure, Reverend Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen led an effort to endow Dutch

Reformed clergyman in America with ecclesiastical power over their local churches. Himself a clerical recruit to the Raritan Valley region of New Jersey, Frelinghuysen understood the problems on both sides of the Atlantic: it was difficult to convince Dutch clergy to move to the colonies, and at the same time, it was difficult to run a church in the colonies when all major decisions had to be managed by the Amsterdam Classis. In an effort to address these issues,

Dutch Reformed ministers throughout the colonies met in New York City in 1737 to craft a letter to the Amsterdam Classis asking for local authority.68

In 1747 the Dutch Reformed ministers realized their efforts to achieve local authority with the creation of an American Coetus, a church body which was subordinate to the Classis but held some limited authority of its own. However, some of the ministers wanted more autonomy,

68 Richard McCormick, Rutgers: A Bicentennial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1966), 2; William Demarest, A History of Rutgers College, 1766-1924 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers College Press, 1924), 28.

71 this led to a split among the colonial clergymen. While some of the clergy had achieved their initial goal with the formation of the Coetus, others felt that they should be able to exercise more powers than the Classis had granted them. Some of the powers they desired were the ability to train, as well as ordain, ministers in the colonies. To wield such powers, however, the Coetus needed to acquire the status of a classis. Those members of the body opposed to such overreach subsequently left the Coetus and formed their own, more conservative, body known as the

Conferentie.69

While part of the goal of achieving the status of a classis included the ability to train ministers in the colonies, the members of the Coetus did not wait to become a classis before undertaking efforts to found a college of their own. At a 1755 meeting, the Coetus’ members resolved to “plant a university or seminary for young men destined for study in the learned languages … also that it may be a school of the prophets in which young Levites and Nazarites of God may be prepared to enter upon the sacred ministerial office in the Church of God.”70 At the same time, the Coetus nominated Reverend Theodore Frelinghuysen, son of the late

Reverend Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen, as their delegate to the Classis of Amsterdam and provided him with a commission for his travel to the Netherlands. Despite spending two years in residence in the city fighting for their proposal, the Amsterdam classis ultimately denied the petition for an American classis and Frelinghuysen began his journey home. Unfortunately, the

Reverend never set foot on colonial soil again, for the ship upon which he was traveling wrecked and he drowned in the waters outside of New York Harbor. Determined to establish their college, even if that meant going without the consent of the Amsterdam classis, the members of the

69 McCormick, Rutgers: A Bicentennial History, 2; Demarest, A History of Rutgers College, 29. 70 McCormick, Rutgers: A Bicentennial History, 3.

72 Coetus transferred their allegiance to a new leader: twenty-five-year-old Reverend Jacob Rutsen

Hardenbergh. Prepared for the ministry by Theodores’s brother, Reverend John Frelinghuysen, and married to John’s widow after his passing, Reverend Hardenbergh’s strong connection with the Frelinghuysen family made him the natural choice to lead the cause.71

With their hopes to convince Amsterdam of their need for a classis and college of their own in the colonies dashed, the Coetus turned its attention to seeking the approval of the government of New Jersey for establishing their college. In 1761 the New Light Dutch Reformed ministers of New Jersey made their first appeal to the colonial governor, Thomas Boone, for the granting of a college charter. This appeal, as well as their successive efforts with Governor

Josiah Hardy, came to naught. However, on November 10, 1766, Governor William Franklin, son of Benjamin Franklin, officially granted the ministers their desired charter. While no copy of the charter granted to the college exists today, references to it in contemporary sources reveal much about its contents. First, the founders named the institution Queen’s College in honor of

Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III. Second, the Board of Trustees consisted of forty- one men, including the Governor, president of the Council, the Chief Justice, the Attorney

General, five ministers and sixteen laymen from New York, six ministers and eight laymen from

New Jersey, and two ministers from Pennsylvania. Last, although the college was meant to train clergymen in the Dutch Reformed tradition, the college itself was not a church institution in a strict sense because those ministers responsible for its establishment were working outside of the authority of the Classis of Amsterdam. In essence, this was what had created the schism within the Dutch Reformed Church. Even with the charter in hand, however, the work of starting the college was not an easy road. A stipulation in the charter which differentiated between residents

71 Demarest, A History of Rutgers College, 36, 43; McCormick, Rutgers: A Bicentennial History, 4.

73 and non-residents of New Jersey had made the raising of money in New York extremely difficult. As a result, the trustees almost immediately petitioned Governor Franklin to add an amendment to the charter which would do away with the stipulation. Franklin was reluctant to add the amendment and initially ignored their requests; however, he ultimately decided to fix the problem by issuing the college a new charter on March 20, 1770.72

In contrast to the establishment of the colleges in Rhode Island and New Jersey for the

Baptists and the Dutch Reformed, respectively, the last college founded in the colonies belonged to the same denomination of two existing colleges, i.e., Congregationalist. However, what differentiated Dartmouth College was the demographic it was meant to serve: Native Americans.

Also in contrast to the other eight colonial colleges’ founders, Dartmouth’s Reverend Eleazar

Wheelock had already established one educational institution: a charity school for Native

Americans and English youth. To supplement his income as pastor of the Second Congregational

Church in Lebanon, Connecticut, Reverend Wheelock worked as a private instructor preparing young men for college. One of Wheelock’s pupils was a young Mohegan named Samson Occom, who studied under Wheelock from 1743 to 1748 with aid from the London Society for the

Propagation of the Gospel. Reverend Wheelock’s experience with the young Mr. Occom inspired him to open a charity school in which “Children of different Nations may, and easily will learn one another's Language, and English Youth may learn of them … and their Ministry be much more acceptable and edifying to the Indians”73 His purpose, then, was to prepare Native

American and English youth alike to become ministers of the Gospel so that they could go on to proselytize to Native American communities in such a way that their message was heartily

72 Demarest, A History of Rutgers College, 52-54; McCormick, Rutgers: A Bicentennial History, 5-8. 73 Eleazar Wheelock, A plain and faithful Narrative of the Original Design, Rise, Progress, and present State of the Indian Charity-School at Lebanon in Connecticut (Boston: Richard and Samuel Draper, 1763), 18.

74 received.74 Wheelock’s proposed school came to fruition in 1755 thanks to the raising of funds by the local community and the bestowing of a two-acre parcel of land for the school by Colonel

Joshua Moor. Named Moor’s Charity School in honor of the Colonel’s gift, the school opened with only two students in attendance, but that number increased to four in spring of 1757, five in

1759, seven in 1760, and eleven in early August of 1761.75

By 1763 Reverend Wheelock had conceived of the idea to move the school, with possible destinations including New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York, and enlarge it from a school to a college.76 When the taking up of collections for the proposed college began in 1764, the largest donations came from those places desirous of the college to settle within their limits. Wheelock received £2,300 sterling from Albany, the province of

Massachusetts Bay offered two-thousand acres of land in Berkshire as well as some £800 sterling, several towns in Connecticut made offers for the school to continue in that colony, and the governor of New Hampshire, John Wentworth, promised five-hundred acres of land. Even with this great outpouring of donations, more money was necessary to fund the proposed college.

In 1765 Wheelock applied to the Scotch boards in New York and New Jersey for aid to send his former student, Reverend Samson Occom, and Reverend Nathaniel Whitaker to Britain to raise the necessary funds. With the necessary aid received, Revs. Occom and Whitaker departed for

Britain in December of that year. Subscriptions for the college opened in March 1765 with the donation of fifty pounds sterling from William Legge, the second Earl of Dartmouth, and soon

74 The effort to convert Native Americans in New England to Christianity dates back to the Puritans’ establishment of “praying towns” in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. In fact, the first great seal of the colony of Massachusetts Bay depicts a Native imploring the Puritans to “come over and help us,” a reference to Acts 16:9. 75 Frederick Chase, A History of Dartmouth College and the Town of Hanover, New Hampshire, Vol. I (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1891), 7, 10-11; Wheelock, A plain and faithful Narrative… (1763), 32-33. 76 Similar efforts to establish an Indian School at a college occurred at the College of William & Mary in the form of the Brafferton, but it ultimately failed.

75 after followed by a donation from His Majesty, King George III, of £200 sterling. Despite an initial flurry of donations, thanks in no small part to the novelty-factor of Reverend Occom, the spirit of giving eventually subsided, and Revs. Occom and Whitaker made plans for their journey home. The ministers arrived home on June 6, 1768, having raised over eleven-thousand pounds sterling for the proposed college.77

With the colony of New Hampshire chosen as the permanent home of the new college in

1768, Reverend Wheelock began writing a college charter to send to Governor John Wentworth for his approval. In an unusual move, the charter Wheelock wrote called for two sets of trustees: one in England and another in the colonies. In addition, the charter officially referred to the institution as an ‘academy,’ but Wheelock included a post script to Governor Wentworth in which he wrote: “Sir, -- If proper to use the word ‘College’ instead of ‘Academy’ in the Charter,

I shall be pleased with it.”78 After some ironing out of details, including the elimination of the separate English set of trustees, Reverend Wheelock requested that Governor Wentworth lend his name to the college. The governor refused but suggested that the college bear the name of one of its first benefactors, the Earl of Dartmouth. After five years of trying work on the part of

Reverend Wheelock and his supporters, Governor Wentworth finally granted Dartmouth College its charter on December 13, 1769. Reverend Wheelock had at last established his college “for the education and instruction of youth of the Indian tribes in this land in … all parts of learning which shall appear necessary and expedient for civilizing and Christianizing children of pagans,

77 Chase, A History of Dartmouth College, 32-33, 41, 47-51, 59; Eleazar Wheelock, A Continuation of the Narrative of the Indian Charity-School, begun in Lebanon, in Connecticut; from the year 1768, to the incorporation of it with Dartmouth-college, and removal and settlement of it in Hanover, in the province of New-Hampshire (1771), 6. 78 Chase, A History of Dartmouth College, 114.

76 as well as in all liberal arts and sciences, and also of English youth and others.”79 All that was left to do was to remove to New Hampshire and prepare to open the college.80

Struggles and Hardships

Having finally received their charters, it may have seemed like the worst was behind the

Baptists, Dutch Reformed, and Reverend Wheelock, but actually getting the colleges themselves off the ground and operating them from day to day proved difficult. For example, among the many hardships the corporation of the College of Rhode Island faced, its greatest was the raising of funds. Being one of the poorer denominations in the colonies at the time, the Baptists had an uphill battle. In 1764 the corporation authorized sixty-nine gentlemen throughout the colonies to receive subscription forms, including the founder of the College of Philadelphia, Benjamin

Franklin, but the monies which this campaign raised were not enough to establish an endowment.

In an effort to remedy this predicament, the college corporation sent Reverend Morgan Edwards to Europe to solicit donations on its behalf. In a letter dated April 26, 1768, Reverend Edwards informed Reverend Manning, now the president of the college, of the progress he was making, writing that a banker gave him 20 guineas and promised more if officials at the college would correspond with him every once in a while about how his money was being spent. In sum,

Reverend Edwards raised approximately £888 over his year and a half residence in the United

Kingdom, with one-fourth of the funds having come from Ireland. The corporation also sent

Reverend Hezekiah Smith to seek more donations, but in the southern colonies from 1769 to

79 The Charter of Dartmouth College (Hanover: Printed by Charles Spear, 1815), 6. 80 Chase, A History of Dartmouth College, 114-116.

77 1770. Reverend Smith’s authorization letter does much to reveal the true lack of funds in the college’s treasury since it states, “whereas the said Corporation from the smallness of their funds have found themselves under a necessity of requesting the generous assistance of friends…they empower and authorize you the said Hezekiah Smith.”81 Record of Smith’s efforts appear in his personal diary, in which he mentions his soliciting of donations for the college eighteen separate times. Over his travels on behalf of the college, Reverend Smith ultimately collected about 1,700 worth of pound sterling.82

Along with the corporation’s struggle for funds, College of Rhode Island students had issues with adapting to life at the college once it moved to Providence. While the move to the colony’s capital helped to secure the college’s future prosperity, as discussed later on, the differences between it and the college’s first home were jarring. Warren was a small, rural hamlet, while Providence was a bustling town, the likes of which many students had never experienced before. For instance, Theodore Foster, of the class of 1770, wrote in one of his letters home that studying in Providence was difficult due to the cacophony from outside his window, which often included the sounds of jolting wagons, rattling coaches, and various animal cries. In addition to the raucous environment in which the college now existed, the commencement of communal living in the “College Edifice,” as the administrators’ called the college hall, was troublesome for some students. While in residence at Warren, and during the early years in Providence, students either lived with their own families or boarded with families

81 “Rough Draft of the Reverend Mr. Smith’s Authorization, September 1769,” Rhode Island College Miscellaneous Papers; emphasis my own. 82 Bronson, The History of Brown University, 17, 35, 39; “Reverend Morgan Edwards to Reverend James Manning, April 26, 1768,” Rhode Island College Miscellaneous Papers; “Diary, Volume 5: Oct 1, 1769 – Sept 25, 1773,” Hezekiah Smith Papers, 1762-1805, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

78 which provided them with a certain level of parental oversight. As students moved into the lower stories of the College Edifice in the winter of 1771-72, however, such parental oversight disappeared, and many students ran amok despite the best efforts of the college steward. In a public admonishment delivered in 1774, the administration accused students John Hart, Daniel

Gano, William Edwards, and Walter Wigneron, of “notoriously … violat[ing] the laws of the college in sundry instances.”83 All four young men had habitually neglected their studies and been absent from their rooms during study hours. Individually, colleges’ officials accused Hart of leaving the college at night and entertaining other students in his room, and Gano of being excessively noisy at night, blocking the hall entry, and breaking a window. At the same time, they accused Wigneron of assisting Gano with blocking the hall entry and being excessively noisy at night. In addition to their public admonishment, administrators enumerated the students’ misdeeds in an ominous sounding “black book.” The College of Rhode Island, therefore, experienced a bit of growing pains with its move to Providence, but it was also that very move which helped to make the college a long-lasting institution.84

Unlike their Baptists counterparts, the major issues that the trustees of Queen’s College faced were not financial and domestic but geographical and personnel related. Although the majority of trustees resided in New York, it was in New Jersey that they planned to open the college. The question still remained, however, as to whether Hackensack or New Brunswick would be the better fit. Both towns were home to predominately Dutch Reformed populations, but the latter had already been outbid in favor of Princeton for home of the College of New

83 “Public admonishment of a number of students, March 2, 1774,” Rhode Island College Miscellaneous Papers. 84 Bronson, The History of Brown University, 53-54; “Public admonishment of a number of students, March 2, 1774,” Rhode Island College Miscellaneous Papers.

79 Jersey so its residents were particularly passionate about getting Queen’s on this, their second chance at a college. That zeal, along with the larger subscriptions they were able to provide to the trustees, likely led to the ten-to-seven vote in May 1771 in favor of New Brunswick. It also could not have hurt that New Brunswick lay along the “main highway” through New Jersey.

With a hometown secured, the Queen’s College trustees faced further trouble with the appointment of Frederick Frelinghuysen, nephew of Reverend Theodore Frelinghuysen and stepson of Reverend Hardenbergh, as the sole instructor of the college in the role of Tutor. At only eighteen years of age at the time of his appointment, Tutor Frelinghuysen himself had graduated from the College of New Jersey only a year earlier, in 1770. Despite possessing a

“singular Genius,” as Trustee Hardenbergh raved in a newspaper advertisement for the college, his youth likely led him to not fully understand the weight of the commitment he was making.

Instead of taking up a career in ministry like his father and grandfather before him,

Frelinghuysen gave up the study of theology for the study of law in 1773 and the bar admitted him in 1774. Unable to concurrently practice law and serve as the sole tutor at Queen’s,

Frelinghuysen left the college only a few years after it opened. Fortunately, the college trustees found a replacement in Frelinghuysen’s College of New Jersey classmate, John Taylor, who remained with the college for the next two decades.85

Like his Rhode Island contemporaries, Reverend Wheelock found that the physical establishment of a college could be just as trying as raising funds or getting a charter approved.

Upon Reverend Wheelock’s arrival in Hanover, New Hampshire in August 1770, he directed laborers to dig a well, build a house for himself and his family, and build a house for the

85 McCormick, Rutgers: A Bicentennial History, 5, 9-13; Demarest, A History of Rutgers College, 78-83, 89; Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 99.

80 Dartmouth students. When they failed to find water at the bottom of the dug wells, Wheelock ordered the half-built houses torn down and rebuilt 1,155 feet away. The Reverend’s family, along with thirty students in tow, arrived before both buildings were complete. Accordingly, the male members of Wheelock’s family and the students made beds of hemlock boughs, which they slept on for nearly a month. To make matters worse, the two sawmills upon which Wheelock depended for boards failed and the season was rife with cold temperatures, rain, and snow.

Thankfully, due to the “pure mercy of God,” the weather turned unseasonably warm, a new supply of boards arrived, and the laborers finished work on both the school and Wheelock’s house. In thanks for such a reversal of fortune, Reverend Wheelock held a day of fasting and prayer on January 23, 1771 in which “[the students] solemnly renewed their oath of allegiance to

Christ, and entire devotedness of body and soul, and all endowments of both, without reserve to

God, for time and eternity.”86 While Dartmouth’s first few months of existence had been quite difficult, its members’ unwavering devotion to God had ultimately been rewarded with His mercy.87

God’s mercy, however, did not solve every issue which arose during the establishment of

Dartmouth, which the disillusionment of Reverend Samson Occom demonstrates. While he had willingly traveled abroad to help raise funds for the college, after his return he began to witness a change in Reverend Wheelock’s vision for Dartmouth as an “Indian college.” For instance, while the college charter stated that that school was meant to educate the “youth of the Indian tribes,” no Native Americans graduated from the college in its first year of its existence, nor would any during the six years that followed. Occom viewed this outcome as a misuse of the funds he had

86 Wheelock, A Continuation of the Narrative… (1771), 29. 87 Ibid., 28-29.

81 helped raise and called Wheelock on it, writing “I am very jealous that instead of your Semenary

[sic] Becoming alma Mater, she will be too alba [white] Mater to Suckle the Tawnees, for She is already a’Dorned up too much like the Popish Virgin Mary.”88 In other words, Dartmouth would not be able to provide intellectual nourishment to Native Americans so long as college officials admitted an inordinate number of white colonists, thus making the school little different from the colleges of Europe. Unfortunately, instead of taking Occom’s complaints to heart and changing the college’s approach, Wheelock wrote back that the most benefit to Native Americans would come from educating white colonists for missionary work and accused Occom of not being his friend. Soon after, their correspondence ended. Therefore, Reverend Occom’s disillusionment with Dartmouth College had not only left Reverend Wheelock without the friendship of his former star pupil, but without the face of Native American education which had helped him to attain much of the college’s necessary financial support.89

Creating Lasting Institutions

The College of Rhode Island, Queen’s College, and Dartmouth College helped to secure their institutional futures via the establishment of permanent homes for the first two, efforts to find a professor of divinity for the second, and a change in focus from educating Native

Americans to colonists, for the third. With the College of Rhode Island’s monetary needs in a better state, concern among the trustees turned to the need for a permanent home in November of

1769. While President Manning’s parsonage house in Warren had sufficed as a place for student

88 Quoted in Colin G. Calloway’s The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 27. 89 Ibid., 26-28.

82 instruction in the college’s early years, the expanding student body necessitated a larger space.

The top contenders for the college’s permanent home were the cities of Newport and Providence.

Although Newport had been the original location of choice for the college due to its coastal location, the city itself was occupied by a large number of Congregationalists and Anglicans.

Providence, located at the head of Narragansett Bay, was home to many more Baptists, but did not offer the college as lucrative of an offer. What ultimately swung the trustees in favor of

Providence over Newport was the work of a local family of wealthy merchants, the Browns.

Brown family patriarchs Nicholas Brown Sr. and his brother, Moses Brown, discussed in their personal correspondence the advantages to be had if Providence were chosen. In an October 23,

1769 letter, Moses wrote to his brother, “Providence here after would be a seat of the muses …

Our children may readily have the best education and much cheaper than those abroad. The influence of the seminary here will always add great weight to the influence of this town and country in all governmental matters, and may sooner or later determine the general assembly to be holden here.”90 In an attempt to bring their hopes to fruition, the Browns worked as local boosters to garner the necessary funds to bring the Providence bid in competition with the

Newport offer. With the more Baptist-friendly environment, and a bid now on par with that of its competitor, Providence was the obvious, and final, choice of the trustees. With a home-base in which to build the “College Edifice,” as well as the continued support of the Brown family, the

College of Rhode Island was on track to becoming an enduring institution.91

Instead of constructing a new building like Rhode Island’s College Edifice, the Queen’s

College trustees turned to a former tavern, known as “The Sign of the Red Lion,” to house their

90 “Moses Brown to Nicholas Brown Sr., October 23, 1769,” Rhode Island College Miscellaneous Papers. 91 Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 97-98; Bronson, The History of Brown University, 43-49.

83 New Brunswick school. The tavern rested on “a certain lot of land … beginning at the corner of

King’s Street and running down French Street seventy five foot,” which the trustees rented from

Philip French on a fifty-year lease.92 The old tavern building served as a college hall, providing boarding rooms for the tutor and some of the students, as well as a space large enough to house the classroom. The Sign of the Red Lion would serve this purpose, except during times of closure, until occupancy of the newly constructed college hall, now known as “Old Queens,” began in 1811. With the tavern as a place for instruction as well as to house students, Queen’s

College officials could better ensure the students’ success and, ultimately, the long-term success of the college itself.93

Along with the stability which the tavern provided to Queen’s College, the trustees sought stability in the form of a permanent Professor of Divinity. While students interested in ministry could get individual theological instruction from one of the ordained trustees, none were official college instructors. In order to meet the approval of all of the Dutch Reformed in

America, Queen’s trustees wrote to the Classis of Amsterdam and the Theological Faculty at the

University of Utrecht for the recommendation of a candidate. Regarding these actions, the trustees received a letter from the General Synod of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church in which the synod assented to the administration’s plan and agreed to contribute funds, amounting to £4,000, to the search effort. The approval of the plan for the professorship, as well as the gift of addition funds, by the General Synod demonstrates how much healing had occurred between the Coetus and Conferentie factions of the Dutch Reformed colonists, since members of both parties belonged to the ecclesiastical body. Thus, in the relatively short span of eight years, the

92 Phillip French, “Book of Leases,” Philip French Papers, 1732-1786, Rutgers University Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. 93 McCormick, Rutgers: A Bicentennial History, 10-11, 25-27.

84 Dutch Reformed in America had gone from a rogue faction of colonists chartering their own college against the wishes of the mother church to a joint effort to establish a professor of theology on the recommendation of that same mother church.94

For all intents and purposes, the small Dutch Reformed college in New Jersey appeared to be heading in the right direction, but the onset of the Revolutionary War quickly stifled this progress. In October 1774 Queen’s held its first commencement, awarding the Bachelor of Arts degree to its sole graduate, Matthew Leydt. Speeches from the five members of the rising senior class followed Leydt’s graduation orations in Latin, Dutch and English. These speeches helped to demonstrate the promise of Queen’s future graduates. In addition, the college had just accepted six new students for that year’s freshman class. Queen’s may have been growing slowly, but it was experiencing growth nonetheless. The advent of the Revolutionary War, however, interrupted that growth. The minutes of the General Synod from October 3, 1775, for example, state “By reason of the pitiful condition of our land, the consideration of the subject of the Professorate is deferred.”95 The arrival of General Howe and the subsequent taking up of arms of the students forced Queen’s to close from July 27 to October 21, 1776. Then, in late

November and early December 1776, the college endured further chaos when General

Washington crossed the Raritan River into New Brunswick with the British in pursuit. Alexander

Hamilton prevented the British from following Washington and allowed the general to escape to

94 Ibid., 10-11; Demarest, The History of Rutgers College, 94-99; “Wellerwaarde Heeren, Hoog Geagte mede Broederen in Christo,” John Henry Livingston Papers, 1685-1824, Rutgers University Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; English translation from “Of the Reverend General Meeting of Ministers and Elders of the Dutch Reformed Church, Article IX” in The Acts and Proceedings of the General Synod of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church (New York: Board of Publication of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, 1859), 39-40. 95 “Of the Reverend and General Meeting of Ministers and Elders of the Reformed Dutch Congregations, Article IX,” in The Acts and Proceedings of the General Synod of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church (New York: Board of Publication of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, 1859), 61.

85 Princeton by covering the ford with his battery, but this only kept them out momentarily. The

British army, led be General Cornwallis, made New Brunswick their main headquarters in the colony for the next year, effectively bringing an end to the operations of the college.96

Unlike its aspirational generation colleagues, Dartmouth did not become a lasting institution because officials established a permanent home for the school, but because of

Reverend Wheelock’s decision to change the institution’s focus from Native American youth to colonial youth. In 1771 the student body consisted of only five Native Americans, twenty-four colonists, and one student of “mix’d blood.” Of the five Native American students, Reverend

Wheelock deemed only one fit to be a missionary. Although this determination seems at odds with Wheelock’s purpose for the college, that purpose had begun to change while he was in the midst of founding the institution, for he said: “[I am] fully convinced by many weighty reasons that a greater portion of English youth must be prepared for missionaries to take entirely the lead of the affairs in the wilderness and conduct the whole affair of Christianizing and civilizing the savages, without any dependence on their own sons as leaders.”97 One of the “weighty reasons” for Reverend Wheelock’s change of heart was the removal of Six Nations’ children from the charity school by their parents because they disapproved of Wheelock’s son’s conduct toward the children as one of their teachers. Another reason for the change in purpose was the behavior of some his former Native American pupils, of which he said: “Of these about a half yield to the characteristic vices of their race and some who, on account of their parts and learning, bid the fairest for usefulness, are sunk down into as low, savage, and brutish a manner as they were

96 McCormick, Rutgers: A Bicentennial History, 15-16; Demarest, A History of Rutgers College, 103; Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 83-84. 97 Wheelock, A Continuation of the Narrative… (1771), 17.

86 before.”98 So, while Dartmouth’s charter still stated that its mission was to educate Native

Americans and turn them into missionaries, Reverend Wheelock was preparing to shift the college into an institution which served a greater number of colonial youth. While this decision was essentially an abandonment of the college’s original mission, it was also this decision which likely accounted for the college becoming a lasting institution. For instance, despite Dartmouth holding its first commencement in August 1771, no Native Americans graduated. Of the first four colonial graduates, two went on to do missionary work among “the remote Indians,” while the other two were simply identified as “independent students.” The first Native American graduate, Daniel Simon, did not graduate until 1777. Following his graduation, Simon taught and preached to Native youth in Stockbridge, Massachusetts for a year and thereafter served as an

Indian missionary in Cranbury, New Jersey. By the end of the Revolutionary conflict in 1781, two more Natives Americans, Peter Pohquonnappeet and Lewis Vincent, had graduated with their bachelor’s degrees. Thus, in the span of a decade, only three Native Americans graduated from the college. If Dartmouth’s survival had had to depend solely on the education of Native

Americans, it would likely have shuttered. The shift to educating primarily colonists ultimately saved Dartmouth, but the goal of converting Native Americans to Christianity and educating them to be missionaries was the unfortunate casualty.99

***

The College of Rhode Island, Queen’s College, and Dartmouth College may not have had the same support as their collegiate predecessors in the colonies, on both a financial scale and a

98 Ibid., 20. 99 Wheelock, A Continuation of the Narrative….(1771), 31; Chase, A History of Dartmouth College, 85-86, 230-231; Colin G. Calloway, The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 49, 198.

87 popular scale, but they provided denomination-specific higher education opportunities to their underserved populations. The College of Rhode Island, for instance, gave Baptist colonists a safe place to send their children, free of the threat of conversion to another denomination. Due to the denomination’s size and lack of wealth, the Baptists’ fundraising efforts had to expand beyond

Rhode Island to the southern colonies and across the Atlantic to Britain. They eventually amassed enough to begin instruction and later, thanks to the Brown family, moved the college to the city of Providence. Once in the capital, some of the students found communal living in the

College Edifice difficult, but it was that very home base created by the city and the college hall which helped cement the college as a permanent institution. The Baptists’ desire for a college run in accordance with their religious beliefs was a success.

The Dutch Reformed, in search of autonomy from the classis of Amsterdam, established

Queen’s College so that they could provide their community with ministers from within their own community, not Dutchmen who had no concept of life in the colonies. For a time this effort split the Dutch Reformed colonists into two bodies: the Conferentie, who wanted local authority, and the Coetus, who sought the further ability to train and ordain their own ministers. The Coetus was ultimately victorious, receiving their desired college charter from the New Jersey governor, but their problems were not over. The choice of New Brunswick over Hackensack for the campus upset some ministers and congregants. Then, once the school opened, the sole instructor,

Tutor Frelinghuysen, left the school after only a few years in favor of a law career. Fortunately, these issues were not the end of the college, the old “Sign of the Red Lion” tavern gave Queen’s

College a sense of permanency and the effort to find a permanent Professor of Divinity brought the church’s warring factions back together. While the Revolutionary War would bring an end to

88 instruction at the college for a time, Queen’s would go onto provide higher education in the

Dutch Reformed tradition for years to come.

In an effort to both Christianize and provide higher education to Native Americans,

Reverend Eleazar Wheelock set about establishing Dartmouth College, but the institution which he eventually opened did not altogether achieve this aim. Inspired by both former student

Samson Occom and his pupils at Moor’s Indian Charity School, Reverend Wheelock made plans to expand the charity school into a college. For the necessary funds he turned to the people of

Britain, with Revs. Occom and Whittaker serving as the college’s liaisons. Despite successful fundraising efforts and the awarding of a charter by the governor of New Hampshire, the actual establishment of the college was difficult. Construction issues required the first students to sleep outside in beds made of hemlock boughs. In addition to these pressing issues, Reverend

Wheelock lost the support of Samson Occom because he had begun to change the focus of the college from the education of Native Americans to the education of colonists. This change, brought on by Reverend Wheelock’s belief that the Native Americans he taught were exhibiting a return to their original “savage” and “brutish” behavior, however, was most likely the reason why Dartmouth survived. Only three Native Americans graduated from the college in its first ten years, which was not nearly enough for the college to survive on. Thus, while all of the colleges belonging to the aspirational generation provided higher education opportunities for their respective communities, only the College of Rhode Island and Queen’s College carried out their missions into the nineteenth century.

89 Conclusion

The explosion of religious change in English colonial society necessitated the establishment of nine colleges over a relatively short number of years. The enterprising generations, who established Harvard College, the College of William & Mary, and Yale

College, sought to found their institutions because they had a profound need for more ministers.

Not only were the ministers of the first generation passing, but growth in the colonial population, especially in New England, meant that there simply were not enough ministers to go around.

While the founders of Harvard and Yale were at ecclesiastical odds with the founders of William

& Mary, they all shared the same goal of placing a well-educated clergyman in every available pulpit. The “awakened” generations’ members, the founders of the College of New Jersey, the

College of Philadelphia, and King’s College, responded to the religious revivalism of the Great

Awakening by founding institutions which aimed to either provide the opportunity for a collegiate education for New Lights or counter the New Light’s efforts by educating colonists in the Anglican tradition. Even the College of Philadelphia, the idea of Deist Benjamin Franklin, transformed into an arm of the Anglican Church’s efforts to counteract the monopolization of the middle colonies by New Lights. The aspirational generations, which created the College of

Rhode Island, Queen’s College, and Dartmouth College, hoped to found colleges educationally on par with the other colonial colleges yet representative of their smaller religious communities.

Baptist and Dutch Reformed colonists had the opportunity, for the first time, to train and ordain their own ministers and educate those who did not go into the ministry in their respective faiths.

Native Americans, too, had their greatest opportunity yet during the colonial period to become college educated with the opening of Dartmouth. Unfortunately, that opportunity did not last long once college officials began to prioritize the education of colonists. In the span of a little

90 more than 130 years, the English colonists established three times the number of collegiate institutions than the English motherland had in more than 700 years. While a continuity in intellectual tradition existed between the English colleges and the colonial colleges, the colonists’ emphasis on religion due to the diversity of denominations which existed in the colonies is indicative of change.

91 CHAPTER 2: A COLONIAL AMERICAN EDUCATION

Although the English colonists’ ability to establish nine colleges was quite a feat, the institutions which they created were mere infants on the educational scene compared to the colleges of Europe. The colonial colleges’ survival and success, and by extension the survival and success of colonial society itself, depended upon drawing colonial students away from places like Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris and toward the new schools closer to home. While the expense and danger of traveling from the colonies to Europe was certainly a factor in many of the colonial youths’ decision to attend the colleges in the colonies, the fact that some colonists continued to send their sons abroad for their educations even after the founding of the colonial colleges complicates the matter. There must have been some other tangible reasons which led the colonists to choose a colonial American education over an English or continental European one.

Those colonists who sent their children to colonial American institutions rather than

English or continental European institutions chose to do so because their idea of what constituted a proper collegiate education had changed from the traditional European idea. In terms of curricula, the faculty at the majority of the colonial colleges provided religious instruction which did not align with Anglican doctrine. In colonial American higher education, the religious traditions of the Puritans, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Dutch Reformed could flourish in ways that they could not in England. Additionally, the curricula at the colonial colleges incorporated the ideas of the Enlightenment differently than the English and continental European universities. Professors of natural and moral philosophy in colonial America taught their

92 respective subjects with greater concern for placing the “New Learning” within a Christian context than their European counterparts. A final part of the college curriculum in the colonies which differentiated it from the standard in England was the teaching of history. While colonial and European students alike learned history, both the type of history taught to the colonial students and the way in which their instructors taught them to use said history were distinct.

In addition to the differing curricula, the students at the colonial colleges received instruction from varying kinds of instructors and via novel teaching methods. Many colonial students learned their lessons from the very same men who presided over their colleges: instructor-presidents. Also, from those instructors who held the title of professor, colonial students learned through the utilization of new educational methods, such as the lecture, demonstrations, and experiments. It is, therefore, quite apparent that a colonial American education had changed from the English norm.

Curricula

The colonial colleges’ curricula originated, in part, from the scholasticism of the medieval universities of Europe, in which university students studied the seven liberal arts and the three philosophies. The seven liberal arts consisted of the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the quadrivium: arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music. First- and second- year students concentrated on the trivium, while the quadrivium remained the domain of the upperclassmen. In addition to the quadrivium, the older students studied the three philosophies of

Aristotle: natural philosophy, mental philosophy, and moral philosophy. Dr. James J. Walsh explained that the primary purpose of the scholastic model was to provide a scientific basis for

Christianity. Instead of philosophy and theology being contradictory to one another, medieval

93 educators believed them to be complementary: the more knowledge one gained, the better

Christian one would be. As primarily religious individuals themselves, the appeal of the scholastic model to the founders of the colonial colleges is quite obvious, and so it is understandable why they adopted it, but the scholastic model was not the sole component of the colonial colleges’ curricula.1

Religious education played a large part in the college’s curricula, whether it was for the purpose of training ministers or simply for educating non-clerical students in the Christian tradition. As a result of the Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on sola scriptura (by scripture alone), study of the Bible and biblical languages became an even greater component of religious education in both England and the colonies. The place of doctrine and commentaries in religious education, however, is where the six dissenting colonial colleges deviated from Oxford,

Cambridge, and the three Anglican colleges in the colonies. In these latter schools, the doctrine of the Church of England and the sermons of the major Anglican clergymen were an integral component of the curriculum. Puritan, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Dutch Reformed students had no need for such Anglican interpretations in their religious education.2

Along with religious education in the colonial colleges differing from that which was available in England, so too did education in the “New Learning” of the Enlightenment. Colonial

American professors made a concerted effort to teach that it was possible to gain scientific knowledge while keeping with the principles of Christianity. Also, beginning in the 1740s and

1750s, they took a page from Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Reid and Francis

1 James J. Walsh, Education of the Founding Fathers of the Republic (New York: Fordham University Press, 1935), 9-10, 12. 2 See chapter 4 of this dissertation for more information on the extent of religious education at the colleges in England.

94 Hutcheson to teach the Common-Sense doctrine. This philosophical approach argued that all sane men shared in common with one another certain principles of common sense that served as the basis for human thought. Common sense, therefore, served as a sort of a priori knowledge.3

A final part of the curriculum which may have enticed students to attend the colonial colleges was the historical education offered. In comparison to the history curriculum at the

English universities, in which students only studied ancient history, instructors in the colonies taught both ancient and modern history while incorporating the works of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Whig historians.

Religious Education

Since the men who established the colonial colleges were primarily interested in the maintenance of their respective churches, a major part of their curricula included study in the books of the Bible. At Harvard College, the administration’s 1642 Order of Studies set Thursday as the prescribed day for biblical study. First year students concentrated on what the pamphlet simply refers to as “practice in the Bible,” while second year students studied the Old Testament books of Daniel and Ezra. Students in their third year, which at the time was the final year of the collegiate program, were given free rein, of sorts, to study all of the books of the New

Testament. The class of 1655, under the administration of Harvard’s second president, Reverend

Charles Chauncy, was the first to undertake the four-year bachelor’s program. The exact nature of the biblical study undertaken in this fourth year, however, is a bit murky. The 1655 Laws of

Harvard College simply state that fourth-year students were to carry on their former studies of

3 Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Reid on Common Sense,” The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid, eds. Terence Cueno and Rene van Woudennberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 77-79.

95 the week in divinity. It would not be too much of a stretch, however, to conclude that these so- called “former studies” are a reference to the books of the New Testament which were previously the provenance of the third-year students. At Harvard’s rival, Yale College, biblical study was part of the more broadly defined study of divinity. Also at variance with practice at

Harvard, Yale students did not study divinity until their fourth year of school, when instruction of the students shifted from the responsibility of a tutor to that of the college president. While formal study in the Bible was limited to senior students at Yale, that does not mean that students in their first three years of college were completely bereft of exposure to the Bible. Every morning and evening the college president read and expounded upon a Bible chapter before all of the students. In addition, during their “free time,” what little they had of it, Yale students were expected to read the Holy Scriptures by themselves every day. Also, in Reverend Thomas Clap’s history of the college, he explains that he and the other faculty took great care to instill in students the principles of religion through public and private conversation outside of the classroom and that they demanded that all students attend public worship.4

At the College of New Jersey, the College of Rhode Island, and Queen’s College students received biblical instruction in a more informal manner than at Harvard and Yale. At New Jersey the students spent their Sundays participating in public disputations, which were a type of exercise in argument presentation. After those students interested in a ministerial career received questions on the subjects of natural religion and revealed religion, they delivered their interpretations before the congregation. The intent behind such exercises, according to college

4 New England’s First Fruits, (London: Printed by R.O. and G.D. for Henry Overton, and are to be sold at his Shop in Popes-head-Alley, 1643), 29; Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 328; Copy of the Laws of Harvard College, 1655 (Cambridge, MA: Press of John Wilson and Son, 1876), 7; Thomas Clap, The Annals or History of Yale College (New Haven: Printed by John Hotchkiss and B. Mecom, 1766), 80-81, 83; James J. Walsh, Education of the Founding Fathers of the Republic, 129.

96 president Samuel Blair, was to acclimate students early on to the task of facing an assembly.

Catechism was another piece of biblical instruction which New Jersey students received. On

Saturdays, the college faculty set aside certain hours for students to learn religious truths and principles via catechism. Interestingly, professors taught catechism at the College of New Jersey in two forms: the Presbyterian-leaning Westminster Shorter Catechism and the longer, Thirty-

Nine Article Anglican Catechism. According to Dr. James J. Walsh, this offering of the catechism in two different forms is evidence of the fading of the religious bigotry which had been so common in early colonial society.5

Students at the College of Rhode Island received biblical instruction through attendance at prayer services in the college hall every morning and evening and mandated attendance at public worship. While the prayer services in the college hall were most likely Baptist in nature,

Rhode Island students could attend their mandated public worship at a church with no ties to the

Baptist association if they chose to do so. Queen’s College students who were intent on a career in ministry had to seek individual instruction from Reverend Jacob Rusten Hardenbergh. In addition to his ministry in the Dutch Reformed Church, Hardenbergh served as a trustee of the college and as the college’s president pro temp until 1786, when he officially became Queen’s first president. It is likely that of the thirty-three percent of Queen’s College student who graduated between 1769 and 1775 and went on to a career in ministry, Hardenbergh was solely responsible for their biblical instruction. While study in the books of the Bible was certainly less formal at New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Queen’s than at the colonies’ Puritan institutions, this

5 Samuel Blair, An Account of the College of New Jersey (Woodbridge, NJ: Printed by James Parker), 25; James J. Walsh, Education of the Founding Fathers of the Republic, 152-153; Offering both catechisms was also likely in response to the Act of Union of 1707, which officially joined the Kingdom of England, which was primarily Anglican, with the Kingdom of Scotland, which was primarily Presbyterian, into the United Kingdom, to which the colonies belonged.

97 should not lead one to believe that biblical instruction was less important at the former institutions. More likely than not, such a difference was simply a pedagogical choice.6

Another component of the colonial college curricula which was central to religious education was the study of ancient languages. Students had to obtain a working knowledge of ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Latin because it would provide them with the ability to discern the meaning and lessons of books of the Bible in some of their earliest languages. According to the curriculum in place at Harvard in 1642, students at all levels devoted their Wednesday mornings to the study of Greek, while first-year students devoted their Thursday mornings to the study of

Hebrew and second and third-year students spent them studying Chaldee, a dialect of the

Aramaic language, and Syriac, the ancient language of the Syrian people.7 In one of his histories of Harvard, historian Samuel Eliot Morison explained that this focus on studying Hebrew at the

Massachusetts college was one of the major differences between the curriculum there and the curricula at Oxford and Cambridge. A similar concentration on ancient languages as a part of religious education appears in the records of colonial Yale. Students there devoted their first year of schooling to learning Hebrew and the study of what Yale President Clap describes in his history of the college as simply “the Languages.” Since admission to Yale required that prospective students be able to translate parts of Virgil and Tully, which were written in Latin,

6 Enoch Pond, “Laws and Customs of Rhode Island College, 1774” in Reuben Aldridge Guild, Early History of Brown University, Including the Life, Times, and Correspondence of President Manning (Providence: Snow and Farnham, 1897), 265; William H.S. Demarest, A History of Rutgers College, 1766-1924 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers College Press, 1924), 94; Roger L. Geiger, “Table 1 – The Nine Colonial Colleges,” in The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 113. 7 Aramaic was the native language of Jesus Christ. Also, the Gospel of Matthew was originally written in this language.

98 and the Greek Testament, it is safe to assume that Latin and Greek are “the languages” to which this requirement refers.8

At the colonies’ third Puritan institution, Dartmouth College, the ability to “parse Greek,” as Reverend Eleazar Wheelock put it, was an essential component to advancement to the junior class. As the youngest colonial college, many of Dartmouth’s first students had begun their collegiate educations at other institutions but wished to receive their degree from Dr. Wheelock’s school. In a 1772 letter of introduction on behalf of three prospective students by their instructor

Reverend Simeon Williams, he explains what he has taught these students and his hope that they will receive admittance to Dartmouth’s junior class. In Reverend Wheelock response, he explains that he does not believe these students to be on the same level as the current junior class because they lacked the ability to parse Greek, but is willing to accept them on the condition that they study Greek with the underclassmen until they are caught up to their peers. Thus, whether one was a student at Harvard, Yale, or Dartmouth, language instruction as part of a religious education began early, usually in the first year, and appears to have been administered often if the schedule at Harvard is any indication.9

The administrators and faculty at College of New Jersey, the College of Rhode Island, and Queen’s College approached the study of language for religious instruction differently than their counterparts at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth. Students at the College of New Jersey, for example, did not begin studying Hebrew until their junior years, and only students intent on a

8 New England’s First Fruits, 29; Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1936), 30; James J. Walsh, Education of the Founding Fathers of the Republic, 152; Thomas Clap, The Annals or History of Yale College (New Haven: Printed by John Hotchkiss and B. Mecom, 1766), 81. 9 Baxter Perry Smith, The History of Dartmouth College (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, and Company, 1878), 60-61.

99 clerical career spent their senior years engaged in review and revision of part of the Hebrew

Bible. This approach is reminiscent of the modern-day curricular structure, in which a student takes their major-related classes during their last two years of study. The reasoning behind this different approach is mostly likely due to the fact that New Jersey, unlike Harvard and Yale, was not primarily devoted to instructing future ministers but to instructing students for service in both church and state. Leaving instruction in Hebrew until a student achieved the rank of an upperclassmen meant only those students who were intent on a career in ministry would need to study it.10

In a somewhat similar situation to the one at New Jersey, the administration at the

College of Rhode Island also relegated the study of Hebrew to students in their third year. The only surviving record of what the curriculum was like at Rhode Island prior to the Revolutionary

War appears in the papers of Solomon Drowne, a 1773 graduate of the college. In Drowne’s writings he explains that during his third year one of the subjects he had to undertake was

Hebrew grammar. Drowne, however, did not go on to be a minister, which means that at Rhode

Island, unlike at New Jersey, all students received instruction in religion regardless of their intended career. At Queen’s College, students had to demonstrate the ability to read any parts of the Greek New Testament which their instructors deemed to be important. While the college’s rules and regulations do not stipulate a year during which such proficiency required demonstration, much of Queen’s College’s curriculum was borrowed from the College of New

Jersey because Queen’s first two instructors, Frederick Frelinghuysen and John Taylor, were graduates of the institution in Princeton. Thus, it would seem to be a safe bet to assume that

10 Samuel Blair, An Account of the College of New Jersey, 24; Thomas J. Frusciano, “To Cultivate Piety, Learning, and Liberty: The College of New Jersey and Queen’s College,” The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries, Vol. 55, No. 2 (1993): 16.

100 Queen’s students would not have had to achieve fluency in reading Greek until their final two years of study. Once again, as with their study of the books of the Bible, the students at New

Jersey, Rhode Island, and Queen’s, learned the ancient languages as part of their religious education in a different way than their counterparts at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth. Despite these differences, there is little reason to believe that the students at these institutions were deficient in any way; in fact, many of their graduates went on to quite impressive careers in ministry.11

Enlightenment Education

Although the Enlightenment did not reach the shores of the colonies until long after its ideas had spread throughout much of Europe, many American colonists were receptive to it.

Among those who opened their minds to the “New Learning” were faculty and administrators at the colonial colleges. In fact, between 1716 and 1719, Samuel Johnson, the future first president of King’s College, introduced modern science and mathematics into Yale’s curriculum while he served there as a tutor. Following closely on Johnson’s heels, the administrators at Harvard created an endowed professorship in mathematics and natural philosophy in 1726. Not too long after that, in 1751, Aaron Burr, Sr., president of the College of New Jersey, used college funds to bring a traveling lecturer of science to the school to introduce the students to a new element:

“electrical fluid.” Despite such examples of the Enlightenment appearing in the colonial curriculum, the extent, as well as the very existence, of the Enlightenment in America is still a reoccurring debate among historians. In 1960, Daniel J. Boorstin argued that the American

11 Walter C. Bronson, The History of Brown University (Providence: Brown University Press, 1914), 103; Frusciano, “To Cultivate Piety, Learning, and Liberty,” 16.

101 Enlightenment was a myth. However, sixteen years later, Henry F. May argued that there was an

Enlightenment in America and argued that the best way to understand it was to acknowledge that it existed with Protestantism always in the background. Revived historical interest in the

Enlightenment period resulted in the more recent 2016 work of Caroline Winterer, who argued that the Enlightenment was no concreate event, but rather a series of American enlightenments in which Americans and Europeans attempted to become enlightened. While historical debate over the Enlightenment will likely never end, each of these historians’ works have helped to illuminate different aspects of the intellectual movement.12

In regard to the nature of Enlightenment education at the colonial colleges, this dissertation favors the sub argument of Henry F. May’s The American Enlightenment that the

Enlightenment in colonial America was a “Moderate Enlightenment.” The colonists, he explained, sought to balance religion and reason by keeping “a foot in each camp.” This is precisely what the professors at the colonial colleges attempted to do: teach their students to simultaneously explore the discoveries and revelations of the “New Learning” and maintain their religious beliefs. Influences from the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular, made this attempt possible. This was quite the opposite of the approach of the academics in England; at both

Oxford and Cambridge, professors and tutors included the modern approaches to science of

12 David C. Humphrey, “Colonial Colleges and Dissenting English Academies: A Study in Transatlantic Culture,” History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Summer, 1972): 185; J. David Hoeveler, Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 227-228; Francis L. Broderick, “Pulpit, Physics, and Politics: The Curriculum of the College of New Jersey, 1746-1794,” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 1 (January 1949): 51-52; Some of the historical works belonging to the Enlightenment debate are Daniel J. Boorstin’s “The Myth of an American Enlightenment,” America and the Image of Europe: Reflections on American Thought (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1976), Henry F. May’s The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), John M. Dixon’s “Henry F. May and the Revival of American Enlightenment: Problems and Possibilities for Intellectual and Social History,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 2 (April 2014): 255-280, and Caroline Winterer’s American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). Further explanation of these works’ arguments appear in this dissertation’s introduction.

102 Newton, Boyle, and Rowning into their teaching without appearing to make the effort to frame that learning within a Christian context.13

The arrival of Enlightenment ideas in colonial higher education varied from institution to institution, but it usually depended upon the hiring of a new professor from outside of the existing college faculty. At Harvard, the first inkling that a new professor of science and mathematics could be coming to Cambridge appears in a 1726 exchange of letters between

Professor Edward Wigglesworth and London merchant Thomas Hollis, who wrote: “I am meditating yet some farther donations to your college…I should rejoyce [sic] to see you flourish in all the sciences and have able professors and tutors among you well supported.”14 The mention of “farther donations” is a reference to the fact that Hollis had already given money for an endowed professorship in divinity; this means that Hollis was well in line with the balancing act so central to the Modern Enlightenment. Colonists could be both Protestant and enlightened. The result of this second donation, the Hollis Professorship in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, enabled the college to employ Professor Isaac Greenwood to instruct students in Newtonian science. Additionally, Hollis purchased and had sent the college an “apparatus” which Professor

Greenwood used as part of his new, experimental lectures to demonstrate to the students the basic physical principles of the universe.15

13 Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), xvi, 48, 54; Victor Morgan, The History of the University of Cambridge, Vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 522; E.G.W. Bill, Education at Christ Church, 1660-1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 308-309. 14 “Thomas Hollis to Edward Wigglesworth, February 10, 1726,” Harvard Corporation Records of Gifts and Donations, 1643-1955, UAI 15.400 Box 23, Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 15 J. David Hoeveler, Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 227-228; “Thomas Hollis to Edward Wigglesworth, July 27, 1727,” Harvard Corporation Records of Gifts and Donations, 1643-1955, UAI 15.400 Box 23, Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Massachusetts; May, The Enlightenment in America, 42.

103 While in its previous incarnation as an academy, the College of Philadelphia had a professor of science, the arrival of Provost William Smith led to the implementation of a program of study which required more science than was common at most universities. Smith defined natural philosophy in very broad terms; in the lecture notes of one of his students, Jasper

Yeates, he explained it as the contemplation of the space of the whole universe and all bodies contained in it. Under Provost Smith’s plan, one-third of the students’ classes consisted of mathematics and science, and among these were specializations in geometry, trigonometry, physics, astronomy, chemistry, and botany. Although the students spent much of their time occupied by the sciences, Provost Smith made sure to balance it out with study in the classics, logic, and ethics, through which he attempted to inculcate the students in morality and religion.

According to Henry F. May, these efforts at balance, among others, helped make Smith one of the major figures of the Moderate Enlightenment.16

A few years after the College of Philadelphia, educational advances in math and science began at the College of William and Mary in 1758 with the arrival of Scottish professor William

Small. In a draft of his autobiography, Thomas Jefferson explained that it was his “great good fortune, and what probably fixed the destinies of my life that Dr. Wm Small of Scotland was then professor of Mathematics, a man profound in most of the useful branches of science” and that “from his conversation I got my first views of the expansion of science & of the system of things in which we are placed.”17 While Small did not remain at William & Mary for long, he

16 Richard Hofstadter, Academic Freedom in the Age of the College (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961) 194; Jasper Yeates, “The Substance of a Course of Lectures in Natural Philosophy: Read in the College of Philadelphia by the Reverend Dr. William Smith,” Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Edward Potts Cheyney, History of the University of Philadelphia, 1740-1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940), 83; May, The Enlightenment in America, 80-81. 17 “Thomas Jefferson, July 27, 1821, Autobiography Draft Fragment, January 6 through July 27,” Thomas Jefferson Papers, The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

104 left for England in 1764 to purchase scientific instruments and never returned, he had helped to foster an interest in science among the colleges’ students that continued long after his departure.18

Students at the colonial colleges became familiar with Enlightenment thought through several different avenues, such as the introduction of new schools of philosophical thought, textbooks, and experiments. In 1768, at the College of New Jersey, President John Witherspoon played a central role in elevating moral philosophy to the same level of importance as Newtonian science. While most eighteenth-century educators in Europe utilized John Locke’s Essay

Concerning Human Understanding in their curriculum, Witherspoon taught his students using an interpretation of Locke’s work by Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Francis Hutcheson. One of the major problems with Locke’s work was his argument that there is no such thing as inherent knowledge; to him, the human mind was a blank slate at birth and that it was only through experience that man gained knowledge. This argument was problematic for those of faith because Locke’s claim against inherent knowledge meant that since God was not a universally accepted idea, his existence could not be an inherently acknowledged fact.

Hutcheson’s interpretation, however, followed the Scottish Enlightenment approach to moral philosophy known as Common Sense, or Common Sense Realism. Via this approach, Hutcheson argued that the human mind possessed an inherent moral sense (i.e., common sense), like the physical senses of touch and smell. Therefore, according to this interpretation, since common sense would lead all mankind to believe in the idea of God, His very existence, too, must be fact.

While Professor Francis Alison, of the College of Philadelphia, was the first to introduce colonial

18 Tate, “The Colonial College, 1693-1782,” in The College of William and Mary: A History, Vol. I, 94- 105; Gillian Hull, “William Small, 1734-1775: No Publications, Much Influence,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Vol. 90 (February 1997): 102-103.

105 students to Hutcheson’s interpretation, it was President Witherspoon who went beyond

Hutcheson to include in his teachings the works of Thomas Reid, James Beattie, David Hume

(mostly for the purpose of refuting him) and several other Enlightenment thinkers whose books were available in the college library. According to Henry F. May, Witherspoon’s students were

“listening to the first promulgation of the principles that were to rule American college teaching for almost a century.”19 Thus, the works of the Enlightenment philosophers were welcome in the colonial colleges so long as they could be interpreted in a way that did not remove God from the equation.20

While moral philosophy had begun its ascendance to the level of natural philosophy, science continued to be of great interest to many colonial college students. Back at Harvard, following the dismissal of Hollis Professor of Natural Philosophy Isaac Greenwood for acts of intemperance, the administration awarded the leading professional scientist of the day, John

Winthrop, the professorship. While he shared the same name as his great-great-grandfather, the founder of the Massachusetts’ Bay colony, his interests lay more in science than religion. He worked to modernize scientific instruction at Harvard. This he accomplished partly through the adoption of new textbooks, including Isaac Watt’s The Knowledge of the Heavens and the Earth,

Patrick Gordon’s Geographical Grammar, and Willem Gravesande’s Mathematical Elements of

Natural Philosophy. Professor Winthrop also modernized science at the college by bringing in more philosophical apparatus, such as pulleys, inclined planes, air pumps, vacuum vessels,

19 May, The Enlightenment in America, 64. 20 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Printed for Thomas Tegg, 1825), 37- 44; Francis Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, in Three Books, Second Edition (Glasgow: Printed and sold by Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1753), 6-7, 18-20; Roger L. Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 80-81; Benjamin W. Redekop, “Reid’s Influence in Britain, Germany, France, and America,” The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid, eds. Terence Cueno and Rene van Woudennberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 327-328.

106 microscopes, thermometers, barometers, and an orrery with which to do experiments and demonstrate his theories. One of Winthrop’s popular experiments involved introducing his students in the 1740s to his own personal experiments with electricity, long before Benjamin

Franklin had made such experimentation well-known. Although Winthrop was foremost a scientist, he never dismissed his belief in God. For instance, in his Lecture on Earthquakes, delivered at Harvard in 1755, Winthrop stated that “the operations of nature are conducted, with a view, ultimately, to moral purposes, and there is the most perfect coincidence at all times between God’s government of the natural and moral world.”21 In addition, in the notes from his famous observation of the transit of Venus in 1761, an endeavor upon which he brought along two Harvard students, he wrote that the study would probably provide deeper insight into the

“wonderful works of God.” Therefore, like many of his colleagues, Winthrop not only balanced science and religion in his own life but made the attempt to balance the two in his teaching.22

At the College of Rhode Island, the importance of keeping their students abreast of the advancements in the sciences is apparent in the Corporation’s 1768 request to Morgan Edwards, then in Britain collecting funds for the college, to purchase an air-pump, telescope, and microscope. The following year, the students themselves took the initiative to obtain scientific equipment by circulating a subscription paper calling for donations in order to purchase an electrical apparatus. By 1772 the college was in possession of two globes, two microscopes, and an apparatus referred to simply as an “electric machine,” which may have been a Leyden jar,

21 Quoted from Louis Graham’s “The Scientific Piety of John Winthrop of Harvard,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 1 (March 1973): 115; Winthrop gave this lecture on November 26th, the week after an earthquake hit New England. It is unknown if he was aware of the now-infamous Lisbon earthquake which occurred on November 1st. 22 Roger L. Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 79; Samuel Eliot Morrison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 89; Graham, “The Scientific Piety of John Winthrop of Harvard,” 113-117; Caroline Winterer, American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 36.

107 with which the faculty could perform scientific experiments, but this simply was not on par with the collections of many of the other schools. A supporter of the college lamented in his correspondence that Rhode Island’s lack of apparatus was making it difficult to persuade students to attend school in Providence over Cambridge.23

Perhaps the grandest introduction of colonial students to the discoveries of modern science occurred at King’s College. After introducing students to the likes of Bacon, Descartes,

Locke, and Newton as a tutor at Yale, Samuel Johnson went on to the presidency of King’s

College, where he instituted a curriculum in which a student’s last two years consisted primarily of mathematics and science. Under the tutelage of King’s tutor Daniel Treadwell, third-year students became exposed to John Rowning’s Compendious System of Natural Philosophy, in which they learned mechanics, hydrostatics, pneumatics, optics, and astronomy. In their senior year, President Johnson directly taught the students and their reading material consisted of

Johnson’s own Elementa Philisophica. In this work, Johnson attempted to walk a fine line between advocating for the New Learning of the age while ensuring students remained disciples of Christian orthodoxy. He argued that the wonders of science were really the wonders of God.

For instance, while the rising and setting of the sun could be scientifically explained by the revolution of the earth, the very fact that the sun rose at all was, according to Johnson,

“contingent, as depending on the free exertion of the will of the Deity, who may, if he pleaseth, this moment put an end to the whole course of nature.”24 Johnson also argued that it was only through God that one could truly perceive reality. For example, he wrote, “it is not in our power whether we see light and colors, hear sounds, etc. We are not causes to ourselves of these

23 Walter C. Bronson, The History of Brown University, 106-107; David C. Humphrey, “Colonial Colleges and English Dissenting Academies,” 186. 24 Samuel Johnson, Elementa Philosophica in Samuel Johnson, President of King’s College: His Career and Writings, Vol II, ed. Herbert and Carol Schneider (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 389.

108 perceptions, nor can they be produced in our minds without a cause … they must derive to us from an Almighty, intelligent active cause, exhibiting them to us.”25 Thus, while students may have observed changes in color, light, and sound as they performed their scientific experiments,

Johnson taught that it was only because of God that they were able to perceive those changes.

Therefore, in an approach similar to the one used regarding the moral philosophy of the

Enlightenment, natural philosophy was welcomed in the colonial colleges so long as God and

His omnipotence went unquestioned.26

Historical Education

While history is not one of the seven liberal arts around which the colonial colleges’ administrators and faculty based the majority of their curricula, professors were teaching it nearly from the beginning of collegiate education in the colonies. According to the Order of

Studies at Harvard, printed in New England’s First Fruits in 1642, students at all three class levels attended lectures on history every Saturday afternoon during the winter months. At Yale,

Rector Reverend Thomas Clap first lectured on history in 1743, as part of a new curriculum of his own design. In 1767, seniors at Yale petitioned college officials to have history be a distinct and explicit part of the curriculum, which the officials granted. Following his Scheme of a

Liberal Education, printed in 1754, William Smith’s students at the College of Philadelphia undertook their studies according to the season, with the “reading of history” allotted to the summer months. At King’s College, Reverend Samuel Johnson advised his student to read modern history in their spare time. After the appointment of Myles Cooper, however, King’s

25 Ibid., 375. 26 David C. Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, 1746-1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 168, 171, 177.

109 students had to switch their concentration from modern history to Roman history. In Cooper’s

1763 “Plan of Education,” for example, he listed Sallust’s Historia and Julius Caesar’s

Commentaries as required reading for first year students and Livy’s History of Rome and

Tacitus’ Histories for students in their fourth year. This switch from modern history to Roman history was likely a result of the influence of Cooper’s Oxford education, where ancient history was the only type of history studied.27

In addition to history in the classroom, historical works were available to students in many of the colleges’ library collections. Colonial catalogues from Harvard, Yale, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, for instance, list the works of many ancient and English Whig historians in their respective collections. While Harvard had the largest overall library, Yale’s history collection went unequaled from 1743 through the end of the colonial period. What percentage history books comprised in the collections at William & Mary, King’s, Philadelphia, Queen’s, and Dartmouth, unfortunately, is unknown as fire destroyed the college library in Williamsburg and the other four colleges did not publish catalogues. Taken together, the colonial students’ studying and reading of history provided them not only with chronological timelines of the past, but also with lessons about freedom and repression.28

Historian John F. Roche argued that in addition to the teaching of ancient history, the increasing prominence of the works of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Whig historians, including Paul Rapin de Thoyras, Catharine Macaulay, and William Molyneux, in the colonial

27 New England’s First Fruits, 30; Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 71; John F. Roche, The Colonial College in the War for American Independence (Millwood, NY: Associated Faculty Press, 1986), 10; Edward Potts Cheyney, History of the University of Philadelphia, 84; David C. Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, 174; “Cooper, Dr. Myles Plan of Education in King’s College New York, March 1, 1763,” Columbia College Papers, 1703-1964, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts. 28 H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1965), 6-7, 9-11.

110 colleges’ curricula and libraries made students aware of both the virtues and vices of the commonwealth. These historians’ works prove the soundness of Roche’s argument. In volume one of Rapin de Thoyras’ The History of England, for example, students read about the strength of the Anglo-Saxons and how they consolidated their power in the hands of a monarch who ruled over all seven of the English kingdoms. Later in this same volume, Rapin argued that King

Henry VIII was one of England’s “ill princes” for his cruelty, but that he could not rank him among the nation’s worst kings. In the second volume of Rapin’s work, he introduced readers to the other side of monarchy with Henry’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I. The greatness of

Elizabeth’s reign, he explained, did not boil down to the memorable events which took place during it, but instead sprang from the tranquility which she allowed her subjects to enjoy despite the frequent attacks on her person and her kingdom.29

To get an idea of the further vices of the commonwealth in more recent history, students could read works like Catharine Macaulay’s The History of England. In the fourth volume of her work, she argued that parliament’s execution of King Charles I was warranted because his enlargement of his power weakened both the authority of the law and his subjects’ security, which ultimately transformed him from a protector of the commonwealth to its enemy. In the work of William Molyneux, The Case of Ireland, colonial students had a glimpse into the history of a fellow dependency. Writing on representation, Molyneux stated, “If … it be concluded that the Parliament of England may bind Ireland; it must also be allowed that the People of Ireland

29 John F. Roche, The Colonial Colleges in the War for American Independence, 10-11; Paul Rapin de Thoyras, The History of England, Vol. I (London: Printed for John and Paul Knapton, at the Crown in Ludgate- Street, 1743), 42, 849 n; Paul Rapin de Thoyras, The History of England, Vol. II (London: Printed for John and Paul Knapton, at the Crown in Ludgate-Street, 1743), 57.

111 ought to have their Representatives in the Parliament of England.”30 This helped many students to understand that England’s treatment of the colonists was nothing new, but simply a mirror of what the crown and parliament had done to the Irish. By making students aware of such vices and virtues, these Whig histories not only provided colonial students with a historical education but made them aware of what to look out for in their own dealings with England.31

After having come to the conclusion from their studies that the contemporary English government was, in their opinion, acting in a repressive manner reminiscent of the ancient empires, current and former colonial students turned to history for examples of how to resist and what their path forward could be. In his sermon Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submissions

Harvard graduate Jonathan Mayhew argued that all men had the right “to vindicate their natural and legal rights; to break the yoke of tyranny” and used examples from history to prove so.32 He went on to explain that when Tarquin ruled as a tyrant he was expelled from ancient Rome by a popular uprising; when Julius Caesar did not curb his tyrannical rule he was stabbed to death; when Charles I refused to govern with parliament he was accused of high treason and beheaded; and when James II betrayed the Anglican majority by converting to Roman Catholicism he was forced to flee from the country. Similar consequences, believed Mayhew, should face the English government in contemporary times. At the 1771 commencement at the College of New Jersey, graduating seniors Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Brackenridge presented their poem “The

30 William Molyneux, The Case of Ireland, being bound by Acts of Parliament in England (London: Printed for J. Almon, opposite Burlington-House in Piccadilly, and M. Hingeston in the Strand, near Temple Bar, 1770), 74; said Irish representative had to be a member of the Church of England. 31 Catharine Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Elevation of the House of Hanover, Vol. IV (London: Printed for the Author; and sold by W. Johnston, in Ludgate-Street, T. Davies in Russel Street, J. Almon in Piccadilly, Robinson and Roberts in Pater Noster Row, and T. Cadell in the Stand, 1768), 415; Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience, 6-7. 32 Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers (Boston: Printed and Sold by D. Fowle in Queen-Street; and by D. Gookin over-against the South-Meeting- House, 1750), 12.

112 Rising Glory of America,” in which they referenced history and referred to America as the next center of the civilized world: “Nations shall grow and states not less in fame / Than Greece and

Rome of old.”33 In other words, they believed that America had the potential to become as big and powerful as the Greek or Roman empires, but the stranglehold of England was preventing it from doing so. This line of thinking would go on to receive more full-throated expression a few years later in Thomas Paine’s diatribe Common Sense, which demanded the separation of the colonies from England.34

Harvard graduate and future president John Adams used his education in ancient and modern history in his Novanglus essays to show why he believed English parliamentary control should not exist in the colonies. Adams explained that England had been essentially making colonies for centuries, but parliament had lacked any authority within those colonies’ perimeters until the passage of later acts: Ireland was conquered by Henry II in 1172, but parliament did not have authority there until 1495; Edward I annexed Wales in 1284, but parliament did not have authority there until 1543; last, Scotland became united with England upon the ascension of

James I in 1603, but parliament did not have authority there until the Act of Union in 1707. Since the American colonies never enacted such legislation, Adams argued, they should continue to exist free from parliamentary rule. The colonists, he believed, could only be bound by the laws created in their own provincial legislatures. The education of colonial college students in history,

33 John F. Roche, The Colonial Colleges in the War for American Independence, 52; Freneau was a rather vitriolic individual who later came to prominence in the 1790s for his participation in the country’s early political debates. 34 Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission, 13, 44-46; Thomas Paine, Common Sense in The Writings of Thomas Paine, Vol. I: 1774-1779 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894), 85-89.

113 therefore, not only helped them to identify potential overreach of the English government but also provided them with historical examples of how they could react to it.35

***

The college curricula in the colonies included the scholasticism of Europe’s premiere universities, but it also included religious education, Enlightenment education, and historical education which differed from that offered in England. While the universities of Oxford and

Cambridge offered study in the Bible and aspects of divinity, their connection with the crown ensured that religious education undertaken at the universities had to follow the tenets of the

Church of England. In the colonies, however, Puritan Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth;

Presbyterian College of New Jersey; Baptist College of Rhode Island, and Dutch Reformed

Queen’s College, were free to instruct students according to the beliefs of their respective denominations. In addition, the aforementioned colleges’ religious curricula placed particular emphasis on the ability to translate the Bible from its original languages into the English vulgate.

This is most likely traceable to the dissenting tradition of the majority of the colonial colleges, in which interpretation of the Bible was open to all rather than simply the upper-echelons of the

Anglican hierarchy.

The teaching of Enlightenment thought in the colonial colleges was also quite different from the teaching of it in England because colonial educators took great effort to place the New

Learning within a Christian context. Instead of letting reason overshadow religion, colonial educators labored studiously to balance belief and reason. Anglican educator Samuel Johnson,

35 John Adams, Novanglus; or, A History of the Dispute with America, from its origins, in 1754, to the present time, in The Works of John Adams, Vol IV (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851), 134, 149- 153, 156, 169; Jeff Wallenfeldt, “Acts of Union: Uniting the United Kingdom,” Encycopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., last modified 2020, https://www.britannica.com/story/acts-of-union-uniting-the- united-kingdom.

114 for example, believed as other Enlightenment thinkers that one must look to what is in front of them to determine scientific truth, but he also believed that it was only through belief in God that one could perceive that reality. Similarly, Presbyterian John Witherspoon was a follower of the

Scottish Enlightenment School of Common Sense Realism, so he believed man had an inherent common sense which distinguished right from wrong, but it was God who had placed that sense within man. With such educators teaching at the colonial colleges, it did not matter whether one was attending an Anglican or a dissenting institution, all colonial students received instruction in natural and moral philosophy in such a way that God’s existence and power remained central.

Historical education in the colonial colleges has also proven to have a particularly

American bent. While colonial students studied the same ancient histories as their English brethren, they also read the more modern English histories written by Whigs, i.e., historians who tended to emphasize progress and revolution. In these histories, the students learned about the various actions of the English government on its people. As a result, many came to believe that the colonies were receiving unfair treatment. These lessons, along with the participation of many college leaders in colonial protest, led many current and former students to question government authorities and side with those who sought American independence. The collegiate education one received as student in the colonies, therefore, was quite different from that of a student in

England because the colonists’ experiences were different.

Colonial Educators

Along with the curricula, one of the colleges’ greatest assets for enticing students into their hallowed halls, as well as one of the differentiating factors between an English and colonial education, was the faculty who would instruct students in their studies. During the first two

115 centuries of higher education in the colonies the instruction of students was one of the main duties of the college president. During the first five years of Yale College’s existence, for example, Rector Abraham Pierson served as the college’s sole instructor. Similarly, at the

College of Rhode Island, President James Manning was solely responsible for educating the students when the school opened in 1765, added only one tutor in 1767, and did not receive the aid of a second tutor until 1774. In fact, the first college instructor in the colonies to bear the title of professor did not arrive at Harvard College until 1722, eighty-six years after the General Court founded the college. Therefore, in their early years, some of the only faculty which the colonial colleges could use to pull students away from the English universities were their presidents.

Some of the most famous and well-regarded instructor-presidents of the colonial period were

Charles Chauncy, John Leverett, Thomas Clap, John Witherspoon, Samuel Johnson, and James

Manning. As endowments grew and enrollment expanded, however, the colonial colleges’ administrators started to hire their first professors. Instead of relying solely on tutors, who were often very young men barely out of college themselves, to lighten the teaching load of the college presidents, men eminent in their fields of study began to instruct the students. Some of the intellectuals who undoubtedly drew students to attend college in the colonies were John

Winthrop, Francis Alison, William Small, and William Smith.36

Instructor Presidents

As a graduate of Trinity College Cambridge and former lecturer in Greek at that same college, Reverend Charles Chauncy entered his presidency at Harvard in 1654 with great

36 Richard Hofstadter, Academic Freedom in the Age of the College, 85; Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale: A History, 13-15; Walter C. Bronson, The History of Brown University, 58.

116 educational and teaching experience. Despite President Chauncy’s religious background, he embraced the opportunity to instruct Harvard’s students in both the religious and liberal arts and sciences aspects of their educations. While he worked to ensure his students learn the catechism, listen closely to his sermons, and remember their prayers, he was also interested in science.

Chauncy heartily encouraged the boys under his tutelage to read books which questioned the

Ptolemaic system of the universe in favor of the Copernican model and purchased the college’s first telescope for the students’ use. During his seventeen years as president Chauncy instructed some of the colonies’ most distinguished citizens, including Reverend Increase Mather,

Governor Thomas Dudley, and Judge Samuel Sewall. The regard with which President Chauncy was held by Harvard students and the larger Cambridge community is evident in these words from Cotton Mather: “How learnedly he now conveyed all the liberal arts unto those that sat at his feet; how wittily he moderated their disputations and other exercises; how constantly he expounded the Scriptures to them in the College Hall … the church kept a whole day of thanksgiving to God, for the mercy they enjoyed in his being there.”37 In addition to Chauncy’s administrative and instructive duties, he was also a prolific writer, having published several sermons and translations from Greek and Latin. Therefore, those prospective students who did not know of President Chauncy from the word-of-mouth recommendations of former pupils had the opportunity to read his publications, which may have weighted their favor toward attending

Harvard.38

Another Harvard academic of note is John Leverett, the college’s eighth president.

Branded by Samuel Eliot Morison as “The Great Leverett,” Leverett’s ties to the institution

37 William Buell Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, Vol. I (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1857), 118. 38 Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 37; William Buell Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, Vol. I (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1857), 118.

117 began long before his tenure as president. Leverett was himself a graduate of Harvard who between 1686 and 1697 served alongside William Brattle as a tutor. Despite his rather-lowly title at the time, Leverett, along with Brattle, essentially ran the college when Increase Mather was the president, but often not in residence due to frequent and prolonged absences. Probably in no small part thanks to that experience, the Harvard Corporation elected Leverett to the presidency of the college in 1708. While Leverett’s time at Harvard did not produce a long record of scholarly publications like Chauncy’s did, his knowledge of the learned languages, science, history, philosophy, law, divinity, and politics was so well-regarded that students seeking answers to any myriad of difficult questions often went to him first. President Leverett’s devotion to educating the colonies’ young men is even more evident in the fact that during his time in office Harvard’s enrollment numbers doubled despite the college’s public financial woes.

Leverett was also instrumental in convincing Thomas Hollis to fund Harvard’s first endowed professorship, the Hollis Professor of Divinity. Although Leverett himself was not a minister, his recommendation that Hollis’ donation be used to support divinity studies demonstrates that he was committed to continuing the dream of the college’s founders to place a well-educated clergyman in the pulpit of every Puritan church in the colonies. Perhaps more than anything else,

President Leverett’s legacy as an instructor is evident by the lofty accomplishments of the many young men whom he educated, which included three governors, five colonial chief justices, a

Yale rector, two Harvard professors, and two-hundred and seven ministers.39

Although he was not Yale College’s first administrative leader, Reverend Thomas Clap was the first man at the Connecticut institution to both hold the title of president and instruct the

39 Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 46, 66; John Langdon Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Vol. III: 1678-1689 (Cambridge: Charles William Sever, 1885), 193, 195-196.

118 students. A graduate of Harvard College, President Clap was not only a man of the cloth but also a skilled mathematician and quite knowledgeable in astronomy and natural philosophy. Although

Clap was religiously conservative and a strict disciplinarian, two professional qualities which very likely convinced some colonial parents to send their sons to Yale, he was also responsible for crafting the first orrery in the colonies and organizing the college’s 2,600 volume library. The orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system, was used in the classroom to teach the students the relative positions and motions of the planets, while Clap’s organization of the library aided students in finding the appropriate works for their studies. In addition to his regular teaching schedule President Clap took over the duties of what would become the Livingston Professor of

Divinity before the college had the necessary endowment to fund it. This position required Clap to preach to all students on Sundays and instruct the senior students in biblical studies. President

Clap’s expanded instruction must have been quite popular because the freshmen class which entered following his appointment to the un-endowed professorship, as well as the total number of students attending Yale, were the largest they had ever been.40

As one of only a few Scots to head a colonial college Reverend Dr. John Witherspoon brought to colonial America, and specifically the College of New Jersey, new ideas about college teaching and the incorporation of the New Learning. Prior to his inauguration in 1768 President

Witherspoon had served as lead minister at two churches in Scotland and authored several works published in both Scotland and England. Knowledge of his administrative skills and intellect, as well as the high degree of legitimacy which someone with his standing would bring to the New

Jersey institution, are very likely reasons why college officials recruited him to be the head of the

40 The National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Vol. I (New York: James T. White & Company, 1891), 166; William Buell Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, Vol. I, 345; Kelley, Yale: A History, 64.

119 college. As president, Witherspoon introduced to the College of New Jersey Newtonian science through the implementation of the experimental lecture and the purchase of an orrery originally constructed for the College of Philadelphia. As an instructor, President Witherspoon lectured on a number of subjects, including moral philosophy, divinity, chronology and history, and composition and criticism. He was liked by both students and faculty and is regarded by a

Madison biographer and historian of early America as having had particular influence on future president James Madison and his views of religious liberty.41 During his tenure at the college,

Witherspoon educated over four-hundred and sixty students, including one president, one vice president, six members of the Continental Congress, twenty U.S. Senators, twenty-three U.S.

Representatives, thirteen state governors, and three Supreme Court Justices. The accomplishments of these students alone would be enough to understand what kind of educator

Witherspoon must have been, but the eulogization which contemporary Benjamin Rush gave him drives it home: “[Witherspoon] gave a new turn to education and spread taste and correctness throughout the United States… He was a great man of luminous mind… He made use of his reasoning powers only to communicate it to others.”42 With Witherspoon at the helm of the institution, as well as teaching the students, it makes sense why the College of New Jersey was attractive to colonial students and, in particular, to the sons of southern planters.43

Reverend Samuel Johnson, a convert to Anglicanism after his graduation from Yale and subsequent service as a Puritan minister in Connecticut, became the first president and sole

41 See John Maclean’s History of the College of New Jersey, 404-405, which includes excerpts from biographer William C. Rives’ History of the Life and Times of James Madison (1868-1873) and historian George Bancroft’s History of the United States of America, Vol. V (1876). 42 Dr. Benjamin Rush, A Memorial Containing Travels Through Life or Sundry Incidents in the Life of Dr. Benjamin Rush (Philadelphia: Louis Alexander Biddle, 1905), 30. 43 William Buell Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, Vol. III (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1858), 289-291; Roger L. Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 80, 109; John L. Maclean, History of the College of New Jersey, 1746-1854 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Co, 1877), 387, 402-405.

120 instructor of the students of King’s College in 1754. Since it started with a class of only ten students, President Johnson ran King’s like a family, placing himself in the role of the father. He often referred to his students as “my dear children” or “my dear sons,” and their parents were happy to let him do so. In fact, before the construction of the first college building, Edward

Anthill begged President Johnson to let his son house with him so that “his Heart may be

Improved as well as his head.”44 Fellow “Yalie” Reverend Ezra Stiles considered Johnson an excellent scholar who had few equals in his knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, or Latin, was good in the sciences, and eminent in moral philosophy. Due to his dual role as both president and instructor Reverend Johnson was able to make the decision that a King’s education should include a heavy dose of mathematics and science, and then proceed to instruct students in those very subjects using his own Elementa Philisophica as a text. President Johnson also worked to nurture his students’ faith while simultaneously directing them to be good students; during

Sunday and evening prayers, students “beseeched God to engage them ‘to the utmost diligence’ in their studies.’”45 Despite Reverend Johnson’s short tenure as King’s president, he had ensured that the college survived its infancy and had drawn enough young colonists to increase the student population three-fold in less than ten years.46

With the College of Rhode Island being the only Baptist higher education institution in the colonies one is likely to assume that enrollment there was based solely on religious affiliation, but that would be unfair to the school’s founder, president, and first instructor,

Reverend James Manning. From the opening of the College of Rhode Island in 1766 until the

44 David C. Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, 117. 45 Ibid., 160. 46 Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College with Annals of the College History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1885), 126; David C. Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, 117, 159.

121 appointment of Professor David Howell in 1769, President Manning held the title of Professor of

Languages and Other Branches of Learning, essentially meaning that he was the college’s sole instructor. According to his own narrative of the college’s history, President Manning focused his instruction after the appointment of Professor Howell on the subjects of moral philosophy,

English, and oratory. In the account of one of Manning’s students, however, he also taught Logic and Metaphysics in his final years. Reminiscing on President Manning as a teacher, tutor Asher

Robbins wrote, “I well recollect to have heard the student of the classes whom he chose to take through Longinus particularly, often speak with admiration of his comments upon that author, and of the happy and copious illustrations he gave of the principles from which Longinus deduces the sublime. I could readily believe that admiration was merited.”47 In addition to his students’ enjoyment of his lectures, President Manning was respected by the college community for his ideals, which included religious freedom, the rejection of an established church, and a belief in the blessing of a “sound and wide” education. He was a good fit for Rhode Island. Thus, while the appeal of a College of Rhode Island education may have initially appeared to be its

Baptist traditions, President Manning’s instruction was most assuredly another positive attribute.48

Professors

While John Winthrop, great-great-grandson of the founder of Massachusetts, was not the first Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy he proved to be far more

47 Walter C. Bronson, The History of Brown University, 97. 48 Ibid., 36-38; Reverend James Manning, “Rhode Island College,” Rhode Island College Miscellaneous Papers; William Buell Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, Vol. VI (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1860), 96.

122 accomplished and influential than his predecessor. As holder of an A.B. and A.M. degree from

Harvard, Winthrop had studied under Professor Greenwood but his interest in science began with his reading of the works of Cotton Mather. During his tenure as a Hollis professor from 1738 to

1779 Winthrop built up Harvard’s collection of scientific apparatus and amassed one of the largest collections of scientific works in colonial America. He also wrote several works of his own, including Lectures on Earthquakes, Answers to Mr. Prince’s Letter on Earthquakes,

Account of Some Fiery Meteors, and Two Lectures on the Parallax. As is evident from the titles he wrote, Winthrop was particularly interested in earthquakes and comets. In his professorial role he taught about the scientific causes behind these two natural phenomena, which served a two- fold purpose: he made students aware of modern science’s take on them and he also alleviated fears about their being signs of the wrath of an angry God. Such instruction would prove particularly prudent when an earthquake struck New England in November 1755. Outside of the classroom, Professor Winthrop observed the transit of Mercury near Newfoundland aboard a ship provided by the Colony of Massachusetts, making it the first scientific expedition funded by what would become an American state. He subsequently published his findings in the transactions of the Royal Society. Admiration for Winthrop’s intellect and contributions to science went beyond Harvard Yard and the scientific community. Ezra Stiles, a Yale-educated

Puritan minister, described Winthrop as a perfect master of Newton’s Principia and said he had no intellectual equal, not even among the natural philosophy professors of Europe. While

Professor Winthrop’s passion for science was undeniable, his devotion to teaching Harvard’s young men is perhaps best evidenced by something he chose not to do. On two separate occasions Winthrop served as acting president of the college, and both times the Corporation offered to make the position permanent, yet he declined the offers so that he could return to

123 teaching his students. Professor Winthrop’s well-known intellect alone would probably have been enough to draw students to attend Harvard, but his commitment to teaching, which he did until the day he died, most certainly helped.49

Francis Alison’s commitment to educating the youth of Pennsylvania began before the

College of Philadelphia was even an idea in Benjamin Franklin’s mind. Scotch-Irish and

Presbyterian by birth, Alison arrived in the colonies in 1735, took up a pastorate in the

Pennsylvania town of New London in 1737, and opened his own school in 1743. While the

Philadelphia Synod supported the school, Alison taught his students the classics in addition to their religious lessons. The trustees of the Academy of Philadelphia recruited him in 1753, two years before the academy became a college, to serve as their Vice-Provost and as an instructor in the philosophical school. After the academy’s transition to a college, Professor Alison was one of, if not the first, colonial educators to introduce the Scottish Enlightenment to his students.

Utilizing Francis Hutcheson’s A Shorter Introduction to Moral Philosophy in the classroom,

Alison taught that the natural and the divine, rather than being enemies, reinforced one another in an indispensable foundation of truth. Personally, he believed that reason could not be the sole foundation of religious knowledge, that emotions also had to play a part.50

Having studied with Francis Hutcheson himself at the University of Glasgow, it is appropriate that Alison turned out to be the bearer of the man’s ideas to the colonies. Professor

Alison’s breadth of knowledge in moral philosophy, as well as his accomplishments as a

49 J. David Hoeveler, Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges, 228-229; “Winthrop, John (1714-1779),” The New International Encyclopedia, Vol. XX (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1905), 581. 50 Thomas C. Pears, Jr., “Francis Alison,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society, Vol. 29, No. 4 (December 1951), 215-218; Roger L. Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 67; Edward Potts Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740-1940, 73; J. David Hoeveler, Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges, 175.

124 theologian, were well regarded in the colonies and in Europe, for he received honorary master’s degrees from Yale and the College of New Jersey in 1755 and 1756, respectively, as well as an honorary Doctorate in Divinity from the University of Glasgow in 1758. The reverence which the college’s students had for Alison is perhaps best evidenced by a report on his character written after his death in 1779 by a former pupil. In his “The Character of the Rev. Francis

Alison, D.D.,” Matthew Wilson stated, “Many men of learning had before come over to

America, and some had made some feeble, unsuccessful attempts to teach youth here; but it must be owned by all, they had not Dr. Alison’s talents, resolution, perseverance, or success.”51

Professor Alison’s former students, however, were not the only men to sing his praises; the

College of Philadelphia’s spiritual father, Benjamin Franklin, once introduced Alison via letter as

“a Person of great Ingenuity & Learning, a catholic Divine, & what is more an Honest Man.”52

With all of Alison’s qualities and accomplishments in mind, there can be little doubt that some prospective students chose to undertake their collegiate studies at Philadelphia because of him.

Also, even if they did not choose the College of Philadelphia for Alison personally, his being a

European-educated faculty member helped bring distinction to the institution itself.53

Although he is often cited as an influential instructor of Thomas Jefferson, Professor

William Small had an influence on the education of all of the students at the College of William

& Mary whom he taught in the subjects of mathematics, natural philosophy, and moral philosophy. A graduate of the University of Aberdeen, Small had studied natural philosophy and medicine at Marischal College Aberdeen but chose to leave school with an MA rather than pursue a medical degree. Initially, officials at William & Mary hired Professor Small to teach

51 Thomas C. Pears, Jr., “Francis Alison,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society, 220. 52 Ibid., 213. 53 Thomas C. Pears, Jr., “Francis Alison,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society, Vol. 29, No. 4 (December 1951), 215-218; Edward Potts Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740-1940, 80.

125 mathematics and natural philosophy, but bouts of drunkenness by the professor of moral philosophy led to Small taking over the teaching of that subject as well. Upon his arrival in

Williamsburg in 1758, Small was upset to find that the college students learned via classroom drills and rote memorization. To remedy this distressing situation, he quickly introduced the more modern style of teaching which he had experienced in Scotland: the lecture. Additionally,

Small found the clerical faculty’s standards for teaching science to be lacking, and so he also introduced physics demonstrations and encouraged his students to ask questions. By 1760 Small was in charge of determining William & Mary’s entire curriculum. To the college’s current offerings in classics, religious studies, mathematics, science, and moral philosophy he added ethics, rhetoric and modern literature, the latter of which he sometimes taught as well. In an attempt to further modernize the sciences at William & Mary, Small helped secure a grant of

£450 from the General Assembly and an eight-month leave from the Board of Visitors to travel back to England so that he could purchase scientific instruments for use in the classroom.

Whether it was Small’s intent to stay in England when he departed Virginia in 1764 is unknown, but he never set foot on colonial soil again. He did, however, follow through with purchasing the scientific apparatuses for the college and sending them back to Williamsburg. Altogether, he purchased barometers, microscopes, an achromatic telescope, prisms, mirrors, and “an instrument to try the force of falling bodies.”54 According to academic and scientific contemporaries of Small, William & Mary’s collection of instruments was the best of its kind in

America during the colonial period and long after the Revolution. Therefore, despite Small’s short tenure at the college, he played a large part in drawing students to William & Mary: there was his own reputation as a professor, his changes to the style of teaching at the college, his

54 Gillian Hull, “William Small, 1734-1775: No Publications, Much Influence,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Vol. 90 (February 1997): 103.

126 expansion of the curriculum, and, as a parting gift, his contribution to the college’s collection of scientific apparatuses.55

Before William Smith’s lengthy tenure as provost of the College of Philadelphia,

Benjamin Franklin had invited him to serve as master of Logic, Rhetoric, Ethicks, and Natural

Philosophy at the Academy of Philadelphia in 1754. Franklin and Smith had become acquainted with one another through their respective writings, including Franklin’s Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania and Smith’s A General Idea of the College of Mirania.

Smith was a Scotsmen who had received an education at the University of Aberdeen but failed to officially graduate. Despite his lack of a degree, Smith was well-prepared to be an instructor at the Academy due to the three years he spent as a teacher in Scotland before his removal to

America and his subsequent tutoring of the sons of Governor Long in New York beginning in

1751. When the Academy became the College in 1755, the trustees elevated Master Smith to the dual positions of provost and professor, yet he largely continued his teaching of the older students in philosophy and the other subjects of higher study. Similar to the situation with

Witherspoon at the College of New Jersey, Smith’s appointment to the provostship at

Philadelphia lent credence to the college’s validity as an institution of higher learning. His title was elevated one last time, to Dr. Smith, upon the receipt of honorary Doctorate of Divinity degrees from the University of Aberdeen and Trinity College Dublin in 1759. Smith used his position as provost to implement his Mirania plan at the college, but only succeeded in reforming the first three years. Smith’s plan divided students into two different groups: those designed for the learned professions and those designed for the mechanic professions. Members

55 Ibid., 102, 103; J. David Hoeveler, Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges, 96, 98; Tate, “The Colonial College, 1693-1782,” in The College of William and Mary: A History, Volume I, 100, 105.

127 of the first group attended the College proper, while members of the second attended the

Mechanics School. The lowest class of the college, called the Greek Class, obviously studied

Greek, but also arithmetic and algebra. The second class, the master of which was the Professor of Mathematics, studied geometry, astronomy, chronology, navigation, and the “other most useful branches of mathematics.” Headed by the Professor of Philosophy, the third class studied ethics and physics, the latter of which included natural history, mechanic philosophy, and experimental philosophy. Within this streamlined educational plan, Smith focused on belles- lettres and science. Thus, Smith taught students the importance of composition and style in

English, while at the same time gathering data from the 1769 transit of Venus and passing his conclusions onto his students. Academically, Smith should have drawn many students to the

College of Philadelphia, and he did indeed bring in many Anglicans, but his partisan politics and strong Anglican bent unfortunately turned an equal or greater number of students away from attending the Philadelphia institution.56

*** Collegiate education in the colonies varied from its counterpart in England not only in terms of what students learned, but also in terms of who taught them and how. With many of the colonial colleges beginning with no more than a handful of students in attendance, it was quite common for the college president and the students’ instructor to be one in the same. However, even after the administrators at the colonial colleges hired tutors, or even one or two professors, to ease the president’s teaching load, the instruction of students remained one of the major responsibilities of the college president. Some presidents, such as Harvard’s Charles Chauncy

56 Edward Potts Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 41, 43, 72, 73; The National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Vol. I, 340; Roger L. Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 77; William Smith, The General Idea of the College of Mirania (New York: J. Parker and W. Weyman, 1753), 13-14, 17-18; Roger L. Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 77.

128 and the College of New Jersey’s John Witherspoon, seemed to relish the opportunity to educate the colonies’ next generation of leaders, but others like Harvard’s Increase Mather were more concerned with outside matters, including colonial politics or religious affairs, than to bother with their instructional duties. As instructor-presidents these men had both the power to change their colleges’ curriculum and the position to implement said changes in their own classrooms.

At King’s College, for example, President Samuel Johnson changed the curriculum to have a greater focus on mathematics and science, and then used his own work Elementa Philosophica with which to instruct students in those subjects. Instructor-presidents also had the opportunity to have much closer relationships with their students than college presidents in later years did.

During the first five years of operation of the College of Rhode Island, President James Manning instructed students in one of the rooms of his parsonage. President Johnson of King’s even went so far as to refer to his students as “his sons.”

Once enrollment at the colonial colleges began to increase beyond the capabilities of the president, or of the president and a tutor or two, the administrators began hiring men of letters and science solely for the purpose of instructing students. Without the administrative distractions that the instructor-presidents had to deal with, the colleges’ first professors could focus on bringing innovations in their respective fields to their classrooms. The College of Philadelphia’s

Francis Alison, for example, became the first colonial educator to introduce the Scottish

Enlightenment’s School of Common Sense in his moral philosophy instruction. Similarly,

Harvard’s John Winthrop integrated his own scientific observations of earthquakes and the transit of Mercury into his instruction. Such professors also brought innovative teaching methods to their classrooms. William Small, for instance, replaced drilling and rote memorization techniques with the lecture format at the College of William & Mary, as well as modernized

129 science instruction via the introduction of physics demonstrations. Also, William Smith of the

College of Philadelphia introduced and implemented his College of Mirania plan, in which a student’s class rank determined the subjects they learned and which professor would teach them.

More seems to have been expected of the educators of colonial America than the educators of

Europe: some pulled double-duty as instructors and presidents, while others had to keep abreast of innovations in their fields and figure out how to introduce these discoveries using teaching methods which were new not only to their own classrooms, but to all of the colleges in colonial

America.

Conclusion

Of those American colonists who were college-bound, many chose to attend institutes of higher education in the colonies rather than those which existed in England or continental Europe because their ideas about what a proper collegiate education should include no longer lined up with the prevailing English model. The students at the colonial colleges received educations in religion, the Enlightenment, and history which were quite different from those received by their

English colleagues. In England, the king was both the Supreme Head of the Church of England and responsible for granting colleges their royal charters. This connection ensured that those colleges operated in accordance with the tenets of the Anglican church. In the colonies, however, no such relationship between the Church of England and six of the nine colonial colleges existed, so they were free to teach religious lessons in accordance with their own denominational values.

In addition to differences in religious education, colonial instructors approached the teaching of

Enlightenment ideas differently than their English counterparts. While educated colonists welcomed the arrival of the Enlightenment in America, they did not allow its arguments about

130 reason to usurp their religious beliefs. Instead, many colonists celebrated what Henry F. May called the “Moderate Enlightenment,” in which reason and religion existed in a delicate balance with one another. One of the factors that contributed to this balance was colonial educators’ inclusion of the Scottish Enlightenment’s Common-Sense approach to philosophy. Another element of collegiate education in the colonies which differed from that in England was the study of history. Although students read the histories of ancient civilizations in both the colonies and

England, what they gleaned from such histories was different. In addition, colonial educators taught their students more recent periods of history which the English did not. Of these latter histories, colonial students were particular fans of those English histories written by Whig historians, in which England’s faults were put on display just as much as its triumphs. From these more recent histories, as well as from the histories of the ancients, colonial students could begin to draw parallels between the tyranny of the past and their own treatment by the English government in the present.

While the changes made to the colonial colleges’ curricula from the European standard were purposeful, the other major differentiating factor with England’s higher education system, i.e., the type of instructors who taught the colonies’ college students, was more so a result of outside circumstances. Yet, the instructor-presidents and professors who ended up teaching the colonial students proved to be one of the colonial colleges’ assets for drawing students away from a European education. A combination of initially low enrollment numbers and a scarcity of college-educated individuals in the colonies resulted in the first college instructors taking on the roles of both president and sole teacher. Despite their divided loyalties, to the students and to the trustees, many of the colonial colleges’ instructor-presidents were quite popular with their pupils.

As enrollment numbers at the colonial colleges increased and a greater number of learned

131 individuals immigrated to the colonies, instructional duties steadily transferred from being the work of presidents to that of professors. As men eminent in their respective fields of study, these professors’ employment at the colonial colleges helped to draw students to their campuses. By offering students the opportunity to receive a collegiate education in which their respective religions were welcomed; in which they could embrace the Enlightenment without questioning their faith; in which the history of tyranny could be openly questioned; and in which instruction was led by presidents and professors who were learned in their field, cared for their students, and brought innovations to the classroom; the leaders and faculty of the colonial colleges had created a form of education uniquely bent to the needs of colonial Americans. The regulation of student life in the colonies, which is the subject of the next chapter, was also noticeably different from university life in England.

132 CHAPTER 3: THE COLLEGIATE WAY: STUDENT LIFE AT THE COLONIAL COLLEGES

Along with the intentional curricular and teaching differences which the colonists instituted at the American colleges, they worked to differentiate their students’ living environment from the prevailing English norm. One of the major goals which the colonial college administrators had for their students was for them to live, as Cotton Mather once put it,

“in a more collegiate way.”1 To live in a collegiate way meant that students not only learned side by side but lived alongside one another. Through such constant association with one another, which included eating, drinking, worshipping, studying, playing, and sleeping in common, the students were meant to take part in building each other’s characters. By using the adjective

“more” to describe the level at which the collegiate way should exist in the colonies, however,

Mather was implying that state in which it currently existed was not good enough. Although such a way of life had originated at the English universities, the continental-European university way of student living, in which students rented private rooms in the city, was becoming prevalent in

England.

For many colonial college officials, the collegiate way intertwined with the concept of a proper education. The first Harvard Overseers plainly laid out this thinking in a 1671 letter they sent to ministers in England, stating that “[an] advantage to learning accrues by the multitude of persons cohabitating for scholastical communion,” and that the collegiate way led students to

1 Cotton Mather, “The History of Harvard College,” in Magnalia Christi Americana, Vol. II (Hartford, CT: Silas Andrus, 1820), 7; Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), 252.

133 “actuate the minds of one another.”2 To accomplish these goals, as well as to help their students avoid the temptations that came along with living in a city, collegiate officials in the colonies sought to establish the collegiate way of living at their schools. With the cities of Cambridge and

Oxford having populations of 6,131 and 8,292, respectively, at mid-century, and the colonial cities of Philadelphia, New York, and the Cambridge-adjacent Boston, having respective populations of 13,000, 13,294, and 15,731 at mid-century, it makes sense that colonial college officials and parents would have greater fears about the dangers of city-living than the English.

College officials attempted to foster the collegiate way for their students by providing them with on-campus housing, establishing schedules and rules for their time outside of the classroom, and ensuring student recreation remained within the bounds of what they deemed to be proper behavior. Via fostering such environments at their colleges, colonial administrators had the opportunity to wield greater control over their students than their English and continental

European counterparts. The result they hoped to achieve with these efforts was to send not only well-educated, but morally upstanding, young gentlemen into society.3

Student Housing

When academic operations began at each of the colonial colleges, only a few had the ability to house students on campus. At the remaining schools, students had to either live with their parents and commute to the college or rent a room in a private home nearby. While the first option would likely have been the preference of many parents, it was simply not feasible for

2 “Remarks by Albert Matthews, in communicating a Letter from the Ministers and Magistrates of Massachusetts, relating to Harvard College, dated 21 August, 1671,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Volume XI: Transactions 1906-1907 (Boston: Published by the Society, 1910), 340. 3 “Table I. 18th-century local censuses and their contents,” in C.M. Law’s “Local Census in the 18th Century,” Population Studies, Vol 23, No 1 (March 1969): 90, 92; “Population of the cities of the United States to and including 1790,” in the U.S. Bureau of the Census’ A Century of Population Growth: From the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth, 1790-1900 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), 11.

134 everyone. The latter option, however, was worrisome because the lack of adult supervision could make living in the city both a difficult and dangerous situation for the young men. For many college administrators, therefore, securing on-campus housing for their students was one of their top priorities. The ability to provide such housing, whether through an existing building or by constructing a new building, however, proved elusive for some of the schools during their initial years of operation. Even when student housing was available at each of the colleges, many of the builders did not construct the buildings to the best standards and college officials had to supplement, and ultimately replace, them with new structures.

In 1640, when President Dunster took over administrative and teaching duties at Harvard from the disastrous Master Nathaniel Eaton, the only building owned by the college was

Peyntree house, the former residence of William Peyntree. It was in this house, built in 1633, that

President Dunster and some of the students lived in common. The remaining students roomed in town where, according to Dunster, they often became “miserably distracted.” The first building constructed specifically for the college’s use, known simply as Harvard College at the time and now referred to as “Old College,” opened in 1642. Constructed of timber and covered with cedar shingles, Old College was a three-story-tall, E-shaped building which contained a great hall for lectures and dining, a library, a kitchen, chambers for sleeping, and small, closet-like, studies for reading and writing. Within each chamber there were likely fewer beds than students, forcing each young man to have not only chamber-fellows but a bed-fellow. The only real space that a student had to himself was his study. However, at approximately six-feet-long by four-feet wide, each study was probably only able to hold a writing table, stool, and shelf for books. With no oil to burn, students relied on the sun to light their studies, forcing their placement near the windows on the periphery and away from the fireplace, which caused them to be extremely cold in the

135 winter. The price of a student’s housing cost, however, did not include ownership of a study; any students desiring studies had to pay quarterly rent for their use. Ultimately, both the New

England climate, which the carpenters of Old College failed to take into account during construction, and the wear and tear that Harvard students wreaked led the building to decay and become uninhabitable before the end of the century.4

To supplement, and eventually replace Old College, Harvard administrators had the first iteration of Harvard Hall, Stoughton Hall, and Massachusetts Hall built in 1667, 1698, and 1718 respectively. Although the exteriors of these newer halls varied from Old College by virtue of their wood and brick construction, their interior spaces for students were remarkably similar: small chambers for sleeping and even smaller nooks for studying. Despite some of the unpleasantries of living in the college halls, it was a popular choice among Harvard’s students.

According to “settlement of chambers” records from 1741-1764, Harvard and Stoughton Halls housed at least two or more students in at least ten, and usually all sixteen, of their respective chambers. Massachusetts Hall filled almost all thirty-two of its chambers on a regular basis, minus one year in 1744, when it only filled twenty-one. In contrast, the number of students who chose to live “out of college,” at either their parent’s home or by renting a room in town, varied from four to seventy, which usually amounted to less than half of all enrolled students. Thus, while not all students lived in the collegiate way desired by college officials, those who chose to lodge on campus outnumbered those who decided to live in town. At Harvard, therefore, the

4 Christian S. Arndt, “The Missing Buildings of Harvard Yard,” The Harvard Crimson, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/11/19/missing-buildings-harvard-yard/ (accessed August 27, 2019); Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), 271, 275, 280-281, 284-285, 289.

136 administrators were successful in creating a collegiate way of living that sheltered colonial students more than had become the norm abroad.5

The students at the College of William & Mary fared somewhat better than the first student at Harvard, with their first college building constructed of brick. Although the college opened in 1694, the first students did not reside in the college building, known as the Wren

Building, until the end of 1700. Just as with Old College at Harvard, the Wren Building and

William & Mary were one in the same entity. Originally intended to be a quadrangle, the college building which opened in 1700 had only two walls and was L-shaped. It housed the great hall for dining, lectures, and worship, a school room for the grammar students, a kitchen, and chambers for the students, faculty, and president to sleep in. Despite the Wren Building’s aesthetic superiority, it, too, was a victim of slipshod construction. One of the chimneys had a girder running through it, rendering it unusable, and malfunctioning drains led to the pooling of stagnant water. Such construction issues, however, were of little importance once the entire college building caught fire in 1705 and the only structures left standing after the conflagration were the exterior walls.6

Almost four years passed before, on August 4, 1709, William & Mary’s trustees voted to proceed with the construction of a second college building using the exterior walls of the original

5 “First Floor, Old Harvard Hall, 1667-1764, 1935” Records of Early Harvard Buildings, 1710-1969, UAI 15.10.5 Box 2, Folder 2, Harvard University Archives, Colonial North America at Harvard Library, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.ARCH:16084571, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (hereafter referred to as Harvard University Archives); “Plan of Massachusetts Hall [1718]” Records of Early Harvard Buildings, 1710-1969, UAI 15.10.5 Box 10, Folder 2, Harvard University Archives, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- 3:HUL.ARCH:16084577; Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), 280-285; Settlement of Chambers, 1741-1764: A list of the scholars inhabiting several chambers in the college, UAI 70.27.41, Harvard University Archives, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- 3:HUL.ARCH:11185780. 6 Thad W. Tate, “The Colonial College, 1693-1782,” in The College of William and Mary: A History, Vol. I, ed. Susan H Godson (Williamsburg, VA: King and Queen Press, 1993), 29-36; E.G. Swem, “Some Notes on the Four Forms of the Oldest Building of William & Mary College,” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Oct. 1928): 230-231; “Memorandum re: Several Faults in the Building of William and Mary Colledge, [ca. 1703-05],” Francis Nicholson Papers, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, Williamsburg, Virginia.

137 structure. The second Wren Building, opened in 1716 and completed in 1721, maintained some of the original building’s features but altered others. For example, the new Wren Building, while still imposing, had only two floors instead of the original three, and changes to the roof structure required a smaller cupola. Like the original, however, there was a school room for the grammar students, a kitchen, chambers for the president, faculty, and students, and a great hall for lectures and dining that doubled as a chapel until the completion of the building’s chapel wing in 1732.

Despite the concerted efforts of the college’s builders to make the construction of the second iteration of the Wren Building superior to the first, not everyone was pleased with the outcome.

Thomas Jefferson, who lived in Wren while a student at William & Mary in the 1760s, referred to the building and the nearby Williamsburg hospital, as “rude, misshapen piles, which, but that they have roofs, would be taken for brick-kilns.”7 In the face of such harsh judgement by one of their own alumni, the rector at William & Mary asked Jefferson to draw up a design for enlarging and improving the Wren Building, but the onset of the Revolutionary War preempted any construction. The only other buildings constructed at William & Mary during the colonial period were the Brafferton Building, for the Indian School, and the President’s House, which served no use to the student body. Thus, while Jefferson may not have had the kindest assessment of the Wren Building, it was the only on-campus housing available to William &

Mary students. While they were not as successful as their Massachusetts counterparts in building a multitude of housing options for their students, William & Mary officials had none the less accomplished the goal of keeping students housed on campus, where they could be under the watchful eye of faculty and staff.8

7 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Philadelphia: Printed and Sold by Prichard and Hall, 1788), 163. 8 Tate, “The Colonial College, 1693-1782,” in The College of William and Mary: A History, Vol. I, ed. Susan H Godson, 51-54, 73; E.G. Swem, “Some Notes on the Four Forms of the Oldest Building of William &

138 In spite of the many problems the students living at Harvard and William & Mary faced, they at least had a place to live on campus while they were enrolled. During the first sixteen years of Yale’s existence, students had to either travel daily from their homes or board in a house in one of the many towns where Yale classes met. It was only after the trustees settled upon New

Haven as the college’s permanent home that construction began on a “large and commodious house” for the college in 1717. A wooden building one-hundred-and-seventy-feet long by twenty-two-feet wide, Yale College cost £1,000 to build. Standing three stories high, and with ten dormer windows across each side, the building contained a great hall, library, kitchen, and enough chambers and studies to accommodate fifty students, though it was often known to hold seventy or eighty. This building served as the only housing on Yale’s campus until the construction of another college house, later named Connecticut Hall, began in 1750 due to more than half of the 120 students having to reside outside of Yale College due to a lack of space. The new building, finished in 1752 at a cost of £1,180, still stands today and is one-hundred-feet long, forty-feet wide, and three-stories high. Patterned on Massachusetts Hall at Harvard,

Connecticut Hall contained thirty-two chambers and sixty-four studies. Despite its

Massachusetts’ predecessor, the arrangement of the space in Connecticut Hall did not please everyone. Artist and architect John Trumbull complained in 1792 that the arrangement of the studies resulted in their either lessening the amount of light in the chamber or making the space of the chamber too small. Trumbull went on to remedy these faults, however, in the plans he drew up for the buildings that joined Connecticut Hall over the next few decades. In the meantime, the construction and occupation of Connecticut Hall and its predecessor, Yale

Mary College,” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Oct. 1928): 235-239; Mark R. Wegner, “Thomas Jefferson, the College of William & Mary, and the University of Virginia,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 103, No. 3 (July 1995): 359-361.

139 College, had helped college officials to achieve their aim of a more protective environment for their students, which further differentiated collegiate culture in the colonies from its English equivalent.9

As at Yale, the officials at the Colleges of New Jersey and Philadelphia failed to provide housing for their students until long after they opened. Instruction at the College of New Jersey began in Newark in 1747, but college lodging did not open until 1756. Seeking a place

“sequestered from the various temptations” of the city, the trustees decided to move the school to the village of Princeton and construction began on the college building now known as Nassau

Hall or Old Nassau. Upon completion, Nassau Hall could accommodate 147 students, at three students to a chamber, with each chamber measuring twenty feet square and equipped with two closets. In addition to chambers for the students, Nassau Hall housed a great hall, a 1,200- volume library, large kitchen, dining hall, and steward’s apartments. Despite Old Nassau’s immense size (it was the largest stone building in the colonies) only seventy students moved into the hall in 1757. A similar delay of proper housing occurred at the College of Philadelphia. The college’s students began taking classes in Reverend Whitefield’s “New Building” in 1755, but the trustees did not approve the construction of a building for housing students until 1762. The new building, finished in time for the 1764-65 school year, was seventy-feet long, thirty feet wide, and two-stories high. It was not, however, solely a residential building; the main floor housed the boy’s and girl’s charity schools affiliated with the college, a kitchen, and dining hall, while the upper floor consisted of the sixteen chambers for the students to room in. Although accommodations at New Jersey and Philadelphia took longer to acquire, the buildings which they

9 Thomas Clap, The Annals, or History of Yale College, 1700-1766 (New Haven: Printed for John Hotchkiss and B. Mecom, 1766), 24, 55; Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 40-41; A.S.P., “John Trumbull and the Brick Row,” The Yale University Library Gazette, Vol. 9, No. 1 (July 1934): 16.

140 finally lodged in lasted the schools much longer than the first residences of the students at

Harvard, William & Mary, and Yale. These newer buildings’ durability was especially helpful in

Philadelphia, the colonies’ largest city, where any loss of on-campus housing would have forced students to find rooms in the city like many of their English peers, which colonial college officials sought to avoid because such living arrangements often lacked adult oversight.10

The meagre beginnings of the College of Rhode Island in 1765, which involved students attending classes in President Reverend Manning’s parsonage house in Warren, delayed the construction of any kind of collegiate housing. Even after the trustees decided to move the college to Providence in 1770, students had to find their own accommodations for a time. One student, Theodore Foster, ardently lamented the “ten thousand jinggles and Noises” that he had to continually listen to while lodging in town. The college administrators were also concerned and sought to lift the students “above the smoke and stir” of Providence. Students at Rhode

Island finally had the opportunity to live in college housing when the first two floors of the

“College Edifice” became ready for use in the winter of 1771-1772. Now known as University

Hall, the building is one-hundred-fifty-feet long, forty-six-feet wide, and four-stories high. With its position at the top of a hill, Reverend Manning believed that the college building would allow students to “enjoy a serene and salutary air,” which was the exact opposite of the quality of the air in downtown Providence. The cost of college-owned housing was good too, with college officials setting rent at five dollars yearly, while students boarding in private homes could pay about one-and-a-quarter dollars per week. Although it took quite a long time for the

10 Samuel Blair, An Account of the College of New Jersey (Woodbridge, NJ: Printed by James Parker, 1764), 11-13; Edward Potts Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740-1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940), 54-55; “At a Special Meeting of the Trustees on Saturday, November 20, 1761,” Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania Minute Books, Volume I, 1749-1768, UPA 1.1, University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (hereafter referred to as University of Pennsylvania Archives)

141 administrators at the College of Rhode Island to be able to house their students on campus, they were able to provide a protective environment for their pupils using just this one building until construction began on the college’s second residence hall in 1823.11

The students at King’s College did not have to wait nearly as long as their fellow middle colonists to lodge on campus. Shortly after President Samuel Johnson began instructing students in a schoolhouse adjoining Trinity Church in July 1754, the college governors started making plans for erecting a college campus. While they originally intended to have a quadrangle constructed, meagre funds led to the construction of a single building. Despite this, at the laying of the cornerstone of King’s College by the Governor of New York on August 23, 1756,

President Johnson prayed that God would “grant that this college happily founded may ever be enriched with His blessing; that it may increase and flourish to its entire perfection.”12 Johnson’s prayer, however, went unanswered as King’s College remained a single building for the rest of the colonial period. The gray-stone structure which opened in 1760 stood three stories high, at one-hundred-and-eighty-feet long and thirty-feet wide. Except for a great hall and library, the remainder of the college consisted of student chambers. John Parke Custis, stepson of George

Washington, described his room at the college to his mother in a July 1773 letter as “a large parlour with two Studys or closets, each large enough to contain a bed, trunk, and couple of chairs, one I sleep in & the other Joe [Custis’ slave] calls his; my chamber and parlour are

11 Walter C. Bronson, The History of Brown University, 1764-1914 (Providence: Published by the University, 1914), 37, 51-54, 57, 59, 171; Reverend James Manning, “Rhode Island College,” Rhode Island College Miscellaneous Papers, 1763-1804, John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. (hereafter referred to as Rhode Island College Miscellaneous Papers) 12 “Samuel Johnson’s Prayer for the College at the Laying of the Cornerstone, August 23, 1756,” in Samuel Johnson, President of King’s College: His Career and Writings, Vol. IV, ed. Herbert and Carol Schneider (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 271.

142 paper’d, with a cheap tho very pretty Paper, the other is painted.”13 While the college may not have been as grand as Custis and other wealthy students were accustomed, several visitors to

New York City referred to the building as “elegant” and “exceedingly handsome.” No matter its appearance, however, the King’s College building served the college officials’ purpose by furnishing students with a sanctuary to learn and grow within the colonies’ second largest city while remaining guarded from its seedier influences.14

Aside from Harvard, the only other colonial college to offer housing for at least some of the students from the first day of classes was Queen’s College. In late 1771 Queen’s trustees began leasing the college building, as well as the one-hundred-and-fifty by seventy-five-foot plot of land upon which it stood, from New Brunswick landowner and college trustee Philip French for a period of fifty years. The college building, which had previously operated as a tavern called

“The Sign of the Red Lion,” provided students with both classroom space and sleeping quarters, but they likely had to share the latter with their teacher, Frederick Freylinghuysen. The exact make-up of the chambers, unfortunately, is unknown since many of the college’s early documents have not survived. Despite the lack of knowledge concerning such details, what is clear is that Queen’s officials had done their duty to supply students with a place to study and live in New Brunswick; that is, until British troops took over the city in 1776 and forced the college to temporarily close.15

13 “John Parke Custis to Mrs. Washington, July 5, 1773,” in Letters to Washington and Accompanying Papers, Vol. IV: 1770-1774, ed. Stanislaus Murray Hamilton (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1901), 233. “Joe” was a slave who Custis brought with him from Mount Vernon to be his body-servant. 14 Milton Halsey Thomas, “The King’s College Building: with some notes on its later tenants,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 1 (January 1955), 27, 32, 44, 47; Herbert B. Howe, “Colonel George Washington and King’s College,” Columbia University Quarterly Vol. 24, Iss. 6 (1932): 137. 15 Phillip French, “Book of Leases,” Philip French Papers, 1732-1786, Rutgers University Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; William H. Demarest, A History of Rutgers College, 1766-1924 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers College Press, 1924), 86-87; Richard P. McCormick, Rutgers: A Bicentennial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1966), 10, 16.

143 The initial housing situation at the last colonial college, Dartmouth, proved unique due to the extremely rural setting in which the trustees decided to settle the school. While students at all of the other colonial colleges had the option of boarding in private homes in their college towns, the three-thousand-acre section of Hanover where Dartmouth began was essentially unsettled.

Reverend Wheelock tried to arrange for the construction of his house and the college before the first class of students arrived, but this proved impossible. The wells that Wheelock had workers dig did not have water at the bottom of them, and so the half-built structures had to be torn down and reconstructed almost four-hundred yards away. As a result, when the thirty students arrived to begin their studies in September 1770, the buildings were not ready, and the students had to make booths and beds out of hemlock boughs and live in those conditions until the end of

October. The “College” that the carpenters eventually finished was two stories tall, eighty-feet- long, and thirty-two-feet-wide. When it opened to students in 1771 it consisted of a kitchen, store-room, hall, and sixteen chambers, but in 1774 college officials moved the kitchen, store- room and hall into Dr. Wheelock’s then-abandoned first house, thereafter known as “College

Hall,” and used the leftover space to create four more chambers. The College, along with College

Hall, remained the only college buildings until Dartmouth Hall replaced them in 1792, which continued the college administrators’ legacy of providing safe and secure housing for their students.16

***

Although campus housing was a major component of the collegiate way of living in that it provided students with not only a place to live among one another but a safe space away from

16 Eleazar Wheelock, A Continuation of the Narrative of the Indian Charity-School, begun in Lebanon, in Connecticut; from the year 1768, to the incorporation of it with Dartmouth-college, and removal and settlement of it in Hanover, in the province of New-Hampshire, 1771 (1771) 27-28; Frederick Chase, A History of Dartmouth College and the Town of Hanover, New Hampshire, Vol. I (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1891), 222, 269.

144 the temptations of the city, the accommodations which the administrators at the colonial colleges could provide did not always meet their, or the students, expectations. While Harvard and

Queen’s Colleges had the ability to house some students from the beginning, neither was able to offer the conventional dormitory experience of the period: at Harvard, students lodged in a former private residence, while at Queen’s students slept on the upper-level of a former tavern.

The construction of Old College at Harvard, and then its supplementation by Harvard,

Stoughton, and Massachusetts Halls, brought the college closer to the collegiate ideal, with spaces dedicated to learning, worshipping, dining, studying and sleeping, but Queen’s students remained at the tavern for the rest of the colonial period. William & Mary and King’s College students had the opportunity to live in more traditional college halls not too long after their respective colleges opened, but they, too, had issues. The Wren Building at William & Mary was a victim of both slipshod construction and a devastating fire, and King’s was not as grandiose as some of the wealthier students expected. Officials at Yale, the College of New Jersey, the

College of Philadelphia, and the College of Rhode Island took a longer time to offer housing to their students, but the buildings they did construct lasted the students much longer than the first buildings at Harvard, William & Mary, and Queen’s did. Dartmouth students probably had the rudest awakening of all, for when they arrived to begin classes, they had to sleep out of doors for roughly a month in beds of their own creation until workers completed their building. Despite the many setbacks and obstacles that the administrators at the colonial colleges faced in their efforts to provide housing for their students, all of them were ultimately successful in furnishing their students with campus housing. In such an environment, they hoped, the students could learn and develop with as little unwelcome influence from the outside as possible.

145 Schedules, Rules, and Punishments

The ability to provide housing for students was only one component of the college officials’ efforts to ensure that students lived the collegiate way; another was to provide students with regimented schedules, rules for conduct, and appropriate punishments in the event that they flouted the rules. Although students spent a majority of their time in the classroom, these were not the only hours during the day in which their time was not their own. Since various Protestant denominations founded (or eventually took control of) each of the colonial colleges, a student’s time outside of the classroom included regimented hours spent in worship, devotional prayer, or both. Meals were another scheduled activity during which administrators expected students to follow specific rules of conduct, which could include such minute details as who served whom and in what order. Even during the students’ free time, which only amounted to a couple of hours a day, college officials expected students to conduct themselves in a certain, morally upstanding manner. If students refused to participate in any of the tasks assigned to them or did not follow the rules associated with each task, they could face a myriad of punishments, ranging from monetary fees, to corporal punishment, or even expulsion from the college. Ultimately, the controlling nature of the colonial officials’ schedules, rules, and punishments enabled them to cultivate a collegiate way of life for their students that differentiated it from the much laxer experience of English students.

Aside from the time they spent in class, one of the major elements of a colonial college student’s day was attending worship services and devotional prayers. At Harvard, Yale, and

King’s, the college laws required all students, whether residing at the college or in town, to attend worship services at the college twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening.

Attendance at such activities was meant to strengthen the students’ faith and help them develop a

146 good moral character. As an Anglican institution, the prayer services at King’s followed a specific pattern. The students, along with the college president, recited the Ten Commandments, twenty verses of Psalm, the Nicene Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer. Then, before dismissal, the college president concluded with “A Prayer Peculiar to the College,” in which he asked that God help the instructors to be apt to teach and help the students to be laborious in their studies. The

Harvard laws also specified that on Sunday students had to remain in their rooms for the majority of the day (except for public worship) and apply themselves to the duties of religion and piety.

Any student found being “unnecessarily busy” by visiting others or walking to town was subject to a fine not to exceed ten schillings. The statutes at King’s required that students attend public worship on Sunday, but they could attend services at any place that their parents or guardians chose for them. Students who did not attend, or were late to, services had to pay a fine of four pence. The Yale laws do not mention any specific routine for Sunday, but they did require students to spend time reading the Holy Scriptures on their own at least once every day.17

The trustees at the Colleges of William & Mary, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Rhode Island, and Queen’s and Dartmouth Colleges did not include attendance at religious services in their laws and statutes, but that does not mean that students were exempt from religious observance.

No colonial students, not even those attending well-known Deist Benjamin Franklin’s College of

Philadelphia, could avoid worship and prayers. Instead, college officials expected the students to attend as simply a matter of routine. Provost Smith may have been the lead administrator at

Philadelphia, but he was an Anglican first and foremost, and so it was with this in mind that he

17 “College Laws, 1734,” Laws and Statutes of Harvard 1655-1890, UAI 15.800 Box 4, Volume 1, Harvard University Archives; “Orders and Appointment to be Observed in the Collegiate School in Connecticut,” in Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College with Annals of the College History, Vol I: 1701-1745, ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1885), 348; Samuel Johnson, “The Form of Morning and Evening Prayers to Be Used in the College,” in Samuel Johnson, President of King’s College: His Career and Writings, Vol. IV, ed. Herbert and Carol Schneider (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 265-271

147 expected students to open and close the day’s exercises with prayer. A similar routine occurred at

William & Mary, in which students attended chapel services in the great hall until 1732, and thereafter in the new chapel wing. When attendance at chapel began to lapse in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War, college officials began to take roll at all services. At the College of

New Jersey, participation was a major component of the time the students spent in worship and prayer. In the mornings, for example, a member of the senior class read a chapter from the Bible which he had translated to English and the college president then expounded upon it. In the evenings, students sang a psalmody together before they proceeded to prayer. The surviving records for Queen’s College are silent on the amount of prayer or worship services that students had to attend, but considering Reverend Jacob Hardenbergh’s personal involvement with the college, and his eventual role as president of the college, the likelihood of his preaching to the students on a fairly regular basis would be high. Even in the relative wild that was Hanover in the 1770s, Reverend Wheelock made sure that his students attended daily prayer. According to

David McClure, a former pupil of Wheelock’s at Moor’s Charity School who served as instructor of the grammar school, the Reverend oversaw morning and evening prayers outside and “the surrounding forest … reverberated the solemn sounds of supplication and praise.”

While mandatory attendance at, and sometimes participation in, the religious services offered by each of the colonial colleges was meant to foster faith and good morals among the students, it was also a particularly good way of keeping students under the supervision of faculty and staff and, hopefully, out of trouble.18

18 Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740-1940, 172; Tate, “The Colonial College, 1693- 1782,” in The College of William and Mary: A History, Vol. I, ed. Susan H. Godson, 113; Blair, An Account of the College of New Jersey, 27; David McClure, Memoirs of the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock, D.D. (Newburyport, MA: Published by Edward Little & Co., 1811), 57 (quotation).

148 College officials further regulated the colonial college students’ lives during their mealtimes. While most colonists would have considered themselves starved without a daily allowance of bread, beef, and beer, the content of the students’ meals was not up to them, nor were the times at which they dined, or who they dined alongside. Among the early records at the

College of Rhode Island are the “Orders for the Dining Room.” They dictated that students had to enter commons quietly and by their class rank, with the upperclassmen going first. The members of the senior class divided themselves across the dining room so that each table had a senior student to supervise the younger students. Any underclassman seen making “indecent gestures” or otherwise not obeying the orders of the table would thereafter have to sit next to a senior student. Among the orders of the table were the rules that students received their food in alphabetical order, that one student carve the meat, another distribute the meat and sauce, and those same two students pour out coffee and tea and distribute the proper amount of sugar. The rules also forbid students from taking provisions out of the dining room without the steward’s permission. A glimpse into the kind of food the students ate comes from the college’s

“Directions for the Steward.” At breakfast, students had a choice of tea, coffee, chocolate, or milk porridge to drink, to which they could add brown sugar. If they chose tea or coffee, they could eat white or brown bread with butter, but if they chose chocolate or milk porridge, they could only have white bread without butter. For dinner, the steward had to offer various options throughout the week: at least two meals of salt beef and pork, another two meals of fresh meat

(served roasted, baked, broiled, or fried) and one meal each of soup “and fragments,” boiled fresh meat, and salted or fresh fish with brown bread. To drink, the students had a choice of

“good small beer” or cider. At suppertime, the steward offered fewer options: milk with hasty pudding, rice, samp (a type of cornmeal mush), and white bread, or the previously offered

149 breakfast options of tea, coffee, chocolate, or milk porridge with bread. Although these meals were perhaps not the same as those to which the students had become accustomed at home, there was little likelihood of any of them ever going hungry.19

As at Rhode Island, students at the College of New Jersey had to follow specific rules of conduct while dining. Students and tutors, and sometimes the college president, ate meals together, but they had to sit according to their rank and seniority. New Jersey officials ensured a standard of regularity and decorum at meals by having waiters rather than the students in charge of food and drink distribution. Breakfast was a light meal, consisting of only tea or coffee. For dinner every student had the same dish, dressed in the same way, but this dish could be “all variety of fish and flesh” available throughout the colony. On some occasions the students had pies for dessert but, in general, their meals did not include “luxurious dainties or costly delicacies,” because college officials were most concerned with keeping meals healthy and economical. Although the meals offered at the College of New Jersey were not fancy or expensive, they were of a much better quality than the meals some of the students at the other colonial colleges had to endure. 20

Students at Harvard and William & Mary personally experienced the lows to which dining in commons at a colonial college could fall. During the 1638-1639 school year, when

Nathaniel Eaton served as master of Harvard, the students accused his wife of failing to provide them with beef, serving them sour bread, withholding butter and cheese, serving them un-gutted mackerel, and putting goat’s dung in their hasty pudding. When a magistrate called Master and

Mistress Eaton before the court concerning his beating of the students and an usher, the quality

19 Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), 233; “Orders for the Dining Room,” Rhode Island College Miscellaneous Papers; “Directions for the Steward, R.I., Jan. 17, 1774,” Rhode Island College Miscellaneous Papers. 20 Blair, An Account of the College of New Jersey, 37-38.

150 of her food came up. She confessed “to my shame, I cannot remember ever that they had [beef],” to making bread with “flower [sic] not so fine as it might, nor so well boiled or stirred, at all times that it was so,” withholding cheese, and serving “bad fish,” but denied that there was any goat’s dung in their hasty pudding or guts in their mackerel. Although the magistrate found Mr.

Easton guilty of the beatings, he did not immediately serve time for his transgressions because he and his wife fled with funds he had embezzled from Harvard’s coffers. As a result, the college did not open the following school year.21

William & Mary students had a similarly bad experience with their housekeeper and cook, Isabella Cocke, in 1763. After multiple accusations from students of her serving them bad or inadequate food, failing to properly launder their clothes, and showing special favor to some students, the president and masters sent a letter to Ms. Cocke which provided her with directions on how to best feed and care for the students. Among these directions, she had to serve breakfast, dinner, and supper in the cleanest and neatest manner possible. She could no longer feed the students different scraps but had to offer the same sort of victuals at each table. For every dinner she had to offer both fresh and salted meats as options, and on Sunday and twice during the week there had to be puddings or pies available for the student’s consumption. Concerning laundry, she had to wash their clothes and stockings and remember to pay particular attention to the notes the students left along with their items. If a student’s linen were to go missing, she was responsible for correcting the servants and making a complaint with the president or master. As for the students themselves, she was to not concern herself with their personal business, and if she had a complaint about one of them, she was to address it with the student’s master. Despite the college officials plainly laying out Mrs. Cocke’s duties to her, she did not reform her ways.

21 John Winthrop, The History of New England from 1630-1649, Vol. I (Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 1853), 373n1.

151 Subsequently, in the meeting minutes of the president and masters from July 23, 1763, the attendees agreed that she was “much amiss in her Office of Housekeeper,” and “desire[d] her to

Finish her Year and provide herself with some other Place.” Although the college officials immediately thereafter agreed to place an advertisement in the Virginia Gazette looking for “a

Man capable of managing the Housekeeper’s Business,” they ended up hiring a woman in

November whom they referred to as simply “Mrs. Garret.” Mercifully, there do not appear to be records of students at the other colonial colleges having to deal with stewards or housekeepers like Mistress Eaton or Mrs. Cocke.22

Despite the fact that the majority of time in a student’s day was scheduled for them, including class, worship, prayer, and meals, their unscheduled “free time” was not truly free but encumbered by rules. At Yale, for example, what began as President Thomas Clap’s rule that

“Every Freshman Shall be Obliged to Go on any reasonable and proper Errand when he is Sent by any Student in any Superior Class” grew to a series of regulations governing the conduct of freshmen. Printed as a broadside for all to see, the regulations consisted of eleven rules. They varied from what clothes freshman could wear to their behavior in the yard and buildings.

Concerning clothes, freshmen had to appear completely dressed with a hat, but could not wear said hat within ten rods (55 yards) of the president, eight rods (44 yards) of a professor, or five rods (27.5 yards) of a tutor. The rules also forbid freshmen from wearing gowns and walking with canes. In the yard, they could not run or play with any upperclassmen unless asked. Within the college buildings, they could not call to anyone in the yard through a window, had to rise whenever a superior entered or left a room, and give way to a superior when passing up or down

22 “Journal of the Meeting of the President and Masters of William and Mary College, February 9, 1763,” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 4 (April 1895): 262-263; “Journal of the Meeting of the President and Masters of William and Mary College, July 23, 1763, Nov. 8, 1763” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 1 (July 1895): 44-45.

152 stairs or through an entry or narrow passage. Yale alum Oliver Wolcott, Jr. (class of 1778) got to see these rules in action firsthand when he visited the college yard prior to enrolling. Describing the freshmen he encountered, Wolcott wrote: “There was a class who wore no gowns and who walked but never ran or jumped in the yard. They appeared much in awe or looked surlily [sic]

… Some of the young gownsmen treated those who wore neither hats or gowns in the yard with harshness and what I thought indignity.”23 The rules which President Clap put in place likely made the Yale freshmen feel quite anxious, as if they were always on the brink of unintentionally breaking a rule. They must also have been quite a sight to see: constantly bobbing up and down in their chairs as superiors entered and exited rooms, and frequently donning and removing their hats as their distance from the president, professors, and tutors changed as they made their way across the yard. Even though such regulations of the freshmen’s conduct at Yale might seem unreasonable, they were a part of President Clap’s attempt to both keep the young men in line and develop the qualities of a good character in them. Additionally, the regulations must have worked to at least some extent, as they remained an integral part of college governance at Yale through the end of the colonial period.24

Colonial college officials did not restrict the rules and regulations on student free time to what students could wear or how they behaved toward older students and adults. The “Laws and

Orders” in place at King’s College beginning in 1755, for example, also dictated the moral behavior expected of students. As representatives of the college, students could not be in contact with “any persons of known scandalous behavior,” participate in drunkenness, fornication, lying, theft, swearing, fighting, maiming, or slandering. Many of the favorite past-times of the period

23 Oliver Wolcott, Jr., “Autobiographical Sketch” in Memorial of Henry Wolcott, one of the First Settlers of Windsor, Connecticut, ed. Samuel Wolcott (New York: Anson D.F. Randolph and Co., 1881), 225. 24 “Every Freshman, after his admission into Yale-College…” in Memorials of Eminent Yale Men, Vol I: Religion and Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1814), 215-216.

153 were also off limits to them: students could not play cards, or dice, or bet on cockfights. Any student found guilty of breaking these rules usually had to pay a monetary fine between three and five schillings for the first offense. If found guilty a second time, the student faced either public admonishment or expulsion from the college, depending on the severity of the crime. Despite the seemingly all-encompassing nature of these rules, President Johnson later admitted that he was too lenient on the students.25

When King’s second president, Reverend Myles Cooper, took charge of the college from

Reverend Johnson, he tried to improve the collegiate way of living by tightening up on student discipline. President Cooper introduced what he called the “Black Book” to the college. While the book was simply a record of student transgressions, the fear of one’s name appearing in the book seems to have been enough to prevent many King’s students from misbehaving. In fact, in a letter to fellow educator Jonathan Boucher, President Cooper bragged, “I will venture to affirm, that, with Respect to Discipline (which, it seems is one Accusation exhibited against us,) we are far from being outdone by any College on the American Continent: and I know of none in

Europe, to which, in this Article, we are really inferior.”26 For the time-being, at least, President

Cooper seemed to have been able to solve a problem with which many of his fellow college presidents were still struggling.27

Aside from the Yale rules regarding freshman dress and deference, administrators attempted to strictly limit the activities of all students during their free time. Students could not patronize taverns, victualling houses, or inns for food or drink unless accompanied by a parent or

25 “Laws and Orders of the College of New York, Adopted June 3, 1755,” in Samuel Johnson, President of King’s College: His Career and Writings, Vol. IV, ed. Herbert and Carol Schneider (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 226-227 26 “Myles Cooper to Jonathan Boucher, March 22, 1770,” in Herbert B. Howe, “Colonel George Washington and King’s College,” Columbia University Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 6 (June 1932): 141. 27 David C. Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, 1746-1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 130.

154 similar authority figure. They could not associate with any persons the administrators believed to be leading a “dissolute and unquiet life.” College officials forbid them from attending court elections and participating in hunting and fowling. Even life in the residence halls was supposed to operate according to strict regulations. Students could not visit their fellow pupils in their chambers because to do so would be intrusive. Nor could they leave their chambers after nine p.m. They also had to extinguish their candles by eleven p.m. and could not relight them until four a.m.28

Despite the regulations in place, the residence halls did not exist in a perpetual state of peacefulness and calm. Proof of this appears in a letter sophomore Ezra Clap wrote to classmate

Nathaniel Chauncey in 1738. In the letter, Clap explains that one night some of the freshman got together “six courts of rhum and two payls fool of Sydar,” and eight pounds of sugar and proceeded to wake the other students to participate in their partying. They were so noisy, however, that the tutor woke up and ordered them to return to bed. While most of the students followed the tutor’s orders, others did not and instead went up to the door of “old father

Monsher” and beat on it and yelled and screamed so much that, according to Clap, “a bodey would have thought they were killing dogs.” While the rules at Yale that regulated the student’s free time were strict, their existence helped to ensure that the 1738 incident was a rare, out-the- ordinary experience, rather than a regular occurrence. 29

Similar rules concerning moral conduct were in place at Harvard College. The college laws, for example, forbid students from swearing and lying, frequenting taverns and victualing

28 “Orders and Appointment to be Observed in the Collegiate School in Connecticut,” in Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College with Annals of the College History, Vol I: 1701-1745, ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1885), 347-351. 29 “Ezra Clap to Nathaniel Chauncey, 1738,” in Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College with Annals of the College History, Vol I: 1701-1745, ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1885), 598.

155 houses unless accompanied by a parent or guardian, “taking tobacco,” and keeping the acquaintance of those of a “dissolute life.” It was some of the behaviors which these laws failed to address, however, that caused the administrators the most trouble. President John Leverett, for example, wrote in his diary in 1717 that he and the college faculty and staff were having to contend with students bringing and playing cards in the college and taking part in “riotous actions” in the hall. A student diary from the same period also refers to students leaving

Cambridge for Boston to observe and participate in horse races, pirate hangings, and various other diversions. Student participation in such activities was exactly what college officials had intended to avoid by instituting the collegiate way of living. In his diary, Leverett wrote that the faculty dealt with these issues by publicly admonishing the guilty parties and, in the case of the riotous action in the hall, making the students pay for the damages they inflicted. Such punishments, however, must not have been enough of a deterrent, as Leverett’s successor,

President Benjamin Wadsworth, instituted a new set of college laws that was more exhaustive and added fines ranging from two pence to twenty schillings for each transgression a student committed. Adaptation, therefore, was a key component to keeping the collegiate way of life viable.30

The faculty and staff at the College of William & Mary, meanwhile, had to deal with three particularly difficult periods of student misbehavior in 1763, 1766, and 1769. In the meeting minutes of the president and masters from May 10, 1763, for instance, the college officials explained that they had to expel John Hyde Saunders, a student whom they had

30 “The Lawes and Orders of Harvard College, 1655-1708,” Laws and statutes of Harvard, 1655-1890, UAI 15.800 Box 1, Volume 1, Harvard University Archives; John Leverett, “Diary, 1707-1723,” Papers of John Leverett, UAI 15.866 Box 1, Harvard University Archives, Harvard University; Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636-1936, (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1936), 61; “College Laws, 1734,” Laws and Statutes of Harvard 1655-1890, UAI 15.800 Box 4, Volume 1, Harvard University Archives.

156 previously accused of “impudent and unheard of manner to the Master of the Grammar School,” for refusing to serve out his punishment and not following the rules of the college unless he agreed with them. At the same time, they forbid students from entertaining or associating with

Saunders at the college, and any student found doing so faced severe punishment. By October, three students, John Walker, Walter Jones, and James McClurg, found themselves accused of

“injurious Behavior” to a family in Williamsburg. The president and masters condemned them to return home until November 10; if the students refused to comply with their sentence, they faced expulsion. Only two months later, on December 9, college officials had to expel William

Thompson, a student who was “concern’d in no small act of Violence and Outrage” in

Williamsburg, because he refused to submit himself to punishment. Once again, the administrators forbid current students from associating with the expelled student.31

Even though it would be ludicrous to say that no students broke rules or received punishments over the next two years, student misbehavior underwent a particular lull in 1764 and 1765. By 1766, however, incidences of student misconduct rose once again. In July of that year, college officials ordered Mann Page, Sr. and Nathaniel Burwell to ask pardon for indecent behavior toward the president and demanded that those two young men, along with Mann Page,

Jr. and John Page, face reprimand for frequenting public houses in Williamsburg and going out of the bounds of the college without permission. While Mann Page Jr. and John Page began following the rules after their reprimand, Mann Page Sr. and Nathaniel Burwell did not, and the president and masters condemned them to a month at home unless they confessed and asked the president for pardon before the punishment went into effect the following day. Both Page Sr. and

Burwell ultimately acquiesced and received pardons. In hopes of preventing future students from

31 “Journal of the Meetings of the President and Masters of William and Mary College, May 10, 1763, October 6, 1763, December 9, 1763,” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 1 (July 1895): 43-45.

157 misbehaving as the Page boys and young Burwell did, the college officials resolved to ask the keepers of the public houses in town from allowing students entry into their establishments. If they refused, the president and masters threatened to apply to the authorities to have their licenses taken away.32

Even though the pubs in Williamsburg were thereafter off limits to students, they still found other ways to get into trouble. In April 1769, for example, Thomas Byrd, son of Virginia planter and member of the House of Burgesses William Byrd III, behaved in a “rude and riotous manner” and “destroyed plates and windows.” His punishment was a whipping lasting from ten a.m. to twelve p.m. Not wanting to endure such a harsh punishment, Byrd decided to take advantage of the only option left to him: disenrollment from the college. Byrd’s brother, John, also found himself in trouble that year. The college officials accused, and thereafter found him guilty, of threatening to whip a college servant and then the housekeeper when she tried to intervene. Like his brother, John Byrd chose to leave rather than undergo punishment. The Byrd boys, however, were not the only students causing trouble at William & Mary in 1769. Their fellow student, Robert Robinson, stole two pairs of shoes, one pair of stockings, and a penknife from John Page, as well as other personal possessions from various other students. As a result, the college officials deemed Robinson “a dangerous person and unworthy of being a Member of this Society,” and promptly expelled him from the college. Ultimately, the punishments which the president and masters at William & Mary meted out to their misbehaving students may have

32 “Journal of the Meetings of the President and Masters of William and Mary College, July 22, 1766, July 26, 1766,” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Oct. 1895): 131-132; “Journal of the Meetings of the President and Masters of William and Mary College, August 2, 1766, August 6, 1766,” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Jan. 1896): 187-188.

158 been harsh, but they were a fundamental part of both achieving and maintaining a righteous way of life on the campus.33

***

A key component of maintaining the collegiate way at the colonial colleges was to keep the students hemmed in by schedules, rules, and punishments. By governing not only where the students lived, but how they went about their days, the college officials had a greater ability to control the students’ behavior and their exposure to the temptations of the world. One way that the administrators regulated the students outside of the classroom was with scheduled worship and prayer services. The students’ mealtimes were another scheduled activity that allowed the college officials to maintain control over them. Regardless of student hunger, the college stewards and housekeepers were the ones in charge of setting mealtimes. Similarly, it was the college officials responsible for the dining room rules who decided where students sat

(sometimes according to rank, other times according to class or name) and what, if any, choice they had over what they ate. Strict rules also served to regulate student behavior. To try and keep them on the straight and narrow during their free time, college officials forbid students from both the boyish activities of lying, swearing, and fighting as well as the more adult activities of drinking, gambling, and fornication. A final way to regulate student behavior was through punishment. If students failed to comply with the rules the administrators set for them, they received punishments which could range in consequence from small monetary fees to the act of suspension and expulsion. If the assessment of one young English student in 1671 who referred to Harvard as “a place certainly more free from temptations to lewdness than ordinarily England

33 “Journal of the Meetings of the President and Masters of William and Mary College, April 12, 1769,” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 1 (July 1904): 21-22; “Journal of the Meeting of the President and Masters of William and Mary College, April 15, 1769, Sept. 6, 1769, November 16, 1769,” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Oct. 1904): 133-134, 136-137.

159 hath been,” is any indication, colonial college officials had certainly succeeded in creating a controlled environment for their students.34

Recreation

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of student life was the recreational activities which undergraduates got to participate in during their leisure time. Although organized athletic activities did not become a part of college life until the following century, colonial students still had plenty of opportunities to work off their extra energy. In the warmer months, one of the most common activities that many students took part in was hiking. It was also during this time of the year that students enjoyed swimming, sailing, fishing, hunting (where permitted), and horse- racing. A Harvard student even penned an ode to Fresh Pond in Cambridge in 1731, writing:

“The throng of Harvard know thy pleasures well / Joys too Extravagant perhaps to tell / Hither oftimes the Learned Tribe repair, / When Sol returning warms the growing Year.”35 When the days got colder, students still kept themselves busy by skating, sledding, and, on the rare occasion, taking sleigh rides. The major non-athletic activity that students enjoyed was membership in one of the various literary societies on the campuses. Even theater, while forbidden by some of the colleges’ laws, became a popular activity among many colonial students. While such recreational activities were more often than not organized by students rather than by faculty or administrators, college officials still kept a watchful eye over the students’

34 Quoted in Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 27. 35 New England Weekly Journal Poem, 1731, in Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636- 1936 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1936), 111.

160 activities to ensure that they did not participate in anything that was inappropriate or could potentially be detrimental to their characters.36

Although colonial students initially established literary societies at their colleges to provide themselves with places to sharpen their public speaking and debate skills, these societies often became the be-all and end-all of social life for undergraduates on campus. One of the earliest college literary societies founded in the colonies was the Philomusarian Club at Harvard, started in 1728 to “read members’ poems and indulge in learned conversation, pipes, tobacco, and beer,” but it was relatively short-lived. William & Mary, too, had the F.H.C. (Flat Hat Club)

Society, founded in 1750, which counted Thomas Jefferson as a member, but it only lasted until a little after 1772. The Linonian Society and the Society of Brothers in Unity at Yale, however, still exist to this day, with the latter now a secret society. Linonia and Brothers, founded in 1753 and 1768, respectively, divided up the entire undergraduate body at Yale, with every student belonging to one society or the other.37

College campuses, however, were not the only places that literary societies became part of colonial culture. In fact, colonists established salons, clubs, and coteries up and down the eastern seaboard for the dissemination and appreciation of colonial literature. Unlike at the colleges, most of the literary clubs and coteries in the colonies welcomed women. In addition, some women, known as salonnières, founded and ran clubs of their own. Elizabeth Graeme, one such salonnière, held weekly “attic evenings” in Pennsylvania, either in Philadelphia or at her

36 Kelley, Yale: A History, 43. 37 Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936, 62; “The Flat Hat Club,” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Jan., 1917): 161; Kelley, Yale: A History, 107; W. E. Robinson, A Catalogue of the Society of Brothers in Unity, Yale College, Founded 1768 (New Haven: Published by the Society, Printed by T.J. Stafford, 1854), 1.

161 country home, Graeme Park. Although most of the attendees were women, some men, including future Pennsylvania congressman John Dickinson, attended as well.38

Aside from providing the students with a place to debate and discuss the days intellectual and social issues, these college literary societies also helped to expand the students’ access to literature. Both societies had collections of books which served as small libraries from which the members could borrow books not easily found in the college library. Although the great works of

Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Swift appeared in the Yale library stacks, college officials restricted borrowing privileges for freshmen and sophomores to a mere twenty-eight books. The Linonian Society Library, begun by donations from students Timothy Dwight,

Nathan Hale, and James Hillhouse, grew from approximately thirty books to one-hundred books by approximately 1768 and again to two-hundred books by 1779. Some of the early works donated included Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal, or The Adventures of a Guinea, A.M. Ramsay’s

The Travels of Cyrus, Addison and Steele’s The Spectator, and J.B.L. Crevier’s The History of the Roman Emperors. All of the Linonian’s book were in English, whereas the college library contained a large number of books in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and the Linonians, unlike the college library, did not restrict access to the books based on anything other than membership in the society. Such society-based libraries, including the Brother’s 163-volume library, illustrate that despite the shared interest in intellectual pursuits, the academic library of the college and the social libraries of the students were quite different from each other.39

38 David S. Shields, “The Early American Salon,” HUMANITIES, Vol. 29, No. 1 (January/February 2008), https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2008/januaryfebruary/feature/the-early-american-salon; Caroline Wigginton, with William J. Crosby, “‘The Dream,’ by Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson,” Common-place: The Journal of Early American Life, Vol. 16, No. 4.5 (Summer 2016), http://common-place.org/book/dream-1768-1790-elizabeth- graeme-fergusson/. 39 Kathy M. Umbricht Straka, “The Linonian Society Library of Yale College: The First Years, 1768- 1790,” The Yale University Library Gazette, Vol. 54, No. 4 (April 1980): 184-186; W. E. Robinson, A Catalogue of the Society of Brothers in Unity, 4.

162 In addition to providing members unlimited access to their libraries, the literary societies at Yale were also a place where students could show off their acting chops. Although the college laws still technically forbid students from acting in or being present at the staging of a play, and there was a fine of eighty cents for breaking this rule, college officials often looked the other way and allowed plays to go on as long as women were not permitted in the audience. While small comedic sketches were part of the societies’ everyday meetings, they reserved larger productions for their annual celebrations in April. These plays became quite popular among both the students and the New Haven community. In fact, according to society secretary Ebenezer Williams, when the Linonians put on the comedy West Indian in 1773 it drew “Officers…dressed in

Regimentals, & the Actresses [probably local girls] in full and elegant suits of the Lady’s

Apparel.” The onset of the Revolutionary War forced the societies to cancel their annual celebrations in 1775, but they picked them up again the following year. These subsequent fetes, however, involved much less public fanfare. While the dramas and comedies put on by the societies at Yale were technically against school rules, the college officials’ decision to allow them to go on shows that they deemed plays within the bounds of proper behavior and the administrators did not truly think student participation in them was harmful.40

Student involvement in plays also occurred at the College of William & Mary. While, as a general rule, the colonists tended to oppose the theater due to the long-held beliefs that stage productions were frivolous and the characters in the them were often immoral, communities in the south were more receptive to them. In fact, an advertisement printed in The Virginia Gazette on September 10, 1736 announced: “This Evening will be performed at the Theatre, by the

40 The Laws of Yale-College, in New-Haven, in Connecticut, Enacted by the President and Fellows, 6 October, A.D. 1795 (New Haven: Thomas Green and Son, 1800), 27; Edward B. Coe, “The Literary Societies,” in William L. Kingsley, Yale College: A Sketch of its History, Vol. 1, Part 2 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1879), 312-313.

163 young gentleman of the College [of William & Mary], The Tragedy of ‘Cato’…”41 The play, by

Joseph Addison, follows the final days of the eponymous character, a Roman senator, as he tries to resist the tyranny of Caesar. Addison’s intent was for the audience to view Cato as a symbol of republicanism, virtue, and liberty. Although such ideas in the play would cause problems in the colonies later in the century, the play was apparently a hit. Only a week later the Gazette printed another advertisement, this one for a performance of Addison’s The Drummer; or, The

Haunted House, again staged by the students at the college. While the laws at William and Mary did not strictly forbid students from acting in, or attending, plays as the laws at Yale did, the administration’s willingness to allow the student body to perform before the community is further evidence of the fact that college officials did not truly view the theater as an improper activity for their pupils.42

As at Yale, the College of New Jersey became the home of two major literary societies during the colonial period. The American Whig Society and the Cliosophic Society, founded on

June 24, 1769 and June 8, 1770, respectively, were actually outgrowths of two earlier clubs. Both established in 1765, the Well-Meaning Club, predecessor to the Cliosophic Society, was the brainchild of graduate William Paterson and students Robert Odgen, Luther Martin, Oliver

Ellsworth, and Tapping Reeve, while the Plain Dealing Club, whose founding students’ names have been lost to history, was the predecessor of the American Whig Society. Although each of these predecessor societies were meant to be independent student organizations, the bitter rivalry between the two built to such a fever pitch that the faculty and trustees intervened and suggested

41 Frederic M. Litto, “Addison’s Cato in the Colonies,” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 3 (July 1966): 436. 42 Ibid., 435-436; Robert Manson Myers, “The Old Dominion Looks to London: A Study of English Literary Influences upon The Virginia Gazette (1736-1766),” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 54, No. 3 (July 1946): 211; The city of Williamsburg had a long tradition of theater, but this did not necessarily include the college’s students from the start.

164 the two clubs merge. After students from each group immediately dismissed the suggestion, the administrators decided to suppress the clubs instead in March 1769. The arrival of John

Witherspoon as the sixth president of the college, however, altered their fate. Instead of taking a hostile attitude toward the two societies, Dr. Witherspoon built a type of administrative sponsorship of them, even providing them with separate rooms in Nassau Hall, because he believed that they would help to build the students’ public speaking skills.43

The American Whig Society, founded by future president James Madison, future novelist

Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and future Revolutionary poet Philip Freneau, took its name from the nom de plume of William Livingston, who would go on to serve as governor of New Jersey for fourteen years. The Cliosophic Society, meanwhile, took its name from William Paterson, who had coined the term “cliosophic” as meaning “the praise or learning of wisdom” when he was part of the earlier Well-Meaning Club. Although separate societies, College of New Jersey students had founded Whig and Clio for the same reasons: to create a greater literary culture on campus and to practice oration. Despite these shared goals, however, the two often became bitter rivals. In fact, a so-called “Paper War” ensued between the two societies in 1771.44

During the Paper War, members of each society wrote and distributed satires which lampooned individuals from the rival society. One of the remaining manuscripts, titled Satires against the Tories – Written in the Last War between the Whigs and Cliosophians in which the

Former Obtained a Compleat Victory, includes prose and verse from Whigs Breckenridge,

43 J. Jefferson Looney, “Useful Without Attracting Attention: The Cliosophic and American Whig Societies of the College of New Jersey, 1765-1896,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Spring 2003): 393-394; William Paterson, Glimpses of Colonial Society and the Life at Princeton College, 1766-1773, ed. W. Jay Mills (Philadelphia: J.B. Lipincott Company, 1903), 17-19. 44 J. Jefferson Looney, “Useful Without Attracting Attention: The Cliosophic and American Whig Societies of the College of New Jersey, 1765-1896,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Spring 2003): 393-394; Jacob N. Beam’s The American Whig Society of Princeton University (Princeton: Published by the Society, 1933), 43-44.

165 Freneau, Madison, and Philip Fithian. Although the use of the word “Tories” in the Whig’s title may appear to be a political attack on the Clios, revolutionary sentiment in Princeton was so high that no more than a handful of Clios would actually have identified as Loyalists. Thus, the Whigs employed the word Tory not as a serious political attack but because it meant the opposite of

Whig and they knew that it would rankle the Clios to call them such. The Satires begins with the lines, “Arm’d for virtue now we point the pen / Brand the bold front of shameless, guilty men /

Dash the proud Tory in his gilded car / Bare the mean heart that lurks beneath a star.”45 In spite of the rather malicious tone of these lines, e.g., branding the Clios as “shameless, guilty men” and possessors of “mean hearts” was certainly not kind, the Paper War of 1771 was for all intents and purposes a way for the students to entertain themselves. For example, Madison’s supposed call for his fellow Whigs to shun the Clios “until this tribe of dunces find / The baseness of their groveling mind,” was more of a call for the Clios (and primarily their “poet laureate,” Samuel

Spring) to give as good as they had received than it was an actual order to shun their fellow students. Nor did Madison truly believe that his fellow Princetonians were “dunces” with

“groveling minds.” The Paper War, in fact, provided the students with an outlet to release their pent-up emotions and superfluous energy in a mentally productive way rather than in a physical way, which could possibly lead to them inflicting harm on themselves or others.46

Whig and Clio members, however, were not the only ones who used their writing to release their pent-up emotions; everyday colonists did too. Pennsylvania salonnière Elizabeth

Graeme, for instance, wrote her 1768 poem “The Dream,” to express her frustration with British

45 Hugh Henry Breckenridge, Philip Fithian, Philip Freneau, and James Madison, Satires against the Tories – Written in the Last War between the Whigs and Cliosophians in which the Former Obtained a Compleat Victory in Jacob N. Beam’s The American Whig Society of Princeton University (Princeton: Published by the Society, 1933), 45. 46 Jacob N. Beam, The American Whig Society of Princeton University (Princeton: Published by the Society, 1933), 43-47; James Madison, “A Poem Against the Tories,” in Jacob N. Beam’s The American Whig Society, 56-57.

166 policies. Written as a response to the Stamp Act in the colonies, and John Dickinson’s own

Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, the poem is the recounting of a dream of Graeme’s. In this dream, she witnesses a personification of Britain reprimanding the Pennsylvania colony, the spirit of William Penn descending from the clouds to issue a rebuttal in the form of a scroll, and then John Dickinson proceeding to read Penn’s scroll to the personification of Britain. The heart of the poem begins with Britain scorning the colonists:

What means she cryd this factious upstart Race / For them I leave my concave Grottos place; / Dare they reject my Commerce and my Power, / And spurn my influence in a fatal Hour? / Shall the rich Vessel part my Waves no more / Nor fling my treasure on their woody Shore? / Shall taste, and Elegance, of every kind, / Be by the Natives of those wilds resignd? / Forbid it Royalty! forbid it Trade! / Albion forbids and shall be obeyd! / Draw forth ye daring Tribes retract your claim / And learn to tremble at Britons Name (47-58).47

Like many of her fellow colonists, therefore, Graeme viewed Britain as a harsh mistress whose price for trade, the collection of unfair taxes, was too much to bear. Graeme presents her argument further on in the poem in words which she attributes to William Penn:

But now ‘tis Freedom’s more immediate Cause, / That you from Luxurys Attractions draws: / To show proud Albion that you can resign / Her manufactures and her Trade decline: / When weighty Taxes do each good invade / And strike at Liberty, that lovely Maid! / Safe let her rest beneath your Western Skys; / And fall her Martyrs; or Heroes rise (262-270).48

Thus, through Penn, Graeme advocated that the colonists forgo importing British goods in order to avoid paying the unfair taxes which the British government levied on them. Such taxes, according to Graeme, were a strike at the colonists’ liberty. Further on in the poem, she argues that the colonists can make up for the loss of these imported goods by banding together, man, woman, and child, to produce their own goods. “The Dream,” therefore, was an outright attack

47 Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, “‘The Dream’ (1768, 1790) by Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson,” Common- place: The Journal of Early American Life, Vol. 16, No. 4.5 (Summer 2016), http://common-place.org/book/dream- 1768-1790-elizabeth-graeme-fergusson/. 48 Ibid.

167 on the British government’s taxation policies. Normally, for any British subject, let alone a woman, to question the actions of the government would be asking for trouble. The social culture of the colonies’ salons and coteries, however, protected Graeme, just as the literary societies at the colonial colleges allowed their members to express their ideas without fear of reprimand because their activities were administration approved.49

Even after the so-called “Paper War” ended, members of both societies in Princeton continued to satirize one another. In 1775, for example, Philip Freneau wrote the poem “Mac

Swiggen” about an unnamed Cliosophian, in which he teased, “Come on, Mac Swiggen, come – your muse is willing,/ Your prose is merry, but your verse is killing – / Come on, attack me with that whining prose, / Your beard is red, and swine like is your nose.”50 How the attacked Clio responded to Freneau’s challenge is, unfortunately, unknown because the only manuscripts known to have survived the Paper War are those written by the Whigs. One can imagine, however, that the Clio’s retorts were as equally biting. As with Madison’s lines, it is highly doubtful that Freneau actually viewed his Clio adversary as a writer of “killing verse” or the possessor of a “swine-like” nose. Freneau’s lines were meant in jest; he wrote them for his and his fellow Whigs’ entertainment.51

In addition to the amusement provided, participating in the Whig-Clio writing battles may have actually helped some colonists prepare for their roles in the Revolution by improving their prose, persuasion, and collaboration skills. William Paterson, for example, went on to

49 Caroline Wigginton, with William J. Crosby, “‘The Dream,’ by Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson,” Common- place: The Journal of Early American Life, Vol. 16, No. 4.5 (Summer 2016), http://common-place.org/book/dream- 1768-1790-elizabeth-graeme-fergusson/. 50 Philip Freneau, “Mac Swiggen,” in Charles Richard Williams’ The Cliosophic Society, Princeton University: A Study of its History in Commemoration of its Sesquicentennial Anniversary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1916), 88; Freneau went on to become one of the most prolific journalists and poets of the Revolutionary era and early National period. 51 Charles Richard Williams, The Cliosophic Society, Princeton University: A Study of its History in Commemoration of its Sesquicentennial Anniversary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1916), 86-87.

168 become a delegate to New Jersey’s constitutional convention and helped write the 1776 New

Jersey constitution, while James Madison became a delegate to the Virginia convention and went on to help write the state’s 1776 constitution and the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Although the in-fighting among students brought on by the Whig-Clio rivalry may seem like the exact opposite of what a college administration would desire, President Witherspoon must have thought that allowing the students to take part in these exchanges was beneficial to them. After all, students were not only using their time outside of the classroom to hone the writing and oratory skills they would need in the classroom, but they were building their characters.

***

A final way in which colonial administrators fostered the collegiate way of life on their campuses was to ensure that the activities which the students took part in during their leisure hours were appropriate for young gentlemen. Some of the activities which the college officials approved of were physical in nature, such as hiking in the summer and skating in the winter, but the most popular were more cerebral in nature. In the literary societies on the colonial campuses, the students took part in debates, discussions, and “paper wars” covering everything from current events to answering questions such as “What thing is the most delightful to Man in the world?”52

In participating in such activities, the students mirrored colonial social culture. Students also had the opportunity to pursue their intellectual interests through borrowing books from their society libraries that were not available to them in the college library or were only available to specific students. Another recreational activity that students participated in and administrators approved of was theater. While college officials initially frowned upon students attending and acting in plays (especially in New England) they became more acceptable as the eighteenth century

52 Edward B. Coe, “The Literary Societies,” in William L. Kingsley, Yale College: A Sketch of its History, Vol. 1, Part 2 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1879), 310.

169 progressed, with Yale officials even ignoring the college law forbidding students from the theater. These activities met the approval of the college officials because they encouraged students to engage their minds, albeit in different ways, outside of school.

Conclusion

In an effort to establish a “more collegiate way” at the colleges of colonial America, the administrators at the schools utilized three major strategies: provide on-campus housing for students, implement strict schedules and rules for time outside of the classroom, and keep an eye on recreational activities so that they remain within the realm of acceptable behavior. College officials utilized these three strategies in an attempt to have more control over their respective student populations than colleges and universities abroad did and, through that attempt, produce both scholarly and honorable young gentlemen. While all of the colleges offered on-campus housing to students by the end of the colonial period, the rapidity with which they offered it and the quality of the housing itself varied from college to college. Some, like Harvard and Queen’s, had housing for students available on day one, but while Harvard administrators went on to oversee the construction of four more dormitories for their students, Queen’s students did not move out of their old tavern until the nineteenth century. Yale, meanwhile, did not have housing for students until sixteen years after they began operations, and the first students at Dartmouth had to live outside during the initial months of their college experience. Despite these setbacks, however, the housing provided to the colonial students achieved the goal of bringing the students together under one roof, where college officials could keep an eye on their behavior and the students themselves could figure out how to share cramped common spaces and get along with one another despite their differences.

170 The schedules implemented by the collegiate administrations also encouraged student togetherness, while at the same time organizing the student’s day outside of the classroom and attempting to keep them righteous. Such scheduled activities included worship and meals. While administrators at all of the colleges wanted and expected their students to attend religious services, such attendance was mandatory for students at Harvard, Yale, and King’s College because their college laws and statutes required it. The time students spent in worship not only helped to renew or foster their faith, but also helped to keep them out of trouble. Scheduled meals allowed administrators to instill a sense of order in their students’ days: everyone sat in his assigned seat, ate at the same time, and most of the time ate the same things. By regulating mealtime in this way, college officials were able to reinforce decorum among the students and also ensure that no student went hungry. To control student behavior outside of these scheduled activities, college presidents, trustees, and other administrators created long sets of rules to guide student behavior. Some of the rules were simple, e.g. no students shall frequent taverns, but others were much more complicated, such as Yale’s rules requiring freshmen to essentially wait hand-and-foot on upperclassmen and don and doff their hats according to their spatial relationship to various authorities. When students failed to follow the college rules, they received punishments. Sometimes these punishments consisted of monetary fees, but they could be as harsh as suspension and expulsion. Although no college officials likely enjoyed dolling out such punishments, doing so was necessary for the maintenance of student behavior and the longed-for achievement of a righteous collegiate environment.

Administrative and faculty oversight of recreational activities also helped to ensure that the students conducted themselves properly during their free time. While, as young men, the students were wont to participate in physical activities, there was also a strong desire among

171 many of them to exercise their minds outside of the classroom. To accomplish this, students at many of the colonial colleges formed their own literary societies, in which they were free to read, write, discuss, and debate on as many diverse topics as they could imagine. Literary societies also gave students access to books which were not part of the college curriculum and provided a platform for them to show off their acting skills. The students’ chosen recreational activities not only stimulated their minds, and thus met the approval of college officials, but were advantageous to their learning because their social nature helped build upon the bonds the students had begun to form during their cohabitation. From the dormitory and the dining room, to the church and the stage, the leaders of colonial America’s colleges worked to cultivate a more collegiate way of life for their students than prevailed anywhere else. Although the collegiate way of life did not always guarantee the production of morally superior young men, the attempt to create a principled environment, in addition to the curriculum and teaching techniques instituted at the colonial colleges, were intentional choices made by the colonists to differentiate colonial education from English education, which is the subject of the next chapter.

172 CHAPTER 4: THE ENGLISH EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE

On May 1, 1699, at the College of William & Mary, a student delivered a speech in which he tackled the question of whether it was better to earn an education at home or to obtain one abroad in England. The student ultimately concluded that, “a Virginia education is the most proper and suitable to Virginia children & that with noe such Loss of time health Wealth or

Reputation & with a great deale more Comfort to ourselves and all our Relations wee may follow our studies at home & improve our naturally good Capacityes to the Service of the Church And

State in our own Country.”1 While this answer was surely satisfactory to the student’s

Williamsburg audience, which included Governor Nicholson and members of the House of

Burgesses, his preference for a colonial education over an English one was not a preference which all of his fellow colonists shared.

According to matriculation lists at the University of Oxford and the University of

Cambridge, about one hundred young men left colonial America to enroll in one of the two

English universities between 1648 and 1775. Of those one-hundred students, more than half hailed from Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina. Part of the predominance of southern colonists at Oxford and Cambridge was due to the fact that of the nine colleges the colonists established, they located only one in the South, the College of William & Mary. In addition, the

Anglican tests at Oxford and Cambridge were no barrier to colonial southerners attending the

1 “Speeches of Students of the College of William and Mary Delivered May 1, 1699,” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Oct 1930): 328-329.

173 two English universities, as they were for most of their northern compatriots. Also, many southern colonists, in an attempt to imitate the life of the landed gentry in England and be accepted as “real” Englishmen in spite of their colonial birth, viewed an education at Oxford or

Cambridge as one of the necessary components for becoming a gentleman. Despite the fact that it became a common practice for colonists to send their sons abroad for their education, there were also a myriad of reasons why such a decision could be, and often was, problematic.2

Putting aside the cost and risk involved with attending school abroad, which included cost in both time and money to travel across the ocean, as well as the risk of drowning at sea or disease in England, many of the elements which made up an English education failed to meet the needs and desires of many colonists. As the aforementioned student at the College of William &

Mary pointed out in his 1699 speech, colonists who earned their education abroad were often solely responsible for maintaining their studies, with no parents ensuring that they stayed out of trouble. This situation was similarly problematic for the parents since they did not have the opportunity to frequently visit to ensure their children’s wellbeing. Furthermore, the very education which the colonial students received in England had become questionable. In a 1762 letter concerning education, Reverend James Maury stated that he did not believe that an English education was suitable for American youth because they were different “in so many important

Respects from Europeans, that a plan of Education judiciously adapted to these last, would no more fit us, than an Almanac, calculated for the Latitude of London, would that of

2 Willard Connely, “Colonial Americans in Oxford and Cambridge,” The American Oxonian, Vol. XXIX, No. 1 (January 1942): 6; Willard Connely, “List of Colonial Americans in Oxford and Cambridge,” The American Oxonian, Vol. XXIX, No 2 (April 1942): 77; William Sasche, The Colonial American in Britain (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1956), 47.

174 Williamsburg.”3 In addition to the educational content, some colonists, such as Virginia planter

Landon Carter, had come to believe that an education abroad did little more than return youth to the colonies with airs from the mother country. In an entry in his diary, Carter wrote, “I believe everybody begins to laugh at English education; the general importers of it bring back only a stiff priggishness with as little good manners as possible.”4 For a number of colonists, therefore, the concept of sending their young men abroad to England for an education held less and less appeal.

The beneficiaries of this shift were the colleges of colonial America.5

The Colonists

Of all the colonists to matriculate at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the first came from Massachusetts. In total, seventeen young men from the Bay Colony studied abroad in

England between 1648 and 1773. Not all the students, however, were natives of the colony. The first four, James Ward, Sampson Eyton, Henry Saltonstall, and William Stoughton, had been born in England. The first colonial-born student was John Stone, who matriculated at Pembroke

College Cambridge in 1653. Aside from calling Massachusetts home, these five young men, along with three of their fellow students, had another thing in common since they had all earned their bachelor’s degrees at Harvard College. The work they went on to do at Oxford and

Cambridge, therefore, was postgraduate in nature. Since Harvard did not begin offering graduate degrees until the nineteenth century, these Bachelor of Arts recipients had little choice but to go

3 James Maury, “A Dissertation on Education in the Form of a Letter from James Maury to Robert Jackson, July 17, 1762,” ed. Helen Duprey Bullock, Papers of the Albemarle County Historical Society, II (1941-1942): 57- 58. 4 Landon Carter, “Extracts from Diary of Col. Landon Carter,” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 1 (July 1904): 47. 5 William Sasche, The Colonial American in Britain (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1956), 49-50; “Speeches of Students of the College of William and Mary Delivered May 1, 1699,” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Oct 1930): 326-328.

175 abroad if they wished to continue their education. The first Bay Colonist to go abroad for his undergraduate education was William Knight, who matriculated at Pembroke College

Cambridge in 1656. Fellow prospective undergraduates John Haynes, Francis Higginson, and

William Vesey soon followed Knight to Pembroke College Cambridge, St. John’s College

Cambridge, and Merton College Oxford, respectively. While this initial group of

Massachusettsans going to England for their education at first appears counterintuitive to the goal of Harvard’s founders, which was to provide young men with an education steeped in

Puritan beliefs and traditions, one has to remember that both the political and religious situations in England had changed from what they had been when the Massachusetts General Court founded the college. In 1636, King Charles I was the head of the state and the Church of England was the state religion, but by 1649 parliament had executed the king so there was no Supreme

Head to lead the Church of England. Then, in 1653, Oliver Cromwell named himself Lord

Protector of England and Congregationalism became the state religion. For a time, therefore,

Oxford and Cambridge were relatively welcoming places for Puritan colonists to receive their higher education. Once this period closed, however, no Massachusetts men attended Oxford or

Cambridge for forty years.6

The next group of colonists to travel to England for their education were Virginians,

Marylanders, and South Carolinians. Almost four times as many of them traveled abroad for their education in comparison to their New England compatriots. The first southerners to take the step of sending a son abroad were the Lee family of Virginia, who sent their son, John, to

6 Willard Connely, “Colonial Americans in Oxford and Cambridge,” The American Oxonian, Vol. XXXIX, No. I (January 1942): 6; Willard Connely, “List of Colonial Americans in Oxford and Cambridge,” The American Oxonian, Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 (April 1942): 74-77; G. R. Evans, The University of Oxford: A New History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 177; G.R. Evans, The University of Cambridge: A New History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 215- 216.

176 Queen’s College Oxford in 1658. Fellow Virginian and southern elite Ralph Wormeley followed

Lee to Oxford, but attended Oriel College, in 1665. Virginians began arriving at Cambridge with the matriculations of Henry Perrott and William Spencer at Clare College in 1673 and at Christ’s

College in 1684, respectively. Maryland sent its first student, Henry Addison, to Queen’s

College Oxford in 1735. Throughout the eighteenth century, Oxford and Cambridge became the preferred educational institutions for many famous and well-to-do Virginian families, including the Amblers, Baylors, Beverleys, Burwells, Carters, Carys, Fitzhughs, Lees, Lightfoots, Nelsons,

Pages, Robinsons, and Wormeleys. While the sons of Virginia and Maryland attended both

Oxford and Cambridge from the beginning, no South Carolinians sent their sons to Cambridge until 1764. This could partly be due to the fact that two of South Carolina’s most well-to-do and famous families, which were the Draytons and the Pinckneys, sent their sons to Balliol College

Oxford and Christ Church Oxford, and so their fellow colonists followed suit in hopes of copying their success. It was only after Attorney General of South Carolina Sir James Wright sent his sons, Robert and James, to Trinity College Cambridge that South Carolinians began sending their sons there in waves, and soon outnumbered the Virginians in attendance.7

The final group of colonists who sent their sons abroad to Oxford and Cambridge were from Pennsylvania and New York. The first middle colonist sent to England was Thomas Moore, of Philadelphia, in 1709. He matriculated at Trinity College Cambridge. Nine years later, fellow

Philadelphian James Trent began his studies at Balliol College Oxford. The first non-

Pennsylvanian, James DeLancey, of West Chester, New York, started at Corpus Christi College

Cambridge in 1721. In sum, five young men from Pennsylvania and seven young men from New

7 Willard Connely, “List of Colonial Americans in Oxford and Cambridge,” The American Oxonian, Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 (April 1942): 75-76.

177 York went abroad to England for their education, with the majority matriculating in the 1740s.

Compared to the seventeen colonists from Massachusetts and the sixty-six colonists from

Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, the twelve from New York and Pennsylvania seems a rather paltry number. However, these differences in attendance make more sense when put into context with the colonists’ options. For much of the colonial period, Massachusettsans had two relatively nearby options for earning a collegiate education: Harvard and Yale. At the latter end of the period, they also had the choice of Dartmouth. Throughout the entire colonial period there was only one nearby option for Virginians and South Carolinians, the College of William & Mary.

The colonists in New York and Pennsylvania, however, had four institutions from which to choose: the College of New Jersey, the College of Philadelphia, King’s College, and Queen’s

College. These four colonial colleges not only provided potential students with multiple locations to choose from, but also different religious affiliations: Presbyterian, Anglican, and

Dutch Reformed. The same was not true of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Such options likely played a large part in the lower enrollment of New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians at the English universities.8

Another well-known colonist, who attended the Inns of Court in London rather than

Oxford or Cambridge, was Virginian William Byrd II. His higher education experience in

England adds to an understanding of the colonial experience abroad. Byrd, unlike his contemporaries at the English universities, skipped over an undergraduate education to begin the study of law at the Middle Temple in 1692. Despite the Middle Temple being one of the four

Inns of Court in London, not all students who enrolled there intended to formally practice law. A

8 Willard Connely, “List of Colonial Americans in Oxford and Cambridge,” The American Oxonian, Vol. XXXIX, No. 1 (January 1942): 75-77.

178 former master-treasurer of the school, for instance, described the institution as a place where youth could receive an education for law, government, or “other affairs of state.” The place of importance to which Byrd held his English education is perhaps best expressed by part of the epitaph he authored and had inscribed on his tombstone: “he was sent early to England for his education where … he made a happy proficiency in polite and various learning”9 Similar to his contemporaries at the English universities, the purpose of Byrd’s education abroad was to make him a gentleman. With a life spent as a lawyer, planter, and member of both the Virginia Council and House of Burgesses, his education served him well, but it did not necessarily open up all of the doors he desired.10

***

Although approximately one-hundred young men from the colonies went abroad to

England for their higher education at Oxford and Cambridge, the number of colonists from each colony was widely uneven. Most came from the southern colonies, with thirty-four sailing the

Atlantic from Virginia, eleven from Maryland, and twenty-one from South Carolina. The next largest number, seventeen, hailed from Massachusetts, with the majority attending Oxford and

Cambridge during the seventeenth century. A middling number of students matriculated from

New York and Pennsylvania, at seven and five young men each, respectively. The remaining colonies that sent young men to England, which were New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode

9 William Byrd II, The Dividing Line Histories of William Byrd II of Westover, Ed. Kevin Joel Berland (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2013), 3. 10 William Byrd II, The Commonplace Book of William Byrd II of Westover, Eds. Kevin Joel Berland et. al. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2012), 7-12; J. Bruce Williamson, The History of the Temple, London (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, W, 1924), 100.

179 Island, sent only one each. Such variance in the number of students studying abroad was in large part due to their proximity to a number of quality colleges in the colonies.11

English Educational Concerns

Although it became common practice among some colonists, especially Southerners, to send their sons to England for a higher education, going abroad brought with it concerns which students attending the colonial colleges did not often have to face. One of these concerns was the great distance which students attending English institutions had to live away from their families.

With no parents or other family members nearby to ensure that the students avoided the temptations of the city and kept to their studies, many colonial students living abroad frequently got themselves into trouble. Whether drinking, women, or gambling was their vice, their indiscretions often brought dishonor to their family names. Even those who did not participate in these activities, but instead devoted themselves to their education, could experience shame because of their colonial roots. On top of the devastating social cost some students experienced, there was also the financial cost of studying abroad: travel, educational fees, housing, and daily essentials. For many colonists, an English education was simply too expensive.

Another concern with going abroad was the different way in which professors in England approached certain subjects in the curriculum. As Reverend Maury had expressed in 1762,

English and colonial youth were different from one another, so an education designed for

Englishmen would not fit most colonists. The religious curricula at the two English universities, for instance, did not match up with the beliefs of the non-Anglican Protestant majority in the

11 Willard Connely, “List of Colonial Americans in Oxford and Cambridge,” The American Oxonian, Vol. XXXIX, No. 1 (January 1942), 77.

180 colonies. Not only did the curriculum follow the doctrine of the Church of England, but admission at Oxford and Cambridge was dependent upon students swearing allegiance to the monarch as Supreme Governor of the Church of England and subscribing to the Anglican

Thirty-Nine Articles and Book of Common Prayer. It is difficult to imagine many Puritan or

Presbyterian colonists would have willingly taken such an oath if they had other options. The way in which the English taught Enlightenment thinking was also wanting. Instead of balancing the “New Learning” of the age with religion, as professors at the colonial colleges did, Oxford and Cambridge professors embraced the theories of Newton and Locke, which often relegated

God to the role of a distant and remote creator, by assigning the works of these Enlightenment thinkers to their students. The historical curricula at the English universities also left something to be desired. What little history the professors at Oxford and Cambridge taught to their students seldom included anything beyond ancient Greece and Rome. At the colonial colleges, students learned both ancient and modern history, the latter of which included the discussion of English monarchs like Henry VIII, with his marital problems and bellicose foreign policy, or Charles I and his refusal to work with Parliament in an attempt to make himself an absolute monarch. With such issues attached to completing an education in England, it is understandable that more colonists chose to send their sons to colonial colleges than the universities of Oxford and

Cambridge.

Living Abroad

One of the great challenges that colonial students in England faced was living so far away from home with no parents to guide them. Wine, women, horse-racing, and other forms of gambling were readily available to colonial students living in Oxford and Cambridge. This was

181 especially troublesome because the colonists attending school in England could be as young as fifteen. Some colonial parents received warnings from family members against sending their sons to England because of the raucous environment. Bishop of Worcester James Johnson, for instance, warned against his colonial cousin, Francis Hopkinson, coming to England, writing that it would be “too great a Risque [sic] from him till he was older & more fixed in Principles.”12

Likewise, Virginian Arthur Lee, who had attended school at Eton and the Inns of Court, wrote his brother, William, that he could not recommend his nephews being sent abroad because children sent to England experienced much mischief and little education. Despite such warnings, however, some colonists still wanted to send their sons abroad through the 1770s.13

To combat the possible missteps of their sons many parents maintained a steady correspondence with their children. These letters, unfortunately, could take months to arrive.

Virginian John Carter, for example, received a letter from his father, Robert “King” Carter, in

1721 which castigated John for enjoying the pleasures of the town, failing to write to his sisters and uncle, and writing letters which his father did not find pleasing. Partially as punishment for this behavior and partially due to the limits of his purse strings, Carter instructed John to prepare himself to return to Virginia. By the time John Carter received this letter, however, he had committed these offenses so long ago, and had probably committed more since, that the admonishment of his father had probably lost much of its sting. Some colonial students, aware of the possible trouble they could get into, tried to assuage the fears of their parents in their letters home. South Carolinian Peter Manigault, for instance, wrote his father in August 1750 that he would use his time wisely and vigorously pursue his studies. Like many of his fellow students,

12 William Sasche, The Colonial American in Britain (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1956), 49. 13 Ibid.; Willard Connely, “List of Colonial Americans in Oxford and Cambridge,” The American Oxonian, Vol. XXXIX, No. 1 (January 1942): 75-77.

182 however, Manigault did not keep that promise. That same month, before his first letter probably even arrived in South Carolina, he wrote a second letter in which he stated, “I confess I have been guilty of a great deal of misbehavior, but as I am heartily sorry for it, and firmly resolved, to mend in particular, I hope you will forgive me all, and let my future conduct, blot out all remains of my former indiscretions.”14 Knowing that his parents would be worried about any troublemaking in the future, Manigault recommended they correspond with his teacher, a Mr.

Corbett, since he would be a more capable judge of the young man’s actions than Peter himself had been.15

Aware of the slowness and unpredictability of mail, some colonial parents tried to manage the behavior of their children by asking relatives or friends already living abroad to serve in loco parentis. The Pinckneys of South Carolina, for example, relied on a Mrs. Evance to watch their sons, Charles Cotesworth and Thomas. In a 1761 letter, Mrs. Pinckney wrote to

Charles that she was happy to hear that Mrs. Evance was treating the boys like her own children and that she “wished I knew … how to express my gratitude and the sence [sic] I have of my obligation to her.”16 From the age of seven on, William Byrd II’s English education involved the stewardship of family friend and diplomat Sir Robert Southwell. Likely based on Southwell’s suggestion, Byrd accelerated through his course at the Middle Temple with a “call of grace” in

1695, which allowed him to get a call to the bar despite not finishing the requisite seven years of study. All he had to do to receive the call was have the sponsorship of a member and pay a fine

14 “Peter Manigault to Gabriel Manigault, August 7, 1750,” in “Six Letters of Peter Manigault,” The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, Vol. X, No. 3 (July 1914): 119. 15 “Robert Carter to John Carter, May 27, 1721,” Letters of Robert Carter, 1720-1727, Ed. Louis B. Wright (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970), 99; “Peter Manigault to Gabriel Manigault, August 1, 1750,” in “Six Letters of Peter Manigault,” The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, Vol. X, No. 3 (July 1914): 118. 16 “Eliza Lucas Pinckney to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, February 7, 1761,” in The Papers of Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Harriott Pinckney Horry Digital Edition, ed. Constance Schulz (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2012).

183 of thirty schillings for each term he skipped over. Byrd occasionally took part in the rowdy behavior of his fellow youth, though not to the extent of “ruin, misery, and disease” into which some other Middle Templars plunged themselves. For that saving grace, William Byrd I likely had Southwell to thank.17

Not every guardian and ward relationship, however, worked as well as the Pinckney’s or

William Byrd II’s. Virginian William Lee, for example, volunteered himself to supervise the education of the sons of both his brother, Richard Henry Lee, and his cousin, Colonel Henry Lee

II, but warned them that he must be allowed to have absolute authority over the boys because he had had trouble with a previous ward who had “strong and ungovern’d passions.” Similarly,

Marylander Samuel Galloway had chosen a Sylvanus Grove to watch over his son, Benjamin, but once such duties became difficult Grove deemed the boy “past all management” and refused to continue watching out for him.18

Even for those colonial students who had good relationships with their guardians and intellectually prospered from their time abroad, an English higher education did not always provide the social capital required for a smooth entrance into England’s high society. According to the psychohistorical argument put forth by Michał Rozbicki, colonial gentry experienced anxiety due to the disdain Englishmen, and particularly residents of London, had for their status.

Although he was only a second-generation colonist, hardly far-removed from England, William

Byrd II was a prime candidate to experience such stress. Since one of the stereotypes of colonial

17 William Sachse, The Colonial American in Britain (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1956), 54, 65; The Dividing Line Histories of William Byrd II of Westover. Ed. Kevin Joel Berland. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2013), 3-5 ; J. Bruce Williamson, The History of the Temple, London (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, W, 1924), 557; The Commonplace Book of William Byrd II of Westover, Eds. Kevin Joel Berland et. al. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2012), 8-9. 18 William Sachse, The Colonial American in Britain (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1956), 54; “William Lee to Colonel Henry Lee, London, Oct 30, 1770,” Papers of the Lee Family, Box 9, WLL2009.186, duPont Library, Stratford Hall, Stratford, Virginia.

184 planters was that they lacked education and refinement, he probably thought than an English education would help raise him to the same social level as the English upper classes. While Byrd appeared to have received a fine education, e.g., his commonplace book includes quotes from several ancient luminaries, it was not enough to make him an accepted member of English society. Not only did members of the Virginia Board of Trade in England reject his request for the governorship of Virginia, but an Englishwoman turned down his proposal of marriage in part because of his colonial status. Thus, even for those colonists of distinguished intellect and with the right connections, an education abroad could still be a problematic experience.19

In addition to the lack of parental guidance and feeling of rejection due to their provincialism, another problem for colonial students living abroad was the great cost of learning in England. To study at Oxford or Cambridge could cost a colonial parent more than double what it cost to attend one of the colonial colleges, and that did not even include the cost of travel.

Besides educational fees, parents also had to pay for various other expenses their children incurred. In a 1771 letter William Lee addressed to his brother, Richard Henry Lee, for example, he explained that he would need to provide enough money not only for his son’s schooling, but also for his food, washing, mending, coal, candles, and clothes. Many colonial parents tried to keep these costs down as much as they could by purchasing good, but not necessarily the best, supplies. Even Robert “King” Carter, nicknamed so because of his vast wealth, tried to stay away from buying the finest of everything. In a 1702 letter to London merchant Francis Lee concerning the Wormeley estate left to Ralph and John Wormeley, Carter included the following

19 Michal J. Rozbicki, “The Curse of Provincialism: Negative Perceptions of Colonial American Plantation Gentry” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Nov. 1997): 727-731, 740; Kenneth A. Lockridge, “The Commonplace Book of a Gentleman in Crisis: An Essay,” in The Commonplace Book of William Byrd II of Westover. Ed. Kevin Joel Berland, et. al. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2012), 90-91.

185 observation: “Those Boys that wore the finest close [sic] and had ye most money in their pockets still went away with the least Learning in their heads.”20 In other words, colonists could spend a lot of money to send their sons to England and clothe them well, but it was all a waste if they failed to learn anything worthwhile during their stay.21

***

Colonial students who lived in England often faced greater problems than their contemporaries who stayed close to home. The great distance from the colonies to England made it all but impossible for parents to keep a close watch over their children and as a result many colonial students strayed from their studies and got into various degrees of trouble. Some colonial parents tried to stave off the possibility of misbehavior in their children by keeping constant correspondence with them, but this was problematic due to the amount of time it could take letters to traverse the Atlantic. The harangues-in-letter-form often arrived so long after the boys committed their offenses that they carried less weight than if they had arrived immediately after. Other colonial parents went a step further than the letter-writing parents and employed a relative or family friend in England to serve as a type of guardian for their sons. This, too, however, could be problematic since not all guardians took their jobs as seriously as they should have, while others quit because they found themselves unable to control their wards. Even good students with conscientious adults looking after them, faced an uphill battle for acceptance among the English elite due to the misconception that their colonial birth made them inferior. In addition to the social costs of living abroad, there was the financial cost. Not only did travel to

20 “Robert Carter to Francis Lee, July 15, 1702,” in “Robert Carter and the Wormeley Estate,” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 4 (April 1909): 256. 21 “Speeches of Students of the College of William and Mary Delivered May 1, 1699,” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Oct 1930): 326-327; “William Lee to Richard Henry Lee, July 15, 1771,” Papers of the Lee Family, Box 9, WLL2009.306, duPont Library, Stratford Hall, Stratford, Virginia.

186 England quickly empty one’s purse, but so did the ongoing costs of housing, food, clothing, books, paper, candles, coal, and washing once students settled in. These costs, along with the propensity of colonial students living abroad to get into trouble due to a lack of parental guidance, account for one of the reasons why fewer colonial parents sent their sons to England for their higher education.

The University Curriculum in England

Of the many elements that composed the university curriculum in England, certain subjects, or at least the way in which instructors taught certain subjects, would not have appealed to all colonists. First among these subjects was religion. While students in colonial America had the option of attending a college with Puritan, Anglican, Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, or

Baptist leanings, religious education in England’s two universities had to conform to the doctrines of the Church of England. The new learning of the Enlightenment is another area of study which did not always line up with the beliefs of many colonists. Instructors and professors in the colonial colleges taught philosophy through the interpretation of the Scottish

Enlightenment’s founders, or science through a more Christian-focused lens, but students at

Oxford and Cambridge read the actual works of natural and moral philosophers, many of whom distanced themselves from many of the long-standing beliefs associated with revealed religion.

There simply did not appear to be the same concern in England for the anti-orthodox influence of

Enlightenment thinking as existed in the colonies. A final subject in the curriculum which received a different treatment in England than in the colonies was history. While many students in the colonies became enamored with history thanks to the lessons their professors taught using

187 both ancient histories and the seventeenth and eighteenth-century works of Whig historians, the

English universities placed greater emphasis on ancient history.22

Religious Education Religious education at Oxford and Cambridge was of a particularly anti-Calvinist bent following the accession of King Charles I and the subsequent appointment of William Laud as

Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1620s.23 Both the king and the prelate believed that Puritan activities were threatening the power of the monarch, the authority of the Church and England’s social order. Laud aimed his efforts to rid English society of Puritan influence at the university- level. As Chancellor of Oxford, he sought reform of the university’s statutes and a new charter.

Among the changes he initiated, Laud gave himself the power to pick the vice-chancellor, removed the ability of the congregation (i.e., the university council) to accept appeals against the vice-chancellor, and endowed himself with extensive discretionary powers. Meanwhile, the new charter, passed in March 1636, included letters patent which gave legal status to the university press to produce all sorts of books including the Bible. Thus, as head of the university, Laud largely had control over the works to which members of Oxford town and gown had access.24

With reform of the Oxford statutes and the granting of the new charter accomplished,

Laud turned his attention to the universities’ roles as Protestant seminaries. He planned metropolitical visits to both Oxford and Cambridge in order to assess the “obedience to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England” of both the university bodies and every scholar

22 Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters (New York: Random House, 2013), 107- 109, Nook E-book. 23 Laud favored the High Church form of Anglicanism. 24 Kenneth Fincham, “Early Stuart Polity,” in The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. IV: Seventeenth- Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 199-203.

188 in them. Such visits allowed Laud to ensure that the future clergy enrolled at the universities did not become tainted by Puritan practices and false teaching. He intended to visit Cambridge first because, without his direct guidance, Laud felt that England’s eastern university was in greater need of religious reform. While Laud never went through with his metropolitical visits to either

Oxford or Cambridge due to the two Bishops’ Wars, his influence on both academic and religious practices at Oxford is nearly unquestionable. For instance, reform at Oxford tended to occur following the appointment of new college masters, which was a process over which Laud had considerable direction. In other words, he could steer university officials toward appointing new heads who shared his anti-Calvinist vision. Also, while Laud did not make his planned metropolitical visit to Oxford, he and his close colleagues, along with King Charles I, made visits to all but one of the constituent colleges. Those visitations provided Laud with even more control over the colleges’ operations. As a result of those visits, both Queen’s and Magdalen Colleges instituted more ceremonial chapel services and Vice-Chancellor William Piers issued warnings about the state of college discipline at Wadham. Altogether, Laud’s chancellorship enabled he and his colleagues to change both the religious and disciplinary tempers at Oxford.25

During the English Civil War and the Commonwealth, the universities of Oxford and

Cambridge became the respective strongholds of the Royalists and the Puritans, but this division was far from permanent. For instance, the purging of those from the universities who disagreed with Oliver Cromwell occurred at Cambridge as well as Oxford. Since so many students received training for ordination at Cambridge, the protectorate deemed it necessary to ensure that religious instructors educated students according to Puritan theological views. Often, however, the purges at Cambridge simply drove those with Royalist sympathies to Oxford. Even with

25 Ibid., 203-210.

189 Cambridge’s reputation as the more Puritan of the two universities, the bellicose environment in

England during the Commonwealth likely resulted in few, if any, Puritan colonists willingly sending their sons across the Atlantic for their higher educations.26

Upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, authorities removed Puritan leaders in exchange for Anglican divines. This exchange, along with the gradual shift in emphasis from the education of clergy to the education of gentlemen, however, did not lessen the importance of religion at the universities. In fact, from the very moment of matriculation at university, all students had to acknowledge the ecclesiastical supremacy of the monarch (in his or her role as

Supreme Governor of the Church of England) as well as subscribe to the tenet that the Book of

Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion were agreeable to God, before they could commence work on their degrees. Although concerned parties made several attempts to excuse incoming students from having to make such professions of faith, they all proved unsuccessful.27

As part of their religious education students became intimately acquainted with biblical scripture. At Christ Church Oxford, the most representative of the curricula at the other colleges, undergraduates studied the Bible in both Greek and Hebrew. This was true for the Pinckneys of

South Carolina, as well as seven of their fellow colonists, who studied at Christ Church during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was not the Scripture itself, however, that would not have appealed to all colonial students. The curriculum in the colonies, after all, included a substantial focus on Scripture. The problem inherent in non-Anglican colonial students studying

Scripture in England was that their professors would have expected them to translate and

26 Evans, The University of Cambridge: A New History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 212-215; Evans, The University of Oxford: A New History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 177-178. 27 Ibid., 178; D.A. Winstanley, Unreformed Cambridge: A Study of Certain Aspects of the University in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 301-315.

190 interpret the Bible according to the theological interpretations of the Church of England. The thoroughness with which students had to be able to translate the Bible is perhaps best expressed by the action of one frustrated student who, in 1772, complained to the Bishop of London himself that the college chaplain had required him to translate the New Testament from Greek into Latin and then from Latin into English. The study of Hebrew became part of the curriculum at Oxford following the appointment of the Regius Professor of Hebrew in 1630, which came about as a result of significant donations made by Archbishop Laud. Following the upheaval of the English Civil War, Reverend Dr. Richard Busby brought Christ Church back on track by establishing an Oriental languages lectureship in 1667, at which all undergraduates were required to attend. Evidence of the use of biblical scripture in religious education at Oxford is abundant.

The Christ Church Collections Books show that students William Murray, Charles Wesley, Sir

Francis Bernard, and William Markham all “took up to Collections,” i.e., underwent examinations of, the Hebrew Psalter in 1724, Genesis in Hebrew in 1725, and Deuteronomy in

Hebrew in 1726. Even towards the end of the century, students Harry Trelawny and George

Henry Glasse chose biblical texts for their examinations. Trelawny read the General Epistles, the book of John, the book of Judges, and the book of Genesis in Hebrew for his exams in the

Trinity (spring) term of 1775 and the Epistles of Paul in Hebrew for Michaelmas (fall) term of

1775. Glasse, on the other hand, answered questions on both Genesis and the Psalter in Hebrew in the Michaelmas term of 1778. Even for those students who would enter a career outside of the clergy like Glasse, who became a noted Classical scholar, the books of the Bible remained an integral part of their collegiate education.28

28 E.G.W. Bill, Education at Christ Church Oxford: 1660-1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 301-302; Willard Connely, “List of Colonial Americans in Oxford and Cambridge,” The American Oxonian, Vol. XXIX, No 2 (April 1942): 75-76; Ch. Ch. Archives, li.b. 1, fos. 44, 46v, 49v, 52; Ch. Ch. Archives, li.b. 2, p. 145, 173.

191 At the University of Cambridge, the use of particular biblical texts for religious education is less concrete. Cambridge did not collect notes on the books student read the way that Oxford did. Instead, the best insight into the religious education of Cambridge undergraduates is in the manuals written by their tutors. Richard Holdsworth published his own manual for students, first at St. John’s College and later at Emmanuel College, entitled Directions for a Student in the

Universitie in the 1630s, but it was still being copied by students well into the eighteenth century, including by colonists Francis Higginson and Paul Trapier. Holdsworth prescribed reading of the New Testament in Greek in his outline of studies for first year students. Outside of that outline, however, he requested that all students read three chapters of the Bible a day so as to be able to read the entire text through once a year. Such rigidity would not have allowed students much time to ponder the meaning of the Scripture, and likely have led them to default to the

Anglican meaning assigned to it by their professors and tutors. Fellow tutor James Duport published his Rules to be Observed by the Young Pupils & Schollers in the University in 1660.

Within the manual Duport advised his pupils to keep a steady course of Scriptural reading, with two or three chapters a day being the norm. He also advised that the Bible be read in its original languages, writing that “you can not see clearly into God’s word without the two eyes of Greeke and Hebrew.”29 Eighteenth-century tutor Daniel Waterland never intended to publish his Advice to a Young Student, with a Method of Study for the First Four Years outside of Magdalene

College, but it was done without his knowledge in 1729. Among Waterland’s advice, he said that students should read a chapter of the Old or New Testament (but more from the New) every morning and night before prayers so that, in part, “God will bless you the more for it, enabling

29 James Duport, Rules to be Observed by Young Pupils & Schollers in the University in G.M. Trevelyan, “Undergraduate Life under the Protectorate.” The Cambridge Review. 64 (1943): 328

192 you to become both a wiser and a better man.”30 Despite the valuable insight into the reading of biblical texts at Cambridge which these manuals provide, they are really only expressions of the hopes of the tutors, and not concrete evidence of the reading that students actually did.31

While students showed a preference for the Scriptures at examination time at Oxford and they were the religious text of choice of Cambridge tutors, biblical texts were only part of the religious education which students received along their path to a bachelor’s degree. Secondary to the Bible, students read a number of religious commentaries and pieces of Church doctrine. The requirement to read such works would have been very problematic for non-Anglican colonists since their content did not line up with their interpretations of Scripture or their beliefs about the role of the church in Christianity. At Oxford, Bishop John Pearson’s Exposition of the Creed, originally published in 1659, became a fixture of the religious curriculum for much of the eighteenth century. The Exposition was essentially a collection of the sermons which Bishop

Pearson delivered on the Apostle’s Creed at the Church of St. Clement in London, but also served as the most commonly read book on Anglican doctrine. With the size of the work being so formidable, more than eight-hundred pages in length, professors spread the reading over three successive academic years. The Exposition is featured several times in the Christ Church

Collections Books, with the first four articles, middle four articles, and last four articles of the work appearing in the respective 1724, 1725, and 1726 examination lists.32

30 Daniel Waterland, Advice to a Young Student, with a Method of Study for the First Four Years, Third Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1761), 5. 31 Victor Morgan, A History of the University of Cambridge, Vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 515; Willard Connely, “List of Colonial Americans in Oxford and Cambridge,” The American Oxonian, Vol. XXIX, No 2 (April 1942): 76-77; Richard Holdsworth, Directions for a Student in the Universitie, Emmanuel College MS 48, 7, 28; James Duport, Rules to be Observed by Young Pupils & Schollers in the University in G.M. Trevelyan, “Undergraduate Life under the Protectorate.” The Cambridge Review. 64 (1943): 328. 32 P. Quarrie, “The Christ Church Collections Books,” in The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. V: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 503; Bishop John Pearson, An Exposition of the Creed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1882), x; Bill, Education at Christ Church, 1660-1800, 304; Ch. Ch. Archives, li.b. 1, fos, 44, 46v, 49v, 52.

193 The tutors of Cambridge also asked their students to read the sermons of England’s best divines. In David Waterland’s Advice to a Young Student, he recommended the sermons of

Sharp, Calamy, Blackhall, Sprat, Hoadly, South, and Scot for first year students, Archbishop

Tillotson’s sermons for second year students, and the sermons of Norris, Claggett, Atterbury, and

Stillingfleet’s for third year students. Waterland insisted on the reading of these sermons because

“they [were] the easiest, plainest, and most entertaining of any books of divinity… [and] they contain as much and as good divinity as any other discourses whatever.”33 What exactly

Waterland considered “good divinity,” however, would probably not have lined up with the beliefs of colonists of the Presbyterian or Baptist persuasion. In a student’s last year, Waterland switched from the reading of sermons to the reading of commentaries such as Jenkin’s

Reasonableness of Christianity, Bishop Pearson’s previously mentioned Exposition, and Dutch theologian Hugo Grotius’ De Veritate religionis Christianae (On the Truth of Christian

Religion). Grotius’ work also proved to be one of the favorite defenses of Christianity at Oxford, with the university printing copies of it from 1650 onward. Alongside Grotius, Christ Church

Oxford students strengthened their understanding of, and commitment to, Anglican doctrine by reading Rev. John Ellis’ Articulorum XXXIX: Ecclesiae Anglicanae defensio, originally published as Defensio fidei in 1660. The timing of the release of Ellis’ work with the restoration of the English monarchy was certainly no mistake. To rid England of the Protectorate was not enough, there had to be suppression of the Puritanism of the Protectorate; a defense of the doctrine of the Church of England would help such measures along. At the same time, however, such suppression of Puritanism would likely have turned many non-Anglican colonists from enrolling there. The Articulorum XXXIX did not suddenly disappear from the religious

33 Waterland, Advice to a Young Student, with a Method of Study for the First Four Years, 15.

194 curriculum at Oxford once Anglicanism seemed secure, for it appears in the Christ Church

Collections of students some sixty years later, in 1727. Perhaps more than the books of the Bible, the sermons of Anglican clergymen and the doctrine of the Church of England itself truly differentiated the religious education of students in England from their dissenting counterparts in the colonies.34

Religious education maintained an important place in the curriculum of the universities of

Oxford and Cambridge. Professors and tutors at Oxford and Cambridge taught the same books of the Bible in the thirteenth century as they did in the eighteenth, and instructors at the colonial colleges taught those very same biblical texts. The difference, however, lay in the interpretation of the Scriptures. While I Corinthians 11:24 states “When he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me’” in the Bibles of both

Anglicans and Presbyterians, the instruction meant something different to members of the

Church of England than others. According to Anglican theology, the bread of the Eucharist undergoes a mysterious process to become the literal body of Christ, while in many dissenting

Protestant churches the bread is simply a symbol of Christ’s body. This differentiation would have made an education at Oxford or Cambridge less desirable for those colonists belonging to the Puritan, Presbyterian, Baptist, or Dutch Reformed denominations. Church doctrine was the other important component of religious education in England’s universities. Not only were students required to read and extrapolate on doctrinal works such as Bishop Pearson’s Exposition of the Creed or Rev. John Ellis’ Articulorum XXXIX, but before they could even begin their course of study they had to profess that they held the monarch to be the Supreme Governor of the

34 Ibid., 21, 25, 28, 30; P. Quarrie, “The Christ Church Collections Books,” in The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. V: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 503; Ch. Ch. Archives, li.b. 1, fos. 44, 46v, 49v, 52.

195 Church and believed the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and the Book of Common Prayer were works ordained by God. For an adherent of the Puritan, Baptist, or any other dissenting churches to subscribe to such a statement would be blasphemous. Such religious requirements most certainly turned many prospective colonial students off from attending college at either Oxford or Cambridge.

Enlightenment Education

For much of Oxford and Cambridge’s history, the subjects of science and philosophy meant delving into the works of Aristotle, but the age of Enlightenment soon changed this approach. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries academics began to accept that the intellectuals of their own time could challenge the supposed “certainties” of the ancients. At the

University of Cambridge, advances in the teaching of science and mathematics got a boost from one of their very own: Sir Isaac Newton. A graduate of Trinity College Cambridge, Newton had been tackling questions about color, motion, and gravity since his own time as a student in the

1660s. While Newton served as Cambridge’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics for twenty- eight years, one of his greatest contribution to science and mathematics would prove to be his

1687 work Philosophie Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural

Philosophy), more commonly known as simply Principia. In Principia Newton revealed his discovery of the law of gravity, which states that all objects in the universe are attracted to each other via a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them. This law of physics enabled Newton to explain how the heliocentric model of the universe, in which the Earth spun along an elliptical orbit around the sun, could be true and yet all objects on the planet would not go flying off into space. Taken together, the law of gravity and the laws

196 of motion presented in Principia appeared to point toward a universe which ran according to mechanical principles.35

Despite the fact that Newton’s work neglected to connect the “First Cause” of the universe with the God of the Old or New Testaments or provide any scientific support for the tenets of Christianity (not to mention his own personal skepticism of trinitarianism), scholars and students alike embraced his inclusion in the curriculum. An early example of such inclusion appears in the early-1700s diary of Cambridge student William Stukeley, in which he explains that his tutor, Robert Danny, taught him philosophy, astronomy, and trigonometry using all of

Newton’s works. In tutor Daniel Waterland’s Advice to a Young Student, he recommends that students read Newton-follower William Whiston’s Astronomical Prelections during their second year of study, Whitson’s A New Theory of the Earth during their third and, by their fourth year,

Newton’s own Opticks or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of

Light, as well as Principia. By 1735, Thomas Johnson’s guide for disputation prep, Quaestiones philosophicae, recommended that students preparing to dispute the cause of gravity read

Newton’s Principia and Opticks, along with the works of René Descartes. By the middle of the century, Newtonian science and mathematics had all but completely taken the place of the ancient world’s natural philosophers in the Cambridge curriculum.36

While students in colonial America also experienced a turning away from the ancient world’s interpretation of natural philosophy and towards the New Learning, their professors

35 Evans, The University of Cambridge: A History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 114-115, 190, 200-210; Peter Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge, Vol. III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 147; Shapiro, “The Universities and Science in the Seventeenth Century” Journal of British Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (May 1971): 70-72; Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment, Third Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), loc. 2605-2618 of 4811, Kindle. 36 Outram, The Enlightenment, loc. 2618-2632 of 4811, Kindle; Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge, Vol. III, 151, 152; Evans, The University of Cambridge, 208; Waterland, Advice to a Young Student, with a Method of Study for the First Four Years, 25, 28, 30, 33; Victor Morgan, The History of the University of Cambridge, Vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 522.

197 appeared to work harder to keep revealed religion and the sciences balanced. At the College of

Philadelphia and King’s College, for example, students studied Rev. Samuel Johnson’s philosophy textbook, Elementa Philosophica. Johnson attempted to walk a fine line between advocating for the New Learning of the age while ensuring students remained disciples of

Christian orthodoxy. He argued that God was at the center of the empirical process; rather than a clockmaker who created the world and stepped away to let it run according to rational principles,

God was the nerve-center of the world. It was only through God that one could truly perceive reality. Natural philosophy professors in England made no comparable effort to integrate the teachings of the Bible with the New Learning of the age, making an education there less than desirable for many colonists.37

The turning away from the scientific explanations of Aristotle began a bit earlier at the

University of Oxford. Under the leadership of Warden John Wilkins, Wadham College Oxford became the regular meeting place of the so-called “circle of scientists,” many of whom went on to become the founders of the Royal Society in 1660. Among the circle’s members were future

Savilian Professor of Astronomy Robert Boyle, future architect Christopher Wren and, to a lesser extent, John Locke. The members of the Wadham Circle fostered the original work of their scholars, but also welcomed “outsiders” to work collaboratively alongside them. Another important feature of the group was that they allowed individuals to go off on their own to experiment, yet still maintain an affiliation with the circle. One of the major controversies within which the Wadham Circle became embroiled was the argument between member Robert Boyle and non-member Thomas Hobbes over the advantages of the experimental method. While

37 Samuel Johnson, Elementa Philosophica in Samuel Johnson, President of King’s College: His Career and Writings, Vol II, ed. Herbert and Carol Schneider (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 375, 389; David. C. Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, 1746-1800 (New York: Columbia University, 1976), 168, 171, 177.

198 Hobbes departed from Aristotle with his argument that light, sound, and phantasms were not objective and inherent in the external world, but subjective and learned from human experience, he detested the experimental method. Boyle, on the other hand, championed the experimental method and argued that mechanical laws were superior to Aristotelian explanations. Although neither Boyle’s The Sceptical Chymist nor his A Continuation of New Experiments Physico- mechanical appear in the Christ Church Collection Books, Dean David Gregory insisted at mid- century that works espousing modern notions of natural science, such as John Rowning’s

Compendious System of Natural Philosophy, replace works based on the writings of Aristotle on the list of books prescribed for undergraduates.38

In contrast to the argumentative environment fostered by Hobbes and Boyle at Oxford over the experimental method, colonial professors encouraged their students to observe and take part in experiments. Natural philosophy professors Isaac Greenwood and John Winthrop, for instance, brought air pumps, vacuum vessels, and microscopes into their classrooms at Harvard.

Winthrop even involved his students in his own personal experiments with electricity in the

1740s. A similar fostering of the experimental method occurred at the College of William &

Mary and the College of New Jersey. In Williamsburg, William Small bought barometers, microscopes, an achromatic telescope, prisms, mirrors, and “an instrument to try the force of falling bodies” for the use of the students and introduced them to physics demonstrations.

Meanwhile, under the administration of John Witherspoon, New Jersey students received the

38 Evans, The University of Oxford: A New History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 202-203, 206; Barbara J. Shaprio, “The Universities and Science in the Seventeenth Century” Journal of British Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (May 1971): 61-62; Bill, Education at Christ Church, 1660-1800, 308-309.

199 famous David Rittenhouse orrey, originally intended for the College of Philadelphia, which professors employed during their experimental lectures.39

Philosophical study was another part of the Oxford and Cambridge curriculum which changed from overwhelmingly Aristotelian to the proprietorship of Europe’s contemporary philosophers. This change was another strong signal of the acceptance of Enlightenment thought in England. Previously, Aristotle was the expert in the branches of moral philosophy known as ethics and metaphysics. However, since many young students did not have a strong handle on

Greek, they could not study Aristotle’s writings directly and instead had to read commentaries and textbooks on his works. One of the most popular among these was Asseline Eustachius’

Latin treatise simply titled Ethics. While originally published in 1658, Eustachius’ work appears almost seventy years later in the Christ Church Oxford Collections Books on the examination lists of William Murray, Charles Wesley, Sir Francis Bernard and William Markham. In the

1750s, Dean Gregory overhauled the ethics curriculum by replacing works based on Aristotelian philosophy with the writings of more contemporary philosophers, such as Samuel Pufendorf’s

De Officio Hominis et Civis (Duties of Man and the Citizen) and Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui’s

Principles of Natural Law. A similar change-over occurred at Cambridge as well. In Richard

Holdsworth’s 1630s Directions for a Student in the Universitie he prescribed that students in their third year of study read Aristotelis Ethic, proclaiming that “the reading of Aristotle will … indeed crown all your other learning, for he can hardly deserve the name of a Scholar, that is not in some measure acquainted with his works.”40 By the time of Waterland’s Advice to a Young

39 Roger L. Geiger, The History of American Higher Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),79-80; Gillian Hull, “William Small, 1734-1775: No Publications, Much Influence,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Vol. 90 (February 1997): 103. 40 Richard Holdsworth, Directions for a Student in the Universitie, Emmanuel College MS 48, in H. F. Fletcher, The intellectual development of John Milton, II: The Cambridge University period 1625-32 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 643.

200 Student in 1739, however, third-year undergraduates were encouraged to read Pufendorf’s De

Officio Hominis and Rev Daniel Whitby’s Ethicks, which Waterland described as the newest and best work on ethics at the time. Despite Whitby’s strong Christian beliefs, he had confidence in man’s ability to reason, and believed that one’s conscience could advise one to either do or refrain from doing something. The thinkers of the Age of Reason had officially taken over the ethics curriculum at Oxford and Cambridge.41

Perhaps the greatest change to occur in Oxbridge academia in relation to the

Enlightenment was the acceptance of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in the field of philosophy. A treatise on metaphysics, the branch of philosophy which deals with the nature of reality, Locke’s Essay very quickly became part of the philosophy curriculum and eventually overtook all other previous works on the matter. English students often studied metaphysics in the last two years of their undergraduate careers. Some of the favorite works on metaphysics taken to collections at Christ Church in the early eighteenth century prior to Locke included Robert Baron’s Metaphysica Generalis, Caspar Bartholinus’ Enchiridion

Metaphysicum ex Aristotelis (a handbook on Aristotle’s thoughts on metaphysics), and

Christophorus Scheibler’s Metaphysica. The gold standard of metaphysics texts before Locke, however, was Franco Burgersdichius’ Institutiones Metaphysicae. Burgersdichius appears in the

Collections Books of Christ Church on the examination lists of students in 1727, as well as in

Richard Holdsworth’s Directions for a Young Student in the Universitie as required reading for third-year students at Emmanuel College Cambridge.42

41 Bill, Education at Christ Church, 1660-1800, 297-298; Ch.Ch. Archives, li.b. 1, fos. 44, 46v, 49v, 52; Daniel Waterland, Advice to a Young Student, with a Method of Study for the First Four Years, Third Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1761), 29; Sarah Hutton, British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 39. 42 Judith Curthoys, The Cardinal’s College: Christ Church, Chapter and Verse (London: Profile Books, Ltd., 2012), 173; Bill, Education at Christ Church, 1660-1800, 299; Ch. Ch. Archives, li.b. 1, fos. 44, 46v, 49v, 52; Richard Holdsworth, Directions for a Student in the Universitie, Emmanuel College MS 48, 35, 49.

201 By 1744 at Oxford, and a bit earlier at Cambridge, Locke’s Essay Concerning Human

Understanding eclipsed Burgersdichius as the metaphysics text of choice for professors and students alike. In Essay, Locke argued that the human mind was a blank slate at birth and that it was only through experience that man attained knowledge. This went directly against the teachings of Plato and René Descartes, who argued that every human being was born with some form of inherent knowledge which bound the human race together due to their universal acceptance of certain basic truths. Locke’s argument had the potential to be particularly problematic for those of faith because his claim against inherent knowledge meant that since God was not a universally accepted idea, his existence could not be an inherently acknowledged fact.

Many theologians criticized Locke’s theories, including Anglican Rev. Henry Lee, who went so far as to publish a book refuting Locke’s Essay almost point-for-point and accusing him of being a skeptic.43 Despite the theological problem Locke’s argument created, his works appear in the

Christ Church Collections Books in 1775, and on the lists of three students in 1778. At

Cambridge, John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding appears in Daniel

Waterland’s Advice to a Young Student as recommended reading for students from January through April of their second year. Of Locke’s Essay, Waterland explained, “Locke’s Human

Understanding must be read, being a Book so much (and I add so justly) valued, however faulty

43 In regard to Locke’s theory that God was not an innate idea, Rev. Lee countered that God was an innate idea because “all men come by this notion of God, without any art or teaching, but only by the observation of what they naturally find within themselves and the other sensible parts of the universe. For 1. We cannot but necessarily know and believe our own existence. 2. We cannot but know and believe, that we have and had our own existence from something distinct from ourselves; because if we had it from ourselves, we should be conscious of it; for every intelligent being is necessarily conscious of all such actions as are properly its own; besides, if we had anything to do with in the making or preserving of ourselves, we should have made ourselves wiser, stronger, and with many more perfections than we find we have.” Henry Lee, D.D., Anti-scepticism: Or, Notes Upon Each Chapter of Mr. Lock’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Printed for R. Clavel and C. Harper, at the Peacock in S. Paul’s Church-yard, and at the Flower-de-luce over-against S. Dunstan’s Church in Fleetstreet, 1702), 29.

202 the Author may have been in other Writings.”44 By all appearances, therefore, Locke’s Essay was heartily received in England’s higher education institutions.45

The acceptance of John Locke’s work at Oxford and Cambridge is in direct contrast to the reception his work received in the colonies. While students in England studied Locke’s works directly, in the colonies it was interpretations of Locke’s works which were most popular in the curriculum. First introduced in the colonies by Professor Francis Alison at the University of Pennsylvania, Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson’s A Short Introduction to Moral

Philosophy introduced colonial students to the ideas of Locke’s Essay via the Scottish approach to moral philosophy known as Common Sense Realism. According to this approach the human mind was not simply a blank slate, but instead possessed an inherent moral sense (i.e., common sense). This line of thinking offered an alternative to the skepticism of Locke while still allowing for the principles of Newton and the tenets of Christianity. Hutcheson’s interpretation, therefore, lent to the faithful the assurance that since common sense would lead all mankind to believe in the idea of God, His very existence, too, must be fact. With Hutcheson’s interpretation of Locke a favorite of colonial educators, but Locke’s own Essay Concerning Human Understanding appearing in the curricular records at Oxford and Cambridge, it is clear that differing ideas existed on each side of the Atlantic about how much and which parts of the new learning of the

Enlightenment should be embraced.46

44 Waterland, Advice to a Young Student, with a Method of Study for the First Four Years, 25. 45 Bill, Education at Christ Church, 1660-1800, 299-300; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Printed for Thomas Tegg, 1825), 37-44; Ch. Ch. Archives, li.b. 2, p. 145, 173-174; Waterland, Advice to a Young Student, with a Method of Study for the First Four Years, 25. 46 Bill, Education at Christ Church, 1660-1800, 300; Ch. Ch. Archives, li.b. 2, p. 145, 173-174; Waterland, Advice to a Young Student, with a Method of Study for the First Four Years, 25; Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 80-81; Benjamin W. Redekop, “Review of The Correspondence of Thomas Reid, edited by Paul Wood,” Canadian Journal of History, Vol. 39, Iss. 1 (April 2004), 212; Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (Edinburgh: Printed for Anderson and MacDowall, 1818), 26-30.

203 Based on the different approaches which the professors and tutors at Oxford and

Cambridge and the professors and tutors at the colonial colleges took to teaching Enlightenment ideas, the prospect of a collegiate education in England would have been less than appealing for many colonial students. While the works of Enlightenment thinkers became part of the science curriculum at the English universities relatively quickly, the instructors at these schools made no apparent effort to couch these scientific theories within a Christian-centered framework. Colonial students who held especially strong religious beliefs would likely have found this less than ideal.

Additionally, while natural philosophers in England fought over the strengths and deficiencies of the experimental method, natural philosophy professors at the colonial colleges not only demonstrated experiments in front of their students but also had the students participate in experiments themselves. As for moral philosophy, the widespread acceptance of John Locke’s

Essay Concerning Human Understanding into the curricula at Oxford and Cambridge truly differentiated the teaching of Enlightenment thought in England from the teaching of it in the colonies. Instead of teaching Locke directly, colonial professors and tutors taught their students using the Scottish approach known as Common Sense Realism, which allowed them to accept many of Locke’s ideas, yet maintain their belief in a hands-on, daily intervening God. Once again, devout colonial students would most likely have preferred the approach to the

Enlightenment taken by colonial professors than the professors in England, therefore rendering a collegiate education in England even less desirable.

Historical Education

The study of history did not play a large part in the curriculum at either Oxford or

Cambridge before the eighteenth century. In fact, in Cambridge tutor James Duport’s Rules to be

204 Observed by Young Pupils from 1660, he warned students preparing declamations that “if you bring in Histories or Examples touch but lightly upon them.”47 Even in an academic setting, it appears, displaying a knowledge of history was simply not that desirable at the time. The subject received its initial boost in English higher education through the establishment of two Regius

Professorships of Modern History, one each at Oxford and Cambridge, by King George I in

1724. The purpose of these professorships was to educate men for government positions in diplomatic service and to work as travelling private tutors for young gentlemen. Despite such grand intentions, the professorship did not prove very successful at Cambridge. The first Regius

Professor at Cambridge was a fellow of Peterhouse Hall named Samuel Harris. While Harris gladly took his £400 a year stipend, he failed to deliver any history lectures beyond his inaugural one and only reported on the progress of his scholars twice. Harris’ successor, Shallet Turner, proved no better, essentially treating the professorship as nothing more than a sinecure. None was worse, however, than the third holder of the professorship, Laurence Brockett. During his six years as Regius Professor Brockett failed to fulfill any of his duties and died after falling off his horse during a bout of drunkenness. The professorship went a bit better at Oxford. Its first recipient, David Gregory, was at least interested in history, but his teaching style left something to be desired. Antiquary Thomas Hearne, upon hearing Gregory’s inaugural lecture as Regius

Professor, described it as “a strange Medley of Stuff, without any Method or Connexion [sic], and in a most wretched, barbarous Latin stile [sic].”48 With such lackluster beginnings, the study of history at England’s universities had almost nowhere else to go but up, but not for long.49

47 James Duport, Rules to be Observed by Young Pupils & Schollers in the University, 329. 48 Bill, Education at Christ Church, 1660-1800, 58. 49 Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge, Vol. III, 234, 253; Bill, Education at Christ Church, 1660-1800, 58.

205 The systematic study of history at Cambridge began in 1771 under the fifth Regius

Professor of Modern History, John Symonds. In contrast, students in the colonies had been receiving instruction in history as early as 1642 at Harvard, 1743 at Yale, 1754 at the College of

Philadelphia, and 1763 at King’s. Symonds’ first course was a survey of European civilization from the fall of the Roman Empire, within which he sought to pay particular attention to modern history. Unlike other professors at the time, Symonds varied his lectures from year to year, which allowed him to introduce new information. Despite Symonds’ attempt to keep his lectures fresh, he received poor reviews from some students. One such student, Philip Yorke, described

Symonds’ lectures as “too desultory” to write down, his manner slow, and his pronunciation affected. To make matters worse, attendance at Symonds’ lectures was quite poor; despite a roster of twenty-six or so enrolled students, regular turnout usually equaled only fifteen or sixteen students. Attendance eventually became so poor that he quit lecturing between 1778 and

1779. University administrators may not have appreciated it at the time, but Symonds’ choice to step away from the lectern would prove fortunate. In 1778 Symonds published a pamphlet in which he denied Britain’s right to tax the American colonies.50 If he had been lecturing at the time, and presented such thoughts to his young students, there would likely have been quite an uproar.51

50 The pamphlet Symond’s authored was titled Remarks upon an essay, intitled, The History of the Colonisation of the Free States of Antiquity, applied to the Present Contest between Great Britain and Her American Colonies (1778), it was, as the title suggests, a commentary on The History of the Colonisation of the Free States of Antiquity (1777), authored by William Barron. It was Symond’s only historical work. 51 Victor Morgan, A History of the University of Cambridge, Vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 234-235; D.A. Winstanley, Unreformed Cambridge: A Study of Certain Aspects of the University in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 160-161; New England’s First Fruits, (London: Printed by R.O. and G.D. for Henry Overton, and are to be sold at his Shop in Popes-head-Alley, 1643), 30; Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 71; Edward Potts Cheyney, History of the University of Philadelphia, 84; David C. Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, 174; “Cooper, Dr. Myles Plan of Education in King’s College New York, March 1, 1763,” Columbia College Papers, 1703-1964, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Columbia University, New York, New York. (hereafter referred to as Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts)

206 Historical study became one of the mainstays of the curriculum at Oxford thanks to the appointment of David Gregory to the deanship of Christ Church in 1756. Due to Gregory’s previous appointment as Oxford’s Regius Professor of Modern History, his part in reviving the study of history at Christ Church is no surprise. However, the area of history which Dean

Gregory worked to build up was not modern history, but ancient history, and especially that of

Greece.52 The most popular historical work at Christ Church prior to Gregory’s appointment was that of a Roman author, Julius Caesar’s Commentaries, so his interest in adding Greek historians is understandable, but his failure to incorporate modern historians into the curriculum is rather confounding. Two of the Greek historians Gregory added to the curriculum were Sallust and

Xenophon. Sallust’s “Opera,” i.e., the works of Sallust, appear on the 1777 Hilary (winter) term collections list of George Henry Glasse, while the simple identification of “Sallustius,” with no specific work given, appears on the 1790 Trinity (spring) term examination list of George

Canning. It was not until 1795 that specific Sallust works, such as The Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jugurthine War, appear on a collections list. Dean Gregory’s choice of Xenophon’s

Anabasis, chronicling his march to Persia to aid Cyrus the Great, also proved extremely popular among students. Anabasis appeared on collection lists in 1775, 1777, 1785, 1787 and 1788. Such favoritism for ancient history was in direct contrast to the historical education of students in colonial America. While Caesar and Sallust also appear in the curricula at the colonial colleges, the professors there balanced their works with those of modern historians of England, such as

John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. Therefore, despite Oxford and Cambridge’s locations in

52 Dean Gregory did not author any historical works, his only works were Latin verses lamenting the deaths of Kings George I and II and celebrating the accessions of Kings George II and III, Emily Tennyson Bradley, “Gregory, David (1696-1767),” Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 23: Gray-Haighton (London: Elder Smith & Co., 1890), 95.

207 England, their history curricula were completely bereft of the works of the great seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Whig historians of English history.53

Affirmation of the colonists’ extremely limited, if not non-existent, experience with modern history at the University of Oxford appears in the letters Charles Cotesworth Pinckney wrote to his nephew, Daniel Horry, Jr.54 After Charles’ brother, Thomas Pinckney, had convinced their sister, Harriott Pinckney Horry, to send Daniel to “some public Seminary of

Education in Europe,” Charles began to exchange correspondence with Daniel to help prepare him for his studies. Drawing on his own education at Oxford, Charles began quizzing his nephew on the history of Greece, asking him in various letters to identify and explain the actions of

Lacedæmon, the Ephori, the Council of the Amphictions, and Epaminondar. He also wrote that

Daniel should study the history of the Roman Republic, an endeavor which Charles thought would afford his nephew “a great deal of pleasure.” In a letter to his sister, Harriott, Charles recommended that she purchase a number of books for Daniel to read, including Oliver

Goldsmith’s Roman History, Charles Rollin’s Ancient History, and William Guthrie’s

Geographical Grammar. By prescribing such a course of historical study to Daniel, one which omits any mention of the modern period of history, Charles had inadvertently revealed that his collegiate education in history was very limited in scope. In comparison to his colonially educated counterparts, Charles knew only half of the historical picture.55

53 Bill, Education at Christ Church, 1660-1800, 278-279; Ch. Ch. Archives, li.b. 2, p. 173.; Ibid., li.b 2, p. 430; Ibid., li.b. 3, p. 21; Ibid., li.b 2, p 173-174, 262-263, 430; John F. Roche, The Colonial Colleges in the War for American Independence, 10-11; Paul Rapin de Thoyras, The History of England, Vol. I (London: Printed for John and Paul Knapton, at the Crown in Ludgate-Street, 1743), 42, 849 n; Paul Rapin de Thoyras, The History of England, Vol. II (London: Printed for John and Paul Knapton, at the Crown in Ludgate-Street, 1743), 57; None of the Whig historians whose works were read at the colonial colleges, i.e., Thomas Gordon, John Trenchard, Paul Rapin de Thoyras, Catharine Macaulay, and William Molyneaux, appear in the Christ Church Collection Books. 54 Daniel Horry Jr. later changed his name to Charles Francis Pinckney Horry and therefore appears in later documents by either that name or simply Pinckney Horry. 55 “Thomas Pinckney to Harriott Pinckney Horry, September 26, 1780,” in The Papers of Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Harriott Pinckney Horry Digital Edition, ed. Constance Schulz (Charlottesville: University of

208 In addition to attending the lectures of the Regius Professor, students at Cambridge learned history through the readings assigned by their tutors. In Daniel Waterland’s Advice to a

Young Student he prescribed students to read the works of Justin and Cornelius Nepos during their first year of study. While Justin, or Justinus, is usually identified as a Roman historian, his

History of the World was actually an abridgement of historian Trogus Pompeius’ earlier work,

Historiae Philippicae. Therefore, it might be better to identify Justin as an abridger rather than a historian. Nonetheless, Justin’s work provided Cambridge students with a basic history of the

Hellenistic period. His work does contain one worrisome note, however, in which Justin explained that he was only focusing on “whatever was most worthy of being known; and rejecting such parts as were … [not] attractive for the pleasure of reading.”56 Unfortunately for

Justin’s audience, there existed plenty of history which did not constitute the most pleasurable reading yet was of great importance. Cornelius Nepos, also Roman, wrote Chronica, a history of

Rome, Greece and the Near East, as well as several biographies on the likes of Atticus, Cato, and

Hannibal, but Waterland’s Advice fails to explain which works of Nepos students were to read. A similar problem exists in Waterland’s recommended historical reading for second year students,

Julius Caesar’s Commentaries and Sallust. Two works written by Caesar entitled Commentaries exist; the first concerning his participation in the Roman Civil War and the second his participation in campaigns in Gaul and Britain, but Waterland’s manual does not specify which

Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2012); “Charles Cotesworth Pinckney to Daniel (Charles Lucas Pinckney) Horry, October 4, 1780,” The Papers of the Revolutionary Era Pinckney Statesmen Digital Edition, ed. Constance B. Schulz. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2016); “Charles Cotesworth Pinckney to Daniel (Charles Lucas Pinckney) Horry, October 16, 1780,” in The Papers of the Revolutionary Era Pinckney Statesmen Digital Edition, ed. Constance B. Schulz. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2016); “Charles Cotesworth Pinckney to Harriott Pinckney Horry, October 8, 1782,” in The Papers of Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Harriott Pinckney Horry Digital Edition, ed. Constance Schulz. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2012. 56 John Selby Watson, Justin, Cornelius Nepos, and Eutropius, Literally Translated, with Notes and a General Index (London: George Bell and Sons, 1876), 2.

209 of the two histories students were to read, or whether they should read both. Sallust also wrote more than one history, including The Conspiracy of Catiline, The Jugurthine War, and The

Histories, yet again Waterland was silent on which work students were meant to read.

Thankfully, Waterland’s recommendation for fourth year students to read Livy can only refer to one book: History of Rome. Despite the uncertainty Waterland’s manual leaves behind regarding exactly which historical works student were meant to read, his intention that students should be well-versed in ancient Roman and Greek history is abundantly clear. This was, once again, very different from the historical education of colonial Americans, who read ancient histories such as

Livy’s History of Rome as well as more modern fare, such as William Molyneux’s The Case of

Ireland. It may have been the intention of King George I for English students to study modern history but, aside from the poorly attended lectures of Dr. Symonds, it was the history of the ancient world to which they received the most exposure.57

Greater inclusion of history in the Oxford curriculum continued with Dean Gregory’s successor, William Markham. He too, however, placed an emphasis on ancient history over modern history. In addition to requiring first year students to read Caesar and Sallust, Dean

Markham prescribed the books of Livy, Tacitus, and Herodotus for second-year students and

Thucydides and Xenophon’s Hellenica for third-year students. Tacitus’ Histories was also part of the required reading in the colonies but, unlike in England, colonial professors complemented

Tacitus with the works of modern Whig historians. Of those historical works taken up to collections from Markham’s additions, Herodotus proved most popular, appearing on the lists of

57 Waterland, Advice to a Young Student, with a Method of Study for the First Four Years, 21, 25, 30; John Selby Watson, Justin, Cornelius Nepos, and Eutropius, Literally Translated, with Notes and a General Index (London: George Bell and Sons, 1876), v, x-xxxi; “Cooper, Dr. Myles Plan of Education in King’s College New York, March 1, 1763,” Columbia College Papers, 1703-1964, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts; John F. Roche, The Colonial Colleges in the War for American Independence, 10-11.

210 sixteen students between 1768 and the end of the century. Thucydides came in a close second by placing on fourteen students’ lists, while Xenophon’s Hellenica appeared on eleven. The appeal of the history of the ancient world to the professors of England is obvious: it provided a plethora of examples which the people of England could hope to imitate, especially in regard to creating a grand empire. However, by restricting their study of history to the ancient world, the English were falling behind their counterparts; through studying the modern history of England the colonists in America were coming up with a different understanding of the issues related to the rights of Englishmen.58

Perhaps the most surprising part of the English university curriculum to cause potential issues for colonial students was the study of history. Despite the English universities’ own long histories, the study of history was not a required part of the arts course for a bachelor’s degree at either Oxford or Cambridge. History only became a greater part of the curriculum through the efforts of individuals. Except for some short-lived success in the teaching of modern history by

Professor Symonds, the majority of history which students were taught in the English universities belonged to the ancient world. The works of Justin, Sallust, Caesar, and Herodotus were more familiar to eighteenth-century college students in England than that produced by contemporary historians, such as Paul Rapin de Thoyras or William Molyneaux. Without such

Whig historians appearing in the curriculum, students at the English universities were missing out on lessons about more recent examples of political corruption, repression, revolution, and

58 Bill, Education at Christ Church, 1660-1800, 280, 282; Herodotus appears on the lists of the following individuals: William Legge, Charles Abbot, George Henry Glasse, William Seymour Conway, Edward Deane Freeman, George Bisset, William Henry Cavendish Bentnick, Edward Harding John Stracey, John Barnard, William Wood, George Canning, Peter Elmsley, Lloyd Kenyon, Henry Hallam, Nicholas Ridley, and John William Ponsonby; Ch. Ch. Archives, li.b. 2, p. 138-460; Ibid., li.b. 3, p. 49-171.

211 progress. Therefore, for colonists interested in history, enrolling at a college where history professors did not study their own nation’s past was basically unthinkable.

***

While the most obvious problem colonists attending the English universities had to deal with was the great distance which separated them from their families, they also had to contend with the fact that a collegiate education in England could contradict many of the colonists’ prevailing beliefs and preferences in regard to religion, the Enlightenment, and history. A religious education steeped in Anglican theology would simply not have appealed to the parents of prospective college students belonging to Puritan, Presbyterian, Baptist, or Dutch Reformed households. Similarly, many colonists desired an Enlightenment education which taught the theories of the era’s scientific and philosophical contemporaries but made allowances for God’s role in one’s daily life, rather than relegating Him to a clockmaker who stepped away after creation. Since the curricula at Oxford and Cambridge failed to do this, an English

Enlightenment education would have been of little appeal to many young colonists or their parents. Finally, despite Oxford and Cambridge’s centuries-long historical advantage over the colonial colleges, neither institution’s faculty members made any prolonged attempt to update their curricula with historical works beyond the times of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This put students with an English education at a disadvantage because they only knew part of the world’s history and did not have as great of an understanding of the issues related to the rights of

Englishmen as students educated in the colonies did.

212 Conclusion

Just as the anonymous student at William & Mary concluded in 1699 that the best place for a Virginian to go to school was Virginia, it appears that the best place for colonists to go to school was in the colonies. Although almost one-hundred colonists journeyed abroad to earn their degrees during the colonial period, they were the minority. For some of these colonists, such as those Massachusettsans who had already earned their bachelor’s degrees at Harvard, there was no other option to take up a graduate degree in the English language other than at

Oxford or Cambridge. But for the rest, who were seeking undergraduate degrees, there were nine effective colleges to choose from in the colonies. Despite this fact, many colonists chose to study abroad in England anyway. Some likely felt compelled simply because of the prestige of an

Oxford or Cambridge degree. Those Puritan undergraduates who attended Oxford and

Cambridge during and after the Protectorate most likely did so for this reason. The same reasoning likely applies to those Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, one New Jerseyman, one

Connecticuter, and one Rhode Islander who went abroad after the Restoration. However, for the largest number of colonists who went abroad such as the Virginians and South Carolinians, there were more reasons to head over to England. First among these was the fact that many

Southerners, in an effort to include themselves among the English gentry, believed that the only way their sons could truly achieve gentleman status was to attend an English university. Another reason why southern colonists were more apt to go abroad for an education was the fact that more southerners belonged to the Anglican church, so the religious test at Oxford and Cambridge were not as much of a deterrent to their attendance. Last, while the southern colonists had the

College of William & Mary to attend, they did not have any other choices in the south as their fellow colonists in the north did.

213 Regardless of why some colonists chose to go abroad, their decisions to do so resulted in having an educational experience more rife with issues than their compatriots who stayed in the colonies. To live abroad in England was challenging because these students had to be responsible enough to avoid the temptations of the town and stay focused on their studies without their parents nearby to keep them in check. While some parents tried to guide their sons from afar by keeping up constant correspondence with them, this was only as effective as the speed at which their letters crossed the ocean. Other parents took advantage of family and friends living in

England by having them act as guardian to their children, but this was only as effective as the diligence of the chosen guardian. For far too many students, living abroad brought trouble to them and dishonor to their families. Living in England was also challenging because of the monetary cost. To enroll at either Oxford or Cambridge could cost twice as much as it did at one of the colonial colleges, then there was the cost of travel, housing, clothes, books, and other supplies. For most colonial families, such costs were beyond their means. In addition to the social problems involved with going to England, the curriculum at the English universities was problematic. Unless one was an Anglican, which accounted for many southern colonists but only a smattering in the north, the way in which the professors at Oxford and Cambridge taught religion would have had little to no appeal for most colonists. While the books of the Bible which the students read in England were the same as those in the colonies, the way in which their professors taught them to interpret them was different. Also different were the theological works which students at Oxford and Cambridge read, since they mostly consisted of sermons by

Anglican clergymen and the doctrine of the Church of England. The teaching of the

Enlightenment in England was also at odds with how most colonists had accepted the “New

Learning” of the age. Instead of a moderate acceptance of the Enlightenment, in which reason

214 and religion balanced one another, the curriculum at the English universities included the actual works of Newton and Locke. These works, unlike the interpretations read by students in the colonies, questioned traditional beliefs about God’s place in the universe and in the lives of men.

Finally, the history curriculum at Oxford and Cambridge lacked depth. Colonial students in

England, such as Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, became well-versed in the history of the ancient world, but were bereft of exposure to modern history. The English professors, unlike the colonial professors, failed to teach them about the many times that the English government had mistreated its people. Ultimately, the purveyors of education in England intended to produce fine

English gentlemen; many young colonists, however, no longer wanted to become such men.

215 CHAPTER 5: HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC

The fact that all nine of the colonial colleges survived, in one form or another, the massive upheaval that was the Revolutionary War demonstrates the resiliency of the institutions the colonists had created and the men who saw them through. Such resiliency, however, does not mean that no changes in American higher education were necessary or that Americans did not feel the need to establish new colleges in the early republic. One such necessary change was a commitment, on the part of educators, to play a primary role in producing republican citizens for the new country.

As the only large republic in a world full of monarchies, the United States was undertaking an experiment which no other major state had attempted since ancient times1 The

American people were responsible for creating a new form of government, creating an economy independent of British support and, ultimately, developing a culture which would thereafter exemplify what it meant to be a republic. In order for the United States to succeed, the American people needed to be willing to put aside their own individual interests for the good of the country, i.e., to practice public virtue. Placing such a heavy burden of responsibility on the shoulders of citizens shows why the shift America had undergone from a monarchy-ruled group of colonies to an independent republic was so radical. As Gordon S. Wood stated, “A republic was such a delicate polity precisely because it demanded an extraordinary moral character in the

1 While the Old Swiss Confederation came into existence in the fourteenth century, it was significantly smaller than the United States and internal tensions proved extremely debilitating.

216 people.”2 To cultivate moral character in their citizens, America’s leaders turned to colleges.

They chose to focus on college-age students rather than younger pupils because they believed those young men who voluntarily sought a liberal arts education would more likely than not be the next in line to take up the reins of society.3

To undertake the great responsibility of producing republican-minded citizens,

Americans founded a staggering twenty-three higher education institutions between 1782 and

1799. While the colleges established during the colonial period would certainly be part of the effort to produce republican-minded citizens, many of them had to recover from the effects of the war before they could share in that task. Compared to the nine colleges founded by the colonists during the much longer period of 1636 to 1781, the establishment of twenty-three colleges during the first two decades of the early republic was quite an accomplishment. However, to argue that all twenty-three of these institutions were a result of the first two decades of the early republic would be disingenuous. In fact, nine of them were either outgrowths of already- established grammar schools and academies or initially operated only as academies. Nor do these institutions’ founding dates in the eighteenth century ensure that all students began their collegiate educations during that century. Indeed, five of the colleges failed to commence teaching until the early nineteenth century. Another five of the colleges either ceased to exist shortly after opening (or only existed on paper) and one opened exclusively as a seminary. Only the College of Charleston, Franklin College, and the University of North Carolina had no

2 Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1972, 68. 3 John F. Roche, The Colonial Colleges in the War for American Independence (Millwood, NY: Associated Faculty Press, 1986),183; Roger L. Geiger, The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 128; Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 68-70.

217 preceding institutions, commenced teaching before the turn of the century, and continued to operate beyond their first few years of existence.4

Just as the establishment of the colonial colleges was indicative of the transformation which English culture had undergone in the colonies, the establishment of colleges during the first two decades of the early republic demonstrates that American culture had undergone yet another change, even further differentiating it from its English cultural roots. For instance, while religious education was largely ruled by denominationalism during the colonial period, the officials at the colleges of the early republic were more open to educating students of different

Christian and non-Christian denominations because of their commitment to republicanism. The teaching of Enlightenment ideas also changed. The attempt to balance religion and reason which exemplified the colonial approach to natural and moral philosophy gave way to more radical thinking. Instead of reading interpretations of the philosophes or science texts filled with dogma, students at the colleges of the early republic read the works of Enlightenment thinkers and scientists themselves. A final component of education which changed during the early republic was the teaching of history. While America’s leaders still believed in history’s innate value, they also thought that the study of history would help students to develop into more virtuous citizens

4 Washington College – MD (1782) began as Kent County Free School in 1723, Dickinson College (1783) began as Carlisle Grammar School in 1773, Hampden-Sydney College (1783) began as Prince Edward Academy in 1775, St. John’s College (1784) began as King William’s School in 1696, Williams College (1793) began as Williamstown Free School in 1791, Union College (1795) began as Schenectady Academy in 1785, Georgetown College (1789) operated as an academy until receiving its college charter in 1815; Washington College – TN (1795) began as Martin’s Academy in 1780, and the College of Washington – VA (1796) began as Augusta Academy in 1749; The University of Georgia (1785) did not open until 1801, the University of Vermont (1791) did not open until 1800, Bowdoin College (1794) did not open until 1802, Greenville College (1794) did not open until 1805, and Blount College (1794) did not open until 1804; Mount Sion [Zion] College (1785) functioned as an elementary school by the 1790s, the College of Cambridge (1785) only existed on paper, Cokesbury College (1794) suspended collegiate teaching in 1795, the College of Beaufort (1795) only existed on paper, Alexandria College (1797) only existed on paper, and Transylvania College (1799) opened as Transylvania Seminary in 1783; Jürgen Herbst, From Crisis to Crisis: American College Government, 1636-1819 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 223, 246-251; Donald G. Tewksbury, The Founding of American Colleges and Universities Before the Civil War (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1932), 34-36.

218 for the republic. Students would learn about historical figures known for their virtue, others known for their vice, and those who vacillated from one end of the spectrum to the other. With such knowledge at hand, they could go forth and attempt to replicate the paths of those they most revered. Also important to this effort was the inclusion of more modern, post-Roman histories because they provided students with historical figures with whom they could more easily identify. The colleges of the early republic, therefore, played a major contributing role in providing the young United States with the upstanding republican citizens it would need for the success of their great experiment.

In spite of the great need for republican citizens in the new nation, however, higher education during the early republic remained, as it had been in the colonial period, a privilege.

Equality may have been one of the ideals of the founders but, in reality, colleges continued to educate young gentlemen. Theirs were the families who could afford not only tuition but the cost of living away from home. While students from poorer backgrounds who showed academic promise could sometimes attend via scholarships, they far from made up the majority of the student body. To be college-ready, after all, often meant that one could translate works from

Latin and Greek into English. Such preparation, outside of the few public Latin schools operating in New England, came at a cost. Thus, for all the talk during the Revolution and the years of the early republic of equality and rights, a college education was not a right for anyone. The young men answering the leaders of the United States’ call for republican citizens would likely come from America’s educated classes.

219 College-Building in the Early Republic

Although residents of the newly independent northern states could boast of their region being the home of eight colleges by the onset of the Revolution, the residents of the southern states could boast of only one: the College of William & Mary. This disparity created a desire among many well-educated Southerners to expand the collegiate possibilities for their own sons after the Revolution. One of the earliest efforts to establish a second college in the south, however, actually began prior to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War with the members of the

Charles Town Library Society in South Carolina. In 1770, at the Society’s behest, South

Carolina’s Lieutenant Governor, William Bull, recommended that the General Assembly extend the colony’s free school system to include a provincial college that would be set up on its back settlements. Unfortunately for the Society and the colony’s youth, the onset of the Revolutionary

War and the subsequent exile of potential benefactors forced any further action on the establishment of a college to cease. In 1785, two years after the war’s official end, however, the

General Assembly of South Carolina granted a charter for the establishment of not one, but three colleges: one in Winnsborough, one near Charleston, and one in the district of Ninety-Six. While the former quickly devolved into an elementary school, and it is questionable whether the latter ever functioned as a college, Reverend Robert Smith personally paid for repairs to some of

Charleston’s old military barracks in order to open the College of Charleston there in January

1790.5

5 J.H. Easterby, A History of the College of Charleston, Founded 1770 (Charleston: Trustees of the College of Charleston, 1935), 10, 15; “An Act for Erecting and Establishing a College at Winnsborough, in the District of Camden, a College in or near the city of Charleston, and a College at Ninety-Six, in the District of Ninety-Six, in the State of South Carolina,” in The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, Volume IV (Columbia, S.C.: A.S. Johnson, 1838), 674; Jürgen Herbst, From Crisis to Crisis: American College Government, 1636-1819 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 199; Easterby, A History of the College of Charleston, 28.

220 In neighboring North Carolina, support for the creation of a college came from groups otherwise antagonistic toward one another, the Presbyterians in the west and the gentry in the east, but found ultimate expression in North Carolina’s 1776 constitution. Article 41, known as the education article, is quite simple, stating that “all useful learning shall be duly encouraged, and promoted, in one or more universities.”6 The first attempt to implement the education article came in 1784 with a bill to establish the “President and Trustees of the North Carolina

University” coming before the General Assembly. The bill failed to pass. Successful chartering of the University of North Carolina finally came in 1789 thanks to the charisma and eloquence of assemblyman General William Richardson Davie. He expressed his beliefs about the role of education in the preamble of the university charter thus: “it is the indispensable duty of every legislature to… endeavor to fit [the younger generation] for an honorable discharge of the social duties of life, by paying the strictest attention to their education.”7 He went on to state in the preamble that the best way to achieve this aim was to open a university supported by permanent funds. Despite some early difficulties in raising these funds, General Davie laid the cornerstone of the first building, Old East, on October 12, 1793, and the University of North Carolina opened to students in January 1795.8

Although there was less of a need for new colleges outside of the South, that did not stop members of underserved communities in the north from wanting colleges of their own. In

Pennsylvania, home to a large contingent of Lutheran and German Reformed churches, the

6 “Constitution of North Carolina: December 18, 1776,” The Avalon Project At the Yale Law School: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy. New Haven, CT: The Avalon Project, 1996. 7 “Act Establishing the University of North Carolina, 1789,” The Laws of North-Carolina (Halifax. NC: Abraham Hodge, 1797), 14-16. 8 William D. Snider, Light on the Hill: A History of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 3, 7, 10-11,19; “Act Establishing the University of North Carolina, 1789,” The Laws of North-Carolina (Halifax. NC: Abraham Hodge, 1797), 14-16.

221 congregants longed to open an institution for the German American community. Impressed by

Revolutionary patriot and physician Benjamin Rush’s success in the expansion of Carlisle

Grammar School into Dickinson College, Pennsylvania-Germans recruited him to help them found a college of their own. Rush, along with German-Reformed ministers Justus Christian

Henry Helmuth and Gotthilf Henry Ernst Muhlenberg, and Lutheran ministers Casper Dietrich

Weiberg and Johann Wilhem Hendel, petitioned the Pennsylvania legislature on December 11,

1786 for a college charter. In the general plan of the college, which accompanied the petition, the college’s founders explained that they wished to name their new school Franklin College due to their respect for the great American statesman, Benjamin Franklin. The eminent statesman’s

£200 donation to the college’s treasury was no doubt a motivating factor as well. With little to no reservations about the proposed college, the Pennsylvania legislature granted Franklin College its charter on March 10, 1787. Four months later, instruction of students began in the old “Brew

House” on Mifflin Street on July 18, 1787.9

The Role of Religion in the Colleges of the Early Republic

While each of the nine colleges founded during the colonial period had a direct connection to a Christian denomination which determined the religious atmosphere and education at each college, the religious situation at the colleges of the early republic was quite different. The University of North Carolina, for example, was the first public university to operate in the United States, and so it did not legally have ties to any religious institutions.

9 Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 142.; Joseph Henry Dubbs, History of Franklin & Marshall College (Lancaster, PA: Franklin & Marshall Alumni Association, 1903), 18-19, 61.; “An Act to Incorporate and endow the German College and Charity School in the borough and county of Lancaster in this state [Franklin College Charter],” F&M Founding Documents Collection, Archives & Special Collections, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. (hereafter referred to as F&M Founding Documents Collection)

222 However, the by-laws of the college stated that the president was to lead morning and evening prayers and examine the students’ understanding of the general principles of morality and religion every Sunday evening.10 Meanwhile, at the College of Charleston, the first “principal” of the college, Reverend Robert Smith, was also the first Episcopal Bishop of South Carolina.

Although the choice of Smith by the trustees might lead one to believe that the college was squarely in the corner of the Episcopal Church, that is not wholly true. The Episcopal Church itself, for example, never made systematic contributions to the college, even as it went through periods of economic struggle. Additionally, per Charleston’s college charter, all trustees had to profess themselves as adherents to Protestant Christianity, but faculty and students were free to follow other religious beliefs. Indeed, included among the first faculty members at the College of

Charleston were a Roman Catholic priest and a Huguenot minister. At Franklin College, established in large part by leaders of both the Lutheran and German Reformed churches, some of the first students enrolled in 1787 belonged to the Jewish Gratz family. Such denominational and religious mixing at the colleges of the early republic indicated a change in early American culture. College officials were obviously committed to experimenting with the republican ideal of religious toleration.11

As the first public university to operate in the newly founded United States, the

University of North Carolina did not owe allegiance to any church, yet religious education was a

10 Prayer continued to be part of a public-school education in the United States until 1963. 11 “Laws and Regulations for the University of North Carolina, August 2, 1795,” Pettigrew Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (hereafter referred to as Southern Historical Collection); Easterby, A History of the College of Charleston, 28.; Arthur Ben Chitty, “College of Charleston: Episcopal Claims Questioned, 1785-,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Vol. 37, No. 4 (December 1968): 414; “An Act for Erecting and Establishing at College at Winnsborough, in the District of Camden, a College in or near the city of Charleston, and a College at Ninety-Six, in the District of Ninety-Six, in the State of South Carolina,” in The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, Volume IV (Columbia, S.C.: A.S. Johnson, 1838), 677; “A list of scholars who have entered into the English school, Franklin College, 1787-1788,” F & M Founding Documents Collection, Archives & Special Collections, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA.

223 part of the curriculum and all students had to attend religious services. In the “Laws and

Regulations for the University of North Carolina,” prepared by trustee and Presbyterian minister

Samuel E. McCorkle, it says that the exercises of the first literary class were to include study of the Greek New Testament. Also, all students, regardless of class rank, had to attend prayer services every morning and evening. On Sundays, in addition to prayers, students had to attend divine service and be ready to answer any questions the college president, Reverend David Ker, might pose to them pertaining to the principles of morality and religion. Despite the inclusion of religious instruction by the Presbyterian president and observance of religious rituals at the college, the University of North Carolina was meant to serve students of all denominations.

Support for such religious tolerance appears in an anonymously written 1793 article in The

North-Carolina Journal. The anonymous writer calls for donations to the university at Chapel

Hill, stating: “Ye friends to religion! Give; learning is friendly to religion. It corrects prejudice, superstition and enthusiasm and gives right views of God by leading to the proper knowledge of his works.”12 The writer then continued by calling upon, “Episcopalians, Presbyterians,

Methodists, Baptists, Universalists, and Society of Friends, peaceful Quakers” to give to the university because it would be a center of public friendship and peace. The anonymous-writer’s plea to members of the various denominations, as well as the pleas of others, worked. Between

1793 and 1795 the university had received enough donations to pay $11,060 for the construction of the first college building, Old East.13

12 “Thoughts on the Necessity and Advantages of a general Contribution to the Support of the University,” The North-Carolina Journal (Halifax), No. 36, March 20, 1793. 13 “Laws and Regulations for the University of North Carolina, August 2, 1795,” Pettigrew Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection; “Thoughts on the Necessity and Advantages of a general Contribution to the Support of the University,” The North-Carolina Journal (Halifax), No. 36, March 20, 1793.; Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, 826.

224 The lack of denominationalism at the University of North Carolina, however, could have its downfalls. The moral environment at the university did not always live up to the strict standards of some parents. Charles Pettigrew, the Episcopal Bishop of North Carolina, was one such parent. Bishop Pettigrew’s sons, John and Ebenezer, were students at the university from

1795 to 1797 and during their time there he asked them to report on the morality of their fellow students. In his letters, John wrote to his father, “The Students in general have nothing very criminal in their conduct excep [sic] a vile, & detestable practice of cursing, & swearing…[which] is carried on here to the greatest perfection…there can be hardly a sentence spoken without some of those highflown words which sailors commonly use to divert each other…”14 In response to this behavior of John and Ebenezer’s fellow students, which the Bishop feared was indicative of “an Education without the fear of God,” he withdrew his sons from the college. John died from disease two years after he left the University of North Carolina.

Ebenezer never finished his collegiate education, most likely due to the fact that no other options for higher education would exist in North Carolina until the mid-1800s, but he went on to become a successful planter, a member of the North Carolina Senate, and served one term in the

U.S. House of Representatives. With no single denomination in charge of the college, what one group of students considered harmless fun might seem deeply immoral to others, thus leading strictly pious parents to quickly remove their children from the school.15

14 “Letter from John Pettigrew to Charles Pettigrew, April 12, 1796,” Pettigrew Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection; “Letter from John Pettigrew to Charles Pettigrew, June 27, 1797,” Pettigrew Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection. 15 “Charles Pettigrew to Joseph Caldwell, Nov. 10, 1797,” The Pettigrew Papers, Vol. I: 1685-1818, ed. Sarah McCulloh Lemmon (Raleigh: State Department of Archives and History, 1971), 219; Sarah McCulloh Lemmon, “Introduction: The Pettigrew Family,” The Pettigrew Papers, Vol. I: 1685-1818 (Raleigh: State Department of Archives and History, 1971), xvii; Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, 85-86, 91, 93, 826.

225 In South Carolina, the students at the College of Charleston tended to follow the religious conventions of the Episcopal Church, but students and professors belonging to various Christian denominations could enroll and teach, respectively. The college’s first principal, Reverend

Robert Smith, also served as the first Episcopalian Bishop of South Carolina and wholeheartedly believed that religious education for students was necessary. As a result, students began and ended each class day with a service from the Book of Common Prayer led by Bishop Smith.

While no description of the curriculum during Smith’s tenure as president, from 1790 to 1797, has survived, references in contemporary newspapers and the journal of the trustees provide something of an outline. The faculty divided the students into two groups, or “courses,” the classical course and the English course. English course students included those younger students preparing to enter the classical course as well as those students of the same age as the classical- course-students who wished to pursue all of the subjects of the classical course except for the study of ancient languages. At the first examination of the college’s students, held ten months after the opening of the college, professors tested those students in the classical course on their understanding of Latin and Greek. While these ancient languages were certainly useful for the student’s reading of works such as Livy and Homer, they also happen to be two of the most common languages in which printers published the Bible. With Bishop Smith as the president of the college and his strong belief in religious practice for students, it would not be too much of a stretch to imagine that the students’ study of Latin and Greek also included the Vulgate, i.e., the

Latin Bible, and the Greek Bible. Despite Reverend Smith’s dual positions as both Bishop of

South Carolina and president of the college, the college was in reality a religiously tolerant place.

In fact, the college’s charter included a clause which stated that no matter one’s personal

226 religious beliefs the liberties and privileges of the college, which included both attending the college and teaching at the college, were open to all prospective students and faculty.16

Compared to the trustees at North Carolina or Charleston, the trustees of Franklin

College made their intention to include religious education in the curriculum well-known from the start. In the “Plan of Education” which accompanied the 1786 petition to the General

Assembly of Pennsylvania for a college charter, the trustees explained that in addition to their major goal of “diffusing literature” among the region’s German-American population, they intended for the institution to promote knowledge of morals and divinity. They deemed such knowledge of divinity as crucial because, like the founders of many of the colonial colleges, the leaders of the Lutheran and German Reformed churches feared that without the appropriate avenues for higher education in America there would end up being a shortage of qualified ministers to preach to their ever-growing flocks. Franklin’s founders differed from the founders of the colonial colleges, however, because they willingly overlooked their Lutheran and German

Reformed doctrinal differences to offer higher education opportunities to all interested citizens of

South Central Pennsylvania.17

Similar to the divisions created at the College of Charleston, Franklin College’s president, Reverend G.H.E. Muhlenberg, found it necessary to split the college into two halves.

Instead of a classical and an English course, however, Reverend Muhlenberg divided Franklin

16 Easterby, A History of the College of Charleston, 19, 32, 33; Arthur Ben Chitty, “College of Charleston: Episcopal Claims Questioned, 1785-,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Vol. 37, No. 4 (December 1968): 413.; “An Act for Erecting and Establishing at College at Winnsborough, in the District of Camden, a College in or near the city of Charleston, and a College at Ninety-Six, in the District of Ninety-Six, in the State of South Carolina,” in The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, Volume IV (Columbia, S.C.: A.S. Johnson, 1838), 677. 17 Dubbs, History of Franklin & Marshall College, 19; Sally F. Griffith, Liberalizing the Mind: Two Centuries of Liberal Education at Franklin and Marshall College (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 7.

227 students into a German department and an English department. Aside from the difference in language, students in the English department tended to be younger than those in the German department and did not always receive as advanced of an education as the German department students did. Some idea of the instruction in religion which the students received in both departments appears in local newspaper articles. In the November 5, 1788 issue of the Lancaster

Neue Unpartheyische Zeitung, the writer describes the first annual examination of students from

October of that year, stating that the German students replied satisfactorily to questions asked of them concerning Christian doctrine. In another article, describing the annual exercises on July 3,

1789, the writer explains that the students had improved their academic performance since the previous year. Students in the English department, for example, were able to translate passages from the Greek New Testament as part of their exam.18

Despite the desire of the founders and trustees of Franklin College to further advance the

German-American community through education, and thus ensure the continuity of the Lutheran and German Reformed churches in Pennsylvania, it was actually the English department of the college that was the most successful. The English department enrolled students of various religious backgrounds. The Jewish Gratz family, for example, sent both their son, Hyman, and their daughter, Richea, to Franklin for their collegiate educations. In addition to Richea Gratz, the faculty of the English department taught nearly forty other young women, making Franklin

College the first coeducational college in America. The fact that the religiously diverse and gender inclusive part of the school succeeded while the more denominationally-oriented part

18 Dubbs, History of Franklin & Marshall College, 71-72, 76, 78.

228 floundered appears to show that there was great support for the republican ideal of religious toleration, even in one of the country’s less-diverse regions.19

***

While students at the colonial colleges could spend hours a day studying the books of the

Bible and translating biblical passages from one language to another, students at the colleges of the early republic spent a few hours a week in translation and attending prayer and Sabbath services. This was by design. The University of North Carolina and the College of Charleston were never meant to provide clergy for their respective regions, their founders established them to provide education in the liberal arts and sciences, with religious education as only one of many components. At Franklin College, where some of the founders hoped to provide the region with clergy, religion played a larger part. However, the inclusivity of the English department there helped to bring the college in line with the more tolerant republican values of the day.

Ultimately, the more relaxed approach to religious education which the officials of the colleges of the early republic espoused may very well have facilitated the willingness of some of their alumni to serve the diverse populace of the new American republic, just as Ebenezer Pettigrew and John Geddes did as a senator and a governor.

The Enlightenment in the Curriculum of the Early Republic

By the 1780s, when the founders of the colleges of the early republic first began to establish their schools, the ideas of the Enlightenment had been part of the American intellectual

19 Ibid., 72; “A list of scholars who have entered into the English school, Franklin College, 1787-1788,” F&M Founding Documents Collection.

229 consciousness for several decades. Partly as result of this prolonged exposure, the professors at the colleges of the early republic took a different approach to teaching their students about

Enlightenment ideas than their colonial predecessors. Instead of teaching the Enlightenment through a religious lens, either by teaching interpretations of philosophical works or placing religious doctrine within scientific texts, the professors at the colleges of the early republic taught their students directly from the works of the Enlightenment’s philosophers. In this new, republican age most Americans were simply more open to fully embracing the Enlightenment.

The revolution which had already occurred in America and the revolution which was currently occurring in France had given rise to the acceptance of more radical Enlightenment ideas, not only among American society’s intellectual elite, but also in the classroom.

Natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and political philosophy became more prevalent in the late-eighteenth century curriculum at the University of North Carolina in large part because of the work of William Richardson Davie, the charismatic general who had convinced the North

Carolina assembly to grant the university its charter. After twelve-months of instruction according to the educational plan drawn up by Trustee McCorkle, General Davie submitted a revised plan to the board. Davie’s plan placed more emphasis on the sciences than the classics, and according to future president and historian of the university, Kemp Battle, “[was] far ahead of the times, anticipat[ing] in some respects the work of Jefferson with the University of

Virginia.”20 General Davie divided the instruction of students among five professors, with the sciences further divided between the Professor of Natural Philosophy, Astronomy, and

Geography and the Professor of Chemistry and the Philosophy of Medicine, Agriculture, and the

20 Kemp P. Battle, History of the University of North Carolina: From its Beginning to the Death of President Swain, 1789-1868 (Raleigh, NC: Edwards and Broughton, 1907), 94.

230 Mechanic Arts. The former professor was responsible for teaching students the laws of motion, mechanical powers, hydrostatics, hydraulics, pneumatics, optics, electricity, magnetism, geography, and astronomy. The teaching responsibilities of the latter professor were more generic, with the plan simply stating that “Chymistry” should be taught upon the “most approved plan.” Of the subjects taught by the Professor of Natural Philosophy, the inclusion of those most associated with Isaac Newton, the laws of motion and optics, stands out. Due to Newton’s personal anti-trinitarianism and the tendency of his theories to punch holes in the colonists’ biblically based understanding of the world, colonial professors usually taught Newtonian science through a religious lens. At the University of North Carolina in the 1790s, however, this no longer appeared to be the norm.21

The teaching of moral and political philosophy at the University of North Carolina was an even greater departure from the norm at the colonial colleges. According to General Davie’s plan of education, the Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy and History was to teach the students William Paley’s The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, Charles-Louis de

Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, John Adams’ Defence of the

Constitutions of the Government of the U.S., Jean Louis de Lolme’s The Constitution of England,

Emerich de Vattel’s The Law of Nations, and Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui’s The Principles of

Natural and Political Law, along with the U.S. Constitution and other modern constitutions of

Europe. None of these works are interpretations of other works, but instead the works of the original writers themselves. In addition to the inclusion of documents pertaining to the United

21 Snider, Light on the Hill, 25.; “Excerpts from Board of Trustees Minutes, December 4, 1795 [Containing the “Plan of the Preparatory School” and the “Plan of Education Under the Professorships of the University”],” Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina Records (#40001), University Archives, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (hereafter referred to as UNC University Archives)

231 States, since it obviously did not exist during the colonial period, the inclusion of works such as

Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws in a college curriculum would very likely have surprised many colonial educators. In this work, Montesquieu argued for a constitutional system of government with a separation of powers. He wrote, “when the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty.”22 In other words, by virtue of vesting so much power in the hands of a king, his subjects (which would have included the colonists) had no liberty. Even when professors taught The Spirit of the

Laws in the classroom in the 1780s and 1790s, it still contained some controversial elements. For example, Montesquieu argued against slavery. He stated, “The state of slavery in its own nature is bad. It is neither useful to the master nor to the slave…by having an unlimited authority over his slaves [the master] insensibly accustoms himself to the want of all moral virtue…”23 To teach that the institution of slavery was not only harmful to the slave, but to the slave master could be controversial. While Thomas Jefferson had similar views to Montesquieu, and made them known, he neither gave up his slaves nor were his works prescribed reading for students at the college. Therefore, the fact that the educators at North Carolina taught these ideas in a country that would not legally ban the international slave trade until 1808, and especially a classroom in the American south, was not only impressive, but brave.24

Not everyone, however, was happy with the changes brought about by Davie’s new plan of education. The designer of the original plan, Reverend Samuel McCorkle, expressed his disapproval of the turn in the university’s curriculum in a 1799 letter to the state treasurer, John

22 Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws (New York: The Colonial Press, 1900), 151. 23 Ibid., 235. 24 “Excerpts from Board of Trustees Minutes, December 4, 1795 [Containing the “Plan of the Preparatory School” and the “Plan of Education Under the Professorships of the University”],” Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina Records (#40001), UNC University Archives.

232 Haywood. In the letter, Reverend McCorkle explained “I reprobate the modern French Jacobine system of Education which would govern wholly by Reason without the Rod of correction. I do assert that Reason is too weak to govern without coercion …”25 What McCorkle meant by the

“French Jacobine system” was the Deist approach to education. Deism was a form of natural religion which argued that the world was a rational place that ran according to absolute and unchanging natural laws. The Creator, or “Supreme Architect,” was responsible for setting these laws in motion, but it was up to man to use his ability to reason, which the Supreme Architect had granted him, to understand the world. Deists rejected supernatural or revealed religions, such as Christianity, because they thought that many of the central tenets of these faiths, such as the idea of eternal damnation, the divine authorship of Scripture, and the divinity of Jesus Christ were assaults on human rationality. As a Christian minister, McCorkle did not agree with the

Deists’ beliefs or their assertion that reason was all that man or, in this particular case, a student, needed to be a good citizen for the republic. In response to the change in the university curriculum Reverend McCorkle left the board of trustees in 1800, ending his over fifteen-year relationship with the university.26

The intellectual turn toward deism was also a problem for some of the college’s students.

In an April 1796 letter young John Pettigrew wrote to his father, Bishop Charles Pettigrew, he stated that one of the favorite books of the students at North Carolina was Thomas Paine’s Age of

Reason. He explained that his fellow students “prefer[ed] it [Paine’s Age of Reason] to all the books that were ever wrote since the creation of the World; they also say that he was sent into

25 “Letter from Samuel E. McCorkle to John Haywood, December 20, 1799,” Ernest Haywood Collection of Haywood Family Papers (#1290), Southern Historical Collection. 26 Thomas T. Taylor, “McCorkle, Samuel Eusebius,” Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, ed. William S. Powell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 128; Kerry Walters, Revolutionary Deists: Early America’s Rational Infidels (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011), loc. 478-488 of 3400, Kindle.

233 the World to set menkind [sic] to liberty.”27 For the students to prefer any book over the Bible would have been problematic enough for Bishop Pettigrew, but the fact that their chosen book was one which attacked the established church and argued that the Bible was filled with myths was, understandably, worse. Already having knowledge of the students’ propensity for swearing, it is really no wonder that Bishop Pettigrew removed John, as well as his brother Ebenezer, from the university after only two years of study there.28

While one of the goals of the founders of Franklin College was to educate young men for positions in the clergy, this does not mean that the professors neglected their students’ education in other subjects, such as natural and political philosophy. In a 1787 letter Benjamin Rush wrote to his mother-in-law he describes the speech he gave at the first meeting of the Franklin College trustees in which he outlined the advantages of the college. One of these advantages was that

Pennsylvania’s young German Americans finally had a nearby school at which they could become qualified to fill positions in the U.S. legislature and, with further learning, become reputable ministers, lawyers, physicians, and schoolmasters. To properly prepare their students to one day take up the latter two professions, the college’s professors had to provide them with a solid knowledge base in the sciences. Although none of the professors among the early faculty bore the title of Professor of Natural Sciences, German-born Professor Frederick Valentine

Melsheimer and President Muhlenberg were the two most likely candidates to have taught the students natural philosophy. Melsheimer holds a special place in early-American scientific history due to his study of over 1,360 species of beetle, the first study of its kind in the United

States. The study also helped to earn him the moniker “the father of American entomology.” For

27 “Letter from John Pettigrew to Charles Pettigrew, April 12, 1796,” Pettigrew Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection. 28 Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, 91-93.

234 his part, President Muhlenberg was a noted botanist and participated in an exchange of American botanical specimens with his European counterparts throughout his tenure at Franklin. Together,

Melsheimer and Muhlenberg would have provided Franklin’s future educators with the scientific education they would need to pass on such knowledge to their pupils, and Franklin’s future physicians with the basic scientific knowledge they would need to further their educations and eventually become physicians.29

Insight into the approach to teaching political philosophy at Franklin, and, realistically, the approach to teaching it at all of the colleges of the early republic, appears in another piece of writing by Benjamin Rush. In his essay “Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,” Rush writes of young male students: “He must be taught that there can be no liberty but in a republic, and that government, like all other sciences is of a progressive nature…here it is open to investigation and improvement.”30 According to historian Eve Kornfield, Rush was the primary voice of a large network of American intellectual elites who believed that republican institutions, like the colleges of the early republic, could be used to preserve republican society by spreading civic knowledge. Due to a scarcity of records from the early years of Franklin’s existence, unfortunately, it is not known which of the college’s professors instructed the students in their political philosophy lessons. The very fact that the trustees and educators at such a small school, in a heavily-German populated part of Pennsylvania, even thought to instruct their students in political philosophy (as well as included in the college charter itself the desire to “preserve the

29 Benjamin Rush, A Letter by Benjamin Rush Describing the Consecration of the German College at Lancaster in June 1787 (Lancaster, PA: Printed by the Order of the College, 1945), 17; Dubbs, History of Franklin & Marshall College, 62-63.; C. Earle Smith, Jr., “Henry Muhlenberg—Botanical Pioneer,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 106, No. 5 (October 11, 1962): 443-444. 30 Benjamin Rush, “Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,” in Essays, Literary, Moral, and Philosophical (Philadelphia: Printed by Thomas and William Bradford, 1806), 12.

235 principles of our republican form of government”) demonstrates the commitment of many of the people of the early republic to embracing the ideals of the Enlightenment.31

At the College of Charleston in South Carolina, during the presidential tenure of Bishop

Smith, the responsibility of instruction in the sciences fell to Simon Felix Gallagher, a native of

Ireland and Roman Catholic priest. In a 1799 article from Charleston’s City Gazette and

Commercial Daily Advertiser advertising Professor Gallagher’s teaching at the college, it states that he taught students mathematics, astronomy, natural philosophy, and logic. While no records of the college’s curriculum during Bishop Smith’s tenure exist, Gallagher himself was a graduate of the University of Paris and it would not be an overstatement to think that he would have taught his students the science that he had learned in college. By the mid-eighteenth century, the faculty at Paris were devotees of Newtonian science, the “new” science of physiology, as well as

Lockean philosophy. In fact, in 1740, French physicist Pierre Sigorgne taught a class at Paris focused solely on Newtonian experimental physics. While it might seem that Professor

Gallagher’s Catholic faith would have precluded him from embracing such scientific learning, this is simply not the case. Jesuit intellectuals at the University of Paris were openly engaged with the Enlightenment’s new innovations in science and epistemology, i.e., the study of the nature of knowledge and rationality, and that intellectualism continued even after Pope Clement

XIV disbanded the order itself.32 Therefore, as the graduate of a program which promoted

31 Eve Kornfield, “‘Republican Machines’ or Pestalozzian Bildung: Two Visions of Moral Education in the Early Republic,” Canadian Review of American Studies, Vol. 20, Iss. 2 (January 1989): 158-161; “An Act to Incorporate and endow the German College and Charity School in the borough and county of Lancaster in this state [Franklin College Charter],” F&M Founding Documents Collection. 32 For more information about the relationship between theology and the Enlightenment, see R.R. Palmers’ Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939) for a classic interpretation, and Jeffrey D. Burson’s The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010) for a recent interpretation. In the latter, the forward and chapter 1 are especially important.

236 Enlightenment thinking in regard to science, Professor Gallagher would very likely have instructed his own students in science with the Enlightenment ideas he had learned at Paris in mind. Among the faculty at Charleston, Professor Gallagher was both the most distinguished scholar as well as the most well-liked by the students. Judge John S. Richardson, one of

Gallagher’s former students, spoke fondly of the professor and his contribution to the sciences at

Charleston, saying: “He was a man of genius and of taste, a scholar and a gentleman … I believe he introduced into the college, logic and natural philosophy, and some taste for belles lettres”33

The combination of Gallagher’s Parisian education and his popularity among the students helped to ensure not only that Enlightened scientific study at the College of Charleston was alive, but that it was a favorite subject of the college’s students.34

***

When compared with their colonial counterparts, the professors at the colleges of the early republic embraced a more radical approach to teaching Enlightenment ideas. This occurred not only because the ideas of natural, moral, and political philosophers had been part of the intellectual environment of America for a longer period of time, but also because the republicanism which was so popular in the United States was itself inspired by Enlightenment ideals. At the University of North Carolina, America’s first truly public university, professors taught students the scientific theories and laws of Isaac Newton without regard for how those

33 “A Historical Sketch of the College of Charleston, South Carolina,” in The American Quarterly Register, Vol. 12, (Boston: Printed by Perkins & Marvin, 1840), 165. 34 Easterby, A History of the College of Charleston, 36.; “Charleston College,” City Gazette, and Commercial Daily Advertiser, Vol. XVIII, No. 3708, July 1, 1799, 1.; David C.R. Heisser, “Gallagher, Simon Felix,” South Carolina Encyclopedia, http://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/gallagher-simon-felix/; Jeffrey D. Burson, “The Crystallization of Counter-Enlightenment and Philosophe Identities: Theological Controversy and Catholic Enlightenment in Pre-Revolutionary France,” Church History, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Dec 2008): 973-975; Bruno Belhoste, Paris Savant: Capital of Science in the Age of Enlightenment, Trans. by Susan Emanuel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 53.

237 ideas might conflict with their students’ personal religious beliefs. Professors at North Carolina also introduced their students to political and moral ideologies which called into question long- held “truths” about monarchy and slavery. While American patriots had recently toppled the first institution, the second would not come to an end for over sixty years; thus, the fact that arguments against that institution were part of the college curriculum is quite remarkable for the time period. The students at Franklin College received a solid foundation in the sciences from men considered America’s leading entomologist and botanist. In regard to political philosophy,

Benjamin Rush encouraged Franklin students to study the republican government of the United

States in hopes of finding ways in which the system could be improved. Seeking such improvement was a hallmark of not only a republican education, but of republican citizenship. At the College of Charleston, Simon Felix Gallagher passed on the science education he received at the hands of the scientists at the University of Paris to the students under his tutelage. This education included study in Newtonian science as well as innovative ideas about physiology and epistemology. In the end, the unencumbered acceptance of the Enlightenment by the educators of the colleges of the early republic helped students to become more fully engaged citizens of the new, republican nation.

History and Virtue in the Colleges of the Early Republic

While history had taught the leading citizens of the early United States many valuable lessons, perhaps the most valuable in their current situation was what it would take for a large republic like theirs to succeed. With the Roman Republic as their only example, they turned to the works of one of the greatest Roman statesmen, Cicero, for answers. In his 44 B.C. work De

Officiis (On Duties), Cicero explained that it was the duty of all citizens to practice the four

238 virtues: first, a knowledge of the truth (i.e., wisdom), second, the maintenance of organized society by rendering each man his due (i.e. justice), third, the greatness of a noble and invincible spirit (i.e., fortitude), and fourth, the orderliness and moderation of everything (i.e., temperance).

If, for any reason, the citizens failed to perform such duties, their society as they knew it was liable to collapse because, as Cicero stated “as, on the one hand, we secure great advantages through the sympathetic cooperation of our fellow men; so, on the other, there is no curse so terrible but is brought down by man upon man.”35 To illustrate his point, Cicero included historical examples of men who had used fear to keep their fellow man inline, such as Alexander of Pherae, Phalaris, and Demetrius, and subsequently paid for their iniquity with their lives.

Thus, if the American people wanted their republican experiment to thrive their citizens would need to practice virtue. Such behavior, however, had levels. According to Classicist Joy

Connolly, Cicero conceived of “the full[est] glory of virtue” coming from an active life in the

Roman forum, with particular preference given to those who became orators. Following that example, the most virtuous citizens of the United States would be those who took part in the government of the new republic. The founders of the colleges of the early republic likely hoped that their respective institutions might one day be the alma maters of such leaders.36

To instill the necessary virtue in its citizenry, America’s leaders turned to education.

Future president John Adam stated as much in the Massachusetts Constitution, writing that wisdom, knowledge, and virtue were dependent on the spread of educational opportunities throughout the country. He further stated that it was not only the duty of the government to provide education, but to “cherish the interests” of it. While Adams specifically mentioned the

35 Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiss, trans. Walter Miller (London: William Heinemann, 1921), 183. 36 Ibid., 191-195; Joy Connolly, The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 143-145.

239 “university at Cambridge” (i.e., Harvard) in the new country’s educational efforts, educators at the colleges of the early republic also took part. Via their teaching of both ancient and modern history, these educators provided their students with numerous historical figures known for their virtue to model their behavior after. They could pick the men they viewed as worthy citizens from both long-gone republics, such as Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, or from republics much closer to home, such as George Washington. The impetus behind the study of history at college, therefore, had changed in the early republic. During the colonial period, educators had used history to focus on lessons about the English commonwealth, freedom, and repression, but during the years of the early republic, educators used history to provide examples of individuals well-regarded for their virtue in hopes of developing good, republican citizens. In addition to this change at all of the colleges, professors at the University of North Carolina introduced their students to the non-Whig interpretation of history which many of them had likely never encountered before.37

At the University of North Carolina, change in both the approach to and the chronological focus of history came as a result of the implementation of General Davie’s plan of education. According to the letters John and Ebenezer Pettigrew sent to their father before the implementation of General Davie’s plan, their education in history included John Clarke’s

Cornelii nepotis vitae excellentium imperatorum; or, Lives of the Excellent Commanders,

Flavius Eutropius’ Abridgement of Roman History, and Julius Caesar’s Commentaries. Simply put, their educations in history were strictly ancient in nature. Not only were the histories they read focused on ancient times, but it was the ancients’ themselves who authored the histories they read. With the implementation of Davie’s plan, however, the Professor of Moral and

37 David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2001), 221-223;

240 Political Philosophy and History began to teach the students Joseph Priestley’s Lectures on

History and General Policy, Abbe Claude-François-Xavier Millot’s Ancient and Modern

History, David Hume’s History of England, and Tobias Smollett’s Continuation of the Complete

History of England.38

The author of Lectures on History and General Policy, Joseph Priestley, was a British polymath who had self-exiled to the United States in 1793. Prior to his exile, Priestley had worked as an instructor at the dissenting academy at Warrington. Priestley’s lectures on history and government were so popular among his former students that he had them published in 1788.

Among the many arguments Priestley made in his lectures, the one most appropriate to the current topic is his argument that studying history strengthens one’s sentiment of virtue. Of the relationship between history and virtue, Priestley stated, “history, by displaying the sentiments and conduct of truly great men, and those of a contrary character, tend to inspire us with a taste for solid glory and real greatness.”39 In other words, even when one comes across unfavorable historical figures in the study of the past, one is still convinced to follow a more virtuous path.

Priestley’s lectures covered history from ancient to modern times, but he paid particular attention to the modern history of England. Pertaining to virtue and vice, Priestley referred to the Stuarts as imprudent, yet still important, because they provided a foil to the virtuous King William III.

According to Priestley, the Glorious Revolution and the king’s subsequent co-reign with his wife, Queen Mary II, was the most important period of English history because it was during that

38 “Letter from John and Ebenezer Pettigrew to Charles Pettigrew, May 4, 1795,” “Letter from John and Ebenezer Pettigrew to Charles Pettigrew, October 3, 1795,” Southern Historical Collection; “Excerpts from Board of Trustees Minutes, December 4, 1795 [Containing the “Plan of the Preparatory School” and the “Plan of Education Under the Professorships of the University”],” Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina Records (#40001), UNC University Archives. 39 Joseph Priestley, Lectures on History and General Policy, Volume I (London: Printed for J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Church Yard, 1793), 65.

241 time that the English government settled the constitution. Therefore, in reading Priestley’s lectures, students at North Carolina had examples of early modern historical figures known for their virtue and vice to examine and would, hopefully, become convinced to emulate the attitude and actions of those figures they viewed as virtuous.40

Scottish historian and Enlightenment philosopher David Hume published his six-volume

The History of England between 1754 and 1762. Hume did not write or publish the volumes chronologically; instead, the first volume published was his history of the reigns of Kings James

I and Charles I, and the last volume published was his history from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the ascension of King Henry VII. Since the 1795 plan of education at North Carolina did not delineate which particular volumes the students were to read, or in which order, it will be assumed that they were meant to read all of the volumes in chronological order. The very fact that Hume’s history extends past the timeline of ancient history demonstrates the superiority of

General Davie’s plan of education to that of Trustee McCorkle’s, but what is particularly interesting about the inclusion of Hume’s history is that it frequently departs from the Whig narrative. Instead of focusing on the progress of humanity as the Whig historians were wont to do, Hume’s The History of England alternates between blame and praise for both the monarch and parliament. In a letter to one of his confidantes, Hume expressed worry that his balanced approach to both sides might lead readers to believe that his narrative was not based on judgement and evidence. While Hume’s successors vilified him as a “Tory,” “atheist,” and a

“philosopher” (rather than a historian) and were relatively successful in making his works appear out of date, many of his contemporaries actually praised his work. Historian Edward Gibbon, for

40 Joseph Priestley, Lectures on History and General Policy, Volume I (London: Printed for J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Church Yard, 1793), 61; Joseph Priestley, Lecturers on History and General Policy, Volume II (London: Printed for J. Johnson, 1793), 30-31.

242 instance, ranked Hume as the greatest historian of their time and called him the “Tacitus of

Scotland,” while Voltaire said that Hume was the only historian to produce an “impartial” history of England and was the epitome of a reliable historian. Therefore, it was Hume’s unpopular turning away from the Whig narrative, not his reliability as a historian, that is primarily responsible for nineteenth century and later historians ignoring his work and, ultimately, his being known today as more of a philosopher than a historian. Not all scholars, however, have forgotten Hume’s history publications. Historian Wilson E. Strand, for example, called Hume’s work “impressive and forward-thinking,” based on his clear and logical writing style, willingness to judge historical figures within the context of their own times, and impartial attitude toward his subjects.41

One of the ways in which Hume’s history went against the popular Whig narrative was his treatment of King James I. Instead of portraying James I as a monarch insistent on having despotic power, Hume argued that “if James has incurred blame on account of his edicts, it is only because he too frequently issued them at a time when they began to be less regarded, not because he first assumed or extended to an unusual degree that exercise of authority.”42 In other words, James I was not seeking more power than he was entitled to; he was simply trying to use the power he already had at a time when those who opposed his proclamations held the majority in parliament. While, at the time, Hume’s argument may have upset Whigs and pleased

Jacobites, his conclusion about James I’s actions is well reasoned. Historians should not have viewed James I as a power-hungry head of state, but instead as a victim (of sorts) of the partisan

41 David Hume, The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to The Revolution in 1688, Volume I (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1983), xiii; Wilson E. Strand, “David Hume, Historian,” Social Science, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Autumn 1975): 195-208. 42 David Hume, The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to The Revolution in 1688, Volume V (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1983), 128.

243 politics of the period. Hume’s work, therefore, belonged in North Carolina curriculum, even if it went against the grain of the more popular histories of the time. Ultimately, the inclusion of

Joseph Priestley’s Lectures on History and General Policy and David Hume’s The History of

England in the curriculum during this period helped advance the study of history at North

Carolina; both went beyond ancient times and Hume’s work introduced students to a different interpretation of ancient and modern history than that to which they had been accustomed. In addition, both works may have aided in the creation of virtuous citizens for the new republic by providing students with historical figures whom they viewed as honorable to emulate.43

The extent of the history curriculum at the College of Charleston in the late eighteenth century is more difficult to ascertain due to the destruction of the early faculty records. While contemporary sources from outside of the college disclosed that Bishop Smith was in charge of the students’ religious education, and Professor Gallagher was in charge of their scientific studies, there are no known outside records that reveal who instructed the students in history.

Some idea of the history the students may have learned in those early years, however, is extractable from the plan of education instituted by President George Buist. After a seven-year period following the resignation of Bishop Smith, during which President Thomas Bee, Jr. operated the college as more of a preparatory academy than an institution of higher learning,

President Buist brought Charleston back to its college roots. An article in the Dec 25, 1805 issue of Charleston’s City Gazette outlining the curriculum under President Buist states that the sophomore class was tasked with studying the works of Titus Livius (known as Livy) and

Plubius Cornelius Tacitus and the junior class was to focus on the study of natural history. Since

Livy’s only surviving work, History of Rome, and Tacitus’ most substantial works, The Annals

43 Ibid., 127-129.

244 and Histories would have been as readily available to Charleston students in the 1790s as they were in 1805, it is very probable that these works had been part of the history curriculum during the college’s early years.44

The surviving books of Livy’s History of Rome span from the earliest legends about the founding of Rome to 167 B.C. This would have afforded students over 500 years’ worth of history from which to learn about historical figures known for their virtue, such as the founder of the Roman republic, Lucius Junius Brutus, or Rome’s legendary selfless servant, Lucius

Quinctius Cincinnatus. Tacitus’ The Annals, on the other hand, covers the history of the Roman

Empire from 14 A.D. to 68 A.D. Within this work, Tacitus provides his own take on turning to history for examples of virtuous and dishonorable citizens, stating: “…I hold that it is the principal function of history to see to it that noble deeds are not lost to oblivion, and to act as a deterrent to evil words and evil actions by exposing them to the judgement of posterity and to the everlasting infamy which they entail.”45 Some of the more and less admirable historical figures

Tacitus featured in The Annals range from Claudius, who presided over the building and restoring of many of Rome’s public buildings and waterways, to Nero, whose path to power included the murder of his political enemies and who blamed the famous Roman fire during his reign on the early Christians. Tacitus’ Histories picks up in 69 A.D., half a year after the death of

Nero, and ends in 96 A.D. with the death of Domitian, but the latter parts are missing.46

44 Easterby, A History of the College of Charleston, Founded 1770, 38, 43, 52.; “College of Charleston,” City Gazette, Vol. XXIV, No. 5711, December 25, 1805, 2. 45 Cornelius Tacitus, The Annals of Tacitus, Books I-VI, Aubrey V. Symonds, trans. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1906), 169. 46 Titus Livius, Livy in Fourteen Volumes, Volume I, Books I and II, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 209; Livius, Livy in Fourteen Volumes, Volume II, Books III and IV (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 91; Cornelius Tacitus, The Annals of Tacitus, Books I-VI, Aubrey V. Symonds, trans. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1906); Tacitus, The Annals of Tacitus, Books XI-XVI, George Gilbert Ramsay, trans. (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1909); Cornelius Tacitus, The Histories, Volume I, W. Hamilton

245 While plenty of historians have judged Tacitus’s writing and found his abilities as a historian wanting, e.g., claiming that his lack of citations makes his writing appear to be no more than gossip, that his writing is not broad enough, and that his writing is too personal, many of the complaints made against him fall apart when the period in which Tacitus was writing is taken into consideration. As argued by Classics professor Louis E. Lord, Tacitus may not have cited sources, but he lived through many of the events he wrote about. His work may not have been as broad as modern scholars, but perhaps modern scholars take too broad of an approach. Last,

Tacitus may have written more personally than historians do now, but he was much less personal than many of the ancient historians. Tacitus’ books, therefore, were proper histories for the time in which he produced them. Since no other ancient historian recorded the events of that period any better than, or even as good as, Tacitus did, his works were the best ancient histories the students at Charleston could hope to read. Of the historical figures Tacitus featured in Histories, the one whose life choices the Charleston students would most likely have chosen to imitate was

Emperor Vespasian. Despite his low (i.e., non-noble) birth and the troubling times during which his rule began, Vespasian was able to bring economic stability, political stability, and peace to the Roman Empire. Although students at Charleston did not have access to the more modern histories that their contemporaries at North Carolina did, the amount of exposure they received to ancient Roman history provided them with a number of historical figures to imitate, as well as deride, in their attempts to live up to the ideal of virtuous citizenship.47

History played an important part in the curriculum at Franklin College for two distinct reasons: first, its inclusion was a sign that Franklin’s educators intended to provide their students

Fyfe, trans. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1912).; Tacitus, The Histories, Volume II, W. Hamilton Fyfe, trans. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1912). 47 Louis E. Lord, “Tacitus the Historian,” The Classical Journal (Dec 1925): 181-183.

246 with an education in the same vein as other liberal arts college in the country; and second, the study of U.S. history was part of a larger effort by the non-German trustees and supporters of the college to integrate Pennsylvania Germans into American culture. Evidence of the importance of history in the curriculum at Franklin comes from a list written by Professor Melsheimer in the late 1780s. Initially missing from the college’s records, Franklin College historian Joseph Henry

Dubbs discovered the list in the early 1900s. The list includes the names of the fourteen young men enrolled in the German Department of the college between October of 1788 and January of

1789, along with the corresponding subjects that they were to receive instruction in. Over half of the students listed have the subject of history next to their name. As for the type of history the students learned, a November 5, 1788 article in the Lancaster Neue Unpartheyische Zeitung states that at the annual festival in October of that year the professors examined students in history and geography, with particular emphasis given to United States history and geography.

The author of the article also makes the observation that the students’ quick answers to the professor’s questions are indicative of U.S. history and geography being of great interest to the students.48

Since it was only the 1780s when the Franklin professors administered these annual exams to their students, the timeline of United States history was rather short; yet, the students’ chronological proximity to the American Revolution provided them with many men of virtue who had made significant contributions to U.S. history, and many of whom were still living. As

General of the Continental Army (he was not yet president), George Washington was an obvious choice for a role model, yet the students’ German heritage may very well have led them to choose one of Washington’s right-hand men instead: Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben. He

48 Griffith, Liberalizing the Mind, 7-8.; Dubbs, History of Franklin and Marshall College, 71, 76.

247 not only shared the students’ German heritage but was instrumental in training the American troops for battle. Even if Franklin students were to have put Washington and Von Steuben aside, the events leading up to, the events of, and the events after the Revolution would have provided them with a nearly unending supply of men to both avoid the mistakes of and to emulate.

***

America’s early leaders believed that the survival of the United States, like the survival of the Roman Republic, depended upon their citizens’ willingness to practice virtue. To instill that necessary virtue in the citizenry, they turned to education. The study of history would provide students with examples of both virtuous and villainous men as well as explain how those historical figures’ actions led them to either glory or infamy. With such examples before them, the colleges’ young men learned that to be good citizens for the republic they would have to try and emulate the lives of those men who lived virtuously and avoid the pitfalls of those who lived dishonorably. At the University of North Carolina, students initially received instruction in only ancient history, but the reorganization of the plan of education by General Davie added modern history to the curriculum. In the work of Joseph Priestley students learned about several virtuous figures in English history, such as King William III, and in David Hume’s work they learned to reevaluate historical figures they may have once thought to be dishonorable by viewing them through a new historical lens. Students at the College of Charleston were more likely to have received all of their historical education within the ancient period, but they were not left bereft of virtuous figures whose lives they might wish to emulate. The ancient Roman republic, after all, began with Lucius Junius Brutus, a man who overthrew the monarchy and, upon awarding of the consulship, swore an oath that neither he, nor any men, would ever rule over Rome as king again. The connection between the actions of Lucius Junius Brutus and those of President

248 Washington would very likely not have been lost on Charleston’s students. Finally, at Franklin

College, the trustees and educators largely restricted the students’ history curriculum to the history of the United States. They did this as part of the larger effort to assimilate Pennsylvania

Germans into the national culture. This restriction, however, did not prevent Franklin students from finding worthy roles models: if George Washington or Baron von Steuben were not to their liking, they could always turn to Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, or Thomas Jefferson. Perhaps more than any other subject, the study of history introduced students to the best and worst aspects of humanity. They learned of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus’ voluntary relinquishment of dictatorial power but also of the gruesome murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket while in sanctuary. The survival of the new American nation, therefore, seemed to depend upon these students’ willingness to emulate the best of humanity.49

Conclusion

Much like the colonists who established the colonial colleges, America’s newly independent citizens established the colleges of the early republic because their culture had undergone a significant transformation. The administrators at the colleges of the early republic, for instance, valued religious toleration and therefore cultivated a form of religious education which was vastly different from the denominational model of the colonial period. Although attendance at prayer and Sunday services at the University of North Carolina were mandatory for all students, and every student had to be ready to answer religious and moral questions posed by

49 Titus Livius, Livy in Fourteen Volumes, Volume I, Books I and II, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 221; Ibid, Volume II, Books III and IV, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 99; David Hume, The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to The Revolution in 1688, Volume I (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1983), 230.

249 the president, no particular denomination received favor over another. In a newspaper article calling for subscriptions to support the growth of the university, for example, the author asked citizens of Methodist, Quaker, and Universalist beliefs to donate right alongside their

Presbyterian and Episcopalian brethren because the university would be a place of friendship and peace among the denominations. Under the tenure of Bishop Robert Smith, the religious instruction at the College of Charleston had an Episcopalian-bent to it, but the college itself was not affiliated with the Episcopalian Church, nor did it receive any kind of funding from the diocese. Additionally, the College of Charleston openly welcomed students and faculty of all faiths, Roman Catholic priest Simon Felix Gallagher’s position as professor of natural philosophy and Huguenot minister Reverend Jean Paul Coste’s position as professor of French are the very evidence of such toleration. Even at the most religiously minded institution under consideration, Franklin College, students of varying faiths enrolled at the college for their higher educations, including a couple members of the Jewish Gratz family. In fact, in addition to a tolerant model of religious education, the trustees and faculty at Franklin College were tolerant of co-education: among the first class of 114 students, 36 were female. The religious toleration, as well as gender toleration in the case of Franklin, of the officials at the colleges of the early republic was a true expression of the values of the republic.

Administrators at the colleges of the early republic also changed the way in which college professors taught Enlightenment ideas. While colonial professors accepted certain aspects of the

Enlightenment, they tended to do so at arms-length. For example, when colonial professors taught science, they made sure to incorporate various aspects of their religious faith.

Additionally, instead of teaching the political and moral philosophies of John Locke directly from his works, colonial professors taught interpretations of Lockean philosophy. At the

250 University of North Carolina, however, the Professor of Natural Philosophy, Astronomy, and

Geography taught the students the laws and theories of Isaac Newton directly, without any religious influence. Likewise, the Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy and History taught

North Carolina students the actual works of Baron de Montesquieu and William Paley even though they contained ideas which would not necessarily have complemented every student’s moral upbringing. Students at Franklin College, meanwhile, received solid grounding in the sciences from America’s leading entomologist and botanist. Although both men were also pastors, records show no sign of their religious beliefs influencing their teaching of the sciences at the college. The approach to the teaching of political philosophy at Franklin was also quite

Enlightenment-minded. The United States was a republic and, according to Rush, in a republic the government thrives on progress. Therefore, following Rush’s logic, it was the duty of all

American men, including college students, to think of ways to improve the nation’s government.

As for the acceptance of Enlightenment thinking at the College of Charleston, that was essentially due to the thinking of natural philosophy professor Simon Felix Gallagher. As a student at the University of Paris, Gallagher learned Newtonian Science and his professors introduced him to new ideas about physiology and epistemology. As a professor at Charleston,

Gallagher passed the education in Enlightenment science which he had received as a young man onto the young men he taught. The greater acceptance of Enlightenment thought by the faculty at the colleges of the early republic not only made them exemplary citizens of the republic but helped them to prepare their students to be such citizens in the near future.

A final sign of the change in culture which the early American republic had undergone was the emphasis which professors placed on learning virtue through the study of history. After the overhaul of the curriculum at the University of North Carolina in 1795, the Professor of

251 Moral and Political Philosophy and History taught students the history of both the ancient and the modern world but gave particular emphasis to the modern world. In Lectures on History and

General Policy, Joseph Priestley presented King William III as the virtuous foil to the misguided

Stuarts, while David Hume argued in his History of England that James I, a Stuart king, may not have been as devious as other historians had previously concluded. The history curriculum at the

College of Charleston focused on the history of the ancient world rather than the modern world, but this focus did not leave students without plenty of men known for their virtue to model themselves after. Livy’s History of Rome, along with Tacitus’ The Annals and Histories, covered over 550 years of Roman history, allowing Charleston students to choose a historical figure from the men of the Roman Republic or the Roman Empire to imitate. Finally, at Franklin College, the students’ historical education primarily entailed learning about the history of the United States.

Although the span of U.S. history was quite short in comparison to the history of Rome or the history of England, Franklin students could choose the virtuous figures they wished to model themselves after from a time which was more familiar to them. Even if the students at Franklin did not belong to the same rank in society as George Washington or Baron von Steuben, it was probably easier for them to identify with these men than it was to identify with someone like

King William III or Emperor Vespasian. The historical study completed by the students at the colleges of the early republic, along with encouragement from their educators to choose a historical figure of virtue upon whom to model their behavior, helped bring the students one step closer to becoming the ideal virtuous citizens the republic would need.

252 CONCLUSION

…the Genius of our People, their Way of Life, their Circumstances in Point of Fortune, the Customs & Manners & Humors of the Country, difference us in so many important Respects from Europeans, that a Plan of Education, however judiciously adapted to these last, would no more fit us, than an Almanac, calculated for the Latitude of London, would that of Williamsburg – 1

In the eyes of educator Reverend James Maury, who once counted Thomas Jefferson and future Bishop James Madison amongst his pupils, providing an English education to colonial youth was no more fitting than providing a Virginia farmer with a London almanac to determine when to plant and harvest his crops. While Maury was specifically concerned with the teaching of what he referred to as the “dead languages,” he was illustrating the larger point that an English education simply did not fit the needs of most colonists. This dissertation has explored why the colonists found English higher education lacking and how they went about creating colleges of their own that better fit the desires they had for their children and colonial society at large.

Despite many troubles and failures along the way, the colonists of pre-Revolutionary America ultimately succeeded in establishing nine colleges which offered five different religious affiliations, curricula which did not push aside religion for reason or ignore much of English history, educators who were willing to challenge the conventional pedagogy, and living-learning environments in which college officials prioritized the collegiate way.

1 James Maury, “A Dissertation on Education in the Form of a Letter from James Maury to Robert Jackson, July 17, 1762,” ed. Helen Duprey Bullock, Papers of the Albemarle County Historical Society, II (1941-1942): 57- 58.

253 This study has also contributed to the larger scholarly debate about cultural continuity versus cultural change by arguing that the colonists’ decision to establish colleges of their own is indicative of a cultural transformation in the colonies and that said decision essentially guaranteed that future generations of colonists, and eventually Americans, would continue to be culturally differentiated from the English. By educating their own future clergy, civic leaders, educators, and intellectuals, the colonists had not only the ability to successfully maintain their own society without relying on England, but to perpetuate the distinct colonial culture they had created. The commitment they were making to the future of the colonies is what makes this study of higher education so different from other aspects explored in the cultural continuity versus cultural change debate. Race and ethnicity, for example, are common aspects of culture explored in the debate. Those who argue for change explain that although the colonies had plenty of

Englishmen, they were also home to Dutch, French, Scottish, Irish, German, and Swedish

Europeans, as well as indigenous Native American and enslaved Africans. While it is certainly true that the colonies were racially and ethnically diverse in comparison to England, the colonists had not intentionally made a plan to create and perpetuate a diverse society. In fact, it would likely have been much easier for colonial society to function if everyone had been English.

Studying colonial race and ethnicity, therefore, helps reveal differences between English and colonial culture, but it does not demonstrate a commitment to cultural change as this study of higher education does. In considering the commitment the colonists made to cultural change via the establishment of their own higher education institutions, this dissertation has added breadth to the cultural continuity versus cultural change debate.

This dissertation began with a simple question: why did the colonists feel the need to establish colleges in the colonies? That question begat more questions: Why did they found so

254 many colleges? Why did they found them in such a short span of time? Studying the foundations of the nine colonial colleges, as the first chapter does, reveals that religion was the primary reason for establishing the colleges. In order for the Puritan and Anglican churches to prosper during the early years of settlement, the colonists needed to be able to replace the first generation of ministers with well-educated and trained successors. Harvard College, the College of William

& Mary, and Yale College resulted from this need. These three colleges, however, would not be enough to meet the needs of the colonists. With the Great Awakening, and the subsequent splitting of congregations into New Light and Old Light factions, more colleges became necessary. New Light Presbyterians, worried about the influence of their youth attending Puritan institutions, established the College of New Jersey. Anglicans, worried about the religious threat posed by the New Lights in the middle colonies, supported Benjamin Franklin’s College of

Philadelphia and eventually took over control of it and established King’s College in New York

City to combat them more directly. Finally, motivated by the establishment of the six previous colleges in the colonies, leaders from the Baptist and Dutch Reformed churches and Puritan educator of Native Americans, Rev. Eleazar Wheelock, founded three more colleges to meet the needs of their underserved congregations. Though much smaller in scale and less developed than their older counterparts by the end of the colonial period, the College of Rhode Island, Queen’s

College, and Dartmouth College succeeded in educating young men in line with their respective religious beliefs. The colonists founded so many colleges and in such a quick manner, therefore, because the explosion of religious change in the colonies necessitated that they do so.

Simply knowing why the colonists established colleges of their own, however, did not explain why so many colonists chose to send their young men to these new, untested colleges rather than the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge; only analysis of colonial

255 curricula, pedagogy, and faculty, as featured in chapter two, would reveal such answers. While the curricula at the colonial colleges included many of the same subjects as the curricula at the colleges in England, how instructors in the colonies taught these subjects to their students differed. At two-thirds of the colonial colleges, for instance, religious education, often in the form of studying the books of the Bible and ancient languages, did not have to conform to

Anglican doctrine but could follow the tenets of their respective denominations. For non-

Anglican college students, the colonial colleges provided them with an opportunity they did not have at the English colleges. In the natural and moral philosophies, colonial educators taught students Enlightenment ideas, including the principles of motion and mechanics and the theory of empiricism, and paired them alongside religious teachings to show that reason and faith in

God did not have to be mutually incompatible. Historical education, too, took on a different form at the colonial colleges. Instead of teaching only ancient history, as English professors did, colonial professors taught modern history as well. Nor did colonial instructors shy away from using Whig histories in their classrooms. Such histories helped to both lay bare instances of repression in the commonwealth’s past and alerted students on what to be on the lookout for in their own relations with the English government. Hence, part of what drove many colonists to attend the colonial colleges was that their ideas about what a proper collegiate education should entail no longer aligned with the traditional English idea.

Along with differences in curriculum and pedagogy, the faculty who taught at the colonial colleges were likely another factor that contributed to colonists choosing to attend college in America. In the early years at each of the colleges, educational instruction usually fell to the college president. This not only allowed for a close teacher-student relationship but, for the students under the tutelage of the famous Charles Chauncy, John Witherspoon, and Samuel

256 Johnson, to receive an education from highly regarded individuals from both the colonies and

Europe. The latter also helped to lend legitimacy to the higher education institutions in the colonies. Once instruction moved from the provenance of presidents to that of professors, colonial students had the opportunity to learn from men eminent in their respective fields of study, such as John Winthrop, Francis Alison, and William Small. These professors brought not only expertise in their fields to the students but also implemented new teaching techniques in the colonies, such as encouraging student participation in experiments, the introduction of the

Common Sense approach to moral philosophy, and lectures instead of rote drilling and memorization. Thus, the renown and qualifications of colonial faculty, along with the differences in curricula and pedagogy, helps to explain why so many colonists chose to attend the novice colonial colleges instead of the long-revered universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

The colonists not only made a commitment to their divergent culture when they decided to provide higher education for colonial youth, but also when they chose to provide their young men with the student experience known as the collegiate way, as explained in chapter three. In an effort to produce men of good character, colonial college officials sought to have students not only learn alongside each other but live with one another. These officials believed eating, sleeping, studying, and worshipping together would help the students to build their characters while simultaneously improving their learning. The collegiate way had long been the practice in

England, but it had been going out of fashion in favor of students renting rooms in the city.

College officials fostered the collegiate way through on-campus housing, established schedules and rules, and approved student recreation. Only Harvard and Queen’s had the ability to house at least some students from the first day of classes, but eventually all nine of the colonial colleges provided living quarters for their students where the ills of city life and society

257 were kept at bay. Strict schedules and rules for student conduct outside of the classroom were additional components of the collegiate way. Simply because students were outside of the classroom, they were not free to determine their own schedules or act however they wished. If they tried, they faced monetary fees, corporal punishment, and sometimes even expulsion. In addition to fostering the collegiate way through schedules and rules, college officials kept a tight rein on students by only allowing them to take part in recreational activities that would not besmirch their reputations as young gentlemen. Social life at the colonial colleges revolved around membership in the various literary societies on campus. These organizations promoted debate about social and intellectual issues, provided access to books not available from the college library, and enabled students to take part in theatrical productions which administrators would have otherwise forbidden. The implementation of the collegiate way of life in the colonies, therefore, simultaneously created a safe and protective environment for colonial students and further differentiated their experience from that of their English counterparts.

Although this dissertation began as an exploration of why the colonists chose to establish colleges of their own and send their children to those very institutions, it could not be a study of the American experience alone; it had to include a discussion of the colonial student experience in England, as spotlighted in chapter four. Despite the cost and danger inherent in crossing the

Atlantic Ocean, approximately one-hundred colonists made the journey to receive an education in England between 1648 and 1775. The experiences of these young men, however, were often quite problematic. Opposite of the protective environment created by the collegiate way in the colonies, colonial students in England faced the challenge of keeping up with their studies and staying away from the temptations of the city without any adults to guide them. Some parents tried to control their sons’ behavior by keeping up correspondence with them, but this could be

258 difficult as it took months for letters to arrive and the recipients could easily ignore them. Other parents asked relatives or family friends to serve in loco parentis, but not all guardians were diligent in carrying out their duties. The high cost associated with living abroad also made an

English higher education challenging. Not only did it cost twice as much to enroll at one of the

English universities, but there were also costs for travel, rent, food, clothes, candles, and sundry other goods and services.

In addition to the difficulties which many colonists faced while living abroad, the differences between English curricula and colonial curricula made an English education undesirable for many of them. For non-Anglican students, religious education which espoused the Church of England’s interpretation of the Bible and required the reading of Church doctrine and religious commentaries by Anglican divines, would have been less than appealing. In a similar vein, the Oxbridge professors’ lack of effort to balance natural and moral philosophy with religion in the teaching of Enlightenment ideas likely turned off many devout colonists from enrolling abroad. The study of history was another problematic area in the English universities’ curricula. Despite the efforts of one early Regius Professors of Modern History, the history curriculum at Oxford and Cambridge consisted almost exclusively of ancient history. Colonial students educated abroad, therefore, may have been experts in the works of Livy, Sallust, and

Tacitus, but received no exposure to Whig histories such as those by Paul Rapin de Thoyras,

Catharine Macaulay, and William Molyneux, putting them at an educational disadvantage against those colonists who studied in colonial America. In the end, the various issues associated with living abroad and the conflicting state of the English universities’ curricula led the majority of colonists to forgo an education in England for one in the colonies.

259 Just as this dissertation could not be a study of the colonial American educational experience alone, it could also not be a study of only the colonial period; it had to explore whether the cultural change which brought about the founding of the colonial colleges was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence or, as chapter five shows, further change would come with the new found independence of the United States. The Revolutionary War not only changed who governed the former colonies but transformed American culture even further, which the establishment of the colleges of the early republic help demonstrate. The strong commitment to denominationalism which characterized the colonial colleges began to give way to the more republican-minded ideal of religious toleration in higher education. For instance, while students at the University of North Carolina studied the Greek New Testament and attended prayer services, no single denomination was in charge of the college or determined which biblical interpretations were correct or incorrect. The College of Charleston exhibited a similar level of religious toleration. Although President Smith was also the Bishop of South Carolina, and therefore used the Book of Common Prayer in his services, the college was open to prospective students and professors of all beliefs. Even Franklin College, which its founders intended to be a place for students to learn morals and divinity along the lines of the Lutheran and German

Reformed churches, enrolled students of various Christian denominations as well as some of the

Jewish faith. The officials of the colleges of the early republic, therefore, displayed a commitment to the new nation’s belief in freedom of religion.

The changes which educators at the colleges of the early republic made to Enlightenment and historical education further demonstrate that American culture had undergone yet another transformation. Instead of utilizing interpretations of philosophical works and interspersing natural and moral philosophy lessons with religious teachings, as the colonial professors had

260 done, the professors of the early republic leaned toward using the direct works of Enlightenment philosophes and leaving religion out of their philosophical lectures. These changes were due to a greater acceptance of more radical Enlightenment ideas not only in the field of education, but among America’s intellectual elites. Last, in an attempt to instill in the nation’s young citizens the virtue which the republic would require, educators changed the focus of the study of history from lessons about the English commonwealth, freedom, and repression to providing students with worthy historical figures to emulate. Students at the University of North Carolina studied both ancient history and modern history, while those at Franklin College studied only modern history (in particular, the very short history of the United States) and students at the College of

Charleston studied only ancient history. Despite the different eras of history which the students of the early republic studied, each period provided numerous historical figures who could serve as appropriate examples of living a life committed to virtue.

While this dissertation began with a simple question, the answers it has provided are a bit more nuanced. As a whole, the colonists established colleges of their own because England did not provide what they desired for their sons’ educations. Some colonists were devout Puritans and Baptists who refused to let their children attend one of England’s Anglican universities.

Other colonists found themselves turned off by the seemingly wholesale acceptance of

Enlightenment ideas in England; they wanted educators who would balance those ideas with their Christian beliefs. There were also those colonists who were simply too afraid to send their young men so far away from home. Not every single colonist with a college-aged son, however, opposed an English higher education. If they had, the simple question this dissertation began with would have a simple answer, but it does not. Colonists belonging to the higher ranks of colonial society tended to enroll their children at Oxford and Cambridge. The Lee, Carter,

261 Drayton, and Pinckney families, after all, dutifully sent their sons to England.2 Those colonists who attended college abroad, however, often had a harder time balancing their studies with their social lives and parts of their education did not measure up with that of their colonially educated peers. Nor did all of those high-ranking families who initially sent sons to England continue the tradition. William Byrd I of Virginia sent William Byrd II to the Middle Temple at the Inns of

Court, and the younger Byrd followed suit with his son, William. Byrd III. This latter Byrd, however, changed course and instead sent his sons, John and Thomas, to the College of William

& Mary.3 Thus, while it took some families and individuals longer than others, the majority of colonists had figured out that Reverend Maury was right. They differed in “so many important

Respects from Europeans” that it only made sense to establish colleges of their own; once they did, they had officially made a commitment to the perpetuation of their divergent culture.

2 Willard Connely, “Colonial Americans in Oxford and Cambridge.” The American Oxonian. Vol. XXIX. No. 1 (January 1942): 9, 12. 3The Commonplace Book of William Byrd II of Westover. Ed. Kevin Joel Berland, et. al. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2012), 8-9; “Journal of the Meetings of the President and Masters of William and Mary College, April 12, 1769,” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 1 (July 1904): 21-22; “Journal of the Meeting of the President and Masters of William and Mary College, April 15, 1769, November 16, 1769,” The William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Oct. 1904): 133-134, 137.

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