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William Vaughan: Liberal Education and Voluntary WILLIAM VAUGHAN: LIBERAL EDUCATION AND VOLUNTARY SOCIETIES IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION by Daniel Alexander Jones A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida December 2015 Copyright 2015 by Daniel Alexander Jones ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Douglas Kanter, my thesis chair, for his wisdom and advice throughout my work on this thesis. I would also like to thank Dr. Ben Lowe and Dr. Stephen Engle, my thesis committee members, for their thoughtful guidance. Finally, my sincerest thanks to my wife, Katherine, for her patience and support in all of my life’s endeavors. iv ABSTRACT Author: Daniel Alexander Jones Title: William Vaughan: Liberal Education and Voluntary Societies in the Age of Revolution Thesis Advisor: Dr. Douglas Kanter Degree: Master of Arts Year: 2015 This study examines the life of William Vaughan, a merchant in London during the revolutionary era, and the product of a new form of liberal education developed in England’s Dissenting Academies. By taking full advantage of the innovative principles of liberal education developed by men like Joseph Priestley, Vaughan, as a professional, was able to wield social and political influence on behalf of a new merchant class previously excluded from the halls of power. Vaughan’s success as governor of the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation and promoter of the English shipping industry, as well as his service as a member of numerous civic and philanthropic organizations, demonstrated a commitment to gradual improvements in the material and moral circumstances of the British Empire that had relatively little to do with the partisan political categories typically associated with the revolutionary era. v WILLIAM VAUGHAN: LIBERAL EDUCATION AND VOLUNTARY SOCIETIES IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 1. EDUCATION ............................................................................................ 11 CHAPTER 2. BUSINESSMAN AND WRITER ............................................................. 45 CHAPTER 3. THE VOLUNTARY SOCIETIES ............................................................. 56 CHAPTER 4. CONCLUSION.......................................................................................... 77 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................. 81 vi INTRODUCTION With all the allurements that are attached to biography, people are too apt to descend to the frolics of a school-boy, or the eccentricities of a man, which are little interesting to the public; and it would be better, I conceive, for a man’s failings to die with him, and his virtues to live after him. —William Vaughan, Memoir of William Vaughan, Esq. F.R.S. Although William Vaughan is difficult to find in the annals of British and American history, he played a significant role in the social and political change that took place during the revolutionary era. Born in Jamaica on September 22, 1752, Vaughan celebrated his 24th birthday two months after America’s Declaration of Independence, and his 37th birthday, in 1789, was the same year that the new American Constitution took effect, and just a few weeks after rebels stormed the Bastille in Paris, setting off the initial violence of the French Revolution.1 While his brother, Benjamin Vaughan, eventually aligned himself with men like Benjamin Franklin and played a pivotal role in peace negotiations between England and America, from all indications, William Vaughan played little part in the dramatic revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth century. Rather, he focused on his career as a merchant in London, eventually becoming governor of the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation—one of only two English insurance companies in the eighteenth century—and a member of numerous civic organizations, including the Royal Society and the American Philosophical Society. 1 William Vaughan, Memoir of William Vaughan, Esq. F.R.S.: With Miscellaneous Pieces Relative to Docks, Commerce, etc. (London: Smith, Elder, 1839), 4. 1 Vaughan’s career was significantly different than that of his brother, Benjamin, who by 1805, had already helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris, served as a Member of British Parliament switching from a pro-slavery MP to a staunch advocate of abolition, lived in Switzerland, and permanently relocated his family to an estate in Hallowell, Maine. While Benjamin’s accomplishments have been well documented by scholars, William’s life is largely unknown. Yet it is through the lens of his life that the virtues of eighteenth-century political moderation, the values of liberal education, and the change those virtues helped to facilitate come sharply into focus. Vaughan’s life provides an alternative view of the social and intellectual change that took place during the revolutionary era. While much of the existing historiography focuses on the radicalism and ideological fervor that promoted rebellion and the overthrow of existing social and political structures, Vaughan’s life exemplified the promotion of change through moderation. By taking full advantage of a new form of liberal education and applying its principles as a business and civic leader, Vaughan exerted social and political influence representative of a new merchant class previously excluded from power. Vaughan’s contribution to the change that took place at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries represented a nuanced approach, yet there is no question that the social and political shifts to which he contributed were significant, even within the context of the commercial and mercantile expansion typically associated with the time- period. It was during the eighteenth century, as some scholars have concluded, that English citizens began to recognize the aristocracy’s growing inability to deal with the new socio-political realities of the Commercial, and eventually the Industrial, 2 Revolutions. R.J. Morris argued that by the 1790s, it was clear that many groups “found that the old power structure was increasingly unable to ensure them [even] their basic right [of] a minimal food supply.”2 But even as early as the 1760s, when Vaughan was still very young, corruption of the aristocratic leadership had already tainted much of the public’s perception, and critics were becoming more and more outspoken in their views. On April 23, 1763, John Wilkes, a well-known radical, published the, now famous, Issue Number 45 of the North Briton, in which he assailed Britain’s aristocratic ministers as “tools of corruption and despotism” who “have sent the spirit of discord through the land, and … it will never be extinguished but by the extinction of their power.”3 Some historians, like Nicole Eustace, have argued that although this period is commonly referred to as the age of reason, emotion was as important as reason to the structure of eighteenth century politics in Britain and America.4 But while emotion, like that expressed by John Wilkes in Issue Number 45, may have played a significant role, it is clear that by 1766 the repeal of the Stamp Act in America had shone a glaring light on the aristocracy’s inability to govern its empire overseas, and “the contest with America had … begun to dominate the British political scene.”5 In the early years of the Revolutionary Age, therefore, skilled laborers and professionals were beginning to coalesce around the ideas of self-government independent of the aristocracy on both sides of the Atlantic. 2 R. J. Morris, “Voluntary Societies and British Urban Elites, 1780-1850: An Analysis,” The Historical Journal 26, no. 1 (March 1983): 100. 3 John Wilkes, The North Briton (London: W. Bingley, 1764), 266. 4 Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 3. 5 Winston Churchill, The Age of Revolution (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1957), 141. 3 Debates among historians on the meaning of the republicanism taking hold in eighteenth-century America have persisted for the past two centuries. Robert Shalhope, writing for Reviews in American History, divided historians into two camps on this issue: “advocates of republicanism” and “adherents of liberalism.” 6 According to Shalhope, advocates of republicanism “insist that late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Americans adhered to a classical Renaissance set of beliefs centering on public virtue, or the willingness of the individual to subordinate private interests for the good of the community.”7 On the other hand, Shalhope finds that adherents of liberalism believe “that Americans in this era espoused a modern ideology emphasizing aggressive, self- interested individualism, competitive materialism, individual rights, and pragmatic interest group politics.”8 In Revolutions in the Atlantic World, Wim Klooster has, in a sense, combined these arguments to define eighteenth-century American republicanism as “frugal, industrious, temperate, and simple,” and colonial America as a society “in which every man [at least every white man] enjoyed the right to property, whereby he rid himself of dependence on others and qualified to participate in politics.”9 Regardless of how historians have come to debate and define the terms of the transatlantic
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