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 middle-class movement of the eighteenth century, there were undeniable similarities between the American middle class and the new English bourgeoisie. In

Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth Century

England and America, Isaac Kramnick highlighted the development of a distinctive

6 Robert E. Shalhope, review of Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth Century England and America, by Isaac Kramnick, Reviews in American History 19, no. 4 (Dec. 1991): 468-73. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 26-27. 4 middle class, espousing a distinctly bourgeois ethic, in the eighteenth-century.10

According to Kramnick, English radicals on both sides of the Atlantic "sought to topple

the social order of rank and privilege, the static stratified society of ascription," and

hoped to create "a new liberal ideal, a society of achievement, a social order of

competitive individualism, in which social mobility was possible and the rightful reward

for ingenious people of talent and hard work."11

The role of English Radicalism within the social and political order of the late-

eighteenth century has been explored by a variety of scholars, and Dissenters, like

Vaughan, have typically been regarded as radicals. English Dissent developed out of the religious separation of non-Anglicans, including Presbyterians, Baptists, and eventually

Unitarians, from the established church in England. By the late-eighteenth-century, these

Dissenters had begun to exert progressive political influence even though they were

largely excluded from direct participation in government. That influence coincided with

the American Revolution, which found support among many Dissenters in England,

including Vaughan’s brother, Benjamin, who eventually settled his family in Maine while

maintaining his contacts with the most famous of the Dissenters.

In 1977, Colin Bonwick argued that the simultaneous development of revolution in America and radicalism in England raised questions about the extent of the

relationship between those important historical events.12 According to Bonwick, while

historians continue to debate this connection, English contemporaries “had no doubt: the

perversion of English politics and the attack on colonial liberty were part and parcel of an

10 Shalhope, review of Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism, 470. 11 Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth Century England and America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 4. 12 Colin Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), xi-xii. 5 empire wide disease infecting its entire fabric.”13 As Bonwick argued, late eighteenth-

century English Radicals “often participated in a wide range of reform activities, though

for analytical convenience they can be roughly brigaded into those (a) whose first

concern was with parliamentary reform, and (b) those, being religious Dissenters, who

were primarily interested in securing relief from discriminatory legislation directed

against them.”14 Both of these groups consisted of “moderate” radicals, and included

men like Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, “members of the middle ranks,” who

“respected the rights of property and the gradations of hierarchical society, manifested

little hostility toward those who stood above them socially, and in return expected

deference from those who stood beneath.”15 Yet, while these English gentlemen, often referred to as “Commonwealthmen,” were, according to some historians, “also a group of

self-selected outsiders,” many, like William Vaughan, were even more politically

moderate than historians have previously recognized.16

In The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman, Caroline Robbins explored the

concept of moderate English outsiders, identifying three separate generations of

Commonwealthmen that arose after the Revolution of 1689, during the mid-eighteenth

century, and finally during the age of the American Revolution.17 According to Robbins,

the Commonwealthmen were “articulate and generally from the middle classes of

society,” and were “very academic in character, though beginning to influence the

13 Ibid., xii. 14 Ibid., 3-4. 15 Ibid., 11-12. 16 Ibid., 12. 17 Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (New York: Antheneum, 1968), 5. 6 industrial bourgeoisie who were to be so important in the future of liberalism in

England.”18

In 1967, eight years after Robbins’ work, renowned American historian Bernard

Bailyn explored the role of a particular segment of these Commonwealthmen, the English

Dissenters, in the American Revolution. In The Ideological Origins of the American

Revolution, Bailyn attempted to collect and synthesize the ideological principles that

influenced the American Colonists’ decision to declare independence from their English

forbearers, as represented in the political pamphlets published in the colonies through the

year 1776.19 According to Bailyn, the writers of these pamphlets and the political figures

who read them were largely influenced by a select group of “English advocates of reform

in politics and religion,” which included Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, John

Cartwright, and James Burgh.20 To these men, Bailyn argued, “the situation at home if

not abroad justified, even exaggerated, the worst fears for the future of liberty that their

predecessors had expressed.”21 For these Dissenters, “the long-awaited signs of the total

degeneration of the moral qualities necessary to preserve liberty were unmistakable,” and

they made their arguments “vigorously, convincingly, in a series of increasingly shrill

pamphlets and letters that were read avidly, circulated, published and republished, in

America.”22

In his 1987 introduction to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in

France, J.G.A. Pocock commented on the relation of the Whig aristocracy, which Burke

18 Ibid., 384. 19 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), ix. 20 Ibid., 41. 21 Ibid., 132. 22 Ibid., 133. 7 defended, to modern commerce and the disciples of John Locke, which according to

Pocock, included the English Dissenters. Pocock insisted that by 1775 Burke, like other

English commentators on the American Revolution, was concerned about English

Congregationalism, which he saw as producing “an undogmatic religion of free enquiry increasingly anti-Trinitarian [in] tone.”23 Pocock argued that men like Richard Price and

Joseph Priestley, among others, were leading free English Dissenters in a campaign

against their treatment as second-class citizens. According to Pocock, Burke and others

recognized that, “this campaign arose less from the older nonconformist churches—

Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists—than from a new militant Unitarianism,

and its demands went beyond toleration to the separation of church and state.”24

According to Pocock, men like Richard Price “desired more than toleration for

Protestant Dissenters; [they] desired full equality of civil rights, irrespective of

denominational membership or doctrinal subscription.”25 This, Pocock observed, was

revolutionary, and as late as 1782, Joseph Priestley “had said it may not be achieved

without the fall of the civil powers, and only revolutionary Americans (and not yet all of

them) had made it their goal.”26 As Pocock argued, it was a sermon by Price in praise of the French Revolution that fostered Burke’s decision to publish his Reflections and

defend the traditional role of the Anglican Church in English government.27 Burke did not

fear these capitalist classes, Pocock maintained, but he was “afraid of the power of the

23 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), xvi. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., xxvi. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., xxvii. 8 human intelligence when divorced from all social restraints,” and “feared the Unitarian

dissenters who would separate church from state and reduce all religion to free inquiry.”28

While the dramatic arguments of men like Burke tend to attract the most attention

from historians like Pocock, some historians have taken a more subtle approach. In 2000,

J.C.D. Clark released the second edition of English Society 1660-1832, which was his

attempt to find the “middle ground” in English history from the Restoration through the

Industrial Revolution. According to Clark, instead “of simply labeling a past society

‘authoritarian’ or ‘libertarian,’ we increasingly appreciate the middle ground of English life: that social form which presented itself as both constitutional and royalist, libertarian and stable, tolerant and expressing religious orthodoxy, innovative and respectful of what

was customary.”29 Clark argued that the major societal conflicts of this age arose “not

from the challenge posed by some novel and quite different body of ideas, but by a

schism within a broadly-shared and deeply-held set of beliefs which had profoundly libertarian as well as legitimist dimensions.” 30 According to Clark, most of those shared

beliefs were religious, and the social changes that occurred throughout the late eighteenth

century were, in large part, associated with the sentiments of the Dissenters, sentiments

that still operated within the bounds of established beliefs. These sentiments included a

political philosophy, like that of Richard Price, which “was not built around an account of

the origin of the State, but derived from a moral theory of autonomy of the individual.”31

What is absent from the existing scholarship is the effect that personal

relationships had on the change taking place during the late eighteenth century. Even

28 Ibid., xxxix and xliii. 29 J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1660-1832 (Cambridge: University Press, 2000), 17. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 396. 9 scholarship devoted specifically to the Dissenters as a single element of English

Radicalism, tends toward a macro-history approach, viewing the group as a part of larger

changes occurring during extended periods of time. This approach focuses on the

movement’s broader sociopolitical implications, and ignores the value of the change its

leaders fostered through less political, or less radical, means. Yet, these leaders remained

an important component to how and why the influence of the Dissenters evolved,

especially when considering the personal influence of men like William Vaughan and his

predecessors. By taking a micro-historical approach to the subject through the life of

Vaughan, this thesis will demonstrate that the most important impact that the leading

Dissenters had on society was through their personal influence on young men destined

for active civic lives, primarily through the medium of education. This thesis will also

show that the tendency to associate all English Dissenters with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century radicalism fails to account for the nuance and moderation exemplified by men like Vaughan, who helped foster greater civic responsibility and enlarged the roles of those in the new middle classes within the existing governmental structure.

Vaughan’s life demonstrated a commitment to gradual improvement 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.

10 CHAPTER 1. EDUCATION

William Vaughan was the second of ten children, born one year after his older

and more renowned brother, Benjamin, and sixteen years before his youngest sister,

Hannah. At the time of Vaughan’s birth, his parents, Samuel Vaughan from London and

Sarah Hallowell of Boston, resided temporarily in Jamaica, where Samuel was conducting business for his employer, an English sugar exporter. Like many of the

British colonists in the West Indies, however, the Vaughans never established a permanent home in the islands and, shortly after the birth of their second child, they moved back to London, where they could ensure the best possible education for William and Benjamin.1 As a young boy, William began his education at Newcome’s School in

Hackney, and at age fourteen was admitted to the Warrington Academy. It was this

education, rooted in the Unitarian faith and the Dissenting Academies, which set the

stage for Vaughan’s life as a merchant, businessman, and civic activist.

Vaughan’s education came at a time when the Dissenting Academies were having their greatest impact on the nature of education and on the career trajectories of children of modest privilege from non-Anglican backgrounds. As argued by Robbins, “few of the reformers and pro-Americans of the age of George III did not spend some of their formative years under the teachers at Glasgow, at certain Cambridge colleges, or at such

1 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Vaughan, Benjamin”; Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: the American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 3. 11 dissenting academies as Warrington.”2 According to The House of Commons, 1754-1790:

the educational system of this period (in so far as there was anything which could be called a system at all) was not hierarchical as in popular estimation it is today, nor was education considered to be an essential requisite in the life of every child: it was a commodity, to be bought and sold like other commodities, and of which there were both cheap and expensive varieties. The eighteenth century did not know the difference between public schools and other kinds of school: a public school education was an education at school as opposed to an education at home by private tutors.3

From 1754 to 1790, “about a half to three-fifths of the Members in each Parliament were either educated entirely at home or went to an older established grammar school or a school known only by the name of its founder or proprietor,” and a number of these schools were “kept by clergymen of the Church of England or by Dissenting ministers.”4

The Dissenting Academies developed during the seventeenth century in response

to the Act of Uniformity, which required loyalty to the Anglican Church and

acquiescence to the religious requirements of the Book of Common Prayer.5 The

Dissenting Academies were intended to provide dissenting students, who refused to

subscribe the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine articles, with a higher education similar to

that at Oxford and Cambridge, from which they were largely excluded.6 According to

Irene Parker’s seminal work, Dissenting Academies in England, “the effect of the

2 Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman, 7. 3 Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, eds., The House of Commons, 1754-1790, Volume 1 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1964), 110. 4 Ibid. 5 James C. Spalding and Maynard Brass, “Reduction of Episcopacy as a Means to Unity in England 1640-1662,” Church History 30, no. 4 (Dec. 1961): 414-432. (The Act of Uniformity, enacted by the Cavalier Parliament in 1662, demanded “Episcopal ordination, complete consent to the Book of Common Prayer, and renunciation of the Solemn League and Covenant” of all involved in ministry or government). 6 Ibid. The Act of Uniformity stated: “If any schoolmaster or other person instructing or teaching Youth in any private House or Family, as a Tutor or Schoolmaster, before License obtained from his respective Archbishop, Bishop, or Ordinary of the Diocese, according to the Laws and Statutes of this Realm (for which he shall pay twelve pence only) and before such subscription and acknowledgment made aforesaid; then every school-master and other instructing and teaching as aforesaid, shall for the first offense suffer three months imprisonment without bail.” 12 Conformity legislation was to accentuate the differences between what may be called the

orthodox State schools and the unorthodox Dissenting schools,” and rather than

preventing nonconformist education, the Acts of Uniformity encouraged its development

beyond the education offered by the grammar schools owned by the Church.7 These

eighteenth-century Dissenters, according to Isaac Kramnick, became “the boldest voices

attacking the traditional order; they were the secular prophets, the vanguard, of a new

social order.”8

In his 2010 article for the journal Northern History, David A. Reid highlighted the

reality of the eighteenth-century Dissenting communities, arguing that “without the

financial resources of the Established Church, Dissenters had to fund their own churches

and chapels, pay their own ministers, and sustain their own educational institutions, while

also supporting a variety of charities devoted to the poor.”9 As a result, argued Reid,

“Dissenters had to develop an entrepreneurial approach to fund-raising,” and they

“created personal foundations or bequeathed substantial portions of their estates for the

support of Dissenting causes.”10 The Dissenting Academies were some of the most

important charities that resulted from these efforts, and developed into “collegiate

institutions designed to provide a university-level education for the children of Dissenting

families,” primarily those destined to be ministers, but also offering “instruction suitable

for careers in law, medicine, and commerce.”11

7 Irene Parker, Dissenting Academies in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 47. 8 Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism, 43. 9 David. A. Reid, “Rational Dissent and the Rhetoric of Educational Philanthropy in the Dissenting Academies of Lancashire, Hackney and Exeter,” Northern History 47, no. 1 (March 2010): 98. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 13 By examining the individual experiences of men who attended these schools and

exploring the curriculum and their personal interactions with the tutors that developed

and implemented that curriculum, it is possible to add a great deal to the historical record

of the period. What the experiences of men like William Vaughan indicate is that while

eighteenth-century commercialization and historically related ideas of republicanism

receive the most attention by scholars, the social and philosophical change that occurred

in the Dissenting Academies was equally important to the political shifts of the

revolutionary era. Through the development of a new form of liberal education, the

Academies provided a strong foundation for the emergence of a new class of civic

leaders.

Vaughan began his education at Newcome’s School in Hackney, named for Dr.

Henry Newcome, and reputed to be “one of the best private schools of the day.”12 Dr.

Newcome “was a dissenting minister and a Whig of the old stamp,” and his school attracted “several eminent Whig families [who] sent their children,” destined to be members of Parliament, to Newcome’s School.13 Although many of the Academies “took

in day students from the lower middle class or the crafts, Hackney was strictly a boarding

school for the upper middle and upper classes, in particular, for wealthy Whig families.”14

Despite its prestige, little information has been produced on Newcome’s School.

Perhaps the most complete and concise explanation of the Academy’s history can be

found in Nicholas Hans’ 1951 work entitled New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth

12 Vaughan, Memoir, 4; Nicholas Hans, New Trends in Education,70, quoted in T. F. T. Baker, ed., A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 10 (London: Victoria County History, 1995), 148-65, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol10/ pp148-165#h3-0020 (accessed June 9, 2015). 13 Namier and Brooke, The House of Commons, 110. 14 Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach, Cavendish (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Historical Society, 1996), 107-108. 14 Century. According to Hans, the School, originally known as Hackney Academy, “was the oldest, the largest and the most fashionable of all private schools of the eighteenth century,” and had “an uninterrupted existence at the same place for about 140 years.”15

Founded near the year 1685 by Benjamin Moreland, it was inherited by Henry Newcome

in 1721, thus starting “the dynasty of the Newcomes, whose name was associated with

the Academy throughout the eighteenth century.”16

Students were typically admitted to Newcome’s School between the ages of seven and twelve, and according to Vaughan’s memoir, he was “placed at an early age at Mr.

Newcome’s school in Hackney, (one of the best private schools of the day)."17 This puts

Vaughan’s admission to the school most likely in 1759, and no later than 1764, a time

when Dr. Newcome’s son, Henry, also educated at Hackney and later at Cambridge, was

almost certainly serving as Headmaster.18 According to Hans, the subjects taught were:

(1) Literary (English, Latin, Greek, French, and possibly History), (2) Mathematics and Sciences, (3) Vocational (Army and Navy), and (4) Dancing, Drawing, Music and Physical Training. They had excursions for the study of natural history, as we know that the well-known botanist, Aylmer Lambert, developed his taste for collecting and botany at Hackney. Sports were cultivated; both football and cricket were popular and there was a cricket field adjacent to the school [and] a special feature of the Academy which attracted much attention in contemporary society was the theatrical performances.19

In his memoir, Vaughan credited his education to both Newcome’s School and

the Warrington Academy as laying a solid foundation for his success both in private

enterprise and as a civic activist.20 But where Newcome’s School only received a single

15 Nicholas Hans, New Trends in Education, 70. 16 Ibid., 71. 17 Vaughan, Memoir, 5. 18 Hans, New Trends in Education, 74-75. 19 Ibid., 72. 20 Vaughan, Memoir, 4-6. 15 sentence of discussion in his short twenty-two page memoir, Vaughan dedicated approximately two pages, or just less than ten percent of his entire narrative, to the education he received at the Warrington Academy, where his foundation in community leadership and civil service would truly develop.

William Vaughan entered the Warrington Academy in 1766 at age fourteen. By that time, Warrington was one of the greatest of the Dissenting Academies in England.21

The Academy had opened on October 23, 1757, in the town of Warrington, 194 miles

northwest of London and 20 miles east of Liverpool, with the intent to “’be open to all

Persons, and calculated to serve the Interest of Literature in general’, although with

special ‘encouragement given to those Students who are design’d for the Ministry.’”22

The plan for the Academy emanated from a concern that “for the first time in nearly a

century there was no academy serving the north of England which did not impose a

religious subscription as a criterion for admission.”23 The location of the Academy was

also significant: Warrington was located to “serve the two major centres of dissent,

Manchester and Liverpool,” but the Academy’s recruitment “was not confined to the

north-west,” as students, like Vaughan, “came from all parts of England, Scotland, and

Ireland, as well from the British colonies of Jamaica, Barbados, and South Carolina.”24

The best source available on the Warrington Academy was delivered to the

Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire on November 11, 1858, by Henry A. Bright

21 “Warrington Academy (1757-1786),” Dissenting Academies Online, http://dissacad.english.qmul.ac.uk/new_dissacad/phpfiles/sample1.php?asearch=0&detail=academ ies¶meter=Advacademy&acadid=163&field1=AcademiesLocs.Location&search1=Warringto n (accessed March 17, 2012). 22 Undated printed circular, ‘Proposals for carrying into Execution a Plan for the Liberal Education of Youth,’ in Sundry papers relating to the Academy at Warrington (Harris Manchester College, Oxford), quoted in Reid, “Rational Dissent and the Rhetoric of Educational Philanthropy,” 102. 23 “Warrington Academy (1757-1786).” 24 Ibid. 16 and published a year later in 1859 as his Historical Sketch of Warrington Academy.

According to Bright, he had compiled the sketch pursuant to a request from the Council

of the Historic Society after it was discovered that “a parcel of papers—some letters,

some memoranda—which had belonged to the Rev. J. Seddon, the founder of the

Warrington Academy,” had been “rescued from the hands of a Liverpool cheesemonger,

who was using them for the ordinary purposes of his shop.”25 Among the papers salvaged from the utilitarian destiny of market wrapping for fresh Cheshire Blue and

Creamy Lancashire cheeses were “several letters of Priestley, of Kippis, and of Aiken,” which served to provide “a new light on the history of the Warrington Academy.”26

Bright’s account begins in 1753, when “the failure or decay of the several

Academies belonging to the English Presbyterean body at Findern and Kendal, and

elsewhere, caused no inconsiderable anxiety to the more thoughtful and earnest among

the liberal dissenters.”27 According to Bright, this anxiety fueled John Seddon’s idea of

founding a new Academy, and four years later, on June 30, 1757, “the first meeting of the

Trustees was held.”28 Based on the notes of Seddon, “Lord Willoughby [was] appointed

President, Mr. John Lees of Manchester, Vice President, Mr. Arthur Heywodd of

Liverpool, Treasurer, and Mr. Seddon, Secretary.”29 In addition, three initial tutors were

appointed, including the Tutor in Divinity, Dr. Taylor of Norwich, the Tutor in Natural

Philosophy, Mr. Holt of Kirksdale, and the Tutor in Languages, Polite Literature and

Moral Philosophy, Mr. Dyer of London, who apparently declined his appointment and

25 Henry Arthur Bright, A Historical Sketch of Warrington Academy (Liverpool: T. Brakell, 1859), 1. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 2. 28 Ibid., 5. 29 Ibid. 17 was replaced by Dr. Aiken of Kibworth, who edged out Mr. Priestley of Needham

Market.30 These tutors were hired for an annual salary of £100, and while “poor students

[were] exempted from payment of fees,” the “richer ones [paid] £2 2s. yearly to each of the tutors.” The tutors would “take boarders into their houses at £15 per annum for those who had two months’ vacation, and £18 per annum for those who had no vacation; these terms, however, [were] exclusive of ‘tea, washing, fire and candles.’”31

According to Vaughan, it was at Warrington that he “derived many advantages

from attending the various lectures on history, literature, and general knowledge,” which,

he felt, significantly influenced his life, to the credit of his parents.32 During this period,

Vaughan recalled, the Academy at Warrington “was held in great estimation from the

reputation of its tutors and the greater field they held out in promoting general knowledge

and science on liberal principles, and many other pursuits not to be obtained in common grammar-schools.”33 By the time of William Vaughan’s entry into the Academy, it had, according to Henry Bright, “collected some of the noblest literati of their day. Here the free thought of the English Presbyterians first began to crystallize into the Unitarian theology, which they have since maintained. Here for a time was the center of the liberal politics and the literary taste of the entire county.”34

Based on Vaughan’s memoir, we know that by the time he entered the Academy

in 1766, the Reverend Dr. Aiken, one of the original three tutors at Warrington, was still

serving as an educator there, possibly in the house originally recommended by Mr.

Seddon, which was “handsomely sashed to the front, with a flight of five steps to the

30 Ibid., 5-6. 31 Ibid., 6. 32 Vaughan, Memoir, 5. 33 Ibid. 34 Bright, A Historical Sketch of Warrington Academy, 2. 18 entrance.”35 According to Vaughan, “Dr. Aiken, the divinity tutor, was a man of great reputation, and was the parent of Dr. John Aiken [who also served as a tutor at

Warrington between 1770 and 1783] and Mrs. Barbauld, whose literary works are well known to the public.”36

As a young man, Aiken had been a pupil of Dr. Phillip Doddridge, founder of

Phillip Doddridge’s Academy in Northhampton, which had operated between 1729 and

1751. After graduating from Aberdeen College in 1737, Aiken returned to Doddridge’s

Academy to serve as an assistant tutor until 1739.37 Aiken left Doddridge’s Academy to assume the leadership of a congregation of Unitarians at Market Harborough, in the district of Leicesterchire, but a health condition forced him to resign his ministry and renew his work as a tutor.38 It was in this capacity that he returned to the Academy,

joining the first staff at Warrington in 1757. As stated by Bright, Dr. Aiken “was, if any

can be, Integer vitae scelerisque purus, a man of strictest honour and most blameless life.”39 He was described by the English scholar Gilbert Wakefield as:

a gentleman whose endowments as a man and as a scholar it is not easy to exaggerate by panegyric … his intellectual attainments were of a very superior quality indeed. His acquaintance with all true evidences of revelation, with morals, politics and metaphysics was most accurate and extensive. Every path of polite literature had been traversed by him and traversed with success. He understood the Hebrew and French languages to perfection, and had an intimacy with the best authors of Greece and Rome superior to what I have ever known in any Dissenting minister from my own experience.40

35 Ibid., 7. 36 Vaughan, Memoir, 5. 37 “Aikin, John Sr (1713-1780),” Dissenting Academies Online, http://dissacad.english.qmul.ac.uk/ sample1.php?detail=people& personid=952¶meter=&alpha= (accessed September 9, 2015). 38 Matthew, Dictionary of National Biography, 484. 39 Bright, A Historical Sketch of Warrington Academy, 9. 40 Ibid., 8-9. 19 In his sermon delivered on the death of Dr. Aiken, William Enfield, noted

Unitarian minister and successor to John Seddon as tutor of languages, mathematics and

natural philosophy at Warrington Academy, remembered Aiken as an individual “whose

talents, attainments, and virtues placed him far above the common level of human nature,

and shone through the veil which his modesty cast over them, with a lustre and influence

which commanded universal admiration.”41 Aiken’s scholarly interests included:

All the great questions concerning the nature, faculties, and operations of the human mind—concerning the foundation and extent of moral obligation—concerning the principles of civil government and law— concerning the attributes and providence of the Supreme Being— concerning the divine authority of the Mosaic and Christian revelation ...42

Aiken’s scholarly pursuits, however, were not limited to morals and theology.

Rather, “he took an extensive range through the fields of antient learning, and formed an

intimate acquaintance with the philosophers, historians and poets of Greece and Rome,”

often turning from literature to the natural sciences, gathering “much valuable

knowledge, respecting the general laws of the material world, the distinct properties of

bodies, and the history of nature, animate and inanimate.”43 In short, said Enfield, there

was “scarcely a province in the extensive and daily enlarging empire of human

knowledge, which his philosophic and inquisitive mind did not visit.”44

As a student at the Academy, William Vaughan “attended all the lectures at

Warrington except Divinity; it being intended that [he] should follow mercantile pursuits,” and his “studies were much directed to geography, history, travels, and voyages

41 William Enfield, A Funeral Sermon, Occasioned by the Death of the Late Rev. John Aiken, D.D. Professor of Divinity at the Academy in Warrington (Warrington, UK: Warrington Academy, 1781), 3. 42 Ibid., 5. 43 Ibid., 6-7. 44 Ibid., 7. 20 of discovery.”45 Although Dr. Aiken’s title at the Academy was Professor of Divinity, a

subject Vaughan avoided, Aiken’s wide scholarly interests included lectures in “classics

… French, grammar, oratory, criticism, logic, history, ontology, pneumatology,

philosophy, morals, ethics, law, political philosophy, [and] economy.”46 With such a

range of subjects, it is no wonder that Vaughan found his influence important enough to

include him as one of only two Warrington tutors mentioned in his memoir, the second

being the eminent scientist and academic, Dr. Joseph Priestley.

Priestley, who arrived at the academy in 1761, was perhaps the most famous of the eighteenth-century English Dissenters. He lived a life of the preeminent Renaissance man, and his presence at the Warrington Academy had an enormous impact on the lives of both William and Benjamin Vaughan. As a scientist, Priestley was best known for his discovery of oxygen in 1764, but as an academic, his greatest contribution may have been his development of a new curriculum for the gentlemen of Warrington, “designed for civil and active life.”47 The oldest of nine children, Priestley was born on March 13,

1733, at Fieldhead in Yorkshire, to Jonas Priestley, “a maker and dresser of woolen cloth,” and his first wife Mary, the daughter and “only child to Joseph Swift, a farmer at

Shafton.”48 Priestley’s mother died in the winter of 1739, when he was only six years

old. As Priestley recalled:

not long after being delivered of my youngest brother; and having dreamed a little before her death that she was in a delightful place, which she particularly described, and imagined to be heaven, and the last words

45 Vaughan, Memoir, 7. 46 “Aikin, John Sr (1713-1780).” 47 Joseph Priestley, Miscellaneous Observations Relating to Education (Bath: J. Johnson, 1778), 185-229; Edgar J. Smith, “Joseph Priestley on Liberal Education,” Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors 12, no. 8 (Dec. 1926): 576-77. 48 Joseph Priestley, Memoirs of the Rev. Dr. Joseph Priestley to the Year 1795 (London: C. Stower, 1809), 2. 21 which she spake, as my aunt informed me, were ‘let me go to that fine place.’49

After the death of his mother, Priestley was sent off to school and to the care of

his father’s sister, who had inherited a great fortune from her late husband. According to

Priestley, because she knew:

no other use of wealth, or of talents of any kind than to do good, and who never spared herself for this purpose, I was sent to several schools in the neighborhood, especially to a large free school, under the care of a clergyman, Mr. Hague, under whom, at the age of twelve or thirteen, I first began to make any progress in the Latin tongue, and acquired the elements of Greek.50

Not only did Priestley learn Greek and Latin in the public schools, but he also

learned Hebrew “on holidays of the dissenting minister of the place, Mr. Kirby,”

acquiring “a pretty good knowledge of the learned languages at the age of sixteen.”51

Three years later, in 1752, the nineteen-year-old Priestley, having additionally acquired fluency in three modern languages (French, Italian, and High Dutch) entered the

Academy at Daventry with the intention of fulfilling his aunt’s hopes of his becoming a minister.52 Priestley studied for three years at Daventry under the tutorship of Dr.

Ashworth, who was “earnestly desirous to make [Priestley] as orthodox as possible.”53

Although the pious Ashworth criticized Priestley’s tendency toward “the heteorodox side

of almost every question,” he allowed “great freedom of … speculations and debates,”

among his students, including the introduction of Arianism, and Priestley was “upon the

whole a favourite with him.”54

49 Ibid.,3. 50 Ibid., 3-4. 51 Ibid., 4. 52 Ibid., 5. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 17-18. During the eighteenth-century, Arianism challenged the traditional Christian Trinitarian theology, and argued that Jesus Christ was separate, distinct, and subordinate to God. 22 Priestley’s memoir offers significant insight into the operation of the Dissenting

Academies from the time he spent at Daventry, from 1752 to 1755, to the time spent by

Vaughan under Priestley’s tutelage at Warrington between 1766 and 1768. Writing in

1809 about his departure from Daventry, he stated:

It is not, I believe, usual for young persons in dissenting academies to think much of their future situations in life. Indeed, we are happily precluded from that, by the impossibility of succeeding in any application for particular places. We often, indeed, amused ourselves with the idea of our dispersion in all parts of the kingdom, after living so happily together; and used to propose plans of meeting at certain times, and smile at the different appearance we should probably make after being ten or twenty years settled in the world. But nothing of this kind was ever seriously resolved upon by us. For my own part, I can truly say I had very little ambition, except to distinguish myself by my application to the studies proper to my profession; and I cheerfully listened to the first proposal that my tutor made to me, in consequence of an application made to him, to provide a minister for the people of Needham Market, in Suffolk, though it was very remote from my friends in Yorkshire, and a very inconsiderable place.55

Priestley joined the Warrington Academy in 1761, after spending his twenties serving as a preacher for Dissenting congregations in Needham and at Nantwich, and shortly after the publication of his Rudiments of English Grammar, which was “one of the first attempts to systematically map the structure of the English language with the rigor that scholars had applied to Latin and Greek.”56 Priestley had been considered for one of the three original tutorships at Warrington, the position ultimately accepted by Dr.

Aiken, whom Priestley succeeded as Tutor of Languages and Polite Literature after

Aiken’s promotion to the Theological Tutorship.57 Now fluent in six languages other than English, Priestley was a perfect fit as Tutor of Languages, but he “quickly

55 Ibid., 21. 56 Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008), 19. 57 Bright, A Historical Sketch of Warrington Academy, 11. 23 introduced courses in modern history and politics—a cutting-edge curriculum in an educational regimen still devoted to conjugating the verbs of dead languages.”58

According to his memoir, after joining the faculty at Warrington, Priestley quickly realized “that, though most of our pupils were young men designed for situations in civil and active life, every article in the plan of their education was adapted to the learned professions.”59 Writing the year before Vaughan entered the Academy, in 1765,

Priestly found it “a defect in our present system of public education that a proper course

of studies is not provided for gentlemen who are designed to fill the principle stations of

active life, distinct from those which are adopted to the learned professions.”60

A Report of the State of the Warrington Academy, produced on June 28, 1764, at

the annual meeting of the Warrington Board of Trustees, supplies a good picture of the

state of the Warrington Academy just as Dr. Priestley began to formulate his ideas for a

new curriculum. Upon admission, which occurred in early September, students were

given an examination “before any two of the Tutors, to discover the proficiency they

have made at any other place of education, in order to their being properly classed.”61

Each student, after receiving a copy of the Laws of the Academy, was also required to

promise obedience, have his name entered into the enrollment book, and pay a sum of not

less than half a guinea for use of the library.62 He regularly attended “the morning and evening devotions of the Academy and the public worship of the Lord’s day,” and was required to give “regular attendance upon his proper Lectures, and duly perform the

58 Johnson, The Invention of Air, 19-20. 59 Priestley, Memoirs, 42. 60 Priestley, Miscellaneous Observations, 185. 61 “A Report of the State of the Warrington Academy,” (Warrington, UK: Warrington Academy, 1964), 1. 62 Ibid. 24 Academical Exercises enjoined him.”63 Students were not allowed to engage in games of chance, nor “permitted to frequent taverns, or public houses, or any place of public diversion, or to be out of [their] apartments after ten o’clock in the evening.”64

The lectures that the students attended, at least at the time of the Board’s publication in 1764, were heavily weighted toward the classics, yet elements of

Priestley’s influence were already taking shape, especially with the inclusion of “public exercises,” in which, “every Saturday the tutors, all the students, and often strangers, were assembled to hear English and Latin compositions, and sometimes to hear the delivery of speeches, and the exhibition of scenes in plays.”65 According to the Report, all students read the Latin Classics, took courses in mythology, Greek and Roman antiquities, and language courses in French and English, along with courses in history, elocution, mathematics, geography, and natural philosophy.66 The report recognized the distinction between those destined for the ministry, and those intended to pursue other, less lofty callings, articulating the specialized curriculum to which the future ministers adhered:

The Students who are intended for the Christian ministry, in the two first years will be principally engaged with the professors of the belles letters, and philosophy; the Divinity Tutor during that time only instructing them in Hebrew; and giving them some lectures to form them to a critical knowledge of the language of the scriptures. In the Third Year he teaches ontology, pneumatology and ethics, with the elements of jurisprudence, so far as it is derived from the same sources with the doctrines of natural religion and private morality; and gives critical lectures on the scriptures and Jewish antiquities. He will this year go through a course of lectures upon Justinian’s institutes of the Roman civil law. In the fourth and fifth years, the subjects of his lectures will be the evidence of revelation and its doctrines; scripture criticism as before, and church history. One day in

63 Ibid., 1-2. 64 Ibid. 65 Priestley, Memoirs, 43. 66 “A Report of the State of the Warrington Academy,” 2-3. 25 every week is appropriated to such exercises as may best prepare the Students for pulpit compositions, and public speaking. The last year will conclude with some lectures on the pastoral care.67

Apparently, the primary complaint with the operation of the Warrington Academy

in 1764 was that the complexity of the lectures naturally excluded young men under the

age of fourteen, and that there was “not a provision made for young gentlemen intended

for business, which was originally expected in the first institution.”68 The Trustees

addressed both of these complaints in their report, and with regard to the distinction

between education for ministry and business, responded as follows:

It is indeed true that the original design of the institution of this Academy was not only to provide a proper education for young men intended for the ministry; but to institute a plan of instruction, upon an open and liberal scheme, where young Gentlemen in general, whether intended for business or any of the learned professions, might receive with advantage at least the former part of their education: in doing of which it was the general opinion that the most effectual provision would at the same time be made for the liberal education of ministers: and this is found to be true in fact; for whoever will candidly attend to the plan laid out for the Student in Divinity … must be sensible, that it is impossible for any institution to have that object more fully and directly in view; and that a regard is had to every circumstance that can be supposed to qualify them for that sacred and important office.69

With this academic foundation as a backdrop, Priestley set out to articulate a new curriculum designed to prepare young men, who were not aristocrats, for leadership in the community, not just for success in academic or theological circles. This included the introduction of lectures on “‘History and General Policy,’ on the ‘Laws and Constitutions of England,’ and on the ‘History of England.’”70 In addition to the composition of his

“Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life,” in 1765, Priestley

67 Ibid., 3. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., 5. 70 Priestley, Memoirs, 42. 26 produced syllabi for his three new courses, and drafted his comments on Dr. Brown’s

“plan of education, in which he recommended it to be undertaken by the state.”71 As of

1765, Priestley was philosophically opposed to the concept of state-supported education,

“showing how inimical it was to liberty, and the natural rights of parents.”72 Naturally,

Priestley preferred the open environment of the Dissenting Academies, where talented

tutors and students were allowed the academic freedom to explore the subjects and ideas

they found most intriguing without fear of reprisal from government bureaucracy.

Priestley’s “Essay on a Course of Liberal Education” provides direct insight into

the pedagogical philosophy to which Vaughan was exposed during his two years at

Warrington Academy. The “Essay” reflected Priestley’s discontent with the Academy’s

unwillingness, as demonstrated in their 1764 Trustee Report, to emphasize a particular

curriculum for students intended for stations in life outside the ministry. Early in the

work, Priestley noted that:

we have hardly any medium between an education for the countinghouse, consisting of writing, arithmetic, and merchants-accounts, and a method of institution in the abstract sciences: so that we have nothing liberal that is worth the attention of gentlemen, whose views neither of these two opposite plans may suit.73

In other words, Priestley’s work highlighted the lack of education for those

situated for stations in life above the vocational trades and below the academics and

clergymen, for whom “the whole plan of education, from the grammar-school to the finishing at the university [was] calculated for their use.”74 The consequences of these

shortcomings in education were, Priestley thought:

71 Ibid., 43. 72 Ibid., 42. 73 Priestley, Miscellaneous Observations, 185. 74 Ibid., 186. 27 that the advances which were made to a more perfect and improved state of society were very slow; and the present happier state of things was brought about, rather by accidental concurrence of circumstances, than by efforts of human wisdom and foresight. We see the hand of Divine Providence in those revolutions which have gradually given a happier turn to affairs, while men have been the passive and blind instruments of their own felicity.75

But according to Priestley, by 1765 “the same supine inattention with which

affairs were formerly conducted [was] no longer safe; and that without superior degrees

of wisdom and vigour in political measures, everything we have hitherto gained will

infallibly be lost, and quickly transferred to our more intelligent and vigilant

neighbors.”76 Priestley, a religious man, recognized that a modern society could no longer be sustained solely by the hand of divine providence. He set out, therefore, to

create a curriculum for men destined to engage “in those higher spheres of active life,”

including law, the profession of arms, and commerce.77

Priestley’s curriculum was articulated in great detail in his Syllabus, which not

only identified the subjects intended for his course of study, but provided brief summaries

of the individual lectures that should be contained within those subjects. The first

subject, General History, contained discussions divided into seven primary categories: the

general uses of history, the sources of history, what is necessary or useful to be known

previous to the study of history, directions for facilitating the study of history, the order

in which the most useful histories may be read to the most advantage, proper objects of

attention to an historian, and a general view of history, civil and ecclesiastical.78 History

was followed by a brief discussion of the study of Geography:

75 Ibid., 188. 76 Ibid., 189. 77 Ibid., 195. 78 Joseph Priestley, Miscellaneous Observations, 230-231. 28 particularly to the branch of it which may with propriety be called commercial geography, exhibiting the state of the world with respect to commerce, pointing out the most advantageous situations for carrying it on; and more especially, noting those articles in the natural history of countries which are, or may be, the proper subjects of commerce.79

Interestingly, Chemistry followed Geography as “absolutely necessary to the extension of this useful branch.”80 For Priestley, a knowledge of both Chemistry and

Geography was absolutely necessary to the effective participation in commerce, for

“without some knowledge of this kind, a man might for instance be digging for the ore of a baser metal, and overlook another of much more value, which might lie in his way.”81

Priestley’s curriculum therefore presumed the conduct of international business, and more specifically, commercial speculation by his students. According to Priestley “it is more probable, that the countries to which we trade for articles of small account are capable of furnishing us with commodities of much greater value, and will be found to do it, as soon as our attention is sufficiently awake to discover them.”82

Following the discussion of General History, Geography, and Chemistry,

Priestley’s Syllabus next moved to his Course of Lectures on the History of England. For

Priestley,

a knowledge of general history will enable you to account for the present appearances in the world in general, but you must look into the annals of your own country to account for what you see at home, and without this historical knowledge, every news-paper of daily occurrences will, in fact, be unintelligible to you.83

For his method of English History, Priestley proposed dividing “the whole into separate periods, and to digest all the materials relating to each under certain important

79 Ibid., 260. 80 Ibid., 262. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Joseph Priestley, Miscellaneous Observations, 263-264. 29 heads.”84 Priestley’s headings for each period were those “which mostly occur in every

period, or reign of importance,” covering every type of history from government and

taxation, to religion, to war, art and foreign affairs.85

Courses on the Constitution and the Laws of England followed English History,

such study being necessary “to those persons whose fortune, and whose station in life,

give them any degree of influence over their fellow-subjects” by serving as “magistrates,

or legislators in the state; to have a voice in its councils, and to be concerned in acting

and repealing its laws, and in regulating its whole internal policy.”86 For this course,

Priestley was “guided by a view to the great objects of all civil policy; relating, in the first place, those institutions which tend to make us HAPPY, and consequently POPULOUS at home; then those which tend to make us FORMIDABLE abroad, and lastly show the manner in which the EXPENSES OF OUR GOVERNMENT are defrayed.”87 Priestley’s

curriculum considered the legislative and executive power of the state, the “method of

proceeding in the courts, in order to obtain the benefit of the laws,” and the laws

themselves.88 He divided those laws into those “which are of a PUBLIC or more general

nature,” including those whose object is the preservation of government, trade and

commerce, and public conveniences, and those addressing “the mutual obligations of

INDIVIDUALS to one another,” including those laws meant “to guard our lives, limbs,

liberty, reputation and property … and those which relate to the commerce of the sexes,

and the domestic relations.”89 Such was the outline of Priestley’s curriculum for students

84 Ibid., 272. 85 Ibid., 275-278. 86 Ibid., 286. 87 Ibid., 298. 88 Ibid., 299. 89 Ibid. 30 like Vaughan, who entered the Academy with a view toward mercantile pursuits, barred

from the state-sponsored English universities but destined to develop a career in the

economy and politics of empire. The curriculum was designed to provide these men

with a foundation for a well-rounded life, both in their community and within their own

personal and family lives.

Priestley’s tenure with the Warrington Academy came at an opportune time for

Vaughan, who benefited from both Priestley’s formal academic curriculum and his

personal mentorship. As a student at Warrington, Vaughan boarded with Priestley and

his wife Mary in their home on Academy Court. Mary was the daughter of a Welsh

ironmaster, Isaac Wilkinson, and the sister of the industrialist, John Wilkinson, well

known for his production of cast-iron during the Industrial Revolution. John and Mary’s

youngest brother, William, had been Priestley’s pupil at Nantwich, where Priestley met

Mary and became well acquainted with her family.90 According to Priestley,

this proved a very suitable and happy connexion, my wife being a woman of an excellent understanding, much improved by reading, of great fortitude and strength of mind, and of a temper in the highest degree affectionate and generous; feeling strongly for others, and little for herself. Also, greatly excelling in everything relating to household affairs, she entirely relieved me of all concern of that kind, which allowed me to give all my time to the prosecution of my studies, and the other duties of my station.91

By the time of Vaughan’s arrival between 1765 and 1766, the couple had a two-year-old daughter, Sarah, and according to Vaughan’s memoir, the arrangement upon his arrival at

Warrington was especially beneficial:

Dr. Priestley was another tutor distinguished for his amiable character and kindness of manner as well as for his literary and philosophical pursuits, and for his lectures on history, &c. &c. My eldest brother Benjamin and

90 Priestley, Memoirs, 41. 91 Ibid. 31 myself resided in his house, and derived very great advantages from that circumstance.92

When Vaughan and his brother Benjamin arrived in Warrington, the Academy

had already relocated from its original setting, an “ugly, mean, old brick house,” with a

simple front and “narrow dingy side with six windows ranged in pairs along it, and a

single attic window, surmounted by weatherlock,” to a more appropriate facility on

Academy Place, “which opens out of the Butter Market Street.”93 By 1762, according to

Henry Bright’s Historical Sketch, it had become “desirable to leave the old Academy, and erect more suitable buildings,” and the Academy in which Vaughan enrolled in 1765 included “an old brick building, with stone copings, and a clock and bell turret in the centre.”94 Though it could not “pretend to architectural beauty,” it was “not unpleasing with its quaint old-world look.”95

Life was exciting in such a center of liberal, theological, philosophical, and literary debate, not only in the classroom, but also through the “free, familiar

conversation” and interaction among students, tutors, and their families in residence.96

Between Saturday morning lectures and tea-parties at the home of Dr. Aiken, Dr.

Priestley’s public exercises on Saturday afternoons, and the reading of verse and theatrical performances, intellectual activity and vociferous debate were lively, and in some ways, liberating. There were two types of students, according to Bright, at

Warrington Academy: those who engaged in “the wild life of the wilder of the Academy students,” and the “quiet and respectable set, who afterwards reflected credit on their

92 Vaughan, Memoir, 6. 93 Bright, Historical Sketch, 10-11. 94 Ibid., 11. 95 Ibid. 96 Parker, Dissenting Academies, 112. 32 alma-mater.”97 It is clear that William Vaughan fell comfortably into the quiet and respectable set, who “took walks into the country with young Dr. Aiken, and listened to sermons in Cairo Street Chapel, and otherwise prepared themselves for a calm future of happy usefulness.”98 Benjamin, by contrast, appears to have dabbled in the wilder life of

Warrington Academy, which included stories from the children of West Indian Planters

(a group to which the Vaughan brothers belonged), practical jokes, and “love-making in the tutors’ houses,” specifically in the home of the “beautiful Miss Rigbys,” who “made wild work with the students’ hearts.”99 And then there were the politics. According to

Bright, the tutors, who were traditionally strong Whigs, were “alarmed and terrified at the anti-English zeal,” displayed by many of the students, especially in later years “during the American war.”100

Apparently, Vaughan’s father, Samuel, slowly became aware of the growing temptations facing his sons at the Warrington Academy. He initially wrote to the headmaster, John Seddon, on October 26, 1767, Samuel Vaughan expressed his gratitude for the care of William (“Billy”) and Benjamin, stating he was “very particularly obliged for your Information, Care & kind Intentions of Inspecting Assisting & directing Billys pursuits & Study, from whence with the pleasing Accot Ben gives of his application flatter my self that he will (under so able Tutors) make great progress &

Improvement.'”101 A year later, however, Samuel expressed discontent with what

97 Bright, Historical Sketch, 21-22. 98 Ibid., 22. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid. 101 “Dr. Williams’s Library,” Dissenting Academies Online, http://dissacad.english.qmul.ac.uk /sample1.php?parameter=personretrieve&alpha=2287 (accessed October 20, 2015). 33 appeared to be pernicious behavior reflected in his son’s spending habits. He

complained, in a letter to Mr. Seddon in August 1768, that:

my Son Ben’s expenses during ten months absence amounts to £112, and Billy’s to £59 12s.; this (should nearly suffice for the University, and) of its self, would to many be a sufficient objection, but in my opinion, the consequence of the expense is abundantly more pernicious, as it naturally leads to Levity, a love of pleasure, dissipation, and affection of smartness; diverts the attention, and prevents the necessary application to serious thought and Study.102

According to Samuel, his purpose for sending his sons so far from home for their

education was “to imbibe good Morals, acquire knowledge, and to obtain a manly and

solid way of thinking and acting, but they are returned with high Ideas of modern

refinements, of dress and external accomplishments, which if ever necessary, yet resumed

by them much to soon.”103 While Samuel believed that “no person can more wish for,

and encourage an open and Liberal way of thinking and acting than my self,” he felt that

his son’s excesses were progressing outside the realm of moral and religious decency,

and needed to be curtailed.104

Apparently, Benjamin Vaughan found it necessary on more than one occasion to

express contrition for his behavior, writing in response to his father’s August letter that he was “certain that none of us have been vicious but only gay,” and that “none of us have received any injury from ye Liberty allowed us, but others may make a bad use of it.”105 To some extent, Benjamin’s academic performance relieved his father’s discontent with his son’s forays, but his pleasure did not extend so far as an additional allowance for

102 Samuel Vaughan to John Seddon, August 1768, in Bright, Historical Sketch, 23-24. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid. 105 Bright, Historical Sketch, 24. 34 William, who was clearly spending at a level more agreeable to his father. Writing to

Seddon on November 17, 1768, Samuel stated:

Am much pleased to hear my Sons apply closer to Business, it is high time they did so. Billy hath applyd for augmentation of allowance. I do not think he deserves it yet do I leave that matter to Your better judgment. I beg You may pay [??] that he borrowd of his Brother, with an injunction to avoid the like custom in future. what ever you draw for upon their Accounts shall be always duly honoured.106

Although Vaughan’s memoir provides little insight into his experience at

Warrington, he spent significant time reflecting on the relationship that developed

between Priestley and his brother Benjamin. According to Vaughan, Benjamin’s

relationship with Priestley grew so close that when Priestley “published his Lectures on

History, in 1797, [he] dedicated them to his pupil,” Benjamin Vaughan.107 By that time,

Benjamin was long removed from his escapades at Warrington, from which he:

went to Cambridge and Thence to the Temple, where he studied law, and went subsequently to Edinburgh, where he studied medicine, but never practiced either professionally. He was in Parliament for some time, and afterwards removed to America, and resided many years at Hallowell, in the State of Maine, where he continued his literary, scientific, and agricultural pursuits.108

By the time William Vaughan arrived at Warrington in 1765, Priestley had been

at Warrington for four years and had most likely implemented the bulk of his proposed

curriculum in order to make necessary adjustments before its publication that same year.

Since Vaughan’s “studies were much directed to geography, history, travels, and voyages

of discovery,” it is likely that he received the benefit of a substantial portion, if not all, of

Priestley’s curriculum during his two years at the Academy.109 While Vaughan

106 “Dr. Williams’s Library.” 107 Vaughan, Memoir, 6. 108 Ibid., 5-6. 109 Ibid., 7. 35 emphasized the importance of his studies in history, it was literature that seemed to have

the greatest impact on his brother Benjamin. According to a memorandum written by

Benjamin in 1804 on the life of Priestley, “besides teaching the Greek & Latin languages, he lectured on history; on oratory and criticism; [and] on English law, respecting which he published a syllabus; and on the theory of grammar, his lectures on which were printed

& had merit, though they were never published.”110 But Priestley’s interest in science,

especially electricity, also caught Benjamin’s attention, and he assisted Priestley “in his

Electrical experiments,” through which Priestley, “composed his history of Electricity.”111

Benjamin’s unpublished account provides valuable insight into the virtues and values

Priestley instilled in his pupils:

He said that God alone knew his times & seasons & that the views of man were so limited that he must follow his duty, though he should not foresee the particular pursuits to be derived from his endeavors. He contended that great events required to be prepared, ‘that clamor drew attention to a new subject; & that when the shock of first prejudices was over, men would more calmly look at what should be urged afterwards.’ He was also more decided in favor of attempts to do good without regard to temporary consequences, from his full persuation that Christianity, truth & knowledge, would finally have mastery in the world. He was accordingly prepared to suffer persecution in his own case.112

There is no question that William was extremely proud of his brother’s

attachment to Priestley and the connections he made with great men during his career.

According to Vaughan’s memoir, his brother “was possessed of considerable talents and

general knowledge, which by perseverance made him conversant with philosophical

pursuits, and introduced him to the acquaintance of many distinguished men.”113 Like his

110 Memorandum on the Life of Joseph Priestley by Benjamin Vaughan, Benjamin Vaughan Papers, American Philosophical Association, Philadelphia, PA.. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid. 113 Vaughan, Memoir, 5. 36 brother, William was greatly affected by the liberal principles of Dr. Priestley, but his interests tended more toward the practical and less toward the philosophical and idealistic pursuits that occupied his brother throughout his life. It was decided at an early age, by his father, that William “should follow mercantile pursuits,” which dictated he steer clear of lectures in divinity at Warrington, and toward those that would better prepare him for a career as a British merchant. While at Warrington, Vaughan “took great interest in accounts of shipwrecks and other disasters at sea,” and he “saw and heard a great deal respecting canals, docks, manufactures, commerce, and population.”114 As Vaughan subsequently remembered, “small beginnings often lead to greater efforts,” and over twenty-years later he

was, in 1791, induced to join with some friends in endeavouring to procure a good collection of the history and plans of the canals of this country, with a view of forming a society for their encouragement; and, for this object, wrote a prospectus, which appeared on the wrapper of the European Magazine.115

Although this first attempt to create a full picture of the canals of England failed, the knowledge gleaned from this experience would contribute to the successful career that Vaughan would ultimately have in mercantile pursuits, specifically those directly related to the shipping industry, and his tenure as governor of the Royal Exchange

Assurance Corporation—one of only two English insurance companies in the eighteenth century.

What do William Vaughan’s experiences at Hackney and Warrington Academies reveal about the social and political changes occurring in the late eighteenth century? In order to answer that question, it is necessary to understand the context in which the shift

114 Ibid., 7. 115 Ibid. 37 from “classic” to “liberal” education occurred and what that shift actually meant. The

concept of “liberal” education was not new to the eighteenth century, but its definition

had changed considerably over time. As early as the first century, the Roman stoic

philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca had expressed his concept of a liberal education as

follows:

You want to know what I feel about liberal studies. I don’t admire or count as worthwhile any study which aims at making money. Such studies are just hiring out our talents and are only of value if they train the mind and do not pre-occupy it. We should only spend time on them as long as the mind has nothing better to do, as they are our apprenticeship, not our proper work. You can see why liberal studies are so called: they are worthy of a free man. But only one study is truly liberal in making a man free, and that is the study of wisdom, with its strength of purpose and its noble and exalted ideals. 116

Almost fourteen-hundred years later, between 1392 and 1404, Petrus Paulus

Vergerius, Renaissance thinker and professor at the University of Padua in Italy authored his treatise De Ingenuis Morbis et Studiis Liberalibus (On Noble Manners and Liberal

Studies). According to David J. Wilcox, Vergerius’ letter was the first important treatise to “outline a systematic plan” for secular education and provided a definition of liberal studies that was “one of the most concise in Renaissance literature.”117 Like Seneca,

Vergerius defined liberal studies as those:

which are worthy of a free [liber] man; they are those through which virtue and wisdom are either practiced or sought, and by which the body or mind is disposed towards all the best things. From this source people customarily seek honor and glory, which for the wise man are the principle rewards of virtue.118

116 Seneca to Lucilius, in Bruce A. Kimball, The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Documentary History (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010), 38. 117 David J. Wilcox, In Search of God and Self: Renaissance and Reformation Thought (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1975), 92. 118 Petrus Paulus Vergerius, De Ingenuis Moribus, in Humanist Educational Treatises, trans. Craig Kallendorf (Cambridge: University Press, 2002), 29. 38 But less than two-hundred years later, in sixteenth-century Britain, a shift was

taking place that reversed the classical perception of “liberal” education, and redefined

what effects liberal education should have on those who undertook it. Much of this

change took root in Scotland, where John Knox was laying the foundation of a fully

developed public school system. Of course, as a leader of the Protestant Reformation in

Scotland, Knox was not in favor of education outside of religion, and his government

developed an educational framework based primarily on biblical concepts. Through his

Protestant values, Knox “clearly believed in the danger of allowing men not devoted to

the Protestant cause to teach in the educational system,” and thought that “education was

to train youth to be godly and virtuous.”119 What Knox worked toward, however,

influenced education in the British Isles for centuries to come. First, the newly reformed system established in Scotland emphasized education for all children, regardless of their socio-economic status.120 Second, it “de-emphasiz[ed] the Scholastic theology that had

been a major factor in medieval higher education,” moving toward a curriculum that

included instruction in the crafts, politics, economics, and physics.121 Although this shift

in curriculum was not as dramatic as it subsequently became in Britain, the move from

aristocratic theological education to a biblical education with moderately liberal

dimensions was nonetheless significant. Along with Knox’s belief in public education

for all, regardless of socio-economic status, this change helped formulate the educational

foundation for the Dissenting Academies and influenced English Enlightenment thinkers

who were also helping to redefine the concept of “liberal” education.

119 Richard L. Greaves, “The Social Awareness of John Knox: The Problems of Poverty and Educational Reform,” Renaissance and Reformation 12, no. 1 (1976): 39-40. 120 Ibid., 40. 121 Ibid., 43. 39 In 1690, John Locke published Some Thoughts Concerning Education, which was

reprinted frequently in Britain throughout the eighteenth century. The father of classic liberalism, Locke believed strongly in the education of youth as a means of securing the future of England:

I wish, that those, who complain of the great decay of Christian piety and virtue everywhere, and of learning and acquired improvements in the Gentry of this generation, would consider how to retrieve them in the next. This I am sure, that if the foundation of it be not laid in the education and principling of the youth, all other endeavours will be in vain. And if the innocence, sobriety, and industry of those who are coming up, be not taken care of and preserved, ‘twill be ridiculous to expect, that those who are to succeed next on the stage, should abound in that virtue, ability, and learning, which has hitherto made England comfortable in the world.122

At the turn of the eighteenth century, however, educational institutions in England

were still largely steeped in the aristocratic traditions of Oxford and Cambridge, and the

changes which had led to the establishment of the Protestant Kirk in Scotland did not

eliminate the exclusion of non-Anglicans from state-sponsored education in England.

Allan Macinnes observed that at the end of the seventeenth century, “confessional

minorities such as the Dissenters and Catholics remained, respectively, second- and third-

class citizens in public life,” even though Presbyterianism in Scotland “was declared

supreme in the Kirk.”123 As a result of this exclusion, Dissenters developed their own

educational systems based on the concept of liberal education, which had experienced a

complete reversal in meaning throughout eighteen hundred years of Western history;

evolving from an education rooted in the classics and directed toward men of means and

leisure, to Priestley’s curriculum established for men destined for the civil and active life

in business, government, and law.

122 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 5th ed. (London: A. and J. Churchill, 1705), 101-02. 123 Allan Macinnes, “Britian 1700,” History Today 50, no. 10 (Oct. 2000): 44. 40 It was this shift toward a new definition of liberal education that separated the

education that Vaughan received from that of the Anglican aristocrats at state and church- sponsored schools at Oxford and Cambridge. As Irene Parker argued:

the Universities and academies differed fundamentally in their opinion as to what constituted a “liberal” education. The Universities held that the more education was removed from the ordinary activities of life, the more liberal it was; that liberal or “culture” studies were those if not useless, at least definitely not utilitarian. Moreover, under the influence of Ciceronianism, the “culture” studies did not include the broad, literary study advocated by the Renaissance humanist, but merely the narrow, pedantic training in classics and formal logic.124

In other words, according to Parker the aristocratic attachment to “traditional”

academic pursuits not only excluded utilitarian approaches to education, but also

excluded many of the humanistic elements of classical Western education adhered to by

Renaissance thinkers like Vergerius. The Dissenting Academies, however, believed that

in order “for an education to be liberal it was imperative that it should be in touch with

life and should therefore include as many utilitarian subjects as possible.” 125

But according to Parker, it was not just the differences in the appropriate curriculum of liberal education that separated the Dissenters’ experience from those at

Oxford and Cambridge, but the “spirit animating the Dissenters,” that “had moved Ramus

and Comenius in France and Germany and which in England had actuated Bacon and

later Hartlib.”126 According to Parker, while the aristocrats at Oxford became proficient in Sallust and characters of Theophrastus, Vergil, Anabasis, and the Gospels of Saint

Matthew and Saint Mark, students at the Dissenting Academies were subjects of “the first

educational institutions in England to put into practice the realistic theories which had

124 Parker, Dissenting Academies, 132-133. 125 Ibid., 133-34. 126 Ibid., 134. 41 found expression in the works of a series of writers from Rabelais and Montaigne,

Mulcaster and Elyot to Bacon and Comenius, Milton and Petty.”127

It is important to note, as Parker recognized in her important work on the

Academies, that the transition to a new curriculum, while perhaps reducing the intensity with which the classics were studied, did not in any way reduce the importance of humanistic education first conceptualized by Renaissance thinkers like Vergerius,

Erasmus, and Machiavelli. Vaughan was educated by men of letters, men like Aiken and

Priestley, whose own educations were steeped in the humanities—languages, theology, classical literature—and who had dedicated their lives to scholarship.

Although historians, like J.C.D. Clark, have recently begun to view the

Revolutionary Age through a less dramatic socio-political lens, many historians, especially economic historians, have emphasized the commercial and industrial advances that took place during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the leading cause of social change. According to Kramnick:

Between 1760 and 1800 England was fundamentally transformed by the Industrial Revolution. All across England’s ‘green and pleasant land’ were rising ‘dark satanic mills.’ These mills did more than mar the aesthetic landscape, they brought in their wake a new set of values and a new ideology—the values of the middle-class factory owners and managers, bourgeois values. Ultimately in the nineteenth century this ideology would triumph; the bourgeoise would topple the aristocracy, and traditional society would give way to liberal capitalist society. In the late eighteenth century the battle lines were formed. Middle-class ideology was the challenger. It was radical and progressive; it called for changes to liberate and unshackle the individual still bound by traditional restrictions.128

127 Ibid. 128 Isaac Kramnick, “Children’s Literature and Bourgeois Ideology: Observations on Culture and Industrial Capitalism in the Later Eighteenth Century,” in Perez Zagorin ed., Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment (Berkley: University of California Press,1980), 205. 42 Kramnick, like others, argued that two industries, the cotton and steel industries,

“came to symbolize the Industrial Revolution, and with them there emerged two new

social heroes—the entrepreneur and the engineer … shortly behind them stood another

new hero—the scientist.”129 These new entrepreneurs were led, argued Kramnick, by the

leaders of Protestant Dissent, men like Priestley, Wedgewood, Cooper, Paine, and Watt,

who “combined, indeed epitomized, the economic and cultural expressions of the new

bourgeois ideology,” a Protestant ideology that “attacked idleness and luxury while

praising simplicity, productivity, and usefulness.”130 Likewise, R.J. Morris has argued

that while the class society that was formed between 1780 and 1850 developed slowly

during a period of two-to-three hundred years, what did happen during this period was

“the creation of economic conditions in which the relationships of commercial and capitalist production could no longer remain stable.”131 Such focus on economics,

however, misses the more subtle social and intellectual changes that occurred, especially

in the world of academia; changes rooted, specifically in the Dissenting Academies, in

the humanities—philosophy, classicism, and theology. Men like Priestley and Aiken did not simply cast off their scholarly inclinations in favor of economic and scientific curricula focused on creating private jobs and wealth. Rather, they adapted traditional curricula to the education of men who would establish careers outside the church and the academy, and put their ideas into practice both in business and in their communities. As a successful merchant, William Vaughan built a career on these principles, and as a

129 Ibid., 206-07. 130 Ibid., 208-09. 131 R. J. Morris, Class and Class Consciousness in the Industrial Revolution 1780-1850 (Edinburgh: Economic History Society, 1979), 48. 43 member of the voluntary societies, he implemented these principles in his community and even across the Atlantic.

44 CHAPTER 2. BUSINESSMAN AND WRITER

Although it is difficult to measure the true impact of a particular education on a

person’s life, the personal and professional life that William Vaughan led through the transformative period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a direct reflection of the liberal education developed by Joseph Priestley. Vaughan’s success in business and his contributions to the English shipping industry, as well as his lifelong interest in writing, exploration, and civic responsibility, were all products of the education he received at Warrington Academy, and fulfilled Priestley’s ideal of the citizen engaged in the “higher spheres of active life.”1

Vaughan completed his education at Warrington in 1769, and relatively little is

known about his life during the first decade of his professional career. In 1783, however,

he was elected Director of the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation (REA), beginning

a forty-six-year tenure with the company, during which he rose to sub-governor, and

ultimately, in 1816, to governor.2 When he began with the REA, Vaughan was 31 years

old, and the American Revolution came to a close with the signing of the Treaty of Paris

that same year. During this time, British overseas trade was growing, and developments

in modern business practices were quickly changing the ways in which wealth was

created. Scholars have described this time as one of expanding English demand for

consumer goods and raw materials from America, the Far East, and Northern Europe, and

British protectiveness of markets for domestically manufactured goods in Africa and the

1 Priestley, Miscellaneous Observations, 195. 2 Vaughan, Memoir, 8; Supple, Royal Exchange Assurance, 80. 45 American colonies.3 As a result, “trade growth [in Britain] depended on development of

a wide variety of credit practices, supported primarily by big wholesalers and export

merchants. Wholesalers and merchants also accounted for important institutional

innovations.”4 Vaughan’s position at the REA placed him at the heart of the growing

British mercantile economy, much of which was tied to overseas markets, including the

United States. Vaughan’s career, therefore, was built and dependent on this new global economy, and he relied on the practical business education that he received at the

Warrington Academy as he negotiated these new mercantile realities in London.

The REA was established by Royal Charter on June 20, 1720, for the purposes of insuring ships involved in foreign trade.5 Marine insurance, its historian has observed,

“was the oldest and best-developed branch of insurance—with its remote origins in the

maritime loans of classical and early medieval times, and its formal beginnings in the

Mediterranean trade of the fourteenth century.”6 But it was during the late eighteenth and

early nineteenth centuries that war and industrialization contributed to important changes

in the fire, life and marine insurance industry. These changes included legislation that

extended the power of the REA “to include the purchase and sale of annuities (1793), fire

and life insurance overseas (1796), the insurance of vessels and cargoes on inland

waterways in the United Kingdom (1801), and the loan of money or stock on the security

of mortgages (1826).”7

3 Jacob M. Price, “What Did Merchants Do? Reflections on British Overseas Trade, 1660-1790,” Journal of Economic History 49, no. 2 (Jun., 1989): 267-284. 4 Ibid. 5 Supple, Royal Exchange Assurance, 4-5. 6 Ibid., 6. 7 Ibid., 105. 46 During his tenure at the REA, Vaughan helped to lead the Corporation through all

of these changes, witnessing firsthand the dramatic expansion of insurance and financial

markets during the Commercial and Industrial Revolutions. According to his memoir, his

time at the REA:

embraced the most useful, important, and pleasant part of my life, during which I formed many friendships and attachments. Having some leisure, and wishing to make myself useful in that situation, I drew out various general and consolidated statements of the different branches of the concerns of the corporation for a century, namely, from the year 1720 to 1819 inclusive, for which I received the thanks of the Court, and they were pleased to adopt many of the hints and suggestions therein submitted to their consideration, and to request me to sit for my portrait, which was painted by Mr. Phillips.8

Many of Vaughan’s writings from this period are included in the miscellaneous

documents published with his memoir, and they provide valuable insight into his

professional life and the business environment in which it was spent. Between 1793 and

1800, Vaughan’s interests were largely directed to the continued development of the

London shipping industry. He played a fundamental role in the promotion of “docks,

warehouses, and other accommodations in the Port of London” by organizing the

mercantile community, lobbying the government, and producing tracts and pamphlets “to

show the wants of the Port of London in 1793, and the remedies proposed.”9

Vaughan’s first tract was printed on March 6, 1794, and it promoted St.

Katharine’s, Wapping, the Isle of Dogs, and Rotherhithe as convenient places for the expansion of the London Dock system, with a preference for the location at Wapping,

“on account of its local advantages, and its vicinity to the seat of commerce.”10 Shortly

after the first tract’s publication, a meeting of merchants and chairmen of public bodies

8 Vaughan, Memoir, 8-9. 9 Ibid., 25. 10 Ibid. 47 was held to discuss the London quays, which were built during the time of Queen

Elizabeth in the late sixteenth century, and by 1794 were considered inadequate “for the accommodation of the trade of London.”11 As a result of that meeting, a committee was established “to receive any information or proposals for the further accommodation of the trade.”12 At a meeting on March 13, 1795, the Committee resolved that “the wet docks at

Wapping would best tend to remove the difficulties and inconveniences which affected the commerce of the Port,” and that “the forming a cut from Blackwall might be proposed, and that a communication of the plan should be made to the Corporation of the

City of London, and also to Government to request their support.”13 In 1796, following a meeting of the Committee at the London Tavern, a Petition to that effect was prepared for submission to Parliament.14 In the Petition it was also resolved, “that the thanks of this meeting be given to William Vaughan, Esq. for the assiduity and ability he has manifested, and the assistance he has given during the progress of this business.”15

In conjunction with these initial plans for the expansion of the London Docks,

Vaughan published “Reasons in favour of London Docks,” which “was a little publication distributed in 1795, and reprinted in 1796 and 1797.”16 In Vaughan’s estimation, approximately three thousand copies were printed and given to friends and opponents of the project.17 According to the tract,

The Merchants of London have recommended to the public the forming of Wet Docks in Wapping, for the reception of 400 Sail of loaded ships, when all are completed; and a Lighter-Dock, capable of holding 30 Lighters every tide. They are now applying to Parliament or leave to

11 Ibid., 26. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 27. 16 Ibid., 30. 17 Ibid. 48 make the same; and in order to give a fair discussion to all parties and all interests, it is intended that the Bill shall be read once, and printed, and then to lay over until next sessions.18

The text then provided fourteen numbered paragraphs setting forth the “reasons why mercantile and city interests should join in the application,” including the rapid increase in commerce, shipping, and revenue in the Port, and the inadequacy of the current facilities to accommodate that expansion.19 In Vaughan’s opinion, the text

“contributed greatly to remove many objections to Docks, and to their proposed situations.”20

Vaughan also published a tract promoting the London docks that took the form of a letter to Thomas Irving, dated August 16, 1795.21 Irving had been appointed as

Inspector-General of Imports and Exports, and Register of Shipping of North America in

1767. From 1780 until his death in 1800, Irving was responsible for almost every

“officially compiled account of the trade of Great Britain and its empire.”22 He was best known for his innovative strategies in collecting and organizing large amounts of data regarding trade, especially colonial trade in the Americas.23 Although his work impressed the Commissioners of the American Board of Customs, his reforms were also credited with tightening British control over American trade and altering the rights of the colonists.24

By 1795, when Vaughan’s letter arrived, Irving’s attention was spread across a wide swath of British trade and the shipping industry, and he shared Vaughan’s letter

18 Ibid., App. 3 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 30. 21 Ibid. 22 John McCusker, Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic World (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1997), 131-33. 23 Ibid., 137. 24 Ibid. 49 regarding the expansion of the London Docks with William Pitt, the Prime Minister, and

George Rose, Clerk of the Parliaments and former Secretary of the Treasury, “who were

pleased to receive favourably the suggestions contained in it.”25 Shortly thereafter, on

April 22, 1796, Vaughan was brought before a Committee of the House of Commons for

an examination, along with Captain A.M. Shields, regarding their survey of the River

Thames, which included “soundings of the river, and the position and number of the

mooring-chains, from London Bridge to Bugsby’s Hole; and also plans of the several

sections and soundings across the river at different parts.” These plans were eventually

presented to the London Dock Company, and were framed to hang on display in its

committee room. Four years later, on July 12, 1800, construction began on the new

docks envisioned by Vaughan and his contemporaries, and on September 1, 1802, the

first docks “opened for the reception of shipping.”26 Subsequent docks were completed at

Wapping in 1805, and in 1806 the East-India Docks opened to facilitate the shipment of tea in the promotion of trade with India. Vaughan was “on board the ships that first entered all of these docks,” and later witnessed the expansion of the docks in 1813 with the opening of an additional commercial dock for timber, oil, and corn.27 In 1825, an act

was also passed to establish docks “for the convenience of the Baltic and other trades.”28

These docks were finally completed in 1828, thirty-five years after Vaughan published his first tract promoting the improvement and expansion of the London Docks.29

Included in Vaughan’s Miscellaneous Tracts is a brief essay entitled “Metropolis

and the Port of London as it was in the Year 1836,” in which he described, among other

25 Vaughan, Memoir, 30. 26 Ibid., 33. 27 Ibid., 36. 28 Ibid., 35-36. 29 Ibid., 36. 50 things, the explosion of the London shipping industry between 1793, when he published

his first tract, and 1836, a period during which London “increased in extent, population,

commerce, wealth and power beyond general conception.”30 It is clear from his writing

that, in Vaughan’s mind, this expansion was due in large part to the growth of the

shipping industry, which he attributed at least in part to the development of the London

Docks. According to Vaughan’s estimates, in 1793 the Port of London received 9,973

vessels with a total tonnage of 1,196,760.31 By 1836, the Port of London, improved

through years of parliamentary action promoted by Vaughan and his contemporaries,

received 20,471 vessels for a total tonnage of 2,764,982—more than double the vessels

and cargo received just before the turn of the century.32

Vaughan’s success as director of a large insurance company and promoter of the

English shipping industry through the development of the London Docks was, in part, a

result of the liberal education he received at the Warrington Academy under the tutelage

of men like Priestley and Aiken. The training he received in commerce and economics

was essential to his success as an entrepreneur and business executive. Additionally,

Priestley’s courses in the Laws of England and English History provided the background

Vaughan needed in legislative affairs and parliamentary procedure, necessary tools in an

effort to pass and fund legislation. Finally, Vaughan’s exposure to languages and

rhetoric, through tutors like Aiken, gave him the public speaking skills he needed to sell his ideas both in the board room and to the parliamentary committees necessary to turn those ideas into reality.

30 Ibid., 45. 31 Ibid., 47. 32 Ibid. 51 The pieces included in Vaughan’s Miscellaneous Tracts demonstrate the importance of economics and business in Vaughan’s life and in the life of the London merchant class, and the impact of that class on England’s industrial development. But his success in business, which eighteenth-century Englishmen defined as the “liberal” portion of his education, did not overshadow his interest in subjects more closely associated with the “classical” portions of his education, such as history, philosophy, languages, and literature. In a tract entitled Commerce and England, Vaughan described

English commerce as it had developed between 1763 and 1831, including statistics on population and agricultural production, along with commentary on England’s access to natural resources. A substantial portion of his narrative on English commercial success, however, was dedicated to the virtue of the English people, “much attached to their country … great lovers of justice and good faith, and … liberal in promoting works of public utility.33 According to Vaughan:

Literature and the arts and sciences are also much encouraged in this country, and may be happily exemplified by the British Museum, whose collections of Egyptian, Grecian, and Roman sculpture remain unrivaled. Its library is extensive, and has lately been enriched by the valuable collection of George the Third, which was presented to the nation by George the Fourth.34

To Vaughan’s satisfaction, Parliament had “recently voted liberal sums for enlarging the building of the Museum,” and as the Museum’s annual exhibitions continued to expand, he encouraged England, which remained dependent on foreign schools of art, to “form a school of her own, founded upon the laws of Nature, which are simple, grand, and beautiful.”35

33 Ibid., 55-56. 34 Ibid., 56. 35 Ibid., 57. 52 Although Vaughan’s Miscellaneous Tracts were devoted substantially to his business and professional interests, excerpts like these provide clues to the well-rounded life of an English Commonwealthman during the early Industrial Age. Contrastingly, although Vaughan’s memoir includes a short reference to his work on the London Docks, his narrative is void of any references to his role in the financial success of the REA.

There is no discussion of the business processes or accounting methods used to underwrite large insurance policies for the overseas shipping trade, or the resource speculation being conducted by the businesses that his corporation insured. Rather,

Vaughan’s description of his career with the REA is detailed in the relationships he developed with those in the shipping industry and the Merchant Marine, and in the stories they told and the histories they created through their adventures overseas.

Chief among these was Captain David Woodward, with whom Vaughan became acquainted in 1796, and from whom he received “an account of his hardships and sufferings in the Celebes Seas, and of his residence in the island of that name.”36

Woodward was a mate on the American ship Enterprise, commanded by Captain

Hubbard, which was delayed by strong headwinds between Batavia and Manilla in the

Straits of Macassar. Short of provisions, Woodward and four men were sent ashore for supplies and, after enduring extreme hardship for nearly twelve days, they surrendered themselves to the natives on the island of Celebes. Abandoned, they were forced to live among the locals for two or three years before seizing a boat and escaping to Batavia and then to Calcutta, where Woodward was reunited with Captain Hubbard, by then commander of the ship America. The America arrived in London in 1796, consigned to

36 Ibid., 9. 53 the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation, where Vaughan acquired and edited a

narrative of Woodward’s experience, which was eventually published in 1804.37

Vaughan dedicated his publication to Benjamin Hallowell, a Captain in the Royal

Navy, out of respect for “the great union between the commerce and the navy of this

country,” and in recognition of the “knowledge and information from the friendly

intercourse” that had existed between the two men for years.38 Captain Woodward’s

narrative was published as a single text along with “a list of fifty-two well-authenticated cases of accidents, shipwrecks, and interesting escapes by sea and land, calculated to teach that none should even under the most unfavourable circumstances despair.”39

Vaughan hoped to encourage bravery through the tales of the harrowing adventures of

those who had survived the worst conditions around the world. His ability to parlay his

work as the director of a large insurance corporation into meaningful relationships with

naval captains, whose stories led to published books, was a reflection of the liberal

education he received at the Warrington Academy. For Vaughan, professional success

was not the end he sought, but a means to a life well-lived, and his combined roles as

businessman, supporter of the arts, and writer reflected the teaching of men like Priestley

and Aiken, whom he learned to emulate during his years at Warrington.

From the last years of the eighteenth century through the first decade of the

nineteenth, Vaughan played a significant role in the expansion of insurance, specifically

marine insurance, and in the development of English shipping through extensive

improvements to the London’s ports. He also made contributions to England’s navy and

37 Ibid., 9-11. 38 William Vaughan, The Narrative of Captain David Woodard and Four Seaman (London: J. Johnson, 1804), xi-xii. 39 Vaughan, Memoir, 11. 54 Merchant Marine through his publication of harrowing tales from life on the sea. While historians have debated the broad principles of eighteenth-century English Dissenters in

terms of radical ideals, cultural and religious beliefs, and revolutionary zeal, Vaughan

showed an unwillingness to be defined by ideological categories combined with an ability

to develop practical solutions to complex problems, even in the face of political and

social turmoil. Through Vaughan, we see the adherence to classical beliefs of public

virtue espoused by “advocates of republicanism,” along with the pragmatic interest group

politics and competitive materialism of those labeled by historians as “adherents of

liberalism.”40

40 Shalhope, review of Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism, 468-473. 55 CHAPTER 3. THE VOLUNTARY SOCIETIES

Nowhere was Vaughan’s contribution to the greater community more evident than

in his participation in England’s burgeoning voluntary societies. Vaughan’s education,

especially under Priestley, encouraged him to take an active role within the community, not just as a business leader, but as a leader in civic organizations that addressed issues of poverty, crime, and the general betterment of the social conditions of the working class.

By addressing these problems through his work with the voluntary societies, Vaughan acted on the principles of Priestley’s liberal education, and these actions represented a culmination of the new values of the emerging transatlantic middle class.

During his life as a London merchant, Vaughan witnessed the exceptional growth of urban populations associated with industrialization, which also encouraged the growth and success of the voluntary societies.1 These societies were organized for a variety of

purposes, including education, philosophy, labor, and relief from poverty and disease.

Their membership was drawn primarily from the middle class and dominated by the elite members of that class—in other words, by men like Vaughan.2 According to Peter Clark,

“precise numbers are hard to calculate, but during the eighteenth century there may have been up to 25,000 different clubs and societies meeting in the English speaking world.”3

Although London was the center of development for these societies, their growth was

also expansive in North America, where some voluntary societies were so important that

1 R. J. Morris, “Voluntary Societies and British Urban Elites,” 95-118. 2 Ibid., 96. 3 Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2. 56 towns and communities were named after them.4 Vaughan actively participated in many

of these societies on both sides of the Atlantic, and his contributions had a profound

impact on the services they provided, both to the laboring and educated classes.

According to his Memoir, Vaughan was a member of no less than ten voluntary

societies, including the Royal Society, the American Philosophical Society, the Society

for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, the Society for the Refuge for the Destitute, the

New England Corporation for Civilizing the Indians in New England, the Society of

Friends for Relief of Foreigners in Distress, the Marine Society, the Merchant Seamen’s

Office, the Committee for the Relief of British Prisoners in France, and the Historical

Societies in New York. Although, as an educated man, Vaughan rose to prominence in

societies such as the Royal Society and the American Philosophical Society, the diversity

of his voluntary memberships represented a dedication to practical problem solving

within his community, not simply a life of philosophical enlightenment and ideology.

Vaughan’s first mention of his participation in the voluntary societies in his

Memoir, however, was related to his professional life as a director of insurance for the

shipping industry and went hand-in-hand with his publication of the perils of Captain

Woodward. According to Vaughan, “an attempt was made to form a society for the

purpose of preserving life, and aiding those who might be exposed to shipwrecks or other

hardships, by collecting the narratives of those who had survived such trials, that others

might profit by their experience.”5 Although this attempt failed, Vaughan “felt it [his] duty, at various periods during the long war, to attend with others the different

4 Vaughan, Memoir, 3-4. 5 Ibid., 12. 57 committees for public subscriptions.”6 In other words, Vaughan hoped to contribute to the betterment of society by devoting his time to causes that assisted the laborers in the marine shipping industry, the industry that his company was responsible for insuring.

The first of these committees was founded in response to the “loss of the Royal

George with Admiral Kempenfelt at Portsmouth, on the 3d August, 1782.”7 The Royal

George was a 100-gun ship that, although present at the Battle of Quiberon Bay and the

Battle of Cape St. Vincent, suffered a rather un-heroic demise while laying off Spithead

Anchorage near Portsmouth.8 While performing work on a new cistern pipe, carpenters

requested that the ship be heeled in order to bore a hole in the side of the ship.

Unfortunately, rotten beams and timbers in the ship’s hull failed to withstand the

operation and gave way, sinking the ship in a matter of minutes. According to the Royal

Naval Museum, between 900 and 1,200 sailors lost their lives, including Admiral

Kempenfelt, a distinguished naval innovator. Vaughan’s committee was meant to raise

funds to aid those sailors and their families.

Not all of Vaughan’s philanthropic work in the shipping industry was centered on

tragedies like the loss of the Royal George; some of it addressed systemic problems

within the naval ranks. As described in his Memoir, by 1797 there was a mutinous attitude in the British Navy that Vaughan and his contemporaries were determined to quiet:

The year 1797 was a year of much anxiety, from a state of insubordination instigated by evil-minded persons in the British Navy; and also by the mutiny at the Nore, which excited so much attention, that the merchants,

6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 “An Account of the Lost of the ‘Royal George’ at Spithead, August, 1782,” Royal Museum Greenwich, http://www.rmg.co.uk/researchers/collections/by-type/archive-and-library/item-of-the- month/previous/an-account-of-the-loss-of-the-royal-george-1782 (accessed August 21, 2015). 58 bankers, and traders of London were publicly convened to meet on the Royal Exchange, in order to take prompt measures to restore tranquility.9

According to Vaughan, that meeting resulted in a recommendation that all those involved in the mutiny should never again be employed in England’s naval and merchant service, and “an active committee was appointed, and a large subscription raised to take such measures as might be deemed expedient upon such occasion.”10 In order to promote the views of the committee, Vaughan “drew up a little address to the British seamen” that was approved and circulated by the Secretary of the Navy and “went to prove how much the British seamen were better off than the seamen of other countries.”11 Vaughan’s address, signed “The Seaman’s Friend,” set forth three areas in which the life of the

British seaman exceeded all others in comfort and support:

1st. To look to the navy and the merchant’s service of other countries, and see where seamen have been so well paid, so well fed, or so well treated as in this country. 2d. Where they will meet with so many hospitals, public and private, charitable funds and institutions for themselves and families in case of old age, accident, or death. 3d. Whether there are not thousands of foreign seamen who enter voluntarily into the British service in peace and in war, in preference to the pay and the service of the countries to which they belong.12

Vaughan maintained that British seamen should “rouse themselves to a true sense of their situation and duty, and be sensible that they cannot better serve their country than to protect it in time of war; and at the termination of it, that they cannot better promote its interest as well as their own than by the exertions of peaceful industry.”13 Vaughan encouraged these men to consider their fate should they engage in mutiny while in the

9 Vaughan, Memoir, 12-13. 10 Ibid., 13. 11 Ibid. 12 Vaughan, Memoir, 99. 13 Ibid. 59 Navy, because after their service was over, mutinous actions would preclude them from

service in the private industry of merchants and ship-owners. Commerce, Vaughan insisted, was “a perpetual nursery for seamen,” providing them with continued access to jobs and financial stability after their naval service was over.14

Vaughan’s participation in the government’s attempt to quell the mutinies of 1797

is a unique microcosm through which to view the larger political and social issues of the

day. The mutinies began in February 1797 aboard the ships laying off Spithead

Anchorage, an important naval port in southern England, and eventually spread to the

ships at the Nore, mentioned in Vaughan’s Memoir, and finally to Duncan’s Squadron at

Yarmouth.15 These mutinies were grand in scale, organized in their execution, and their

effectiveness was magnified by the fact that French ships were assembling across the

English Channel. Thus, the threat of foreign invasion loomed large as a majority of the

sailors aboard the English fleet refused to leave their home ports until their demands for

better pay and working conditions were met.

Modern historians have debated the cause of the naval mutinies of 1797,

beginning with Conrad Gill in 1913 who argued that: “the idea of mutiny was introduced

into the fleet by men of a seditious character, who worked deliberately to spread the

disaffection among their fellow seamen.”16 For Gill and others, the fervor that the French

Revolution generated among the English working class was the impetus behind the

sailors’ brazen standoff with their commanding officers. Some historians, however, like

P.A. Brown and Ann Veronica Coats, have disputed this conclusion. According to Coats,

14 Ibid. 15 P.A. Brown, The French Revolution in English History (Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1918), 155. 16 Conrad Gill, Naval Mutinies of 1797 (Manchester: University Press, 1913): 313, quoted in Veronica Ann Coats, “The 1797 Mutinies in the Channel Fleet,” in The Naval Mutinies of 1797: Unity and Perseverance, ed. Veronica Ann Coats and Philip MacDougall (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), 124. 60 writing in 2011, “the seamen of the Channel Fleet were not inspired by foreigners and

were not revolutionary in their aims.”17 Rather, Coats argued, they were only

“revolutionary in their methods, in the eighteenth-century sense of returning to previous

working procedures, but remained loyal to their country … they were not conspiring to

overthrow the state, but to reclaim a traditional role on their ships.”18

Regardless of the cause, the mutinies of 1797 must be viewed in the context of the

revolutionary environment in which they occurred. Vaughan’s role in the attempt to

subdue the mutinies, however, reveals a contrast between the ideologies typically

assigned to English nonconformists in the late eighteenth-century, and the thoughts and

practices of the nonconformists themselves. Historians like Isaac Kramnick and Caroline

Robbins have emphasized the radicalism of the Dissenters, especially within the

Unitarian Church, who “represented the very quintessence of dissent, the right of anyone

to think as he pleased, to worship as he pleased, and to resist all attempts at definition and

subscriptions, both by church and by state.”19 In other words, these Dissenters were

ideologically aligned with the radical leaders of the French Revolution. In the case of the

mutinies of 1797, however, Vaughan fell squarely outside this description. Vaughan

knew that many sailors in the British Navy were former merchant sailors forced into service by governmental conscription, which according to Robbins, the Unitarian dissenters vehemently opposed.20 Vaughan also understood the importance of the

principles of the French Revolution to the English Dissenters, especially those set forth in

The Rights of Man, which declared equal citizenship and opportunity for all positions,

17 Veronica Ann Coats, “The 1797 Mutinies in the Channel Fleet,” 141. 18 Ibid. 19 Robbins, Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman, 230. 20 Ibid. 61 while the Dissenters in England continued to be excluded from the halls of government.21

Yet, when it came to the mutinies of 1797, he sued for peace and for the return of the

sailors, conscripted and otherwise, to their stations among the naval fleet. This contrast

demonstrates how Clark’s “middle ground,” was not limited to the aristocracy, and how

Vaughan was also part of that “social form which presented itself as both constitutional and royalist, libertarian and stable, tolerant and expressing religious orthodoxy,

innovative and respectful of what was customary.”22

Vaughan’s participation in the committee for the loss of the Royal George and the

committee established for the suppression of mutiny were directly linked to his own

financial success in the shipping industry as a marine insurer. Yet his actions and

writings on these matters reflect a life balanced by interests in both personal and

professional success, the need to serve one’s own country and community, and a

resistance to any ideology that impeded the ability to reach practical solutions to real

problems. While it may be argued that his actions in this context fail to reflect any virtue

beyond individual professional success, Vaughan’s writings on the role of the Navy and

of naval men in English society did reflect empathy and understanding for those less

fortunate than he. Additionally, Vaughan’s association with the voluntary societies went

beyond shipping, and included participation on committees dedicated to the financial

welfare of the families of sailors wounded or lost in battle.

Vaughan’s philanthropic work also included societies dedicated to assisting the

less fortunate that were entirely unrelated to shipping, the Merchant Marine, or the

British Navy. The first of these voluntary associations was the Society for Bettering the

21 Brown, The French Revolution in English History, 29. 22 Clark, English Society, 17. 62 Condition of the Poor, founded in 1796 by Sir Thomas Bernard, an English social

reformer whose father had served as Governor of the Province of New Jersey and the

Massachusetts Bay Colony. Bernard was educated at Harvard but his studies were cut

short by the first disturbances of the American Revolution, during which Bernard served

as a private secretary for his father.23 When his service to the crown failed to lead to a

public appointment in England, however, Bernard became “determined to pursue a more

independent line of life,” and was admitted to the practice of law in 1780.24 After fifteen

years of practice, Bernard withdrew from the legal profession and began his philanthropic

work on behalf of the laboring class. According to Bernard:

The question of whether the rich support the poor, or the poor the rich, has been frequently agitated by those who are not aware, that while each does his duty in his station, each is reciprocally a support and a blessing to the other. All are parts of one harmonious whole; every part contributing to the general mass of happiness, if man would but endeavor to repay his debt of gratitude to his Creator: and by a willing habit of usefulness, to promote the happiness of himself and of his fellow-creatures. In this way the higher classes of society may, by superiority of power and education, do more service to the other parts of the community than what they receive; the welfare of the poor being then, in truth, more promoted by the gradations of wealth and rank, than it ever could be by a perfect equality of condition; even if that equality had not been in its nature chimerical and impracticable; or (if practicable) had not been hostile and fatal to the industry and energy of mankind.25

Bernard believed that “rank, power, wealth, [and] influence constitute no exemption from activity or attention to duty; but lay a weight of real accumulated responsibility on the possessor.”26 He took this responsibility seriously and, in 1796, his efforts at social improvement led to the founding of the Society for Bettering the Condition and

Increasing the Comforts of the Poor. The society’s purpose was to add “much to the

23 James Baker, The Life of Sir Thomas Bernard (London: J. Murray, 1819), 2. 24 Ibid., 4-5. 25 Ibid., 6-8. 26 Ibid., 8. 63 general mass of national happiness” by “promotion of the welfare of our fellow-

creatures.”27 Its objects, according to Bernard:

would be every thing that concerns the happiness of the poor, every thing by which their comforts can be increased. To remove the difficulties attending parochial relief, discouragement of industry and economy, by the present mode of distributing it; to correct the abuses of work-houses; and to assist the poor in placing out their children in the world.28

Bernard’s plan for the establishment of the Society was signed by a representative of the

Bishop of Durham, and by William Wilberforce, the parliamentary leader of the effort to

abolish the slave trade in the British empire.29 The establishment of the society was made

known to King George III, who declared himself a patron, and after unanimous resolution

by its first governing committee, the Society’s early proceedings were published in May

1796.30

The Society’s documented activities, proceedings and observations provide insight into the interests and direction of the organization and its members. Its publications included extracts detailing life in England for the lower classes, including accounts of a village shop at Mongewell, a spinning school at Okham, a jail and house of corrections at Dorchester, and an industrial school for girls. 31 These accounts also

offered reflections and proposals for supplying the poor with fuel, providing relief for

chimney sweepers, and the establishment of charities for “placing out” poor children as

apprentices.32 According to Bernard’s “Preliminary Address to the Public,” included in

the first volume of the Society’s published activities, “the interests of the poorer classes

27 Ibid., 16. 28 Society for Bettering the Poor, The Reports of the Society for Bettering and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor, Vol. I (London: Savage and Easingwood, 1805), 391. 29 Ibid., 392; Baker, The Life of Sir Thomas Bernard, 19. 30 Baker, The Life of Sir Thomas Bernard, 21-22. 31 Society for Bettering the Poor, Reports of the Society, iii-viii. 32 Ibid. 64 of society are so interwoven with those of every part of the community, that there is no

subject more deserving of general attention, nor any knowledge more entitled to the

exalted name of SCIENCE, than that in which their well being is concerned.”33 For

Bernard, “inquiry into all that concerns the poor, and the promotion of their happiness,” should be considered a science, exercised through practical investigation and systematic discovery of the nature and consequences of “those things which experiences hath ascertained to be beneficial to the poor.”34

Although Vaughan was a member of the General Committee by 1805, his largest

contribution to the Society, according to his Memoir, was his involvement in an 1815

resolution to establish a savings bank in London.35 A similar bank had already been

established in Tottenham “for the purpose of providing a safe and convenient place of

deposit for the savings of labourers, servants, and other poor persons.” 36 According to

one influential member of the committee, Mrs. Wakefield, writing in 1805, it was not

sufficient to introduce the poor to industry unless they could be taught the virtues of

frugality.37 Wakefield argued that “many instances indeed have occurred that for want of

a place of security for their money, the poor have lost their hard earned savings, by

lending it to some artful or distressed person, who has persuaded them, it will be safe in

his hands.”38 According to Vaughan, recognizing this need in the metropolis, “a meeting

was held in Westminster, at which a number of distinguished and respectable persons

attended for the purpose of forming the Bank which was afterwards opened at Leicester-

33 Ibid., 1. 34 Ibid., 2. 35 Vaughan, Memoir, 18. 36 Society for Bettering the Poor, The Reports of the Society for Bettering and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor, Vol. IV (London: W. Bulmer and Co., 1805), 206. 37 Ibid., 208. 38 Ibid., 209 65 place.”39 At this meeting, Vaughan later recalled, “it was in contemplation to establish

one in the City of London; and subsequently it was settled, by a meeting of a few friends

at my house, that one should be established.”40 The bank was established at Bishopgate

Churchyard in July 1816, and in 1828, prior to its relocation to a new building at

Bloomfield Street, Moorefields, Vaughan laid the building’s first stone, receiving a silver trowel, inscribed as follows:

Respectfully Presented by Mr. James Foster, Builder, to WILLIAM VAUGHAN, ESQ. Governor of the ROYAL EXCHANGE ASSURANCE COMPANY, on his laying the First Stone of the LONDON PROVIDENT INSTITUTION, OR BANK FOR SAVINGS, In Blomfield-Street, Moorfields In the City of London he being one of the Vice Presidents, and Chairman of all Committees on the 20th day of September 1827 J.B. Shepherd, Esq. Architect.41

Just two years after the Provident Institution’s establishment, in 1818, a report

was published in London entitled Annals of Banks of Savings, which included accounts of

the rise and progress of the Savings Banks, essays on their national importance, rules for

their formation and management, and reports from more than sixty institutions in Great

39 Vaughan, Memoir, 18. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 66 Britain and Ireland.42 According to the comprehensive report, the London Provident

Institution was already a “flourishing Institution.” 43 It was among the first savings banks

to abandon the system of making its depositors stockholders, and “the beneficial effects

of this change [had] already shown themselves in the rapidly increasing prosperity, which

has ever since distinguished it.”44 The report included a statement of the Institution’s

accounts as of December 22, 1818, demonstrating the liquidity of the Institution and the

value it offered to more than 1,600 depositors. According to the report, the bank had

received 9,155 deposits from 1,661 persons, totaling £21,503 15 11, with total dividends

of £155 4 3, repayments of £4,727 71, and cash in hand of £155 12 2.45

These numbers demonstrate that just two years after its formation, the London

Provident Institution was liquid and its accounts were balanced, providing members of

the working class with a secure place to deposit their earnings, and even collect some

modest dividends on their savings. From all indications, Vaughan played a significant

role in this success, a shining example of the combination of business acumen and

humanitarianism that he learned fifty years earlier as a student of the Warrington

Academy.

Included in his Memoir is a paper originally written for private communication,

but eventually printed in March 1818 under the title “Of the Influence of Savings Banks on the Habits and Morals of Society.” In it, Vaughan argued that “since the introduction of the Poor Laws in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, there has been perhaps no plan which has held out so many advantages for bettering the condition of the poor, for increasing

42 Sir Francis Burdell, Annals of Banks for Savings (London: L. Hansard, 1818). 43 Ibid., 145 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 67 their comforts, and promoting their happiness and moral habits, as the system of the

Savings’ Banks.”46 Although the Poor Laws may have been adequate for the maintenance of the poor when they were first enacted at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Vaughan suggested, the “increase of industry, commerce, and wealth,” had been accompanied by a rise in pauperism, which showed “that there must have been something radically wrong and defective in the system of the poor laws,” requiring “new and powerful aids to correct those evils which have so alarmingly preyed on the morals and habits of society.”47 For Vaughan, Savings’ Banks were one of those aids, and in his explanation for the reasons why, the complete development of a mind steeped in eighteenth-century liberal education is evident:

It has been stated that the creative powers of industry are to property, what education is to the mind; and Savings’ Banks, by bringing industry and frugality into union and action, will put it in the power of every man to better his condition in life by his own exertions. In these institutions he will find a never-failing spur to his industry; a security to property, and a check to many of the evils arising from losses, plunder, and imprudence; and after providing for the common incidents of life, a friendly fund and resource at hand against the day of want, sickness, and old age.48

According to Vaughan, the great benefit of these institutions to the poor was reflected in the fact that, at the time of his writing, there were “but a few single deposits in the

London Institutions exceeding £50 at a time,” and most deposits had been under £5. For

Vaughan, every man “that saves ten or £100 a year out of his income, gains the first perch to independence, and a further removal of himself and his family from a state of dependence and degradation.”49 Moreover, just as “Friendly Societies are found beneficial in making a decent provision for sickness or for a man’s family after his

46 Vaughan, Memoir, 105. 47 Ibid., 106. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 107. 68 decease,” through Savings’ Banks, “a man by his prudence creates a fund at all times for the common exigencies of life, and a more decent provision for his family.”50

Vaughan served as a Committee member and later Vice-President of the London

Provident Institution from its inception in 1816 through February 1836, when he resigned

“in consequence of increasing age and infirmities.”51 According to Vaughan’s calculations, between 1816 and 1837, the Institution received deposits totaling

£2,609,640, and disbursed £2,053,853 in payments, including interest, to depositors, leaving a total of £555,786 held at the Institution on behalf of 25,010 depositors.52

During its meeting on February 26, 1836, the London Provident Institution announced

Vaughan’s resignation as Vice-President and thanked him for the

Eminent services rendered to the Institution through his indefatigable zeal, assiduity, and ability; they cannot forget, what must ever remain strongly impressed upon their minds, that he was the author of the Institution, over the government of which he has continued to extend his paternal and fostering care.53

The Institution’s best wishes for Vaughan included the “earnest hope that the reflection of his having by his philanthropic exertions largely contributed to promote the temporal welfare and moral condition of a numerous class of his fellow-subjects, may be to him a lasting source of enjoyment.”54

Vaughan’s domestic philanthropy also included memberships in the Society of

Friends for the Relief of Foreigners in Distress, from which he resigned as Treasurer in

1829 after twenty-one years of service, and the Committee of the Society for the Refuge for the Destitute, founded in 1806

50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 19. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 111. 54 Ibid. 69 to provide a place of refuge for persons discharged from prisons, or the hulks, unfortunate and deserted females, and others, who from the loss of character, or extreme indigence, cannot procure an honest maintenance, though willing to work; also, in cases of very urgent necessity, to afford temporary relief to distressed persons, until parochial or other assistance can be obtained, and thereby to put an end to the plea of necessity urged by many of the idle, disorderly and profligate characters that infest our streets:–it being understood, that persons discharged from penal confinement are ever to be considered the primary objects of this Institution.55

The Society paid particularly close attention to the improvement of the morals of men

and women who had been released from prison, and while the males were “employed in

working in the garden, pen cutting, coarse netting, and wool cutting,” the females were

busied “in washing, knitting, and in needle and household work.”56 At the end of their

stay with the Institution, after having

acquired a due sense of religion, and such habits of industry as may render them useful members of society, reconciliation to their friends or relations … is attempted; proper situations are sought for them, and recommendations given to the clergy and principal inhabitants of the places, where such situations are found, and rewards are bestowed on those who are observed to persevere in good conduct.57

As a member of the Committee tasked with overseeing the Institution’s operation,

Vaughan would have attended a meeting at the refuge every Saturday at one o’clock in

order to oversee its operations.58 By the time of publication of its annual report in 1815,

Vaughan was included on the List of Subscribers as a “Governor for Life,” with total

personal donations of £33.59 The previous year the Society had admitted seventy-seven individuals for rehabilitation, “the greater number of whom were received at the instance

55 The Refuge for the Destitute, Short Account of the Refuge for the Destitute Middlesex House, Hackney Road, Shoreditch, Containing the Nature and Views of the Institution, with Its Rules and Regulations, and List of Subscribers to April 1, 1815 (London: W. Phillips, 1815), 5. 56 Ibid., 5-6. 57 Ibid., 6. 58 Ibid., 7. 59 Ibid., 28. 70 of the Judges and Magistrates.” 60 Already fifty-four of them had been “discharged to their friends or to service.”61 According to the Report, “several of those, discharged from

the commencement and during the progress of the Institution, still continue to persevere

in an honest and industrious course of life.”62 Here again was evidence of Vaughan’s

ability to put the practical training he received in his liberal education to work serving the

greater interests of the community.

Vaughan’s participation in the voluntary societies, however, was not restricted to

England, or even to Europe. According to Vaughan, “from connexions and friends in

America, [he] became acquainted with many of the distinguished and literary characters of that country, and from their kindness [he was] made an honorary member of the

American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia, and of the Philosophical and Historical

Societies at New York.”63 Vaughan also served in the New England Corporation for

Civilizing the Indians, in which he succeeded Sir William Pepperell as Governor. The

Corporation was founded by an Act of Parliament on July 27, 1649, and continued its

work late into the nineteenth century.64 After the American Revolution, however, the

Company was “by a decree of the Lord Chancellor,” transferred to New Brunswick,

Canada,

but not meeting with the success they anticipated, they removed their establishment to Upper Canada, where it is principally confined to the Indians of the Six Nations upon the Grand River, consisting of the

60 Ibid., 9. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Vaughan, Memoir, 19. 64 Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the Parts Adjacent in America, Report of the Proceedings of the New England Company for the civilization and conversion of Indians, Blacks and Pagans in the Dominion of Canada, South Africa, and the West Indies during the two years 1871-1872 (London 1874), xiii. 71 Mohawks and other tribes, who had removed from New England and the parts adjacent.65

In addition to the Mohawks, the six nations of the Grand River included the Onondaga,

Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora nations, otherwise known as the Iroquois

Confederacy. Although the Tuscarora and the Oneida tribes primarily sided with the

American colonists during the Revolution, the Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca

tribes sided with the British. After the British ceded their interests in New York to the new United States, the Crown awarded land near the Grand River in Upper Canada to the entire Iroquois Confederacy, where much of the work of the New England Corporation continued for more than 100 years.

The work of the New England Corporation for Civilizing the Indians not only

served Indian tribes, but according to Vaughan:

A portion of the funds under the Company’s directions is applicable to the advancement of the Christian religion among Indians, Blacks and Pagans in some one or more of His Majesty’s plantations or colonies; and they have devoted a part of them, with some success, to the instruction of the negroes in Jamaica and other British islands in the West Indies.66

Included in his Memoir is a short tract entitled “Missionary Societies.” In it, Vaughan argued that “civilization and liberty had been for ages little understood, and may be compared to wild plants that require the hand of cultivation.67 England, argued Vaughan,

“was amongst the first countries that began to improve,” and in addition to Alfred’s

creation of trial by jury, “which secured rights and property, and formed one of the great

pillars” of England’s Constitution, “the introduction of Christianity also caused a great

65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 20-21 67 Ibid., 126. 72 revolution and improvement in our morals, customs and habits.”68 England was,

consequently, one of the few countries in the world that had taken “so deep an interest in

the printing, translating and circulating the Bible and the New Testament to all parts of

the globe.” 69 Through the efforts of organizations like the New England Corporation for the Civilization and Conversion of the Indians, the Bible had been translated and distributed extensively, “particularly in the East Indies and amongst the many clusters of

Islands in the South Seas, as well as in New Holland, Van Diemen’s Land, China,

America, Athens, Arabia, Africa, &c.”70 These societies spent in the neighborhood of

£500,000 annually on their efforts to spread the message of Christianity around the

world, but most important to their preparation for these efforts, argued Vaughan, was “the

best education, with a knowledge of the language, manners and customs of the countries

they visit … the aid of artizans, and a knowledge of medicine.”71

Vaughan’s participation in the New England Corporation for the Civilization of

the Indians and his comments on the role of the English missionary in global affairs

provide a striking metaphor for the analysis of his life through the lens of his eighteenth-

century liberal education. Like his roles in the creation of the London Provident

Institution and the Society for the Refuge for the Destitute, Vaughan’s perspective on the

role of the missionary took a practical approach to the improvement of lives less

fortunate. Yet, contrary to a modern liberal perspective that may emphasize the clearly

progressive elements of Vaughan’s life as an eighteenth-century Commonwealthman, the

importance of religion in his life cannot be underestimated.

68 Ibid. 69 Ibid, 127. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 73 In his 1960 work entitled English Religious Dissent, Erik Routley argued that at

the turn of the nineteenth century, the “Evangelical Revival [had] added a touch of

romance to life, and the new note of ‘conquering new lands for Christ in church life

[matched] the commercial enterprise for which the century has already made itself famous.”72 Vaughan was an example of this new romantic vision. He was a successful

businessman who undoubtedly felt it his duty, and England’s duty, to spread the virtues

of Christianity around the world to the outer reaches of British influence, and he labored

at the center of the missionary societies from which “men of adventure and religious

integrity” went out “under the conviction that the Christian faith must be preached to all

the nations.”73 What Vaughan’s experience demonstrated, however, was a practical

approach to the spread of Christianity and moral virtue through the provision of basic

needs like housing, financial security, medical care, and, most importantly, education. In

Vaughan, it is possible to see the modest beginnings of the adventurous missionary spirit

evoked in the mid nineteenth century by more famous men, like David Livingstone, who

combined “a missionary zeal of the spirit with, on one hand, a highly practical concern

for the physical privations of backward races and, on the other, a dauntless and eager

compulsion to explore.”74

Although Vaughan’s Memoir excludes any mention of his role in the church, it is clear that his faith was a significant factor in his life, and likewise, he was sure to have been an influential member of the religious community. One potential explanation for his omission was the significant difference in social conditions for the Dissenters in England in 1838. While men like Priestley and Aiken had experienced categorical exclusion from

72 Erik Routley, English Religious Dissent (Cambridge: University Press, 1960), 162. 73 Ibid., 163. 74 Ibid., 164. 74 government service in the late eighteenth century, they had also laid the framework for a

significant expansion of political influence for later generations. By 1832, just six years

before Vaughan completed his Memoir, the Reform Act had passed, expanding the electorate from 366,000 to 650,000, and paving the way for significant parliamentary reform throughout the nineteenth-century.75 The Reform Act was passed on the heels of

the repeal, in 1828, of the Test and Corporation Acts, which opened parliament and

public office to those, like Vaughan, who were unaffiliated with the Church of England.76

As stated by Routley, “dissent was flourishing in those new cities which the Bill sought

to franchise, and it was Dissenters, brought up to revere liberty and to profess liberal

politics, who spoke loudest in defence of the reform.”77 The Enlightenment and the

French Revolution had fostered a new age of thought and egalitarian spirit across religious denominations. Even before the turn of the century, William’s brother

Benjamin had served as a Member of Parliament, and through the growth of nineteenth- century missionary societies, like those in which Vaughan participated, integration of

Anglicans and nonconformists had been encouraged for the cause of spreading the gospel around the globe.78 Consequently, Dissenters in the 1830s experienced acceptance in

ways completely unknown to their predecessors, forecasting the ecumenical movement

that would occur almost one hundred years later.79

This is not to say that grievances did not persist. Just a year after the Reform Bill

was enacted, in 1833, a unified committee of Dissenters listed no less than five major

75 British Library, “The 1832 Reform Act,” http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/21cc/struggle/ chartists1/historicalsources/source2/reformact.html (accessed June 11, 2015). 76 J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 527-33. 77 Routley, English Religious Dissent, 165. 78 Ibid., 162-63. 79 Ibid., 186. 75 grievances requiring parliamentary redress, including: (1) the state’s failure to register

baptismal births that occurred outside the parish churches; (2) the requirement that legal

marriages occur in parish churches; (3) the necessity that dissenters be buried in

graveyards owned by the Church of England; (4) the state’s taxation of Dissenters to

support a church to which they did not subscribe; and (5) the continued exclusion of

Dissenters from the Universities at Oxford and Cambridge.80 While there is no question

that Vaughan was subjected to religious discrimination as a result of these policies, by the

time he sat down in his study at 70 Fenchurch Street to write his Memoir, religious

identification was not as exclusionary as it once was. As a successful leader in

mainstream society, wielding significant influence in both the voluntary societies and in the halls of Parliament, a reminder of his status as an “outsider” was simply unnecessary.

This modest, practical approach, even to the story of his life in his own words, was typical of the values explicated throughout Vaughan’s significant, yet little known, life.

80 Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church: Part I (Oxford: University Press, 1966), 80-81. 76 CHAPTER 4. CONCLUSION

By the time he wrote the closing words to his Memoir, on September 22, 1838,

Vaughan, at 86 years old, was finally ready for retirement. He summed up his life’s observations as follows:

I have been placed in many situations where I have endeavoured to make myself useful, and been blessed with many friendships and attachments, and my wishes now induce me to decrease my occupations; and I have found, from experience, that contentment forms a large portion of the happiness of human life; which is confirmed by what Mrs. Barbauld says, (whom I became acquainted with early in life,) who shews that, by moderating our wishes we may lessen many of our imaginary wants and evils; and now I seek, during the remainder of my life, for ease and retirement, and I look forward with a humble hope that I may hereafter be transferred to a better and happier state.1

Vaughan lived during a time of great transition in the transatlantic world; a time of exploration, war, and revolution. Yet his experience reflects changes more subtle than those echoed in the dramatic episodes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His Memoir makes relatively little mention of the American, French, or

Haitian Revolutions, England’s abolition of slavery, or the rise of Napoleon on the

European continent. These omissions are especially significant in light of the context of his life. First, his brother Benjamin acted covertly on behalf of the Americans to negotiate the Treaty of Paris, and his involvement was so substantial that he drew the ire of King George III, who wrote to Lord Shelburne in August of 1782 that “by what I have seen from the correspondence of Mr. Vaughan I have but little opinion of his talents, yet

1 Vaughan, Memoir, 21-22. 77 it confirms my opinion that Dr. Franklin only plays with us.”2 Second, because his work

as the director of a large insurance company centered on the shipping industry, Vaughan

would have been sensitive to the revolutionary fervor ever-present in the transatlantic

world in which he lived, and he was an early participant in the Commercial Revolution

that would forever change the face of the globe. Finally, prior to Vaughan’s birth, his

father spent time in Jamaica working for an English sugar exporter, who would have

relied heavily on slave labor, especially in the Caribbean, and the Vaughan family’s

landholding interests in Jamaica, including the Flamstead and Crooked Springs Estates,

encompassed the possession of slaves well past the turn of the eighteenth century.3

What Vaughan’s life demonstrates, however, was that the revolutionary

movements that occurred during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were

the result of subtle and complex shifts in society that cannot be explained by expansive

theories or anachronistic political idealism. Vaughan sought a via media in politics

centered on a commitment to gradual improvements in the material and moral

circumstances of the British and their empire, and those objectives had relatively little to do with partisan political categories. He was educated in a traditionally religious school

by men like Joseph Priestley, who was trained in the classics yet would eventually become renowned as a scientist. Vaughan was a successful merchant who fell outside the traditionally aristocratic tradition, yet many of his professional accomplishments, including the improvement of the London Docks, depended on his ability to influence

Parliament, even while his brother worked with the Americans to forge peaceful relations

2 Francis Wharton, ed., The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States Volume I (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1889), 647. 3 A Statement of the Number of Negroes and their Valuation on Flamstead and Crooked Spring Estates in April 1802, Benjamin Vaughan Papers, American Philosophical Association, Philadelphia, PA. 78 with their adversaries. And, finally, he was an influential member of the missionary

field, yet his focus was less on spreading the gospel and more on improving the lives of

the less fortunate through the provision of sustenance, medical care, and education.

By examining the lives of men like Vaughan, we see that the most important

impact that many of the leaders of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had

was their personal influence, through the medium of education, on young men who were

being prepared for active civic lives. Vaughan’s life demonstrates the significance of the

new form of liberal education espoused by men like Joseph Priestley and John Aiken. By

placing an emphasis on the classics in areas including history, philosophy, language, and literature, within a larger academic curriculum that encompassed law, political science, economics, and science, the tutors at the Warrington Academy developed principled young men with a social flexibility sufficient for success in a political system that was hostile to their cultural status, and even their religion. Equipped with this solid educational foundation, these men went on to play an important role in the future of the

Atlantic world.

Although some of these men, like Benjamin Vaughan, engaged in the more

dramatic episodes of the revolutionary period, others, like William Vaughan, fostered

advances in more concrete and practical ways. While working professionally in the

marine insurance industry, Vaughan successfully sought to improve the English shipping

industry through practical improvements to the London docks, the very infrastructure that

fostered that industry. Additionally, by engaging his interest in sailors and life at sea,

Vaughan worked to improve the lives of those sailors and of their families, while

opposing the mutinous upheavals of the 1790s, which some historians argue were

79 fostered by men politically aligned with the English Dissenters and likeminded revolutionaries.

Finally, by taking personal responsibility for his own community, Vaughan became an extremely influential member of a broad range of voluntary societies; societies developed principally for the purposes of improving the lives of the lower classes. These societies worked not only to elevate the lower classes in England, but their influence spread across the Atlantic to the new United States, and even to the Six Nations of

Indians residing on the Grand River in Canada. While some of these societies were dedicated to the spread of religion, Vaughan seemed always to focus on the practical impact they could have on other cultures and societies through education that provided them with “knowledge of the language, manners and customs of the countries they visit.”4 Ironically, although Vaughan’s life was lived amidst the political upheaval of war, revolution, and separation, the principles he learned at the Warrington Academy, and which he embraced throughout his life, helped to foster that reunification of societies now referred to most commonly as globalization.

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