Collegia Ante Bellum Attitudes of College Professors and Students Toward the American Revolution
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Collegia Ante Bellum Attitudes of College Professors and Students Toward the American Revolution HE polemical pamphlets that crossed the Atlantic in the dozen years before the American Revolution included the Targuments of intellectuals on both sides. The colonial American spokesmen counted such thinkers as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Otis, Daniel Dulany, John Dickinson, Alexander Hamilton, James Wilson, and, soon after war began, Tom Paine. None of these men was, or became, a college professor, unless Wilson be counted one for delivering a course of law lectures at the College of Philadelphia in 1789-1790. Yet there were nine colleges operating in the American colonies before 1775. How did the academicians view the growing controversy and the coming of war? And how did their students react on campus ? The nine colleges were small, of course—even mini-colleges— ranging in enrollment from a score of students to two hundred. All but two were founded by churches.1 Three of them can be disposed of rather briefly because of their relative newness and their few faculty members. Rhode Island College, chartered in 1764 at the instigation of the Baptists, was located at first in Warren. It opened in 1765 with one student, but by the time of its first Commencement in 1769 seven seniors were at hand to graduate. At the ceremony, which drew an audience from across the colony, all the seniors and the president made a point of dressing in clothes of domestic manufacture to 1 The late Prof. Beverly McAnear wrote several articles on colonial colleges. See "The Selection of an Alma Mater by Pre-Revolutionary Students," in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, LXXII (1949), 429-440; "The Raising of Funds by the Colonial Colleges," in Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXXVIII (195a), 591-612; "College Found- 2 ing in the American Colonies 1745-75," ibid.y XLII (1955)5 4~44» More specialized articles by him appeared in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and in Delaware History. 5o 1971 COLLEGIA ANTE BELLUM 51 show their allegiance to the nonimportation agreements endorsed by the colonies after the Townshend Acts. Two of the seniors engaged in a debate over the wisdom of American independence. This was an extremely early date for the possibility of separation to be even mentioned in public. Yet young William Williams advocated independence, while James M. Varnum declared it would not be in the best interests of the colonies. Later, in a curious reversal of roles, Williams sat out the Revolution while preaching and teaching in Wrentham, Massachusetts, while Varnum joined the army and became a brigadier general.2 In 1770 the college was moved to Providence and eventually was renamed Brown University. Its faculty consisted of President James Manning, a 1762 graduate of the College of New Jersey, professor of languages, and twenty-six years old when he assumed the presi- dency; and Tutor David Howell, another New Jersey graduate, who soon became professor of mathematics and physics, and later on a judge. Both remained on duty until 1779, when the college was closed temporarily due to the war, and both were Patriots, or rebels. Manning was also pastor of the Baptist Church, first in Warren and then in Providence. He appeared before the Continental Congress in 1774 with a plea for religious liberty against the oppres- sion suffered by the Baptists in some states. Baptists resented hav- ing to pay taxes in Massachusetts to support the Congregational Church, and they were persecuted in Virginia and North Carolina by the Anglicans.3 Privately, Manning deplored the war as un- christian, although he thought the colonial cause was just.4 At the September Commencement in 1771, student Thomas Arnold took part in a dialogue affirming the necessity of perpetuating the union between Great Britain and her colonies. But in the afternoon he delivered the valedictory on civil law, arguing that to render a state prosperous and happy it must be governed by laws founded on mutual compact.5 Civil government and civil liberty were topics of Commencement orations in 1772 and 1773. 2 Reuben A. Guild, "The First Commencement of Rhode Island College," in Collections of the Rhode Island Historical Society, VII (1885), 265-298; sketches of Williams and Varnum in the Dictionary of American Biography, hereinafter cited as D.A.B. 3 John C. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution (Boston, 1943), 194. 4 Sketch in D.A.B. 5 Newport Mercury, Sept. 13, 1771, p. 3. 52 HOWARD H. PECKHAM January Addiction of the Baptist students to religious liberty spilled over into opposition to the Church of England or any effort toward encouraging a state-supported church. At Commencement in 1774 the valedictory by Barnabas Binney was on this theme, and it was subsequently published. In it were several expressions of approval of the political stance taken by the colonies against England.6 Samuel Ward gave an oration on patriotism, with observations on the present situation of the colonies which pleased the audience. This Commencement was ornamented by the appearance of a stu- dent company of cadets in uniform, organized apparently during the year. The company not only escorted the governor to the ceremony, but later gave an exhibition of maneuvers on the college green that "procured universal approbation and convinced the spectators that Americans are no less capable of military discipline than Europeans."7 Of the three Commencement orators named, Binney served as a surgeon in the Revolution, while Arnold and Ward became officers in the 1st Rhode Island Regiment. The ten seniors scheduled to graduate in June, 1775, petitioned the trustees and faculty to forego the usual festivities of a public Commencement. In view of the gravity of public affairs and the exhortation from the Continental Congress to frugality and sobriety, the class's wish was granted.8 Queen's College, chartered by the Dutch Reformed Church in 1766, did not open until 1771. Located in New Brunswick, New Jersey, it had no president and only one tutor, Frederick Freling- huysen, a 1770 graduate of the College of New Jersey, to carry the faculty burden. He was to instruct in "the learned Languages, Liberal Arts and Sciences." Despite the name of the college, it exhibited no royalist inclination. Frelinghuysen was soon assisted by a classmate, John Taylor. Since Frelinghuysen later became a militia colonel and fought at Trenton and other battles, there is no question where his sympathies lay. When he resigned from the college in 1773 to study law, Taylor carried on alone. The first Commencement was held in October, 1774, for one lone graduate from a student body of about twenty. 6 An Oration Delivered on the Late Public Commencement at Rhode Island College . (Boston, 1774). 7 Newport Mercury, Sept. 12, 1774, p. 3. 8 Reuben A. Guild, Early History of Brown University (Providence, 1897), 286. I97i COLLEGIA ANTE BELLUM 53 Late in July, 1776, the college suspended because several students were off to New York to fight against the British landing on Long Island. Taylor entered the army as a captain later in the year. Twice shut down by the war, Queen's did not obtain a president until 1784. Its name was changed to Rutgers College in 1825.9 Dartmouth College barely got started before the American Revo- lution. The Rev. Eleazar Wheelock, a Congregationalist who had been conducting a school for Indians in Connecticut, obtained a charter for a college and an endowment of 44,000 acres of land in New Hampshire in December, 1769, and opened it at Hanover the next year. He had decided that mixing whites and Indians would inspire the latter to industry. Wheelock taught divinity and em- ployed two tutors for twenty-four students—eighteen whites and six Indians. Among the four in the first graduating class, 1771, was his son John, who had spent three years at Yale before transferring. The next year only two degrees were conferred, but ninety students, red and white, were enrolled in 1773.10 Wheelock, an emotional preacher, was a Yale man himself, class of 1733. For financial reasons he may have regretted separation from England, because he had solicited money for his Indian school in Great Britain and named his college for one of the benefactors, the Secretary of State. Since he was dependent on pounds sterling he was suspected of being a Loyalist, a notion he refuted in a sermon published in 1775. Clearly, he approved of his son's election to the Provincial Assembly and his acceptance of a commission in the Continental Army, for he named John in his will as his successor at Dartmouth. Another son also held a military commission, and both tutors were active rebels. Upon Eleazar Wheelock's death in 1779, the trustees made John the second president. Only a few students turned out for militia calls as most of them were studying to be missionaries.11 The other six colleges were both older and larger, and represented dissident attitudes. Located on the edge of the Boston cauldron that was the first to boil, Harvard took on the heat and color of its 9 Richard P. McCormick, Rutgers, a Bicentennial History (New Brunswick, 1966), 1-18, 40. 10 Frederick Chase, A History oj Dartmouth College (Cambridge, 1891), I, 121, 146, 231, 252, 320; Jeremy Belknap, The History of New Hampshire (Worcester, 1791), II, 350-354. 11 Chase, 324-421 passim. 54 HOWARD H. PECKHAM January environment. In the fall of 1767 the seniors voted to refrain from drinking tea and not to wear clothes of foreign fabric at their Commencement. Their theses were even printed on paper made in New England.