Collegia Ante Bellum Attitudes of College Professors and Students Toward the

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 , Thomas Jefferson, James Otis, Daniel Dulany, John Dickinson, , 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. 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, , while Varnum joined the army and became a brigadier general.2 In 1770 the college was moved to Providence and eventually was renamed . Its faculty consisted of President , 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 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 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 (, 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 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 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. President permitted this student gesture although he seemed to be politically neutral and devoted himself strictly to his college duties. The arrival of two British regiments in Boston in September, 1768, did not dissuade those graduating in 1769 and 1770 from wearing homespun. At the 1769 Commencement, two of them debated a presumably current topic: "Whether Public Liberty can subsist without the Freedom of the Press."12 On the death of Holyoke in 1769, the Corporation offered the presidency to two men, both of whom refused it. Governor Thomas Hutchinson, class of 1727, said the trustees could not find a qualified man with the political principles the Corporation wanted. In his History of (^Massachusetts cBay> he noted that Harvard was already in the rebel camp by this time. At length, in the spring of 1770, about the time of the Boston "massacre," the Rev. Samuel Locke, '55, was installed as president. If his politics were acceptable, his morals ultimately were not. He resigned abruptly in December, 1773, after it was discovered that he had seduced his maidservant.13 In October, 1774, the Rev. , '40, assumed the office. As president he was a failure, but he was a strong Patriot. A classmate of Sam Adams, he had served as chaplain to a New Hampshire regiment in the capture of Louisbourg in 1745 and sub- sequently as a pastor at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. At Harvard he endured an unhappy time with the students and with the General Court until his resignation in August, 1780.14 If the presidents of Harvard were favorable to Massachusetts' pretensions, the college's most distinguished professor was cool to the Patriot cause. Edward Wigglesworth, '49, became professor of theology in 1765 and continued in that position until 1791. Of a conservative temperament, he was not sympathetic with the radical position taken by the students. He called the war an "unnatural contest," but by tending to his teaching duties and helping to

12 Boston Weekly News-Letter, July 20, 1769, p. 1. 13 Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936 (Cambridge, 1936), 100 l33> *35\ C. K. Shipton, Sibley's Harvard Graduates (Boston, 1965), XIII, 620-627. 14 Morison, 100; Shipton, X, 508-528. I97i COLLEGIA ANTE BELLUM 55 manage the college funds, he avoided trouble from any hotheads. In the interval after Langdon's resignation he even served as acting president.15 Stephen Sewall, '61, became instructor in Hebrew in 1764, and later held the Hancock Professorship of Hebrew and Oriental Languages for twenty years. He married Professor Wigglesworth's daughter and supported the Revolutionary movement, being elected to the Massachusetts General Court in 1777.16 , '32, professor of astronomy and mathematics from 1738 to 1779, was elected to the Provincial Congress in 1774 and spoke glibly as a supporter of defiance and rebellion.17 The students' most frequent contacts, of course, were with a succession of tutors, numbering nineteen between 1765 and 1775. Only two of them became Loyal- ists: John Wadsworth, who nevertheless stayed on until 1777; and Isaac Smith, who left in 1775.18 After British troops came to Boston, the students formed a volunteer military company. In 1771 it contained sixty-one mem- bers. In June of that year the seniors took the printing of their Commencement theses away from the Tory 'Boston J^ews-J^etter and gave the work to the Whig (Massachusetts Spy.19 Insignificant as it appears today, this move created a sensation. Some indication of student attitudes may also be gained from the §luaestionesy or topics, on which candidates for the master's degree spoke or were prepared to speak at Commencement, depend- ing on the program's length. Most of the orations were on philosophy, theology, science, and law, but a few dealt with political and social problems and had current application. Thus, in 1765, Elbridge Gerry, a future Signer of the Declaration of Independence and Vice- President, gave an affirmative answer to the relevant proposition: "Whether the new prohibitory duties, which make it useless for the people to engage in commerce, can be evaded by them as faithful subjects?" The next year Tarrant Putnam said no to the question: "Is it legal, under the British government, to collect taxes by military force?" In 1769 William Pepperrell argued that a "just

15 Shipton, XII, 507-517. 16 Sketch in D.J.B. 17 Shipton, IX, 24-64. !8 Letter from C. K. Shipton, Harvard Archivist, to the author, Feb. 21, 1968. 19 Morison, 141, 144. 56 HOWARD H. PECKHAM January government" is "the only stable foundation of public peace." John Hunt went a step farther, declaring that "the people" are "the sole judges of their rights and liberties." Two Harvard candidates in 1770 spoke on both sides of the same coin. "Is a government tyrannical in which the rulers consult their own interests more than that of their subjects?" was given an affirmative answer by Thomas Barnard (who became a Loyalist and later a baronet in England), while (later governor of Massachusetts) also affirmed that "a government" is "despotic in which the people have no check on the legislative power."20 To escape mob interruption the General Court moved out of Boston in 1770 and convened at Cambridge for the next three years. The Corporation was not pleased by this invasion, but the students enjoyed the sessions. They heard James Otis address the House after the Boston "massacre." Perhaps as a result of watching pro- ceedings, the students formed two speaking or debating societies in 1770, and liberty was furiously declaimed.21 Yet the topics on which master's candidates prepared themselves for the Commencements of 1771, 1772, and 1773 were a^ nonpolitical. In general it was a relatively quiet interlude. In 1774 Commencement festivities were cancelled because the port of Boston was closed as punishment for the Tea Party. Not another public Commencement was held until 1781. Apparently the students kept to their vow against tea drinking, for on March 1, 1775, nonconforming students bringing tea into the college nearly precipitated a riot. Seven weeks later, six students turned out with the Minute Men and hurried off to Lexington.22 A typical showdown with students occurred later that day when Lord Percy marched into Cambridge with reinforcements to rescue the earlier column which had met with musket fire. He asked which road led out to Lexington. No student or townsman would admit knowing. But Tutor Isaac Smith told him—and left for England that summer.23

20 Edward J. Young, "Subjects for Master's Degree in , 1655-1791, in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, XVIII (1880), 119-151; also letter from Harvard Archives to author, Sept. 18, 1969. 21 Morison, 136-139. 22 Ibid., 146-147. 23 Ibid., I47. 1971 COLLEGIA ANTE BELLUM 57 On May i, with Boston under siege and New England militia everywhere, Harvard dismissed its students early for vacation. The Provincial Congress wanted to use the buildings. Next, General Washington made Cambridge his headquarters, and 1,700 soldiers were quartered in the college and town. When Harvard reconvened in the fall, it met at Concord. Since the Provincial Congress tried to get students known to be unfriendly to the colony expelled, there must have been some Loyalists among them. Samuel Eliot Morison, historian of the university, checked the records and found 1,224 graduates living on January 1, 1776. Of them, 196, or sixteen per cent, became Loyalists.24 Harvard voted an honorary doctor of laws degree to Washington in the spring of 1776, but the commander in chief left for New York before it could be conferred in person.25 In June, three months after the British and Loyalists evacuated Boston, Harvard returned to Cambridge, and the state voted £450 to repair the buildings occupied by soldiers. The college enrolled about 130 students a year during the war, down from the prewar figure of 200.26 As New England developed its quarrel with Old England, Yale College was emerging from a low ebb in its fortunes—intellectual, political and financial. General Thomas Gage, commander in chief of His Majesty's forces in North America, was one of those who held a poor opinion of Yale in 1765. Gage referred to some of its graduates as "pretended patriots, educated in a seminary of democracy/'27 Under President , Yale had gone down hill. The Connecticut Assembly complained of its narrowness under a cor- poration composed exclusively of clergymen. Clap was a target of old deists and the new anticlericalism of the populace. Emphasizing a traditional Puritan outlook, he was passive to political events like the Stamp Act. By 1766 Clap had lost all his tutors and most of the students; only forty were left and they petitioned the corporation for his removal. Clap resigned as of September, 1766.28

Z^Ibid.y 14711. See p. 151 for repair to buildings. 25 "Diary of Samuel Cooper," in American Historical Review, VI (1901), 339. 26 Quinquennial Catalogue of , 1636-1925 (Cambridge, 1925). 2? F. B. Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College (New York, 1903), III, 170. 2« Louis L. Tucker, Puritan Protagonist, President Thomas Clap of Yale College (Chapel Hill, 1962), chapters 8-10. 58 HOWARD H. PECKHAM January The Rev. Naphtali Daggett, '48, who had become Yale's first professor of divinity, was named acting president in 1767. He was a much more agreeable person to the Assembly and to his academic colleagues and was considered an outstanding Patriot. Daggett had written a pseudonymous letter against the Stamp Act, motivated, however, not by patriotism but by a personal grudge against the Connecticut agent.29 In 1769 the senior class voted to appear at Commencement in homespun as part of the nonimportation policy against the Town- shend Acts. The Boston Tea Party and the consequent sealing of the harbor by Parliamentary act set in motion new disputations about rights and duties. Two candidates for the master's degree at Yale for their Commencement performance in September, 1774, delivered a dialogue on the rights of America and the unconstitu- tionality of Parliament's recent measures. Three months later, some of the classes voted to give up drinking tea, and in February, 1775, a student military company was formed. It drilled for Washington when he passed through New Haven on his way to Cambridge in June to take command. President Daggett resigned his acting administrative work in March, 1777, but continued his teaching of divinity. The corporation took some time finding a new president on whom the trustees could agree. They offered the job to the Rev. Ezra Stiles, '46, who had disapproved of the Stamp Act. The investigation of the Qaspee's sinking, the Boston Tea Party, and the closing of the port of Boston had made him more staunchly "a Friend to American Liberty."30 Favoring independence, he had moved from his church at Newport in 1776 after three-fourths of his congregation had fled in fear of the British. Stiles arrived in New Haven to take charge early in 1778, and also to teach ecclesiastical history, philosophy, and Hebrew. There were 132 students enrolled at that time. Stiles had been in office only little more than a year when war came to New Haven. On the night of July 4,1779, while the students were still celebrating the historic day, word was brought that a British fleet had been sighted. Stiles wanted the militia called out,

29 Connecticut Gazette', Aug. 9, 1765; Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis (Chapel Hill, 1953), 225, 232-233. 30 Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan (New Haven, 1962), 262-263. 1971 COLLEGIA ANTE BELLUM 59 but no one could believe that New Haven was the enemy's destina- tion. Next morning about 2,500 British troops were landed under the command of General William Tryon. Stiles fled while seventy students under senior George Welles marched off to meet the enemy. Apparently Stiles' sixteen-year-old son was with them, and so was old Professor Daggett. Students and militia together delayed the British awhile, and Daggett was captured and ill-treated. The redcoats reached the village green about one o'clock (guided, it is said, by Captain William Chandler, class of 1773) and plundered the town, burning shops and wharves until about eight in the evening. Although papers were stolen from the president's office, Yale's buildings were un- touched, possibly because one of the British provincial regiments was led by General Tryon's protege, Edmund Fanning, Yale master's of 1757. (He reminded Yale in 1802 of its debt to him and was granted an honorary doctor's degree!)31 The following day the British departed. Twenty-seven Americans were killed, nineteen were wounded, and a few were carried off as prisoners. The enemy lost ten dead and forty-nine wounded. Their original intention had been to draw Washington from the Hudson into Connecticut, but the bait was not taken. Yale struggled along during the rest of the war, hampered mainly by lack of provisions. Only fifty students could find board early in 1780. Late in the year Professor Daggett died, and the next year the corporation pushed Professor Nehemiah Strong, '55, into resign- ing. Appointed professor of mathematics and physics in 1770, Strong was probably a true neutral.32 So, at the end of the war President Stiles had no faculty beyond tutors. The college was back where it had been in 1766. The College of Philadelphia was a pediment supported on the four pillars of the Academy: a Latin School, English School, Math- ematical School, and Charity School. The provost of the college headed this nondenominational educational system devised by Benjamin Franklin and his friends. To this office the Rev. William Smith was named in 1755 when instruction at the college level

31 Dexter, II, 458-461. 32 Ibid., II, 384-385. 6o HOWARD H. PECKHAM January began. A graduate of the University of Aberdeen and a minister of the Anglican Church, he was only twenty-seven years old, but he had written a thoughtful essay on his concept of higher education.33 Moving to Philadelphia, Smith first aroused opposition by favoring the appointment of an American bishop for his church. Then he attacked the Quakers in the Pennsylvania Assembly for their pacifism during the French and Indian War. In the running battle of politics between those who favored the Penn family as nontaxed proprietors of the province and those who did not, Smith vigorously defended the Penns, thereby earning Franklin's enmity. It is clear that he was energetic and devoted to the college, laboring successfully to raise money for it and always carrying a full load of varied teaching. He introduced a pragmatic curriculum, vocationally oriented, at a time of classical supremacy. Although conservative and aristocratic to the point of snobbishness, as were many of his trustees, when the Stamp Act was passed he opposed it. In the spring of 1766 the college sponsored an essay contest on the reciprocal advantages of perpetual union between Great Britain and her colonies.34 At the Commencement exercises in June, 1770, four graduating seniors debated whether resistance to the supreme powers of government was in any case lawful, and three candidates for the master's degree engaged in a poetic dialogue which was printed in ^he Pennsylvania Qazette for June 14. After much classi- cal imagery and reference, one speaker rhapsodized: "Attend, ye Patriot Throng! ye noble Sons Of Freedom, who, to save your Country's Rights, With rigid Self-denial, sacrifice Your private Gain ...... your Names shall ever live/'

A feature of the 1773 Commencement suggests that the college was far from offensive to the authorities—the band of the Royal Irish or 18th Regiment, then in Philadelphia, played for the cere-

33 A General Idea of the College of Mirania (New York, 1753). 34 The contest was won by Dr. John Morgan. Edward P. Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740-1940 (Philadelphia, 1940), 53-120; Four Dissertations on The Reciprocal Advantages of a Perpetual Union (Philadelphia, 1766). i97i COLLEGIA ANTE BELLUM 6l monies.35 The college's Commencement on May 17, 1775, occurring after the skirmish at Lexington and Concord, was attended by members of the second Continental Congress, which had opened its meeting in Philadelphia a week earlier. Smith presided as usual, and his son, senior William Moore Smith, spoke on the "Fall of Empires." This oration was published in both the Qazette (May 31) and in *the Pennsylvania ^Magazine for May. Young Smith thought that the rise and fall of Rome carried a lesson for America, because empires stem from industry and valor, rise to wealth and conquest, to luxury and corruption, then decay to sloth, anarchy, and slavery. Wealth was the unsettling factor, he felt, luxury being the foe of liberty. What was needed was legislation to regulate the use of wealth. He was speaking to London as well as to Philadelphia when he ended: "Rekindle the ancient British spirit wherever Britons dwell. Save a parent state, and save the children too!" His oration was one of pleading rather than rebellion. Provost Smith also wanted the mother country to concern herself with political and economic concessions to the colonies because he favored reconciliation, not independence. After the closing of the port of Boston he had been elected at a town meeting to serve on a local committee of correspondence to concert action for the relief of Boston. A sermon he preached in June, 1775, aroused the patriotic fervor of his audience more than he wished. Trimming his sails, his tone was somewhat different in a memorial address on General Richard Montgomery before the Continental Congress in February, 1776. Some of his expressions so irritated his audience that it refused the customary courtesy of printing his sermon. He had it printed himself.36 Smith was tolerated in Philadelphia until just before the fall of the city to the British in 1777, when he was put under house arrest.37 Released after the British departed, he turned his attention unsuccessfully to rehabilitating the college. The Rev. John Ewing, a 1755 graduate of the College of New Jersey, replaced him as provost in 1779.38

35 Pennsylvania Gazette, July 28, 1773, p. 3. 36 Thomas R. Adams, American Independence (Providence, 1965), 179. 37 Sketch in D.A.B. 38 John B. Linn, A Discourse Occasioned by the Death oj the Rev. John Ewing (Philadelphia, 180a), 14. 62 HOWARD H. PECKHAM January Because of his full teaching schedule and fondness for liquor, Smith had let much administrative work fall on the vice-provost, the Rev. Francis Alison, who headed the Latin School and taught classics to the college students. Alison was also assistant minister of the First Presbyterian Church and had protested the choice of Franklin as Pennsylvania's agent in London. Inasmuch as Alison left Philadelphia at the time of the British occupation, it may be assumed that he was a rebel.39 Hugh Williamson (1735-1819) headed the Mathematics School and taught mathematics in the college until 1764, when he went abroad to study medicine. Although he subsequently became a noted Patriot, his influence as a teacher was early and slight.40 The College of Philadelphia's brightest ornament was its Medical School, the first in the country, started in 1765 at the instigation of Dr. John Morgan. After graduating in the college's first class, 1757, Morgan had apprenticed himself to a local physician. Then he spent a year in London studying medicine, two years at the University of where he earned his degree, and another year traveling on the continent, visiting hospitals and medical schools. In addition to Morgan, the faculty of the Medical School was enhanced by three other able physicians. Dr. William Shippen was appointed professor of surgery and anatomy in 1765, when Morgan was made professor of physics. Morgan and Shippen were joined by Dr. Adam Kuhn, professor of materia medica and botany, in 1768, and by Dr. Benjamin Rush, professor of chemistry, the following year. All four young men were native Philadelphians and had recently earned medi- cal degrees at Edinburgh. They all became active as ardent Patriots in the Revolution.41 When New York Episcopalians started King's College in 1754, they named the Rev. Samuel Johnson, a friend of Franklin, as first president. Two epidemics of smallpox not only carried off his wife and son and step-daughter, but closed down the college. The death of Johnson's second wife in the epidemic of 1763 caused him to resign the presidency and return to Connecticut.42

39 Cheyney, 120. 40 Sketch in D.J.B. 41 Cheyney, passim, and sketches in D.A.B. 42 Sketch in D.J.B. i97i COLLEGIA ANTE BELLUM 63 His successor was the Rev. Myles Cooper, an Englishman who had obtained two degrees at Oxford. The Archbishop of Canterbury had sent him to New York in 1762 to serve as vice-president to Johnson. Cooper taught divinity and enjoyed a worldly life as a bachelor, evincing partiality to good food and wine. He was twenty- six years old when he assumed the presidency and started his attempt to develop King's College on the model of Oxford. Cooper had published a volume of mediocre love poems in England of which a critic said, "He seems to have mistaken taste for talent/' Royal government, like the Anglican faith, claimed his complete loyalty.43 His only faculty at first was Glasgow-educated Robert Harpur (d. 1825), librarian and professor of mathematics and physics, and Matthew Cushing who taught Greek and Latin and ran the grammar school. Harpur, who seems to have resigned in 1767, became a member of the New York Provincial Congress in 1775, was actiye on a Commission for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies, and later served in the state Assembly. Eventually, he was a regent of the State University of New York and a trustee of Columbia Col- lege. Cushing took the other fork in the road and became a Loyalist, losing his job when the college closed. He died obscurely on January 8, I779-44.. On petition of six local physicians in 1767, President Cooper established a Medical School, as the College of Philadelphia had done. Those same six physicians became the first faculty. Dr. Samuel Clossy, an Irishman with a degree from Trinity College, Dublin, taught anatomy. He was said by a colleague to possess "every sense but common/' Clossy remained loyal to Great Britain, resigned his professorship in 1775, and served in a British army hospital. With the British evacuation of 1783, he left New York and returned to Ireland.45 Dr. John Jones (1729-1791), who had studied abroad and obtained his medical degree from the University of Rheims, taught surgery and obstetrics. At the beginning of the war he prepared a manual for treating wounds and fractures for the benefit of American military surgeons, and became a surgeon himself

43 ibid. 44 Officers and Alumni, 1754-1857 (New York, 1936), 280. 45 Thomas Gallagher, The 'Doctors' Story (New York, 1967), 16-21. 64 HOWARD H. PECKHAM January in the Continental Army in 1776.46 Dr. John Van Brugh Tennent (1737-1770), a College of New Jersey graduate, had earned his medical degree in 1764 at the University of Edinburgh, where he became a friend of Dr. John Morgan. He was appointed professor of midwifery in 1767, the first such chair in the . Unfor- tunately, his health failed and he went to the West Indies, where he contracted yellow fever and died. His political sympathies are not known. Dr. Samuel Bard (1742-1821), another graduate of Edinburgh, was made professor of the practice of physics initially, and then succeeded Tennent as professor of midwifery. He was Loyalist in sympathy and left New York in 1775, but returned after the British captured the city. Following the war, the mayor vouched for him, and he was taken on by the rechartered Columbia College, even- tually becoming dean of the medical faculty! While New York was the nation's capital, President Washington used Dr. Bard as his personal physician. Dr. Peter Middleton, professor of physiology and pathology in the new medical school, was born in England and obtained his medical degree from St. Andrews University in 1752. A successful practitioner in New York, he served as a surgeon with the provincial forces during the French and Indian War and was a Loyalist. He resigned and went to Bermuda in April, 1776, returning after Sir William Howe captured the city that summer. Dr. Middleton died in January, 1781. The sixth man on the medical faculty was Dr. James Smith (d. 1812), who had earned an M.D. from the University of Leyden. He became professor of chemistry and materia medica, but left the faculty before the war, ultimately following Dr. Jones into the Continental Army as a surgeon.47 As resistance to Great Britain increased in New York and Pres- ident Cooper steadily defended royal prerogative and parliamentary supremacy, he became a detested Tory. After news of the clashes at Lexington and Concord, he felt it prudent to take temporary refuge on a British frigate in the harbor. Early in May, 1775, a locally printed broadside threatened Cooper and others as parricides and

46 Plain Concise Practical Remarks, on the Treatment of Wounds and Fractures (Philadelphia, 1776). 47 Gallagher, 10-21, 31, 34-35, 39, 43. I97i COLLEGIA ANTE BELLUM 65 warned them that Americans would no longer be content to hang them in effigy. The writer ended with advice to "fly for your lives/'48 This was all the incitement the mob needed. On the night of May 10 a crowd of about 400 advanced on the college building where Cooper lived. He was saved by a student activist, Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton had entered King's College in 1773 as a special student and at first was greatly attached to Cooper. But as Hamilton began involving himself in public questions, he came into opposition with the president. Hamilton addressed an outdoor crowd on July 7, 1774, speaking against the Boston Port Act. In December he wrote a pamphlet, and another in February, 1775, in reply to Samuel Seabury's pro-British tracts.49 He also contributed anonymous articles to the local Whig paper, arguing for national action rather than separate provincial acts. As soon as Hamilton learned of the mob approaching the college, he rushed out with his roommate, Robert Troup, and warned Cooper to flee. While the president escaped out his back door to a British ship for the second time, Hamilton stopped the mob on the front steps and harangued them on the disgrace their proposed action would bring to the cause of liberty. The mob moved away and vented its wrath on James Rivington, the Tory printer.50 Cooper prudently sailed for England, missing Commencement which was held in private on May 16. The J\[ew York Qazette for May 22 made no mention of the president's absence. Fifteen degrees were awarded. King's College then closed its doors, its building subsequently serving as an army hospital. In 1784 the state of New York rechartered the institution as Columbia College. Under President Samuel Finley (1715-1766) from 1761 to 1766, the College of New Jersey held closely to its Presbyterian heritage. Instruction was carried on by the Rev. Mr. Finley and three tutors, all of whom became ministers. Finley, who had come to America from Ireland at the age of nineteen, was a fervent and devout

48 The broadside, undated, is in the New-York Historical Society and seems to be a reprint of a threatening letter in the Pennsylvania Journal, Apr. 26, 1775. 49 A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress (New York, 1774) and The Farmer Refuted (New York, 1775) were Hamilton's arguments. 50 Broadus Mitchell, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1957), I, 74-75. 66 HOWARD H. PECKHAM January preacher who took little interest in political affairs. He taught the classics—Greek, Latin, and Hebrew—and was beloved by his students. When he went to Philadelphia in 1766 to seek medical treatment and died there, eight seniors acted as his pall bearers.51 Nearly half the graduates during his incumbency became ministers.52 The only political involvement of the college was reflected in a naive address in 1766 of the trustees to the king, thanking him for repeal- ing the Stamp Act and asking for a grant of land to support the college. Inasmuch as George III had bitterly opposed repeal of the Stamp Act by Parliament, it is not surprising that no land grant was forthcoming.53 Late in 1766 the trustees offered the presidency to the Rev. John Witherspoon of Paisley, Scotland, a descendant of John Knox and a leader in orthodox Presbyterianism in Scotland. Owing to his family's disinclination to migrate, Witherspoon declined. However, when that objection dissipated, he let it be known that he was interested, and the trustees renewed their offer in December, 1767. Witherspoon accepted and arrived the following August.54 Meanwhile, the trustees had appointed the Rev. John Blair of Pennsylvania as professor of divinity on the promise of the Synod of Pennsylvania and New York that it would pay part of his salary. Because not enough money was forthcoming, Blair resigned after two years and died several years later.55 So President Witherspoon was left with three or four tutors to carry the load of instruction. His star graduate was , '71, the future President. No new professor was added until 1771, when William C. Houston, '68, (d. 1788), a tutor, was elected professor of mathematics and physics. Witherspoon was especially interested in public questions and his sympathies were immediately engaged by American aspirations. Yet no political coloration seemed to tinge the college. Commence- ment exercises on September 30, 1773, were normally nonpolitical, and Governor William Franklin, later a Loyalist, attended.56 As

51 John Maclean, History of the College of New Jersey (Philadelphia, 1877), I, 277-281. 52 Ibid., I, 274. 53 Ibid., I, 264. 54 Sketch in D.J.B. 55 Maclean, I, 304-306. 56 Pennsylvania Gazette, Oct. 13, 1773, p. 2. I97i COLLEGIA ANTE BELLUM 6j war approached, however, Witherspoon served on a committee of correspondence and in the provincial convention. In 1776 he was elected to the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence, the only academic person besides Dr. Rush to do so. Remaining in Congress until 1782, he was widely regarded as an intellectual leader in interpreting the controversy with Great Britain. His The 'Dominion of 'Providence Over the Passions ofzMeny published in May, 1776, was addressed chiefly to Scotsmen in America and rejected any prospect of reconciliation with the mother country. There was no controversy over the Revolution in the college. The trustees were all known to be rebels, and Professor Houston was elected to the Continental Congress in 1780. The name of the college was changed to in 1896. Lastly, we come to the second oldest and most southern institu- tion, the College of William and Mary. Another Anglican school, it had for its president from 1764 to 1771 the Rev. , a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge. He also served on the Council of Virginia and as rector of in Williamsburg, making him both a king's man and a bishop's man. As a councilor he opposed popular legislation and as an Anglican he favored an American episcopate in the face of local opposition* No one was too sorry when his health failed and he resigned his appointments. He died while returning to England.57 His successor as president was the professor of divinity, the Rev. (1718-1778), a like-minded academician. He, too, was a Trinity College graduate and a champion of crown and mitre who had already crossed swords with the big tobacco planters over the Two-Penny Act. Governor Fauquier, who died in 1768, found Camm "a man of abilities but a turbulent man who delights to live in a flame." Later on, Arthur Lee was to call him the "center of all the dissatisfaction in the colony."58 Another faculty member who had served under President Horrocks was Richard Graham, professor of mathematics, an Englishman who found the colonies too much for him and returned home in 1766. A tutor must have handled mathematics for a few years after his

57Lyon G. Tyler, Williamsburg^ the Old Colonial Capital (Richmond, 1907), 38-61, 86, 166-168, 170, 172, 178. 68 Sketch of Camm in B.A.B. 68 HOWARD H. PECKHAM January departure, for the next professor in that field, and also in physics, was James Madison, class of 1771, who was appointed in 1773. (He was a second cousin of the James Madison who graduated from New Jersey, also in 1771.) Madison taught two years and then went to England to be ordained in the Anglican Church. Despite this background, he returned an avowed rebel. The Rev. Samuel Henley (1744-1815), professor of moral philos- ophy, also returned to England in 1775 after difficulties with Presi- ident Camm over his opposition to an American episcopate.59 Sometime after Camm became president, the Rev. John Dixon was appointed professor of divinity. He, too, was Loyalist in outlook. The faculty offered a fawning address of welcome to Lord Dun- more upon his arrival as governor in 1771.60 When he returned to Williamsburg on December 4, 1774, after conducting a military campaign against the Shawnees, he found a vibrant political atmos- phere quite different from that which had prevailed at the time he left in July. His campaign had been unsupported by the House of Burgesses and ignored by most of the Tidewater planters. Their attention was focused exclusively on the deepening quarrel with Britain. An unauthorized convention of delegates had met in Williamsburg in August and had elected representatives to the first Continental Congress which convened at Philadelphia in September. Into this charged atmosphere Governor Dunmore rode almost anachronistically. True, the city of Williamsburg presented an adulatory address, so did the hand-picked Council, and the president and professors of the College offered a groveling welcome, but the public attitude had changed.61 Evidence of this can be found in the columns of the 'Virginia Qazette where the faculty was sarcastically congratulated on its message, and also for "their most hearty dissent from the association of the whole continent."62 Tension increased during the winter, and on April 20, 1775, Dunmore quietly stole all the powder from the public magazine and put it aboard a ship. The city government protested, and a few nights later all the muskets

59 See The Virginia Gazette, July to October, 1771. w Ibid., Oct. 3, 1771, p. 2. 61 Peter Force, American Archives, 4th Series, I, 1019. 62 Dec. 22, 1774, p. 1. i97i COLLEGIA ANTE BELLUM 69 and swords were taken from the magazine by the populace. Following news of the clash at Lexington, aroused militiamen under Captain Patrick Henry forced the royal receiver-general to pay for the stolen powder. The General Assembly met, and on June 8 Dunmore fled to a British ship in Norfolk harbor, where he remained for more than a year before sailing for England.63 Professor Henley was succeeded by the Rev. Robert Andrews, who later taught mathematics, fine arts, and "the law of nature and of nations." He was a graduate of the College of Philadelphia and remained on the William and Mary faculty until his death in 1804. As secretary of the local Society for the Advancement of Useful Knowledge, he was closely associated with the patriot figures in Williamsburg. In 1779 he was chairman of a town meeting to set prices and halt depreciation of the currency, and later in the year was elected a city alderman. By 1777 the Tory sympathies of Camm and Dixon became ob- noxious to the College's Board of Visitors. Dixon resigned and Camm was dismissed, ostensibly for "irregularities." The Rev. James Madison was then named president at the age of twenty-eight. An ardent Patriot, he used to speak of Heaven as a republic rather than a kingdom; he was commissioned a captain of a student company of militia just before he became president. Madison saw active service on several occasions and remained president until his death in 1812.64 In 1779 the College was reorganized along modern lines (under the influence of Governor Thomas Jefferson) and its curriculum was broadened to include law, medicine, and modern languages. George Wythe began his distinguished career as professor of "Law and Police/' the first chair of law in any American college. Wythe had opposed the Stamp Act and had signed the Declaration of Inde- pendence.65 Carlo Bellini, hired to teach modern languages, had come to America in 1774 to join his and Jefferson's friend, Philip Mazzei, and immediately became very pro-American and anti- British. He volunteered as a soldier in 1775, but because of his facility in languages was later made Clerk of Foreign Correspondence

63 Ivor Noel Hume, 7/75, Another Part of the Field (New York, 1966), 222, 458. 64 Sketch in B.A.B. Mlbid. 7O HOWARD H. PECKHAM January for the Virginia Council.66 Dr. James McClurg, '62, was appointed professor of anatomy and medicine. He had earned his medical degree at Edinburgh and had continued his studies at London and Paris. During the war he was surgeon to the Virginia militia and director of hospitals for the commonwealth. Here, then, was a faculty of five, compared to Harvard's four and Yale's three. This aerial view of the groves of Academe permits only a few inferences. If we ignore tutors, except for the two who served as the only faculty of Queen's College, there is a grand total of forty-six professors and presidents active in the dozen years before the Revo- lution and during the first part of the war. Not all of them were teaching at the same time, of course. Of this total, twenty-eight were rebels, ten were Tories, and eight were either neutral or their politics unknown. Perhaps it makes more sense to view the scene as it was after 1770, when we find that eight men had died or resigned, and the score for the thirty-eight active contemporaries is twenty-six rebels, nine Tories, and three neutral or unknown. There was unanimity of opinion in favor of the Revolution in four colleges—Rhode Island, Dartmouth, Queen's, and New Jersey— while three colleges each contained one neutral. In only two col- leges—King's and William and Mary—were the faculties really divided into hostile camps of Patriots and Loyalists. King's em- ployed five Tories and four rebels. At William and Mary there were four Tories and five rebels. One college was located in a city, the other in a small town. What they had in common was that both were Anglican, and they were the only Anglican colleges in colonial America. It was the church affiliation of the professors that seemed to make the difference. Another look at the thirty-eight academicians reveals that twenty- four were humanists and fourteen were scientists. Yet the emphasis of their intellectual training made little difference in their politics, for sixteen of the humanists, or two-thirds, became rebels, while ten of the scientists, or seventy-one per cent, were rebels. Place of birth was a more decisive factor. Nine of the thirty-eight professors were

66 Antonio Pace, "Another Letter of Carlo Bellini/' William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, IV (1947), 3So~3SS- 1971 COLLEGIA ANTE BELLUM 71 born in the British Isles and one in Italy. The latter became a rebel, but only two of the Britons defected while one other was neutral. There remains only a brief word to say about the influence of these intellectuals. The Tories and neutralists had little effect even on their students, for the vast majority turned out to be rebels. Beyond the bounds of the campus, the professors exerted little influence, either. President Witherspoon of New Jersey attracted some audience through his preaching and publishing on American rights. George Wythe was widely respected as a lawyer and delegate before he started teaching at William and Mary. Ezra Stiles had displayed an American patriotism on public issues before he became president of Yale. President Myles Cooper fought a losing battle in New York for royal prerogative. Presidents Horrocks and Camm were successive rectors of Bruton Church in Williamsburg, yet were unsuccessful in keeping their parish loyal to the king. Why did these acknowledged intellectuals not achieve more leadership as the colonies began to dispute with Parliament and king? The first reason is the obvious one of their small number. Forty-six professors in a white population of more than two million inhabitants along the Atlantic seaboard is an infinitessimal percent- age. Further, they were not in touch with one another, as there were no academic societies through which those who agreed on public issues could emphasize and publicize their position. By contrast, for instance, the state of Michigan, with a population of eight millions in 1963, contained 7,235 professors in baccalaureate col- leges, or 900 per million, and yet they had little influence on elec- tions or political debates.67 Secondly, teachers were generally regarded as inhabiting a private world. They were explicators of what others had written, hopefully transferring the judgments of past giants to the pygmies seated before them. Their occupation and the curriculum did not require them to take notice of current and changing political and economic tides in the way that lawyers, merchants, and planters were required to watch them. Professors were felt to be insulated from practical

67 Faculty and Other Professional Staff in Institutions of Higher Education, 1963-64, U.S. Office of Education (Washington, 1966). This figure does not include instructors at junior colleges, or teaching fellows, staff members, extension lecturers, and full-time research workers at any college. 72 HOWARD H. PECKHAM January matters. No layman considered seeking the opinion of a professor; the political "brain trust" had not been conceived. Finally, of the forty-six professors half were clergymen, and by 1765 clergymen had lost that position of authority which they had enjoyed in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The growth of deism and the decline of covenant communities had loosened the hold of the churches. The quarrel between mother country and colonies was turning more and more on economic and political issues, and a new breed of men—lawyers—along with merchants and planters were dominating the arguments that went on continuously. These concerned matters that clergymen had not dealt with; they were not theological or moral questions. College professors suffered further eclipse from this turn to practical advisers. Had the professors been able to agree in favor of England or America, and had they been able to petition together or to speak to the public in one voice, they might have carried weight. But neither preliminary condition prevailed. The arguments back and forth across the Atlantic proceeded on wave lengths outside the range of their antennae. In consequence, as sides were chosen, professors tended to be followers, or reluctant joiners, not leaders.

William .£. Clements library HOWARD H. PECKHAM