COLONIAL COLLEGES, 1740–1780
NEW COLLEGES FOR THE MIDDLE COLONIES
IN THE MID-EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, COLLEGES IN the American colonies doubled in number and changed in character. The College of New Jersey (1746), King’s College in New York (1754), and the College of Philadelphia (1755) were chartered and began instruction. The new colleges on the New York–Philadelphia axis were products of the rapid growth of the economies and populations of the Middle Colonies, although each reflected the distinctive demography and religious character of its surroundings. Unlike the settings of the first three colleges, the entire region was populated by diverse peoples with differing Protestant beliefs. However, initially only a few of these groups had any interest in colleges. The growing number of Presbyterians had close roots in Scotland and Ireland, where ministers were expected to be highly educated. In the two cities, upper-class members of the Church of England sought institutions to solidify their social position and ties with English culture. Still, these foundings were interconnected. The Presbyterian initiatives in New Jersey kindled the efforts in New York and Philadelphia. The latter sought Samuel Johnson for its head before he opted to lead King’s; and William Smith’s meddling in the planning for King’s led to his appointment as provost in Philadelphia. Each of these campaigns took nearly 7 years to create a college, and these prolonged processes affected the outcomes. Ultimately, the colleges of the Middle Colonies represented the learning and spirit of the American Enlightenment. But strangely, the catalyst for these developments was the Great Awakening of evangelical religious fervor.
Historians have accorded the Awakening a large role in shaping colonial colleges. However, the most vigorous outbursts of revivalist preaching occurred in the early 1740s, and the lasting schisms they provoked in major churches overlapped with other social and political fault lines. The central figure was George Whitefield, a young Anglican minister who acquired notoriety for his revivalist preaching in London during 1738–1739 while raising funds for a Georgia orphanage. When he returned to America late in 1739, his reputation preceded him.1 Whitefield relied on the publicity of his revivalist exploits in colonial newspapers and the regular publication of his own Journal to heighten public anticipation of his appearances. The colonial equivalent of a rock star, his act and tours were thoroughly orchestrated. Starting around Philadelphia, he delivered nearly 350 sermons during 3 tours lasting through 1740. He estimated that on 61 occasions he preached to crowds of 1,000 or more, and a few reportedly as large as 20,000—more than the population of the largest American cities. He preached in every colony but achieved a huge response only in the Calvinist “revival belts,” consisting of mostly Presbyterians in the Middle Colonies and Congregationalists in Connecticut and Massachusetts—the location of his third tour.
Whitefield was clearly an orator of great talent, able to make listeners acutely aware of the perils of damnation and desperate to improve chances for salvation. He espoused a crude version of old-time Puritanism but sidestepped predestination by offering listeners the possibility of salvation through the conversion experience. The conversion of souls at these revivals was regarded as evidence of the “Work of God,” an interpretation sanctioned by the colonies’ foremost theologian, Jonathan Edwards.2 The transient appearances were part of the performance. He gave only a few well-rehearsed sermons in each locale, stirring religious passions, before moving on and leaving local clergy to deal with the aftermath of anguished souls. These and later revivals had a cumulative effect, becoming more intense in preaching tactics and spiritual impact in the following years.
Whitefield himself seems to have been an amiable fellow who got on well with a spectrum of hosts, especially in his later tours.3 He befriended Benjamin Franklin, for example, who shared none of his “enthusiasm” but admired his eloquence—and may have appreciated the boost Whitefield’s publicity gave to his printing business. Whitefield ingratiated himself with contemporary Puritans by claiming to espouse traditional Calvinism and railing against the Arminianism of Tillotson and the Church of England. However, a crucial tactic of Whitefield’s self-advertisement was to foment controversy, and here the message contained a poison pill. To dramatize his own piety compared with the laxness of existing churches, he made reckless accusations that present ministers were unconverted—lacked a conversion experience—and hence unfit to lead their parishioners to salvation. Although he was cordially welcomed at Harvard and Yale, they received the same treatment. In his published Journal he wrote, “As for the Universities [sic] … Their Light is now become Darkness—Darkness that may be felt—and is complained of by the most godly ministers.”4
Whitefield was soon followed by a succession of imitators, itinerant revivalist preachers who were more extravagant in their preaching and blatant in their attacks. Thus, the Awakening quickly evolved from an apparent Work of God to a challenge to the churches and the two northern colleges. The radicalism and blatant emotionalism of the Awakening soon divided the Reformed churches into New Light adherents and Old Light defenders. Nowhere was the schism more dramatic than at Yale College.
Whitefield spent 3 days in New Haven (October 24–26, 1740), preaching in the college and the town. He was warmly greeted by Rector Thomas Clap, who approved of the spiritual agitation he inspired in Yale students. Among the itinerant preachers who followed, Gilbert Tennent preached for a week in the spring of 1741. A leader among the New Light Presbyterians in New Jersey, he had collaborated with Whitefield, who explicitly encouraged him to “blow up the divine fire” in New England. Tennent was even more emotive than Whitefield and was especially damning toward allegedly unconverted ministers. The Awakening spawned increasing numbers of itinerant preachers, like Reverend Eleazer Wheelock (Yale 1733), who exulted after one revival, “the Whole assembly Seam’d alive with Distress[,] the Groans and outcrys of the wounded were such that my Voice Co’d not be heard.” Perhaps the worst was James Davenport, demented and self-anointed, who one knowledgeable commentator called “the wildest Enthusiast I ever saw.” Thus, the Awakening assumed a radical form that divided congregations, repudiated an educated ministry, and reduced religion to raw “enthusiasm.”5
At this point Clap had seen enough. He helped the colony promulgate a ban on itinerant preachers and eventually deport Davenport as non compos mentis. At Yale, student preaching and proselytizing had completely disrupted the college order. Clap first expelled one of the New Light leaders, David Brainerd, for allegedly saying that a tutor had “no more grace than a chair.” Then, in 1742, he was compelled to close the college and send students home. When it reopened, with the most zealous New Lights pursuing salvation elsewhere, order was restored and the crisis appeared to be over. But Clap was unrelenting against New Light influence in and around his college. He sought to discredit both Gilbert Tennent and Jonathan Edwards. In 1744 he expelled two brothers for attending a New Light service while home with their parents. Like the Brainerd affair, this arbitrary act was widely publicized and fanned controversy throughout the colonies. When the student protested that he broke no college law, Clap replied, “The laws of God and the College are one.” In truth, these were the laws of Thomas Clap, who embraced intolerance and autocracy at a time when colleges were moving in the opposite direction.6
Whitefield attracted enormous crowds in Boston, but the response of the college was much cooler.7 The Harvard faculty flatly rejected his condemnation of Tillotson, and relatively few students were affected. When Whitefield’s disparaging Journal remarks appeared, battle lines were drawn.8 Whitefield returned to New England in 1744 but was now excluded from the pulpits of Harvard and Yale. He responded with renewed attacks. On this occasion, he was answered with a “Testimony” of the president and faculty of Harvard “against the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield, and his Conduct” (1744). This pamphlet condemned him for “Enthusiasm,” for claiming “greater Familiarity with God than other men,” and for “Arrogance … that such a young Man as he should … tell what books we shou’d allow our Pupils to read.” Whitefield’s ineffectual rejoinder was countered by a more thorough denunciation by Hollis Professor of Divinity Edward Wigglesworth. In addition to a blow-by-blow refutation of Whitefield’s accusations, he upheld the college’s Calvinist credentials and accused Whitefield, despite his evasions, of antinomian heresy.9
This incident is testimony to the growing maturity of Harvard College. The appointment of its president, Edward Holyoke (1737–1769), was considered a victory for the liberal faction, and his long tenure was notable for modernizing the curriculum (discussed below). The advancing spirit of the Enlightenment was evident in the Harvard argument that “Reason, or … Revelation of the Mind of God” are better trusted than Whitefield’s “sudden Impulses and Impressions.” Harvard reflected the cosmopolitanism of a great seaport, rather than the religious enthusiasm of the common people who flocked to Whitefield. Harvard also had a professor of divinity with the authority to oppose the celebrity upstart. All these qualities were lacking at Yale.10
Old Lights dominated colonial government in Connecticut, and they rewarded Clap in 1745 with prompt approval of a new charter that made him a member of the trustees. Although this represented a formal elevation of Clap’s status, he increasingly behaved as if he had become sovereign ruler. In an effort to enforce religious conformity, he required all students to attend religious services in the college rather than the town. To justify this action, Clap wrote: “Colleges are Societies of Ministers for training up persons for the work of the Ministry.” And Clap himself became the arbiter of the nature of that training. He stiffened the religious tests for all teachers and denied students access to liberal books in the library. Clap’s obsessions may have been reactions to the Awakening, but they soon became more personal than theological. Withdrawing Yale students from New Haven’s First Church alienated Old Lights, but he failed to placate New Lights, even when he reversed course and welcomed Whitefield into the college in 1754. Clap’s autocratic ways earned him increasing numbers of enemies, which would be his undoing when he lost control of the college in the 1760s.11
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The split between old-light and new-light Presbyterians in the middle colonies began before Whitefield’s arrival and from the outset raised the issue of ministerial education. Most local ministers had been trained in Scotland or New England, but by the 1730s their numbers could not match the rapid growth of congregations. Some new ministers, especially among recent Scots-Irish immigrants, were trained individually by local ministers, and almost all favored a new-light style of preaching. This was especially the case with William Tennent, Sr., a master’s graduate of Edinburgh who trained Gilbert and three other sons for the ministry. He then instructed additional ministerial aspirants in a log structure that adversaries dismissively called the “Log College.” The classically educated Tennent instructed his charges in Latin, Hebrew, and a good deal of Bible study; they also imbibed his fervent pietism, to the increasing displeasure of the Philadelphia Synod.12 Both factions attempted to alter requirements for ordination to either facilitate or obstruct these new-light candidates. The conflict prompted the synod in 1739 to consider establishing a school or seminary. The arrival of Whitefield inflamed these tensions and led in 1741 to the expulsion from the synod of new-light presbyteries of New Brunswick and New York. The dominant figure in the former was Gilbert Tennent, who now led the opposition of the Scots-Irish New Lights. The area around New York was home to a group of “New England Presbyterians,” led by Yale graduate Jonathan Dickinson. Each side soon sought the means to educate its own ministers.
In 1743 the Philadelphia Synod officially sponsored an academy in New London, Pennsylvania, under Francis Alison, reputedly the finest classical scholar in the colonies and an opponent of the Awakening despite his Scots-Irish background.13 The school sought to teach at both preparatory and collegiate levels, but the synod’s clear intention was to prepare old-light ministers. The school was supported by the churches and charged students no tuition. An attempt was made to have Yale award its students degrees (which would have made it America’s first branch campus), but Thomas Clap was not encouraging. Alison’s school struggled financially and never attempted to obtain a charter. After he joined the Academy of Philadelphia in 1752, the school migrated to nearby New Ark, Delaware.14
In the New York region, Elizabethtown minister Jonathan Dickinson was an articulate advocate of new-light positions similar to those of Jonathan Edwards. He was appalled by President Clap’s vendetta against the New Lights, but overcrowded Yale was no answer in any case to the need to educate more Presbyterian ministers. On the other hand, Dickinson sought a moderate approach that would bypass radical New Lights, whose excesses had tarnished the movement. This precluded a log-college type of seminary. In 1745 Dickinson formed a group of Presbyterians and Anglicans from both sides of the Hudson who pledged £185 and began formulating a charter for a prospective college. Anglicans soon fell out of this coalition, most likely over the issue of control, but this initiative seems to have planted a desire for their own institution in New York City.15 Seven Presbyterian ministers and laymen persisted and by the end of the year presented a charter to the royal governor. A staunch Anglican, the governor promptly rejected it, stating that he had no authority to authorize a “dissenter’s college.” However, he died in May, and the interim governor was advised by friends of the college. On October 22, 1746, a charter was granted to the College of New Jersey, and classes began the following May in the parsonage of Jonathan Dickinson.
The original charter named seven trustees—three New Jersey ministers and one from New York and three Presbyterian laymen residing in New York—six Yale graduates and one son of Harvard. Thus, the college from its birth was academically a lineal descendant of the New England colleges, offering a “plan of education as extensive as our circumstances will admit.”16 But its organization was distinctive. The trustees had the authority to name five additional members, and they quickly moved to invite Gilbert Tennent—who had mollified his radical views—and three other log-college ministers. By incorporating the most prominent Scots-Irish, the college presented a solid front of new-light Presbyterians stretching from New York to Pennsylvania. Nonetheless, the college proclaimed itself open to “those of every religious denomination,” which was consistent not only with New Jersey freedom of religion but also the practices of Yale and Harvard. Its all-Presbyterian trustees resembled the monolithic governing board of Yale; however, the latter represented the colony’s established church, which was not the case in New Jersey. The new governor, Jonathan Belcher, perceived the weakness of the charter, particularly in the face of Anglican opposition. A new light himself and avid supporter, he worked with the trustees to devise a stronger charter. The new charter of 1748 created a mixed board of twenty-three trustees representing the colony as well as the Presbyterian founders. The governor presided as an ex-officio member, but Presbyterians were assured of a majority. Its church-state governance now paralleled Harvard’s Overseers but had far greater control. Thus, the College of New Jersey constituted a distinctive governance model of a provincial college.
The efforts of Mid-Atlantic Presbyterians to educate ministers for their growing needs resulted, through the efforts of Dickinson, in a liberal arts college open to all. Both these traits proved invaluable for the further development of the college. Efforts to secure Presbyterian control had resulted instead in a mixed governing board that made the college a “public” institution, at least in a colonial sense. However, despite the close identification with New Jersey, it had an intercolonial board. Nor did the province ever support the college; Governor Belcher proposed a lottery to raise funds, but the New Jersey Assembly voted it down.
Jonathan Dickinson died only 4 months after opening the college, but instruction was quickly transferred to founder Aaron Burr’s parsonage in nearby Newark. At this point the college was merely an enlargement of the classical schools that both reverends had provided at their homes (an arrangement little different from Yale’s early days in Killingworth). But the college’s legitimacy was soon confirmed in 1748 when the trustees gathered in Newark for the first commencement exercise. Aaron Burr was elected president, and he then proceeded to award six bachelor’s degrees and a master of arts to Governor Belcher. The new college offered a curriculum nearly identical to that of Burr’s alma mater, Yale.17 Still, the founders were aware that a real college required a permanent home and, above all, a collegiate building. From the outset Governor Belcher had favored “Princetown” in the center of the colony. In the event, the town had to outbid rivals in order to secure the college in 1753. To raise the funds for a building, Gilbert Tennent and Samuel Davies, a new-light minister from Virginia, were sent to England for a year of fund-raising. Old-side Presbyterians and Anglicans attacked Tennent for his former radical views, but the pair succeeded by emphasizing the college’s religious freedom for English audiences and lauding its mission of training Presbyterian ministers for donors in Scotland and Ireland.18 The £4,000 they raised financed Nassau Hall, the grandest collegiate structure in colonial America. When it was occupied in 1756, the College of New Jersey achieved permanence and legitimacy. By then it also had rivals in New York and Philadelphia.
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The founding of these two colleges was triggered by the events in New Jersey, and each followed a different path to a similar outcome. The New York Assembly authorized a lottery to raise funds for a college the day after the first New Jersey charter was signed, and the Pennsylvania effort followed quickly upon the college’s 1748 consecration. Both Anglicans and old-light Presbyterians were threatened by what they called the “Jersey College,” since, in their apocalyptic views, a monopoly of collegiate education by New Lights could undermine their churches. However, behind the churches in both cities stood emerging social elites, increasingly aware of the cultural advantage of colleges; if there were to be colleges, these groups felt that they should control them. They were defined by their considerable wealth, in most cases derived originally from commerce but also by positions in government and society that consolidated their status. In New York, many of the key figures were vestrymen in the Anglican Trinity Church—the men who managed the affairs of the Church. In Philadelphia, a party coalesced among supporters of the Proprietor, Thomas Penn, against the Quakers who dominated the local Assembly. Besides holding important official posts, they became trustees of the College of Philadelphia and belonged to other exclusive organizations.19 Finally, elite plans for these colleges did not go uncontested; in each city they were challenged and influenced by individuals with different ideas about education. In the end, though, wealth and social status prevailed.
When the possibility of a New York college arose, Anglicans in the region took the lead.20 Neither the established church in the province nor more than one-seventh of the congregations, they nonetheless regarded the Church of England as an extension of royal government and a natural leader of society. Foremost among them was Samuel Johnson of Connecticut. Following his notorious 1722 conversion, Johnson became a settled minister in Stratford, where he vigorously promoted the Church among hostile Congregationalists. He was responsible for preparing 5 percent of Yale graduates to become Anglican ministers (1725–1748). He also spearheaded Anglican condemnation of the “strange, wild enthusiasm” of the Awakening and regarded the Jersey College as a “fountain of Nonsense.” As a leading colonial intellectual, Benjamin Franklin avidly sought to recruit Johnson to the Philadelphia Academy and published his philosophical treatise, Elementa Philosophica (1752). Prominent Anglicans initially debated the best location for the college. However, the lottery funds were voted by the Assembly rather than the royal governor and consigned to a commission. The location issue was resolved in 1752 when Trinity Church offered to donate a choice piece of real estate on what was then the northern fringe of the city.21
At this juncture a formidable adversary emerged in the person of William Livingston, scion of wealthy upstate landholders, a Yale graduate (1741), and with family ties to the College of New Jersey. He embraced Enlightenment views toward liberty and intellectual progress, and he seemed equally opposed to the presumptuous hegemony of Trinity Church and the Anglican families that dominated its vestry. In 1753 he and his associates launched a journal of opinion, the Independent Reflector, to oppose the planned college. A member of the Lottery Commission himself, Livingston condemned Anglicans for seeking to establish a “Party-College” or the “College of Trinity Church.” As an alternative, he advocated the creation of a public, nondenominational institution. Since the college was funded with public lottery funds, he argued, it should be controlled by the legislature. That body should elect the trustees, who would in turn choose a president. The college should not teach the doctrines of any sect, and students would be free to attend the church of their choice. Anglicans responded that the established church, as they considered themselves, deserved preference in the college. For much of the year this war of words escalated. There was zero likelihood of establishing a nondenominational college governed by the popularly elected legislature, but the anticlerical arguments of the Reflector found considerable sympathy among the majority of non-Anglicans. Thus, as in New Jersey, the controversy shaped the organization of the college.
Behind the scenes, the Anglican elite pressed their advantage. They silenced the Independent Reflector by forcing its printer out of business. They secured the support of the Dutch Reformed Church, traditionally a close ally. Finally, they issued an ultimatum that the college must have an Anglican president and liturgy or else the land would revert to Trinity Church. When this stipulation was accepted by the lottery commission (largely the same individuals), the founding of the college was assured. Samuel Johnson began teaching the first class in July 1754, and several months later lieutenant governor James De Lancey (another ally) signed the charter in the name of the King.
The “College in the Province of New York … in the City of New York in America … named King’s College” conceded several points to its critics. It granted assurances that it would be open to all Christian believers and would not attempt to impose the beliefs of any sect upon its students. These were principles that President Johnson had long upheld and fought for in Connecticut. The college was governed by forty-one trustees who represented the public, though not the elected assembly that Livingston had championed. Seventeen ex-officio members included the royal governor, holders of several public offices, and the senior ministers of Trinity Church and the Dutch Reformed, Presbyterian, French, and Lutheran churches. Twenty-four governors were named in the charter to serve without term, their successors to be chosen by the board. This latter group consisted largely of Trinity vestrymen and their Dutch Reformed allies. They and their successors would hold a firm majority for the life of the college. King’s was thus not the instrument of the Anglican Church that its initial proponents had sought and that its critics had denounced. Only three Anglican clerics sat among the governors—the Archbishop of Canterbury (in absentia), the rector of Trinity Church, and the Anglican president. King’s College instead was owned and operated by the powerful families that patronized Trinity and the Dutch Reformed churches. Moreover, the charter gave the governors powers ordinarily exercised by colonial college presidents, such as choosing the books that would be used and presiding over meetings of the board.22 But why did these gentlemen feel the need to control a college?
A modern answer would be for social reproduction. No less than Massachusetts Puritans a century before, the dominant figures in New York’s hierarchical society hoped a college would perpetuate their community and the social order. By the 1750s, though, cultural ideals had changed. The New York elite envisioned some combination of learning, gentility, virtue, and piety with which to imbue the next generation of lawyers, judges, merchants, and statesmen. Although New York was noted for its philistine preoccupation with business, the spirit of Enlightenment had taken root. Several of King’s founders had amassed enormous libraries, and a few had signed on to Benjamin Franklin’s inchoate philosophical society. William Livingston, among the younger elite (and no less elitist than his foes), had organized a “Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge.” Learning had become an expected adornment of a gentleman. The English model of gentility represented another cultural ideal for social climbers in the provinces, one tangibly exemplified in the aristocracy of the mother country. Familiarity with the classics and literature was deemed essential for forming the manners and taste of a gentleman. “Virtue” was an explicit, if less concrete, outcome expected from the college. This meant producing “truly good men” guided by devotion to duty, selflessness, and righteousness. Samuel Johnson placed foremost the goal of offering a “truly Christian education,” but this was inextricably linked with the inculcation of virtue at King’s and elsewhere. Indeed, the entire college curriculum was infused with moral purpose stemming from this association of piety and virtue. More practically, the college was intended to produce the professionals who would be leaders of society. The legal profession had clearly emerged as the pathway to elite positions in and out of government. Even as the college was forming, New York lawyers established the requirement of a bachelor’s degree to become an apprentice. In the next decade, the King’s College Medical School was organized in an effort to dominate that profession. Thus, there was a direct connection between the cultural ideals the college was expected to cultivate and entry into the upper ranks of New York society. This social reality, more than denominational doctrines or interests, lay behind the bitter controversy over the organization of the college.23
In one sense, the critics’ polemics against the college proved to be self-fulfilling: they so tarnished the enterprise that almost no students from outside Anglican and Dutch Reformed circles chose to attend. However, Anglican hopes were disappointed too. The college failed to provide the ministers needed for Anglican congregations, producing an average of just one per year. Nor did Anglicans from other colonies send their sons to New York. Of the 226 students who matriculated from 1754 to 1776, three-quarters resided within 30 miles of the college, most within walking distance. Fully one-quarter of students were related to governors of the college, and others came from the same social circles. King’s charged the highest tuition of any colonial college and, unlike the College of New Jersey, insisted on 4 years of matriculation to graduate. These factors no doubt helped to depress the graduation rate to near 50 percent.24 Moreover, the governors were unperturbed by this situation. A narrow gateway to the upper ranks of society certainly suited their family interests, but they also regarded it as part of the natural order—as did their counterparts in Philadelphia.
The Proprietary Party in Philadelphia faced a more amiable foe. Self-made and self-educated Benjamin Franklin was exquisitely sensitive to the gradations of social hierarchy that he himself had surmounted but also somewhat skeptical toward colleges, which he had ridiculed as a young man. As an indefatigable proponent of intellectual advancement, Franklin naturally came to address the city’s educational vacuum. His principal concern was to establish an English-language school that would teach modern languages, history, and science, thus preparing students “for learning any Business, Calling or Profession, except such wherein Languages are required.” He broached such a project in 1743, the same year he launched the American Philosophical Society, but found no support. Assured of backing in 1749, he published an extensive Proposal to establish such an academy that would provide all students with a thorough grounding in the English language and, he conceded, instruction in Latin and Greek for those aspiring to “Divinity … Physik [or] Law.” In November, twenty-four trustees gathered to draw up a “Constitution for the Public Academy in the city of Philadelphia” following Franklin’s plan. These self-perpetuating trustees represented the non-Quaker elite of the city: three-quarters were Anglicans; the others were powerful old-side Presbyterians, plus Franklin as president, and one token Quaker. It soon became apparent that the trustees were far more interested in classical than English schooling. Nonetheless, the Academy opened in early 1751 with three instructors responsible for “schools” in Latin and Greek, mathematical subjects, and English. It was described by contemporaries as a “collection of schools.”25
From the outset, the trustees envisioned a higher institution, but the path to creating a college had to be trod carefully.26 When Thomas Penn received Franklin’s Proposal, he initially found it too ambitious, likely to “prevent … application to business,” where only a “good common School education” was needed. But Penn needed supporters on the ground in his struggles with the Quaker-dominated Assembly, and the trustees were his natural allies, soon to be known as the Proprietary Party. He consecrated their work in 1753 by issuing a charter for the Academy, including a Charity School. By then, Francis Alison had been hired and was already teaching collegiate subjects in the “philosophical school.” At this juncture, the Philadelphia project intersected with coeval efforts in New York in the person of William Smith.
A product of Aberdeen University, Smith came to New York in 1751 as a tutor. He quickly inserted himself into the college controversy by publishing a pamphlet supporting the Trinity party, the faction most likely to advance his own situation. He then wrote a more ambitious piece, A General Idea of the College of Mirania (1753). The first American treatise on higher education, it described an educational system for mythical Mirania that embodied Enlightenment values still novel in America. Miranians divided the population into “two grand classes.” Those designed for the learned professions, including the “chief offices of the state,” received thorough training in Latin and some Greek to prepare them for college. The first 3 years of the College of Mirania provided extensive coverage of classical authors, mathematics, contemporary philosophy, and science. A final 2 years were devoted to applying this knowledge, first through polishing speaking and writing skills and finally by studying agriculture (applied science) and history (applied philosophy). All subjects were suffused with natural religion, which provided such a solid base that “revealed religion” in the form of “the general uncontroverted Principles of Christianity” was touched on only once a week on Sunday evenings. As for the rest of the Miranians, they were educated in a Mechanic’s School that is “much like the English School in Philadelphia, first sketched out by the very ingenious and worthy Mr. Franklin.”27 This volume so impressed Franklin and the trustees that Smith was recruited to teach in the philosophical school. But first, Smith returned to England to be ordained as an Anglican priest. His ordination appears to have been a reward for his efforts on behalf of King’s College rather than a reflection of his piety, but he also considered this status appropriate for leading a college. More important, Smith met with Thomas Penn and struck a deal: Penn would support Smith and the establishment of a college, and Smith would work as the Proprietor’s unofficial agent in Philadelphia. In May 1754, Smith was appointed provost; a year later a new charter established the “College, Academy, and Charitable School of Philadelphia, in the Province of Pennsylvania.” The founding of the college was an amicable, consensual affair, but Smith’s new role ensured that this would not be the case for long.
The College of Philadelphia was unique in having neither religious nor government ties. It was led by its assertive provost, who was a political rather than a theological Anglican. He was balanced by vice provost Francis Alison, a committed old-light Presbyterian who shared Smith’s disdain for religious enthusiasm. The college was open to all denominations, as promised in its charter. It considered itself a public institution, despite being governed by a self-perpetuating board of individuals who represented only themselves. Moreover, the trustees exerted tight control over the institution. They created no president, and they reserved to themselves all powers over admissions, appointments, and finance. In this respect, the college was dominated by a social elite as much as King’s, but only some of the outcomes were the same. The college was, by comparison, a thriving, multitiered institution. Around 1760, Smith reported 100 students altogether in the college and Latin and Greek schools, plus an additional 90 students studying English and mathematics in the academy. But like King’s, the college produced few graduates—just 154 from 1757 to the Revolution. More than one-third came from Philadelphia, and many of them were related to the trustees. But the college also drew Anglicans and Presbyterians from the hinterland and surrounding states. Some 20 percent of graduates became ministers, 14 Presbyterian versus 12 Anglican. Some sons of wealthy families attended for several years but felt no need to graduate before pursuing careers.28 Taken as a whole, including the charitable elementary schools for boys and girls, the institution provided substantial education for the region and especially the city, while also serving the purposes of its elite governors. No doubt it could have done more.
By the time the College of Philadelphia was chartered, William Smith had already plunged into provincial politics on behalf of his patron. In anonymous pamphlets, soon unmasked, he attacked the democratic nature of the assembly and advocated greater authority for the proprietor. This offensive included gratuitous slurs of Franklin, who was backing the other side. This struggle grew more acrimonious as additional issues accentuated the polarization. Most important here, Smith’s aggressive Anglican and proprietary positions gave the college a political coloration, which was confirmed when the trustees stood behind him. Franklin was eased out of the board presidency in 1756. He later complained, “Everything to be done in the Academy was privately preconcerted in a cabal…. The Trustees had reaped the full advantage of my head, hands, heart and purse … and when they thought they could do without me they laid me aside.”29 The bitterness of this conflict was exemplified in 1758, when the assembly had Smith jailed for alleged complicity in a libelous attack. The trustees authorized him to teach his students from his confinement, thus thumbing their noses at the assembly. Smith had to go to England to be absolved of the charges, where he was honored with doctorates from the universities of Oxford and Aberdeen. Smith apparently assumed, correctly, that he was protected in his aggressive behavior by the backing of the trustees and proprietor. But the college was not so fortunate. Both Alison and Franklin complained that Smith’s strident Anglicanism was the cause of low enrollments and dwindling participation in its lotteries. As Smith made himself “universally odious,” in Franklin’s words, he could scarcely help but make the college appear partisan.
The irony of this situation was that, aside from its political association, the College of Philadelphia had in Alison and Smith the strongest faculty of any colonial college, save Harvard. Both provost and vice provost were products of the Scottish Enlightenment and introduced the moral philosophy of Francis Hutcheson (discussed below). Smith was the most progressive college leader of the colonial era. His College of Mirania was informed by the midcentury curricular reforms at the University of Aberdeen. In a Postscript to the second edition (1762), he explained that the Mirania plan had been implemented at the College of Philadelphia. Only the first 3 years of the Miranian scheme were taught, but this streamlining of the college course was in itself a significant innovation.30 Smith personally focused on belles lettres and science. A poet himself, he stressed the importance of mastering composition and style in English; he also organized student plays, which were forbidden elsewhere, for public audiences. For science, he became a patron of the famous instrument maker David Rittenhouse and collaborated in gathering data from the celebrated 1769 transit of Venus. The printed course of study for the college was accompanied by a long list of “books recommended for improving the youth” during “private hours,” including “Spectator, Rambler, &c. for the improvement of style and knowledge of life.” Thus, the College of Philadelphia had the potential to provide intellectual leadership for the American colonies, a role that the College of New Jersey would belatedly fill. However, given the predominance of dissenters, few wished to follow a truculent, self-serving Anglican. The hollowness of Smith’s strategy would become apparent when the crisis with Britain arose.31
The founding of the three mid-Atlantic colleges established a pattern that had not been apparent before 1740, when just three dissimilar institutions existed. This pattern, though, did not consist of simple characteristics but rather of a series of appositions that reflected the tacit spread of Enlightenment thinking. First, either formally or in public opinion, they were considered public institutions, but they operated as if owned by particular groups. Ownership was vested in the external boards, or the faculty in the case of William & Mary; but although there could be differences of opinion among these owners, their collective authority was never shaken under colonial rule. Second, the general acceptance of Enlightenment notions of toleration coexisted with a distinct denominational commitment—“toleration with preferment” in the words of historian Jurgen Herbst.32 Thomas Clap’s atavistic resistance—and its ignominious failure—was the exception that proves this rule, as will be seen. Within the colleges, students largely managed to deal with whatever tensions might arise from differing creeds (at least post-Awakening), but contradictions were never entirely resolved among external constituencies, especially where Anglicans were involved. Finally, the spread of Enlightenment doctrines forced the colleges to assimilate the new knowledge into cultural and curricular templates that had been shaped by ancient Greece and Rome. Coming to terms with the American Enlightenment was the most dynamic influence shaping colonial colleges before the Revolution.
ENLIGHTENED COLLEGES
As provincial outposts of the British Empire, the American colonies were slow to appreciate the rich outpouring of ideas from eighteenth-century Britain. When these doctrines were assimilated with dissenting religious traditions, the resulting fusion of ideas has been called the Moderate Enlightenment.33 For new ideas to leap from the pages of books requires individuals to espouse them, a context in which they are meaningful, and institutions in which to embed them. For the colonial colleges, this process first needed the conviction that the new ideas should be taught, then the instructors, books, and materials to teach them. From the 1730s to the 1760s this process gradually accelerated, as trans-Atlantic communication, immigration, and domestic printing all increased. Spearheading this transformation and legitimating other forms of new knowledge was the Newtonian revolution in natural philosophy.
Incorporating Newtonian physics into American classrooms required three pedagogical advances. Explicating the Newtonian universe was perhaps the most basic. Next came the need to demonstrate physical principles through experiments performed with “philosophical apparatus.” Most challenging was to elevate the teaching of mathematics to conic sections and trigonometry and, ultimately, to calculus. The Hollis Professorship of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy created the first such opportunity. Harvard graduate Isaac Greenwood, who was instrumental in obtaining the Hollis gift, studied Newtonian science in London from 1724 to 1726. Upon returning to Boston, he privately offered “An Experimental Course of Mechanical Philosophy” that included “Three Hundred Curious and Useful Experiments” to acquaint his audience “with the Principles of Nature, and the Wonderful Discoveries of the Incomparable Sir Isaac Newton.”34 Greenwood was appointed to the Hollis chair immediately afterward and began teaching the same material to Harvard students (almost 40 years after Newton published the Principia). Essentially a talented popularizer, he presented a general account of Newton’s “Wonderful Discoveries” and employed the philosophical apparatus, also donated by the Hollis family, to demonstrate physical principles in experimental lectures. Telescopes that the college had acquired were employed to teach astronomy. Greenwood upgraded the teaching of mathematics and authored a basic textbook. Dismissed in 1738 for intemperance, he was replaced by John Winthrop, who held the Hollis chair until his death in 1779. Winthrop was easily Colonial America’s foremost professional scientist, continually engaged in observation and inquiry. He published papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and led an expedition to Nova Scotia to observe the 1761 transit of Venus. In the classroom he employed a growing trove of instruments in experimental demonstrations. With Winthrop, Harvard set a standard for teaching natural philosophy that other colleges could only hope to emulate.
Harvard accumulated, through donations from the Hollis family and others, an extensive collection of philosophical apparatus.35 These consisted of assorted balances, pulleys, and inclined planes to demonstrate mechanical principles; air pumps and vessels for creating vacuums; optical instruments to show Newton’s theories of light and colors; as well as microscopes, thermometers, and barometers. Winthrop demonstrated experiments with electricity in the 1740s, before Franklin popularized that subject. For the foremost Newtonian science, astronomy, Harvard acquired a collection of telescopes. Another Hollis gift supplied an orrery—a mechanical model of the solar system that showed the relative movements of the planets. When Harvard’s large collection was destroyed in the 1764 Harvard Hall fire, it was more than replaced by timely donations from 150 different individuals. By that date, the scientific demonstration lecture had become an expected part of the college course. Such apparatus was deemed essential by all the colonial colleges, and they devoted scarce resources to acquire them. However, teaching this subject now required special skills. Creating these positions and finding competent teachers proved more difficult.
At the College of Philadelphia, William Smith was proficient in mathematics and astronomy and later taught natural philosophy to medical students. He employed another math teacher as well. The first professor Samuel Johnson appointed to teach these subjects was a Winthrop student, but he died after 3 years, and his replacement proved inadequate.36 William Small, Jefferson’s mentor at William and Mary, provided scientific instruction for the few years he was present (1758–1762). Later, the college commissioned him to purchase $2,000 of the latest philosophical apparatus. These instruments were used by the future president, Reverend James Madison, a 1772 graduate who became professor of natural philosophy and mathematics in 1773. At Yale, President Clap was an enthusiastic astronomer. After his departure a professorship for natural philosophy was established in 1770, but the incumbents, when the position could be filled, were competent teachers at best. A chair of natural philosophy was a high priority for the College of New Jersey’s new president, John Witherspoon, which was filled in 1771. That same year, Witherspoon purchased the famous Rittenhouse orrery, originally intended for the College of Philadelphia, which then had to wait for a copy to be made. The significance and prestige of Newtonian science altered college teaching by introducing the experimental lecture employing apparatus, creating a demand for specialized professors and establishing the expectation that the curriculum should incorporate new knowledge.
The legacy of John Locke followed a more circuitous route into the curriculum of American colleges. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding was being read in the colleges by the 1730s, but the problem of reconciling his empiricist conception of knowledge with prevailing theology was largely ignored. In Scotland, however, moralists wrestled with the implications of Locke’s doctrines. The most influential interpretation was offered by Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), a Glasgow professor whose writings on moral philosophy became widely appreciated in the 1740s and 1750s. As a moderate Presbyterian, Hutcheson’s views were compatible with the dissenting American colleges. His moral philosophy epitomized the Moderate Enlightenment’s synthesis of reason and religion, which became the preferred approach in prerevolutionary colleges. Hutcheson posited that the human mind was not a Lockean tabula rasa but rather possessed an inherent moral sense, analogous to human physical senses like touch and smell. A moral sense that distinguished between right and wrong was compatible with revealed and natural religion, while also invoking reason to sharpen these distinctions, especially where the public good was concerned. For subsequent interpreters, this foundation for ethics was “common sense,” and that term came to represent this Scottish approach to moral philosophy that would later predominate in American colleges. For Presbyterians on both sides of the Atlantic, it provided a cogent marriage of reason and religion.
Hutcheson’s moral philosophy was first propounded in America by Francis Alison at the College of Philadelphia, who led students through a literal explication of his writings.37 Philadelphia students began moral philosophy in the middle of the second year and continued it into the first term of the third (final) year. In addition to basic ethical issues, Alison later included Hutcheson’s views on natural rights and social questions. Hutcheson drew upon the “Whig canon” in justifying natural rights, balanced government, and the right of resistance to tyranny; Alison, too, taught these doctrines in his classroom and later invoked them for the patriot cause. More influential in elevating moral philosophy to a central role in the curriculum and Republican ideology was John Witherspoon, the Scot who became president of the College of New Jersey in 1768. Witherspoon lectured the seniors on moral philosophy, thereby enshrining it as a “capstone” of the college course. He taught the basic doctrines of Hutcheson but was considerably more eclectic. He included recent enlightened thinkers, such as David Hume, if only to refute them; and he encouraged students to read current authors in the college library, often in the volumes that he had brought from Scotland. In Witherspoon’s worldview, moral philosophy was as much a part of nature as Newtonian science. He looked forward to “a time … when men, treating moral philosophy as Newton and his successors have done natural, may arrive at greater precision.”38 A historian of the American Enlightenment judged that Witherspoon’s “theology, philosophy, and politics were exactly appropriate to their time and place”; and his introduction of the Common Sense philosophy, in particular, was “the first promulgation of the principles that were to rule American college teaching for almost a century.”39
The origins of the political philosophy that underpinned the Revolution are more diffuse. Historian Bernard Bailyn has explained the intellectual roots of the American Revolution as the fusion in “the decade after 1763, [of] long popular, though hitherto inconclusive ideas about the world and America’s place in it … into a comprehensive view, unique in its moral and intellectual appeal.” Sometimes called the Whig canon, it conflated and drew what seemed relevant from three congeries of thought: first, notions of natural rights and social compact drawn from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political theorists; second, the concept of balanced government drawn from historical examples of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy; and third, belief in the inherent liberties of Englishmen and the English constitution, shaped by that nation’s tumultuous history. American colleges taught some of these constituent materials throughout the eighteenth century, added more enlightened authors by the 1760s, and allowed or encouraged students by the 1770s to explore this ideology on their own. Thus, while the colleges had little direct input to the Whig canon, they provided a milieu in which its multiple components could reinforce one another.40
Political theorists who rationalized theories of natural rights and the consent of the governed were read sparingly in the curriculum. Locke’s Two Treatises on Civil Government was not used before the prerevolutionary years and then was only recommended. The widest arrays of these writings were recommended at the colleges of New Jersey and Philadelphia. Witherspoon and Smith explicitly advocated outside reading as an essential component of education and provided lists of titles that students should peruse for their own “improvement.” In addition, Hutcheson’s Moral Philosophy reinforced the Whig canon where it was taught. Undoubtedly, political theory became more pertinent as the crisis with Britain deepened after 1765. In the readings pursued on their own, students often favored histories, including the English saga of opposition to government tyranny from the Commonwealth to the Glorious Revolution. At Harvard, where there is some documentation, students read a broad spectrum of modern histories. Typically for the period, such works were written from inherently moral perspectives.41 This was even truer of the Latin and Greek classics that had been the staple of the college curriculum since Henry Dunster.
A large part of this literature is concerned with political themes. The Greek states of the fifth century BCE, were preoccupied with wars and issues of governance; the most read Latin writers dated from the two centuries after 50 BCE that witnessed the fall of the Republic and the vicissitudes of early Empire. After 1750 college assignments included greater coverage of historical works that directly addressed such issues. Caesar’s Commentaries and the histories of Sallust and Tacitus were now added to Cicero’s political orations; in Greek, the historical writings of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plutarch were now read. These writings were filled with republicanism, civic morality, and observations on government, which became more relevant as the crisis deepened.42 College students in these years appeared to embrace classical studies enthusiastically, and this interest laid a foundation for the doctrine of republicanism that dominated the new nation from the time of the Revolution. Students in the enlightened colleges of the 1760s and 1770s found immediate relevance in the ancients even as they sought to assimilate the new learning of their own century.
The intellectual currents of the eighteenth century favored the increasing attraction of belles lettres in prerevolutionary colleges. The term encompasses work in the English language—literature as well as the perfecting of writing and speaking that was also called rhetoric. Literature included imaginative writings, particularly drama, history, and essays. Especially popular were the writings of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in The Spectator, a short-lived literary journal (1711–1714) that was widely reprinted. The Spectator was admired for its literary style, for popularizing basic Enlightenment ideas, and for applying them to everyday life. William Smith reflected this perfectly when he recommended students read it for self-improvement. Smith was an early advocate of belles lettres, making command of the English language a goal of both the College of Mirania and the College of Philadelphia. Belles lettres thus connoted both the cultivation of useful skills, particularly public speaking, and assimilation of the sophisticated culture of the mother country. These objectives were so attractive to students that they pursued them independently through the organization of literary societies (discussed below). Harvard students showed increasing interest in plays, poems, and novels, and they organized a drama club in 1758. The restocked Harvard library after the Harvard Hall fire contained ample works of contemporary literature, and in 1771 Harvard created a chair in rhetoric and oratory.43
Yale students were late in manifesting an interest in politics but took a lively interest in belles lettres. These interests were encouraged by two tutors, future president Timothy Dwight (Y. 1769) and the poet John Trumbull (Y. 1767). They challenged the prevailing view that “English poetry and the belles-lettres were … folly, nonsense and an idle waste of time.” Students responded by petitioning the Yale Corporation to allow Dwight to offer special instruction in rhetoric and belles lettres.44 Trumbull produced a remarkable satire of the traditional Yale student, “The Progress of Dulness or the Rare Adventures of Tom Brainless.” The protagonist is a country boy prepared and sent to college by his parents. Incapable of benefiting from the experience, he
Read ancient authors o’er in vain,
Nor taste one beauty they contain.
Four years at college doz’d away
In sleep, and slothfulness and play.
Tom graduates despite these failings and, unfitted for anything else, becomes a teacher:
He tries, with ease and unconcern,
To teach what ne’er himself could learn.
Tom’s natural progression is to become a soporific country preacher, who
On Sunday, in his best array,
Deals forth the dullness of the day.45
Trumbull’s mockery of what had hitherto been the modal Yale student reveals how Enlightenment culture had displaced orthodox Calvinism in the late-colonial colleges.
I see
Freedom’s established reign; cities, and men,
Numerous as sands upon the ocean shore,
And empires rising where the sun descends!——
The Ohio soon shall glide by many a town
Of note; and where the Mississippi stream
By forests shaded, now runs weeping on,
Nations shall grow, and states not less in fame
Than Greece and Rome of old!
Originally justified to polish the speaking skills of ministers and statesmen, belles lettres transcended that role, capturing the imagination and enthusiasm of collegians to craft their own indigenous literature.46
★ ★ ★
Finally, medical education provides an entirely different example of the impact of trans-Atlantic learning on American colleges. Interest in establishing medical schools arose among physicians in New York and Philadelphia in the 1760s. In both cases, impetus came from recent medical graduates of Edinburgh University. The medical school in Edinburgh had been organized only in 1726, but it quickly became renowned for its excellent instruction and the favored locus for American students. Few university-trained MDs practiced in colonial North America, and almost all were located in the largest cities. They competed there against practitioners with various levels of training and even more varied approaches to healing. University-educated MDs possessed higher status and wealthier patients—as well as an inflated confidence in their own medical acumen.47 Thus, young men with European training seized the initiative to upgrade medical instruction in American cities.
William Shippen Jr. and John Morgan were sons of elite Philadelphia families who took MDs at Edinburgh in 1762 and 1763, respectively. Shippen returned to Philadelphia and began offering private lectures in anatomy. Morgan capped his education with a grand tour of the Continent, where he discussed medicine with famous physicians and had audiences with both the Pope and Voltaire! He returned to Philadelphia with a detailed plan to establish medical education in conjunction with his alma mater, the College of Philadelphia. Morgan’s social standing eased acceptance of his plan. He brought letters of support from Franklin, Thomas Penn, and several college trustees. In 1765 he was appointed Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physick. Shortly thereafter, Shippen was given a similar appointment in Anatomy and Surgery. Other appointments followed of physicians with similar backgrounds, including Edinburgh graduate Benjamin Rush, who later became the most authoritative figure in early American medicine. By 1769 a full medical faculty of five was offering courses—all Edinburgh graduates. Nor was the medical school a financial burden to the college; the professors’ only compensation came from student fees.48
The announcement of the medical appointments in Philadelphia galvanized a group of university-trained physicians in New York to follow this “laudable Example.” They included both newly minted and established MDs. In 1767 their proposal to establish six chairs in a medical school was accepted by the King’s College trustees. These professorships—anatomy, surgery, theory and practice of medicine, chemistry, materia medica (or pharmacy), and obstetrics—paralleled the course at Edinburgh and (its model) the University of Leyden.49 At both King’s and Philadelphia, the new professors had an elevated conception of their mission and, as a result, made degrees difficult to obtain. The first degree was a bachelor of medicine, which required a complete course of lectures, general examination, knowledge of Latin and natural philosophy, and apprenticeship—in at least 3 years. The MD required another round of courses and examinations, plus publication and public defense of a “treatise.” Ten or twelve students earned BM degrees from King’s and two of them proceeded to an MD; at Philadelphia, thirty-one students took the first degree and five, the second. At King’s the vitality of the medical school waned after the first few classes, but attendance at Philadelphia topped thirty students before the Revolution forced a suspension of classes.50
Physicians in the eighteenth century “became stratified primarily by the amount and nature of education” they received; however, patients “rarely benefited … in proportion to the amount of training of the physician.”51 In fact, medical science made little progress during the Age of Enlightenment. Physicians, whether practitioners or professors, made diagnoses on the basis of superficial symptoms, like fever, and were hopelessly muddled regarding causation and cures. These failures, and fanciful theories of disease, made it difficult for physicians to learn from their own cases. The single area in which education and training might improve results was surgery, which was still severely constrained by ignorance of infection and anesthesia. Under these conditions, perhaps it is understandable that neophyte, European-trained doctors were overconfident about the efficacy of medical arts. This was the case with John Morgan and especially Benjamin Rush, a zealous “bleeder” who obstinately defended his convictions and was continually engaged in controversy. But the desire to introduce the “unequalled Lustre” of European medical education no doubt increased enthusiasm for medical schools. Sincerely trusting in their own knowledge, they hoped to raise the standard of medical practice and their own standing as well. Rush noted that his professorial appointment in 1769 “made my name familiar to the public ear … [and] was likewise an immediate source of some revenue.”52 Beyond serving their professors, the schools met with limited success. They raised the bar too high for new MDs and thus constrained access to what little knowledge the professors could offer. And the public never shared their own confidence in their art. Consequently, control over medical licensing was generally withheld from educated doctors. This tension between medical schools, the wider medical profession, and the licensing of doctors would bedevil the field for another century.
COLLEGE ENTHUSIASM, 1760–1775
When Reverend Ezra Stiles, future president of Yale, learned of the chartering of Dartmouth College, he noted that three more colleges were in the planning stage in Georgia, South Carolina, and his own city of Newport, Rhode Island: “College Enthusiasm!” he wrote in his diary.53 Stiles was reacting to a growing public interest in colleges, particularly in places where they were lacking. This same concern had already brought existing colonial colleges under increased public scrutiny. Internal and external pressures were pushing them toward reform and modernization. The spread of Enlightenment thinking was only part of the changing environment. Expectations of religious toleration were now paramount among these church-linked institutions. More immediate, the colonial elites that composed their governing bodies were sensitive to changing conditions in colonial society. In the 15 years before the Revolution, the first six colonial colleges were prodded to adapt to rapidly changing conditions, while “college enthusiasm” produced three additional institutions. The waning of the old order was most vigorously resisted at Yale.
Thomas Clap had spent much of the 1740s opposing the New Lights of the Awakening, but in the 1750s his regime was challenged from the opposite direction—by the spreading acceptance of Enlightenment views.54 Clap upheld contrary convictions: he rejected religious toleration within the college, censored library holdings, and argued that colleges are primarily for training ministers. This fundamental divergence lay at the heart of the Yale controversy, but it was grounded in the fractured religious polity of Connecticut and further confounded by the issue of the colonial government’s authority over the college. The Old Lights, who remained a powerful force in Connecticut politics, represented the moderate wing of the Congregational churches, increasingly open to toleration and reason; and these views were further supported by a growing Anglican presence. Clap soon rejected his former allies and embraced the New Lights. But they, too, had changed and were now led by New Divinity preachers—college-educated zealots inspired by Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Hopkins. The New Divinity energized Yale’s dwindling number of ministerial candidates. However, their approach proved too extreme—and esoteric—for most congregations. So here, too, Yale’s sectarian emphasis was out of tune with much of Connecticut society.55
The campaign against Clap began in earnest in 1755 with the publication of a critical pamphlet. The not very anonymous author was Benjamin Gale (Y. 1733), a prominent physician and scientist, member of the Assembly, and staunch secularist. He was closely associated with his father-in-law, Reverend Jared Eliot, the foremost critic of Clap on the Yale Corporation.56 Gale’s pamphlet first addressed Yale’s finances, showing that the college had no need of the annual £100 subsidy it received from the colony. He then attacked Clap’s attempts to force students to attend church services within the college and the proposed appointment of a professor of divinity—steps he called establishing an “Ecclesiastical Society.” Gale found no justification in the statutes for a college church. Yale College was established by the Assembly as a secular institution for the instruction of youth, “either in Divinity, Law, Physick, or some other Profession.” The Assembly, furthermore, was the “Overseer” responsible for the college. Gale’s argument echoed Livingston’s campaign for “public” governance of King’s College, but in this case Clap was actually instituting the kind of denominational hegemony that Livingston had hypothetically imagined. The political question was whether or not the Assembly, as Overseers, would appoint a committee of visitation that would almost certainly undo Clap’s policies.
In the event, the Assembly withdrew Yale’s annual grant but went no further. Clap then proceeded to fulfill his plan. He raised funds for a professorship of divinity and brought in Naphtali Daggett (Y. 1748), who was duly installed after a trial period and intensive interrogation (1756). Despite Yale’s limited faculty, Dagget’s job was to preach, not teach. Yale still had no professors to assist the president in teaching substantive subjects. Clap also succeeded in creating a separate church within the college, over the opposition of Jared Eliot and several other trustees. The president had now alienated his former supporters and at this point turned to the New Light/New Divinity Party for support. He had succeeded in establishing a sectarian college but one that represented only a minority of Connecticut Christians. More ominous, opposition to Clap and his rule, led by Gale, continued to build throughout the province.
Despite the hyperbole over religious intolerance, students seemed little affected. If anything, their behavior reflected the sinking reputation of the president. College discipline degenerated in rising absenteeism, wanton vandalism, and open defiance of Clap. Despite repeated requests to intervene, the Assembly was reluctant—either to confront Clap or become embroiled in religious controversy or both. Finally, in 1763, a petition from leading citizens could not be ignored: It complained of the “arbitrariness and autocracy of the President, the multiplicity and injustice of the laws … and the unrest of the students”; and it requested that the Assembly review the college laws and send a visitation committee.57 Both sides were invited to state their cases to the Assembly. Before a hall packed with spectators, Clap presented a masterful defense. Whereas his opponents assumed that the Assembly was the legal founder of the college and thus its rightful overseer, Clap provided an alternative history: the school was begun a year before the 1701 charter by a meeting of Connecticut ministers, who pledged their own books to found the college. This story was elaborated with legal citations to form an apparently convincing case. Clap further alleged that the charges of the petitioners and the (supposedly exaggerated) disorders in the college were instigated by his long-standing enemies. When the new-light-leaning Assembly declined to intervene, Clap emerged triumphant. Moreover, his dubious account of Yale’s founding was long held to establish the private nature of the college.58 But none of this lessened his problems in New Haven.
Disorder in the college continued to escalate, finally reaching open rebellion.59 In 1766 nearly all the students signed a petition of grievances to the corporation. When the corporation declined to act, they boycotted classes and became violent. The tutors were forced not only to resign but to flee New Haven. The corporation declared an early spring vacation, but when the college reopened (with no tutors), few students returned. Faced with the ruin of the college, Clap had no choice but to resign. The rest of the school year was effectively canceled, and Clap presided over a subdued commencement as his last act. Perhaps the most consequential student rebellion before the 1960s, student resistance had succeeded where Clap’s many enemies had failed. But compared with the growing vitality of other colonial colleges, Yale for long was unable to keep pace.
Unable to find a suitable replacement who would accept the position, the corporation named Daggett acting president. The scholarly Daggett had aptitude neither for administration nor for governing students, and the Corporation signaled their lack of confidence in him by closely managing college affairs, choosing the tutors, for example. Daggett, unlike his predecessor, made few enemies, and the college slowly recovered. But he had previously taught only divinity, and even as the college’s sole professor did not lecture to students. Not until 1770 was an undistinguished professor of math and natural philosophy appointed to cover Clap’s subjects. The college did manage to appoint effective tutors in these years (Dwight and Trumbull), who seem to have carried the instructional load. Nonetheless, the college benefited from a geographical monopoly.60 Throughout the turmoil of the Clap years, it enrolled around 170 students. Attendance fell to almost half that number during and after the collapse but gradually rose to the previous level by the Revolution. By then, students were expecting more from their education (see below). Confronted with increasing student disorder, Daggett resigned the presidency in 1777, although not his professorship. Yale was the second largest colonial college, at times exceeding Harvard in enrollment (table 1), and was reasonably well furnished; but at best Yale offered perfunctory pedagogy and contributed nothing to learning.
Harvard prospered under the placid presidency of Edward Holyoke (1737–1769) from before the Awakening until the pre-Revolution turmoil. Ezra Stiles, who rated all the college presidents he had known, described Holyoke as having “a noble commanding presence … [and] great Dignity”; “Yet not of great erudition.” Holyoke’s own judgment on his career was more negative: “if any man wishes to be humbled and mortified, let him become President of Harvard College.”61 He never explained if this statement reflected his treatment by students or Overseers, but the progressive changes in the college during his tenure largely originated with the latter.
Harvard still retained much of the arts course of a Puritan college when Holyoke assumed the presidency, but it also had unique strengths. The two Hollis professorships ensured that college teaching would reflect up-to-date scientific knowledge and moderate interpretations of religious doctrines. A large and inventive student body found ways to pursue their intellectual interests, as will be seen in the next section. And the Board of Overseers by the 1750s contained “unusually intelligent and cultivated gentlemen” who were sensitive to educational trends. Still, a later president observed that the college adjusted “tardily” to the “impulses given to science and literature in England, during the reign of Queen Anne”; and “it was not until after the middle of the eighteenth century, that effectual improvements were introduced.”62 Beginning in 1754 the Overseers voiced concern for student attainments in oratory and classical learning. In a series of steps that were often resisted in the college, they established public exhibitions of forensic disputations—the kind of public speaking valued by gentlemen like themselves, and by students too. New prizes were awarded based on merit. It took until 1766 for these practices to become the law of the college, but then created an eighteenth-century version of accountability.63 In the meantime, the Overseers began to reorganize instruction.
In a prescient move, the Overseers resolved around 1760 to create more professorships for the college by finding donors of endowments. They obtained six such pledges, all in wills. Only one was realized immediately, the Thomas Hancock Professorship of Hebrew and Oriental Languages. It was awarded in 1765 to Thomas Sewell, an accomplished linguist and instructor in Hebrew, who was rewarded for proposing a plan to upgrade the teaching of classical languages. A second appointment that year installed Edward Wigglesworth Jr. to succeed his father as Hollis professor of divinity. He was a biblical scholar but, unlike his father, not an ordained minister. He also broke precedent by being eager to teach in the college. At this same time, the Overseers decided that “tutors should function differently than they do now.” A reorganization the following year assigned each tutor to teach a single subject to each class, rather than teaching all subjects to a single class. The four tutors were made responsible for Latin, Greek, philosophy (logic, ethics, metaphysics), and science (math, astronomy, natural philosophy). Each also served like a homeroom teacher, providing instruction to a single class in English language skills (elocution, rhetoric, and composition). With these reforms Harvard formalized a faculty that distinguished between introductory and advanced instruction—a structure that could accommodate both basic instruction and some advanced learning.64
★ ★ ★
The three Anglican colleges all had direct or indirect ties with England, although these relationships differed from New York to Philadelphia to Virginia. These colleges also wrestled with issues of curriculum and institutional control. Despite the difficulties in relations with England in the wake of the Stamp Act crisis, Anglicans aggressively upheld the interests of their colleges. Their confidence stemmed from a superficial perception of growing strength.65 Culturally, as the upper classes of colonial cities increased in wealth and sophistication, they became more Anglicized in material goods, social conventions, intellectual culture, and church membership. Politically, the notion of a cosmopolitan British Empire was more appealing than parochial colonial assemblies. And although the Anglican Church in America was relatively weak and fragmented, its leaders usually occupied the heights of the colonial social hierarchy. They believed the Church of England deserved a privileged position in British Imperial society, and for them the colleges were strategic institutions.
At Philadelphia, Provost William Smith fully shared the outlook of the mostly Anglican Trustees, whose interests were aligned with those of Proprietor Thomas Penn. The college was officially nonsectarian and included old light Presbyterians among both faculty and trustees. The issue of religious balance was nonetheless delicate. When concerns were raised about Anglican domination in 1764, the trustees issued a declaration that the existing denominational representation in the college would be permanent. This step assured Anglican advantage but not for proselytizing. Smith was a virtual Deist, who dismissed theological doctrines as “Rubbish.” Philadelphia was by far the most enlightened college, and that in itself may have lured students toward the lenient tenets of the Anglican Church.66
By the end of the 1760s William Smith was at the pinnacle of his social and intellectual eminence in America’s largest and wealthiest city. He was the leading figure in the Anglican Church and the College, an author, scientist, and office-holder in numerous organizations. Typically, he staged public student dramatic presentations—the first being Alfred, A Masque, a glorification of Alfred the Great that concluded with the singing of Rule Britannia. When the American Philosophical Society was resuscitated in 1768, Smith became its permanent secretary. Although he could not match the social and financial status of the proprietary gentry, he was part of the same social circles, and so was the college. Besides attracting the sons of the non-Quaker gentry, the college drew students from large landholders in Maryland and the South. Compared with other colleges, its students paid high fees, had a low rate of graduation, and were notably youthful. Wealthy parents tended to provide thorough and early educational preparation, creating the ironic situation that one of the youngest bodies of students was taught the most advanced curriculum. Graduation was not a high priority for students whose careers would be determined by families, not credentials. The college was financed primarily through fund-raising—another art that William Smith mastered. Both the College of Philadelphia and its Provost were ideally adapted to the Anglophile social and cultural milieu that would soon be challenged by the Revolution.67
The governors of King’s College were less content with their learned president. Nor was Samuel Johnson happy with his position. He endured the deaths of two wives, a son, and a beloved son-in-law during his presidency (1754–1763), and he fled the city for lengthy periods during smallpox outbreaks. Between these absences and an unavoidable turnover in teachers, the college fell, in Johnson’s own words, “much into disrepute.” King’s never had more than 30 students during Johnson’s tenure, leading one trustee to ask, “what need of so many tutors for so few scholars?” By 1760, the governors became more assertive and also began looking for a successor. Tellingly, they appealed to the Archbishop of Canterbury to locate a fitting Oxonian. He recommended Myles Cooper, a 25-year-old graduate of Queen’s College, Oxford, who arrived in 1762. The governors somewhat rudely hastened Johnson’s departure, and Cooper became president the next year.68
The nature of the presidential transition signaled the governors’ ascendancy over the college, and the young Cooper readily conformed to their wishes. The school’s historian characterized him as “first and last that stock character of eighteenth-century English public life, a placeman.” A bon vivant, he fit easily into the New York social milieu, and it was soon said, “Cooper … knows everybody, and everything that passes here.” His distinctive contribution to the college was to make it more English, after the model of his alma mater.69 The college course was shifted significantly toward that of Queen’s College, Oxford. The reading of classical authors in Latin and Greek became the chief emphasis. In philosophy, the focus was logic, metaphysics, and Aristotle—subjects considered outdated by other colleges. In another striking departure, math and natural philosophy were deemphasized to the point of neglect. The contrast to the College of Philadelphia could not have been starker. Cooper also emphasized the collegiate way of living. Although now an American tradition, he gave it an Oxonian twist. Students were required to live in the college, wear gowns, and conform to a much stricter disciplinary regime. He walled in the college grounds and hired a porter to keep the students inside. Cooper boasted (wishfully) that discipline, which had previously been “one heavy Accusation exhibited against us,” was now unsurpassed in any other college. These measures did nothing to raise the popularity of the college. Enrollments averaged just 25 students through the 1760s, and the new grammar school, which was badly needed to improve student preparation, likewise attracted few students.70
By 1770 prospects for King’s College began to brighten. Enrollments increased moderately to around 40, but the college was now wealthy as a result of funds raised in the previous decade. And the launch of the medical department was an added boost to prestige. The governors and their president might have been apprehensive about the deteriorating relations between Britain and America; however, their reaction was just the opposite. Buoyed by the Anglican ideology, they sought a larger role by expanding King’s College into a university. Once again the model was Oxford—a university structure that encompassed constituent colleges. They deluded themselves into thinking that a royal charter for such an institution would cement “the Union between Great Britain and the Colonies … diffuse a Spirit of Loyalty … [and] maintain and extend the Discipline and Doctrine” of the Church of England. Specifically, they hoped to obtain a royal gift of regius professorships, two representatives in the colonial assembly (like Oxford’s seats in Parliament), and future control over any additional colleges in New York. In 1771 Cooper departed for London to sell this plan. Although the idea found some support, he brought no charter document to be approved. When he returned the next year, the governors appointed a committee to draft a charter for “the American University in the Province of New York.” After 2 years, a long and complex charter proposed a King’s College writ large. That is, the governing structure of the university would ensure the authority of Myles Cooper and the existing governors over the university and future colleges. They were still endeavoring to implement this plan in 1775 when Cooper, an outspoken loyalist, was run out of New York City by a patriot mob.71
The politics of higher education were entirely different in Virginia, where the president and faculty of William & Mary were Anglican clergy and the lay Visitors represented the province’s governing elite. The faculty routinely intervened in local politics on behalf of the clergy, and the Visitors were perpetually frustrated by their inability to affect the affairs of the college. Educational issues were often submerged under these conflicts and the personal animosities they generated. In 1763 the Visitors attempted to revise the statutes to secure far-reaching control over the faculty, who naturally resisted. This battle raged for the remainder of the decade until the intervention of the Bishop of London, and perhaps exhaustion, brought some peace but little change. Then, the atmosphere in Virginia began to improve.72
The elevation of the level of scholarship in the college received little recognition. Rather, a crescendo of criticism and calls for reform ensued. There were three obvious targets. First, for good reason, critics wished to abolish the grammar school. It was an anomalous legacy of the original charter that mixed college students with children and caused unending problems with lodging and discipline. However, it was also the mainstay of the institution’s enrollments. Second, William & Mary had an unstructured plan of studies; students were not grouped in classes or examined on their progress, so that few completed studies and took degrees. As an alternative model, critics looked to the now esteemed College of New Jersey, which offered shorter, cheaper, and better education. The faculty countered that their plan followed the superior practices of Oxford and Cambridge. But in 1775 Samuel Stanhope Smith opened Hampton-Sidney, a Presbyterian Academy, bringing the New Jersey model closer to home. Third, many critics called for more practical forms of education. The faculty responded with a self-righteous defense of classical, liberal education. But almost all laymen perceived a need for some provision for medical and legal training. These were issues that colonial William & Mary was incapable of addressing. However, the academic vitality of the early 1770s and the wider appreciation of educational developments elsewhere set the stage for significant change after the Loyalist faculty departed.73
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The last three colonial colleges to be founded were barely launched before the Revolution. Rhode Island College commenced teaching in the president’s parsonage in 1766 and found a permanent home 4 years later. Queen’s College purchased a tavern in which to begin instruction in 1772, with just one tutor and no president. Dartmouth College, the last to be chartered (1769), imported its initial students from Connecticut to a clearing in the wilderness in 1770. The first two of these colleges fulfilled the educational aspirations of denominational communities, while Dartmouth resulted from a unique conjuncture of individual enterprise and government sponsorship.74
Reverberations from the foundings of New Jersey and King’s colleges affected other denominations. New Lights of the Dutch Reformed church were enraged when their old-light brethren allied with Anglicans at King’s College in 1755. Their leader, Theodore Frelinghuysen, declared, “let everyone provide for his own house” and called for the establishment of a college that would also prepare young men for “the sacred ministerial office in the Church of God.” This faction of the Dutch church persisted doggedly until that goal was realized.75 Baptists constituted a far larger population that included many former Congregational New Lights, but they had little internal organization. Moreover, they had little use for colleges, preferring ministers with an inner calling to those with formal education. No Baptist had graduated from a colonial college since 1734. But attitudes began to change among at least a few. The Philadelphia Baptist Association established an academy in New Jersey in 1756 and soon looked to establish a college. It found a possible leader when a product of its academy, James Manning, graduated from Nassau Hall in 1762.76
Rhode Island was the obvious locus for a Baptist college. The province was known for religious toleration, and Baptists were the largest denomination by far; however, the principal city of Newport was a cosmopolitan seaport where Congregationalists and Anglicans predominated. Baptist churches had grown throughout the region with the conversion of schismatic New Light congregations, but they endured discrimination from the Congregational Standing Order in Massachusetts and Connecticut. In 1763 the Philadelphia Baptists sent Manning to Newport to explore the possibilities of establishing a college. He met there with Ezra Stiles, the learned minister of the Second Congregational Church, whose own aspiration was to promote greater unity among the Calvinist-Reformed churches. The two men agreed that Stiles would write a charter for a college jointly operated by Baptists and Congregationalists. The resulting document proposed two tiers of governance: trustees with a majority of Baptists would elect the president, and fellows with a majority of Congregationalists would provide academic governance. Although the draft gave Baptists majority control and veto powers, they balked at the large role reserved for Congregationalists. The Rhode Island Assembly modified the charter to ensure larger Baptist majorities and then passed what was otherwise a liberal charter (1764). Toleration was fine, but ultimately the Baptists wanted control of their own college.
James Manning assumed a pulpit in Warren, Rhode Island, and opened Rhode Island College there in 1766. Three years later the college graduated seven students. At this point a decision had to be made on a permanent home, and the issue of control surfaced again. The two contenders were Newport and Providence. In Newport Baptists would be faced with the cultural hegemony of educated and genteel Congregationalists and Anglicans, while Providence was more comfortably Baptist. Wealthy Newport made the most lucrative offer, but the Providence bid was then made competitive by the exertions of local boosters—the Browns, a family of wealthy merchants. Once again, Baptist control took precedence over all other considerations. Stiles condemned it as a “Party college,” a grave insult among the enlightened, and made a futile effort to found a second college in Newport. The Browns stood by their commitment, and by 1772 a large college edifice was completed, modeled after Nassau Hall. But by 1775 the college enrolled just 41 students, a minority of them from Rhode Island.77 The Baptists now owned a college, even though they had little use for one.
The same determination to have its own college energized the new-light wing of the Dutch Reformed Church. A smaller ethnic community, for whom Dutch was the first language, it had been irretrievably split by the Awakening. As with the Anglican Church, the governing body of the Dutch Reformed Church was across the Atlantic. While the Old Lights remained under its authority, the New Lights had formed a confederation and begun to ordain their own ministers. This “American party” sought to dispense with the Dutch language and establish a college specifically to educate ministers. In 1759 Frelinghuysen took their case to the governing body in Amsterdam, only to be denied (and lose his life in a shipwreck on the return voyage). With both the mother church and New York Old Lights opposing them, they petitioned the governor of New Jersey. At first they were rebuffed, but in 1766 Governor William Franklin (Ben’s son) approved a charter. All trace of this document has been lost, and it was never actually enacted. Meanwhile, the Dutch church sought to divert the project by proposing an alliance with the College of New Jersey. The evangelicals stood their ground, and in 1770 Governor Franklin issued a new charter similar to that of the College of New Jersey.
Queen’s College was organized the following year. Instruction was consigned to a single tutor, Frederick Frelinghuysen, nephew of Theodore and stepson of Reverend Jacob Rutsen Hardenbergh, a trustee and later acting president who had not attended college himself. Frelinghuysen, a 1770 graduate of the College of New Jersey, was soon attracted to the law. He was replaced by his classmate, John Taylor, a Presbyterian, who remained the instructor for most of the next two decades. Prospects were dimmed when the two factions of the Dutch church managed to reconcile, but they then chose to support a professor of divinity in New York City instead of the fledgling college. On this tenuous base, the college persisted until disrupted by the Revolution. It graduated its first student in 1774 and four more the following year. It would graduate 35 more students before tutor Taylor resigned in 1790, some 15 of these graduates becoming ministers. Queen’s College was a premonition of things to come in American higher education. Erected by a denominational faction to meet its own needs, it long lacked the population and resource base to offer more than a rudimentary college course and was unable to do even that for years at a time.
Dartmouth College founder, Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, was a man of pious, single-minded zeal. A 1733 graduate of Yale, the Awakening transformed him into an ardent itinerant preacher. When he returned to his parish in Lebanon, Connecticut, he discovered a second transcendent cause—educating and Christianizing Native Americans. He had been approached by a Christian Mohegan, Samson Occom, who sought a classical education and proved to be an adept student. Wheelock subsequently organized Moor’s Charity School in 1754 to educate Native American youth, with hope of training teachers and missionaries. Wheelock’s intentions would today be labeled cultural imperialism, predicated on a typically deprecating view of Native American peoples and cultures; but few contemporaries possessed as genuine a concern for their welfare.78
The path from Moor’s Charity School to a college in Hanover, New Hampshire, had numerous subplots, but three developments proved key.79 First, Wheelock’s endeavors depended on philanthropy from the first gift from Joshua Moor. In 1765 Samson Occom, now an inspiring pulpit orator, embarked on a fund-raising trip to England that proved hugely successful. Some £12,000 were raised for Indian education and confided to a trust presided over by the Earl of Dartmouth. Second, Wheelock had become discouraged by the inherent frustrations of educating Native Americans.80 He resolved to relocate nearer the frontier and educate white missionaries as well, which meant founding a college. The prize of an established school with a huge endowment elicited numerous offers, but here the third development was decisive—the intervention of New Hampshire Royal Governor John Wentworth. In protracted negotiation, both men tacitly favored establishment of a college—Wheelock to educate minister-missionaries and Wentworth to secure a college for the province. In 1769 they agreed upon a large grant of land on the upper Connecticut River, a territory opened for settlement only 5 years before by the defeat of the French—and a charter for Dartmouth College. The charter provoked an outcry from the benefactors of the Indian school, including the English trustees and Samson Occom. The former were indispensable, and Wheelock assuaged their concerns by assuring that Moor’s Charity School would use the trust funds to educate Indian youth and future missionaries separate from the new college. With legal details settled in the late summer of 1770, Wheelock embarked on the Herculean task of building a college and a community in the primeval forests at Hanover.
Wheelock brought a few students with him from Connecticut in 1770. The next year, he staged a commencement ceremony in the primitive structures that had been built, entertaining Governor Wentworth and an entourage of gentlemen. The four graduates, including Wheelock’s son John, all had transferred from Yale. Despite its remoteness, Dartmouth attracted increasing numbers of students. Many came from Connecticut, either from sympathy with Wheelock’s evangelicalism or disapproval of Yale. Students also came for a free education. Charity students pledged a bond for the value of their education to guarantee that they would become missionaries. In 1772 twenty-four students were enrolled in the college, with seventeen below college level, including six Indians. The Indians and twenty of the English students were on charity. Pre-Revolutionary Dartmouth had by far the highest proportion of ministerial graduates (74 percent), but few of the commitments to become missionaries were honored. Most charity graduates preferred pulpits in the multiplying settlements of the Connecticut Valley, and Wheelock recovered almost nothing from their bonds.
And what of the Indians? Wheelock was accused by contemporaries and historians of duplicity in leveraging donations for Indian education into a personal collegiate fiefdom.81 More likely his motives were mixed. Wheelock was a zealot whose mission to the Indians remained constant through these years, yet the objective of a college for white students had become uppermost in his plans. Dartmouth College thus emerged as the dominant offshoot. Financially, although he had pledged to spend the English trust funds on Indian education, the funds seem to have been largely consumed in clearing land and erecting buildings and were exhausted by 1774. These expenditures for founding the settlement were parceled between Dartmouth, Moor’s, and, for that matter, Wheelock’s personal accounts. Little of this enterprise benefited Indians, to be sure, but circumstances played a large role. Wheelock was effectively excluded from the more placid Indian tribes of New York and Pennsylvania and eventually found recruits to the North among Canadian tribes. Between fifteen and twenty were in attendance before 1776, and three Indian students graduated from the college (1777–1781). Wheelock’s loyal early graduates did undertake missionary work for a time. But all these activities became more difficult to support after the charitable funds were exhausted. Inevitably, he experienced the same frustrations as in Connecticut. Still, until his death in 1779, the Indian mission was kept alive. Afterward, occasional Indian students continued to be educated at Moor’s School until the 1850s, supported by a Scotch charity, but few advanced to Dartmouth College.82
These three colleges have several traits in common. All were inspired by New Light, or Calvinist, beliefs; all the founders sought control of their colleges above all else; and all subordinated learning, particularly the new learning, to perfunctory replication of traditional curricula. These founders were no doubt correct in fearing that mixing with more learned and sophisticated groups would submerge their own particularistic goals. But Rhode Island Baptists also rejected emerging academic standards when they excluded Congregationalists. Wheelock, too, had to defend his control by deflecting attempts by Governor Wentworth to attach Anglicans to Dartmouth. In fact, academically the new colleges were distinctly inferior to their established peers. Here the opinion of Ezra Stiles is probably more accurate than accounts of later college historians. He found it “singlular” that Wheelock rose “to the figure he did, with such a small literary Furniture.” He noted that Manning was made president only 2 years out of college, “not … for his Literature, but because he was a Baptist”; and that he had “a superficial general Knowledge of the Languages & Sciences,” besides being “very biggotted.”83 Manning’s assistant followed his same educational track and was appointed “professor of natural philosophy” with no apparent qualifications 3 years after graduating (CNJ. 1766). Wheelock enlisted charity students as tutors, including his son John, as soon as they graduated, and they later became the college’s first professors. Wheelock, in fact, evinced no interest in curriculum and largely reproduced the college course he had known at Yale in the 1730s.84 Rhode Island was no better. At Queen’s the entire course was confided to a single tutor, and no college graduate could be found to serve as president. Despite the advances in learning incorporated elsewhere, a minimal study of classical languages, English, philosophy, and a smattering of mathematics and science was accepted in America as a collegiate course of study for the AB degree. Of course, just such laxness had allowed Connecticut ministers to start the Collegiate School and Jonathan Dickinson to launch the College of New Jersey. But this low minimal standard set an ominous precedent for the new nation. However, on the eve of the Revolution, American colleges appeared to have bright prospects.
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In the 1760s, the principal concern of “Nassau Hall,” as it was familiarly known, was to preserve new-light control over the institution that embodied those convictions. President Samuel Finley’s death in 1766 exhausted the supply of Awakening veterans to lead the college.85 The schism between the new-light New York Synod and the old-light Philadelphia Synod had been papered over in 1758, but the estrangement ran deep. Now, Philadelphia Old Lights approached the trustees with an offer of badly needed financial support if their candidates were named president and professor. In near panic, the trustees elected as president, sight unseen, a Scottish minister, John Witherspoon, before considering (and tabling) the Philadelphia proposal. Witherspoon had an impressive reputation as a battler for the evangelical wing of Scottish Presbyterianism but no connection with America or the College of New Jersey. He declined the honor, citing his wife’s refusal to leave Scotland. For Benjamin Rush (CNJ. 1760), who was studying medicine in Edinburgh, an Old Light alternative was unthinkable. In his hyperbolic words, it would mean the triumph of “enemies of the college,” “the cause of her dissolution.”86 His importuning eventually swayed both Witherspoons. The offer was renewed, and in 1768 John Witherspoon was installed with great fanfare as the college’s sixth president.
In Witherspoon the college got far more than it had anticipated.87 As a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, he brought broader knowledge, higher intellectual standards, and more sophisticated interpretations of Presbyterian doctrines. The college’s shortcomings in these areas had previously worked to its advantage. Lax admission standards allowed most students to enter as sophomores or juniors, facilitating access for the many nonaffluent students. With almost half its graduates (1748–1768) joining the ministry, the perpetuation of New Light divinity was the foremost mission and the chief attraction for many students. But intellectually the drift toward New Divinity metaphysics and a subordination of the new learning to service to the faith was tarnishing its reputation. Remarkably, Witherspoon succeeded in raising the college to his standards while at the same time fortifying its mission. He modernized instruction more fully to incorporate the new learning, introduced Scottish moral philosophy, harmonized theology with the Moderate Enlightenment, and led the college in its commitment to patriotism.
Witherspoon brought more than 300 books with him, including the latest Scottish authors, to update the library and the knowledge base. One of his first acts was to personally take charge of the college grammar school in order to strengthen student preparation. An attempt to force all students to study for 4 years was abandoned, largely because most could not afford to do so; but steps were taken to tighten the granting of advanced standing. Witherspoon introduced the practice of lecturing with his own subjects—moral philosophy, divinity, history, and eloquence. He dictated his notes for students to transcribe and then elaborated on the material. History and composition were repeated for juniors and seniors. After some vigorous fund-raising, the college was able to appoint a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy in 1771. Philosophical apparatus was purchased, making experimental lectures possible. Besides teaching composition and criticism, Witherspoon gave increased attention to English skills through orations and forensic disputations. For most New Jersey students, the junior-senior years were the bulk of their college education, and they largely consisted of science, public speaking, and Witherspoon.
To teach and defend true philosophy, Witherspoon felt it necessary to confront and refute false doctrines. The Common Sense philosophy that he brought from Scotland provided refutations of the philosophical idealism of the New Divinity, the skepticism of David Hume, or the incipient threat of Deism. It accommodated the learning of the Enlightenment by positing the reality of the physical world and, hence, the entire scope of natural philosophy. It accorded the moral sense an analogous scientific foundation. And it found revelation to be perfectly compatible with reason and the natural order, while remaining above reason in other respects. Witherspoon thus expounded a “new moral philosophy” that preserved Calvinist doctrines in part but repudiated a good deal of the college’s New Light heritage and the drift toward the New Divinity. He thus brought the College of New Jersey to the forefront of eighteenth-century higher education and the Moderate Enlightenment.88
Prior to the Stamp Act crisis, college leaders supported the English monarchy as the enemy of Papist powers (namely, France) and defender of the liberties of Englishmen. They consistently urged students to become involved in public affairs. The vestigial distrust of American Presbyterians toward England was nonetheless quickened by the deepening crisis. Arriving as the crisis unfolded, Witherspoon’s wholehearted commitment to the American cause provided leadership and inspiration to his students. Once familiar with the situation, he unhesitatingly opposed British policies to tax and to punish the American colonies. In 1772 he published his first political pamphlet supporting American liberties. From 1774 he became progressively involved through the local committee of correspondence and the New Jersey Provincial Assembly. Elected to the Continental Congress, he became the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. College of New Jersey students imbibed patriotism in their classrooms and from local role models and had ample opportunity to express these sentiments in public speaking.89
In 1772, Witherspoon decided against a fund-raising trip to the West Indies and instead penned an Address to the Inhabitants of Jamaica … in Behalf of the College of New Jersey. Although in his post for scarcely 4 years, his description stands as the ideal of the American colonial college at the zenith of its development. The close association with the upper classes was explicit in the notion that a college education was especially needed by “the children of persons in the higher ranks of life” The purpose of a colonial liberal education was “either to enjoy life with dignity and elegance, or imploy it to the benefit of society, in offices of power or trust.” Arguing the superiority of American over English education, he emphasized rigorous instruction and examinations, and since students lodged in the college with their teachers, “their morals may be more effectually preserved.” He described the 4-year course of instruction as being equivalent to the English universities, but the features he stressed were science and public speaking: the numerous orations students delivered instilled “by early habit presence of mind and proper pronunciation and gesture”; and the college’s philosophical apparatus, including the Rittenhouse orrery, were “equal, if not superior, to any on the continent.” Witherspoon took particular pride in the fact that “the College of New Jersey is altogether independent”: it consequently was not beholden to government or patrons. Further, the college was open to “every religious denomination,” and “every question about forms of church government is … entirely excluded” from its teaching. “A tree is known by its fruits,” Witherspoon wrote, and Nassau Hall could point to the many “Clergy, Episcopal and Presbyterian” that it educated, as well as “gentlemen in the Law and Medical departments.” Fittingly, each September’s Commencement was “always attended by a vast concourse of the politest company, from the different parts of this province and the cities of New-York and Philadelphia.”90
The institution that Witherspoon described embodied crosscutting elements of culture, careers, and knowledge. It featured the Enlightenment veneration for science as well as the now sacrosanct respect for religious toleration. It identified the professions that graduates were expected to pursue, along with public offices and the verbal skills that would assist them in their exercise. And it made repeated reference to the cultural attributes of the “higher ranks of life” that graduates would occupy as gentlemen and members of the “politest company.” The feature of the colleges that Witherspoon failed to mention, but which was so prominent in the stories of the nine colleges just reviewed, was social and denominational particularism—the concerted efforts of specific constituencies to secure and maintain control over collegiate institutions. Behind these efforts lie just those factors Witherspoon emphasized—guaranteeing access for a particular constituency to the higher ranks and politest company. In reality, the role of colonial colleges in linking these elements was exceedingly loose and variable. Enlightened sensibilities were an intended outcome of college in Cambridge, Philadelphia, or New York. Professional careers, especially in the ministry, were paramount in Hanover, New Haven, or New Brunswick. Cultural capital was linked with family capital most strongly in Williamsburg and New York. And efforts to tie the medical and legal professions to the colleges were most overt in New York and Philadelphia. The learning that some colleges valued highly was only weakly related to these outcomes. Size, wealth, and status depended above all on a college’s constituency. To appreciate how these factors interacted, and with what results, one needs to examine how they affected students.
COLONIAL COLLEGE STUDENTS
The estimated 721 students attending American colleges in 1775 represented roughly 1 percent of an age cohort of white males. A quarter-century later, in 1800, about the same proportion attended colleges. Looking backward, the proportion was similar around 1740. While precise numbers remain uncertain, the most revealing fact is clear—American colleges served a stable and quite small portion of the population for the latter two-thirds of the eighteenth century.91 The most trustworthy numbers for this era are bachelor’s degrees.92 The number of annual graduates reached 50 in 1721 as Yale joined Harvard in graduating students. But the totals stayed at that level until the late 1750s, when the mid-Atlantic colleges began contributing. Graduates quickly rose to an average 110 per year in the 1760s and 130 from 1771 to 1775. By the 1790s graduates doubled the average of the 1760s, but the population grew faster, by 140 percent. Taking a longer view, the number of college graduates in the whole population was about 11 per 10,000 at the beginning of the century and the same at the end. That figure was only slightly higher, at 12, prior to the Revolution. Thus, the intellectual vitality of the colleges from 1760 to 1775 was only faintly echoed in demography. As a social institution, the colonial colleges never transcended a narrow social base, and the same conditions persisted well into the nineteenth century.
Several factors affected college attendance. Each college was “owned” by and oriented toward a particular group. Even while accepting outsiders, each college had a distinct constituency. Attendance was further influenced by accessibility, cost, and the availability of preparatory education. Most significant by far was the limited demand for the learning and culture that colleges offered.
Preparation for college was the first obstacle faced by potential students. This meant acquiring a basic competence in Latin and rudimentary knowledge of Greek. These skills were taught, along with other subjects, at the grammar schools and academies scattered unevenly throughout the colonies, but mostly in the Northeast. Unless such a school was locally available, the cost of room and board—the principal expense associated with education—could be prohibitive. Many students instead were “fitted” for college by local ministers. Thus, students arrived at colleges with different degrees of preparation, and preparatory instruction was needed for the weaker cases. Samuel Johnson pleaded for such a school at King’s, which was not created until his departure. Witherspoon turned his attention to this problem as soon as he reached Princeton. Manning opened a Latin school before the college in Rhode Island, and Wheelock used Moor’s School for this purpose.
New students were examined by the college president on their classical language skills and assigned accordingly. Since the freshman year was largely a review and reinforcement of the skills required for admission, well-prepared students were placed as sophomores or sometimes higher. Advanced placement was the norm at New Jersey but less common at Harvard or Yale. For most graduates, the average time of the course was closer to 3 than 4 years. Given the anarchic modes of preparation, college students varied widely in age. Wealthy students or those with educated fathers might acquire sufficient Latin to enter at 14 or younger. Less privileged students, particularly those feeling a call to the ministry, often worked for several years and began college in their 20s. Students in the Harvard class of 1771 ranged from 12 to 27 years. The median age of graduates was 21 at Harvard, Yale, and New Jersey, but 18 at Philadelphia and 23 at Dartmouth. Of course, not all students graduated. Perhaps five of eight matriculates received a bachelor’s degree, but here too the variance was huge (and the data uncertain). Almost all New Jersey students (92 percent) graduated prior to Witherspoon, compared with none at William & Mary before 1772. King’s and Philadelphia graduated just above half of their students. Whether or not a student chose to complete the college course often reflected his reasons for attending in the first place.
Which college a student chose to attend might be affected by cost, proximity, or religious affinity—but such factors interacted. Most likely, especially for younger students, choices would be determined by personal or family connections. Recommendations from teachers or ministers also played an important role. Other factors were superimposed on this typical eighteenth-century matrix. Geographical proximity was the norm, since travel costs were high and family connections were more likely to be local. New Jersey is the notable exception, drawing only one-quarter of its prerevolutionary students from its namesake state. Before Witherspoon, the college attracted New Lights from New England, but such students soon disappeared. This loss was balanced by a growing number of southern students, reflecting the spread of Presbyterianism in the region but also a growing demand for collegiate education among wealthy planters.93 Dartmouth attracted New Lights from New England. The majority of Rhode Island students also came from other states, but probably not from very far away. Both the latter schools were the cheapest to attend. Along with New Jersey, low cost was undoubtedly an attractive feature, especially for Dartmouth. It was notorious for students who worked their way through by teaching during winters, practically emptying the college. In addition, it provided the equivalent of student loans by allowing students to “run a tab.” Many students owed the college significant sums by graduation, which they then had to promise to repay.94
Harvard represented one extreme not only in its seniority but also in the maturity of its social relations. The creation of new colleges actually narrowed its geographic catchment. Forty-one percent of prerevolutionary classes came from Eastern Massachusetts, where the prevalence of college graduates was five times the national average and numerous preparatory schools existed. For that reason, seven of ten students entered Harvard before age 18, and most students began as freshmen and took the full 4-year course. Harvard endowment funds supported about 10 percent of classes with “work-study” scholarships, frequently awarded to the sons of country clergymen.95
Aside from the new-light preferences for early New Jersey and Dartmouth colleges, religion does not seem decisive when proximity and family connections are taken into account. Anglicans freely attended Yale and Harvard; Baptists and Dutch Reformed were comfortable at Nassau Hall. For all the emphasis that some colleges placed on learning, academic quality seems to have had little impact on enrollment decisions. The growing reputation of Witherspoon’s New Jersey for southern planters, who could afford any school, may be an exception, as would Harvard’s ability to attract occasional students from abroad. The negative case is supplied by Yale, which sustained the largest or second-largest enrollment despite “poor teaching of an incapable faculty.”96
Why did 1 out of 100 male youths embark on the arduous path of preparing for and attending college? There can be no simple answer, since students came from a variety of social backgrounds and pursued quite different career paths. Rather, family influence and individual agency interacted to produce several distinctive patterns. With some exceptions, the motive was not preparation for careers. Every student followed an identical course; decisions and training for subsequent careers generally followed graduation. The college course provided a liberal education for young men who hoped to become gentlemen. In the enlightened age of the late eighteenth century, becoming a gentleman had a moral as well as a social meaning. John Adams defined it not as being wellborn or wealthy, “but all those who have received a liberal education, an ordinary degree of erudition in liberal arts and sciences.” However, learning was insufficient by itself; gentleman was a status accorded by society. A gentleman needed to cultivate the inner virtue and the outward manners demanded by polite society, just the qualities that Witherspoon showcased in his promotional address. A gentleman knew Latin and Greek but also how to dance gracefully. Acquiring the wealth to maintain the lifestyle of a gentleman was a separate—and essential—matter. Most important, in the sharply graded social order of provincial America, gentlemen occupied positions of respect and distinction. They filled local and provincial offices, led public meetings, and were accepted in polite society and respected in the community. Young men who went to college expected at the least to attain such status or perhaps do better.97
Almost no college students came from the lower ranks of society, for whom such a path would be unimaginable, let alone unaffordable. For reasonably prosperous families, however, including those with substantial farms, college might be at least a possibility.98 For this segment of society, college going represented maintaining or gaining social status. For early College of New Jersey (pre-1768), one-half of known student fathers were farmers. Although this figure fell steadily afterward, 48 percent of prerevolutionary students came from farming or nonelite backgrounds. The fact that the college drew students from such a distance reflected wealthier families, who predominated after 1776. At Harvard, the availability of local educational opportunity seems to have translated into social mobility. Just 23 percent of students were sons of Harvard graduates on the eve of the Revolution, while 45 percent came from farms and nonelite households.99 Such diverse origins produced several patterns of college going.
Young men who had a conversion experience and dedicated their lives to the ministry were a distinctive type. They provided most of the mature students, belatedly obtaining preparation for college and often entering after age 20. Undertaking a ministerial calling was a serious, adult commitment. Younger students might be identified as “hopefully pious” but were not expected to take such decisions until they finished college. New Light New Jersey was a magnet for such students, and they seem to have been the predominant clientele at Dartmouth. They were also a significant presence at Harvard and Yale, where 10 and 15 percent of prerevolutionary graduates, respectively, were age 25 or over.100
Perhaps most difficult to characterize are those students who aspired to become “first-generation” gentlemen. Their fathers were likely to be prosperous and respectable farmers or merchants (or both) and leaders in the local community. The students had probably distinguished themselves through motivation and achievement, recognized by their families, ministers, or teachers. As the colonial economy grew, these middling strata—country gentry and urban bourgeoisie—prospered. College became affordable for their sons and promised increased social status. And for the colleges, these groups constituted an important source of students in more ways than one. The Founding Fathers were predominately first-generation college graduates—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, James Madison, Benjamin Rush, James Wilson, and many more.101
For households with college-educated heads, sending sons to college was a natural form of status maintenance. Yet, this was a limited population. College-educated ministers, the largest group, were shrinking demographically; and educated lawyers or physicians were miniscule in number. The 23 percent of graduate sons at Harvard is a surprisingly small figure for the school with the most highly educated ambient population, and the proportion at Yale and New Jersey was certainly less. Little wonder that King’s and Philadelphia, oriented toward elite families, had small enrollments.
For truly wealthy families, college was merely one of several options for their sons, and graduation was irrelevant. James Bowdoin III left Harvard in his senior year (1771) for England, where he burnished his genteel credentials by learning horsemanship, French, dancing, and fencing, followed by two grand tours of the Continent (still, he later regretted his “negligence” at college). New York Lt. Governor James De Lancey (himself educated in England) sent his eldest son directly to a merchant apprenticeship, while two other sons attended both King’s and Philadelphia without graduating, before taking up the law. This pattern of attending college for a dose of culture and learning was virtually the norm for southern planters, certainly those who patronized William & Mary. This was apparently true for the Maryland landed gentry too, who reportedly sent at least 100 students to the Philadelphia Academy as of 1753 but counted only 9 graduates in the first decade of the college. Statistics on graduate occupations show relatively few idle “gentlemen” or planters, but they may have been numerous among nongraduates.102
Ezra Stiles thought that most Yale graduates returned from whence they came, to “mix in with the Body of the public, and enter upon Commerce, or the Cultivation of their Estates.” However, enumerations of known careers shows the majority of colonial college graduates entering the major professions of clergy, law, or medicine.103 Except for those students called to the ministry, choosing among these paths was problematic. College could accomplish the first goal of forming young gentlemen but not the larger challenge of securing a livelihood. Young Benjamin Rush was typical in being undecided on a career after graduation: tentatively choosing law by process of elimination, he was finally steered toward medicine by his former teacher. Many graduates wavered between the ministry and law and in later years increasingly opted for the latter. But the years after graduation were a time for probing and further preparation. On average, more than 5 years elapsed between college graduation and certification as minister, physician, or lawyer. A few, especially future ministers, remained at college to further their learning. Fully one-quarter of Harvard graduates taught school for at least part of this time, as John Adams did. How and where one acquired professional credentials made a great deal of difference, since one could preach, plead, or attempt to heal without going to college. Professionals who were also gentlemen set themselves apart.
Detailed statistics exist for graduate occupations, though they reveal nothing of the nuance and ambiguity of actual lives. The clearest trend is the fall off in the number and proportion of ministers after 1765. This trend is evident at Harvard and Yale but not yet at the College of New Jersey, where Witherspoon no doubt attracted ministerial candidates. Overall, the proportion of ministers dropped from 36 percent (1761–1765) to 28 percent (1771–1775). (See table 1.) The countertrend was a rise in the number of graduate lawyers, but this development was muted before the Revolution—10 percent of graduates in the 1750s, 15 percent in the 1760s. Both these trends accelerated after the Revolution and were more characteristic of that era. Becoming a physician was a steadier choice, made by about one of eight graduates.104
For at least half of colonial students, college represented an opportunity for social advancement. Whether these opportunities were realized depended on connections, character, circumstances, and individual ability. Colonial colleges had mixed records on recognizing merit. “Genius” was recognized only in the awarding of parts at commencement, and this was the only competition that seemed to matter for students.105 Otherwise college was an endurance test. Those who persisted graduated, like Tom Brainless. However, students from less privileged backgrounds were somewhat more likely to possess the talents and motivation that would help them to succeed. Success in eighteenth-century society meant attaining the status and livelihood of a gentleman. Of course, many graduates did more. Each college can cite a list of graduates who held important office and contributed to the new nation, with the College of New Jersey claiming the most distinguished record.106 But this was also a time of abundant opportunity as the Revolution opened room at the top. It was also true that many graduates achieved less. A careful reading of class biographies reveals subtle and not-so-subtle indications that numerous college graduates fell short of success—country preachers rejected by their congregations, itinerants who wandered South or West without ever establishing themselves, and individuals with pronounced eccentricities. Such cases of gentlemen manqué may account for roughly three of ten graduates. When early fatalities are added, colleges would be fortunate if more than half of their graduates achieved the expected status.107 However, these results were hardly random; prerevolutionary students actively sought to shape their own futures.
TABLE 1 ★ THE NINE COLONIAL COLLEGES
Students who embarked on the collegiate way of living in late colonial colleges entered a cloistered, artificial world, but one that replicated the hierarchical societies from which they came. On one hand, everyday’s activities were regimented according to a strict schedule, ruled by the college bell; on the other hand, the college was in itself a distinct social world.108 The discipline of the college schedule was necessary for the enforcement of liberal learning, let alone maintaining order, but the social life of the college conveyed much of the learning sought by future gentlemen. Until 1767 at Yale and 1772 at Harvard, entering classes were ranked according to the social standing of each student’s father.109 The college constituted a hierarchy, headed by the president, professors, and tutors and among students determined by the seniority of the four classes. Deference was required to social superiors and encoded in social rituals and mandated customs.
An avowed aim of the colleges was to nurture their wards into gentlemen, but the means with which they encouraged manners and gentility tended to be externally imposed, like the rules upholding college discipline. Acquiring the virtues of a gentleman was instead an internal process but one that could be affected in three principal ways. First, the primary social unit of the college was the individual class, the context for most all activities over 4 years. A student’s character was thus subject to the critical judgments of his classmates. In order to earn their respect, students were expected to develop and manifest gentlemanly qualities of honor, generosity, independence, and—above all—loyalty. Such qualities were associated with male maturity and contrasted with the rigid disciplinary regime aimed at controlling youth. This disjunction was the source of the most notable confrontations between students and college authorities.110 Second, the distinctive experience of advancing in status each year conveyed powerful social messages. Freshmen entered at the bottom of the college hierarchy. They were hazed by the sophomores who gleefully forced them to assume a subordinate status, and they were also obliged to run errands for the seniors (fagging). These college customs were elaborately detailed and enthusiastically enforced, with full backing of the college government. The reward for enduring such humiliation was the opportunity to inflict it upon others in the following years. Thus, college instructed students in a most direct way to accept subordinate status when necessary but also how to exercise authority over social inferiors. By their senior year, they ascended to the pinnacle of the student hierarchy and the status of incipient gentlemen.111 Finally, students took the initiative on their own or with parental encouragement to acquire genteel trappings. Most colleges offered optional instruction in French, and dancing and fencing lessons were available in the cities. However, students also demonstrated initiative in seeking the intellectual skills appropriate to their station.
The decade before the Revolution saw the creation of student literary societies, which would come to dominate campus life for nearly a century. These organizations allowed students to hone their literary skills, particularly public speaking and debate. They also expressed a provincial yearning to partake of the thriving literary culture of England. Within these organizations students assumed responsibility for their own education. Some earlier groups had sought similar ends. At Harvard, clubs had been formed to practice oratory, first by prospective ministers and later by broader groups. In the 1750s drama clubs presented plays (i.e., reading parts) privately in student rooms. These earlier groups were based on friendships and interests and thus lacked continuity. However, in 1770 students organized a debating society “to improve the art of speaking.” By inviting members of all classes to join, the Speaker’s Club was able to persist, albeit with subsequent mergers and name changes. But the club culture at Harvard was unique. Each club had its own purpose, so that some students joined them all.112 Elsewhere, the signature feature of literary societies was two, secret, competing societies enrolling most of the student body.
This pattern evolved at both Yale and the College of New Jersey, absorbing some earlier clubs. The Linonian was founded at Yale on September 12, 1753, but no further trace of its existence is known before 1766, except that freshmen were not admitted. That issue provoked the formation of Brothers in Unity (1768), and both societies subsequently included all classes. At this stage, both societies admitted fifteen to twenty Yale students and seem to have met off campus in rented space or in the homes of sympathetic alums. The Linonian appears to have been the more organized of the two; Brothers was founded “for the improvement of science and friendship,” but also “to procure enjoyment.” The American Whig Society was formed at New Jersey in 1769 and the Cliosophic Society the next year, both evolving from predecessors that existed since about 1765. The Whig took inspiration from the pseudonym used by William Livingston to attack the threat of creating an Anglican bishop, and Clio sought to invoke “the praise of learning or wisdom.” Both colleges at first disapproved of the societies. Witherspoon soon endorsed them and provided space in Nassau Hall, but Yale sought to restrict dramas as frivolous.113
As the first independent student organizations, the literary societies provide a rare insight into student mentality. Students clearly valued practicing parliamentary process, since the societies had elaborate procedures, an abundance of elective offices, and frequent elections. Multiple activities also ensured that everyone would participate. Debate was central, but it took several forms: forensic disputations (carefully prepared), extempore debates (probably less prepared), or questioning (discussion of current issues). Members also gave declamations or orations and submitted compositions. Various forms of drama were also popular, especially comedies and “humorous dialogues.” The Yale societies had a decided literary emphasis. Although plays were outlawed—at Yale and throughout New England—the Linonian presented an elaborate production in a local tavern, in which “the Officers appeared dressed in Regimentals, & the Actresses [probably local girls] in full & elegant suits of the Lady’s Apparel.” In 1773, the Linonian staged its “anniversary” celebration at a New Haven home, including guests. Festivities began at 11 a.m. with orations and elections. A sumptuous dinner followed with appropriate libations, followed by a drama, music, humor, and one final oration, concluding at 5 p.m. This event was repeated the next year but canceled in 1775 because of the hostilities.114
Besides “procuring enjoyment,” the deeper purpose of the literary societies was self-improvement. Although little is known of prerevolutionary activities at Nassau Hall, it appears that they provided practice for the orations and debates that Witherspoon emphasized. The societies provided a supportive setting; one Harvard club typically included in its rules, “no Member Shall presume to Impose on another or Laugh or Scoff at his performance.” Developing linguistic skills was valued in all colleges. At King’s, for example, Alexander Hamilton met weekly with four other students to practice composition, debate, and oratory. Queen’s College, with twenty students, still established a literary society, no doubt imitating its neighbor. Literature was also cultivated by students. As soon as the societies had regular quarters they began to accumulate libraries of contemporary works.115 Probably only at Philadelphia were such subjects incorporated into the curriculum. The founders of Whig included future novelist Hugh Henry Brackenridge and poet Philip Freneau as well as future president James Madison. This literary impulse was mobilized by societies to attack one another periodically with scurrilous doggerel. These rivalries enhanced the psychological impact of the societies, fostering greater effort and commitment.
There is little evidence that the literary societies played a significant role in the rising tide of patriotism. The societies were, after all, for self-improvement, not resolving issues. And their proceedings were secret. Students found other outlets for political expression. Students at the more rigorous colleges were well prepared to wrestle with issues of liberty, justice, and civic morality from their readings of classical authors, moral philosophy, and natural law. As the crisis deepened, orations and declamations drew increasingly pointed morals from the classical authors. Commencement theses were prominent outlets for such themes.116 Harvard students were immersed in the escalating patriot movement from the first confrontations in Boston until British troops marched through Cambridge, pausing to ask directions, on their way to Lexington and Concord. Harvard students were consequently the earliest and most thoroughly committed to the patriot cause. At Princeton, students devised their own protests, wearing homespun to commencement as early as 1765, hiring a public hangman to ceremoniously burn a traitorous letter in 1770, and staging a tea party bonfire in 1774. Rhode Island and Yale students soon demonstrated their patriotism as well, marking these four schools as the foremost patriot colleges. Each had organized a student militia by 1774.117 In contrast, the three Anglican colleges resisted the rush toward revolution to different degrees: Philadelphia opposed British policies but did not favor independence; the loyalist faculty of William & Mary was increasingly isolated; and only King’s College was unabashedly loyalist. These three schools would be most profoundly reshaped by the Revolution, but that momentous event altered the entire landscape of American higher education.
1 Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
2 Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 20–41.
3 After an initial visit to Georgia in 1738, Whitefield had six American tours—starting in 1739, 1744, 1751, 1754, 1763, and 1769. During his later tours, although still preaching fire and brimstone, he was regarded as a religious statesman.
4 Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait (New York: Vintage: 1971), 288.
5 Louis Leonard Tucker, Puritan Protagonist: President Thomas Clap of Yale College (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), quotes pp. 123, 126; Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 30; Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale: A History (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974), 50–55; Edwin Scott Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), quote p. 47: “Enthusiasm” had a specific meaning of personal revelations of divine impulses or visions, as well as ‘religious frenzy’: Gaustad, Great Awakening, 77–78.
6 Tucker, Puritan Protagonist, 133, 139.
7 Josiah Quincy, The History of Harvard College (Boston, 1860), 39–71.
8 Edwin Scott Gaustad estimated that the high tide of the Awakening in New England lasted 2 years, but a severe reaction quickly followed. Arguments against the Awakening and its prophets were well developed by the time Whitefield returned: Great Awakening, 61–79.
9 J. David Hoeveler, Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 215–22.
10 Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith, eds., American Higher Education: A Documentary History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), quotes pp. 62–63; Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936).
11 Kelley, Yale, 55–70, quote p. 62; Tucker, Puritan Protagonist, 173–97.
12 The Log College operated from 1735 to ca. 1744 and produced about 20 ministers: “William Tennent,” Dictionary of National Biography Online; Hoeveler, American Mind, 102–12. Presbyterian infighting is explicated most thoroughly in Leonard J. Trinterud, The Forming of an American Tradition: A Re-examination of Colonial Presbyterianism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1949).
13 For Alison, see Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal (New York: Teachers College Press, 1971), 73–102.
14 For the New Ark Academy, see Elizabeth Nybakken, “In the Irish Tradition: Pre-Revolutionary Academies in America,” History of Education Quarterly, 37, 2 (1997): 163–84.
15 Bryan F. Le Beau, Jonathan Dickinson and the Formative Years of American Presbyterianism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 173–74; Robert A. McCaughey, Stand Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754–2004 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 8–9.
16 The original trustees wrote: “Though our great intention was to erect a seminary for educating ministers of the gospel, yet we hope it will be a means of raising up men that will be useful in other learned professions—ornaments of the State as well as the Church.” Jurgen Herbst, From Crisis to Crisis: American College Government, 1636–1819 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), quote p. 84. The following also draws on Hoeveler, American Mind; and Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, Princeton, 1746–1896, with a new preface by John Murrin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996 [1946]).
17 Francis L. Broderick, “Pulpit, Physics, and Politics: The Curriculum of the College of New Jersey, 1746–1794,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 6, 1 (Jan. 1949): 42–68.
18 George William Pilcher, Samuel Davies: Apostle of Dissent in Colonial Virginia (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1971), 135–57; Sloan, Scottish Enlightenment, 116.
19 Stephen Brobeck, “Revolutionary Change in Colonial Philadelphia: The Brief Life of the Proprietary Gentry,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 33, 3 (July 1976): 410–34; Ann D. Gordon, The College of Philadelphia, 1749–1779: Impact of an Institution (New York: Garland, 1989); David C. Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, 1746–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 25–30.
20 See Humphrey, King’s College; Robert A. McCaughey, Stand Columbia, 4–25.
21 Humphrey, King’s College, 25.
22 Ibid., 68.
23 Ibid., 152; McCaughey, Stand Columbia, 33–44.
24 Humphrey, King’s College, 194.
25 John Hardin Best, ed., Benjamin Franklin on Education (New York: Teachers College, 1962), quotes pp. 146, 171; Edward Potts Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940), 72; Mark Frazier Lloyd, “The College, Academy, and Charitable School in the Province of Pennsylvania: Simultaneously Franklin’s Triumph and Defeat” in John H. Pollack, ed., ‘The Good Education of Youth’: Worlds of Learning in the Age of Franklin (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2009), 150–67.
26 On the College of Philadelphia, see Gordon, College of Philadelphia.
27 William Smith, A General Idea of the College of Mirania, with a Sketch of the Method of Teaching Science and Religion in the Several Classes (New York: 1753), quotes pp. 15, 59. The title page addressed the volume “to the consideration of the Trustees nominated by the Legislature to receive Proposals, etc., relating to the Establishment of a College in the Province of NEW-YORK.” Albert Frank Gegenheimer, William Smith: Educator and Churchman, 1727–1803 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1943); Roger L. Geiger and Nathan M. Sorber, “Tarnished Icon: Provost William Smith and the College of Philadelphia,” Perspectives on the History of Higher Education, 28 (2011): 1–31.
28 Gordon, College of Philadelphia, 213–41.
29 Cheney, University of Pennsylvania, quote p. 109; Robert Middlekauff, Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 42–54.
30 Thomas R. Adams, ed., Account of the College, Academy and Charitable School of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania by William Smith, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Library, 1951).
31 Geiger and Sorber, “Tarnished Icon,” 18–20.
32 Herbst, From Crisis to Crisis, 65 et passim.
33 Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
34 Quoted from title of Greenwood’s course: in Theodore Hornberger, Scientific Thought in the American Colleges, 1638–1800 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1945), 45. See also Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956); and Siegel, Governance and Curriculum at Harvard College, 237–39, 248–53.
35 Josiah Quincy, The History of Harvard College (Boston, 1860), 482–83.
36 Humphrey, King’s College, 106–8; a third professor, Samuel Clossy, taught natural philosophy in the college but joined the medical school in 1767 (134–35).
37 Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal (New York: Teachers College Press, 1971), 73–102; Smith, Account of the College, 22.
38 Sloan, Scottish Enlightenment, 103–45; Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic; 1768–1822 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 36–52, quote p. 41; Hoeveler, Creating the American Mind, 122–26.
39 May, Enlightenment in America, quotes pp. 62, 64.
40 Bernard Bailyn, The Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), quote p. 22; David W. Robson, Educating Republicans, the Colleges in the Era of the American Revolution (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), 57–74.
41 Robson, Educating Republicans, 87–89.
42 Ibid., 77–81; Carolyn Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1790–1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
43 William Smith, Account of the College, Academy, and Charitable School of Philadelphia (1762), quote p. 23; Thomas Jay Siegel, Governance and Curriculum at Harvard College in the 18th Century, PhD Diss. Harvard University, 1990, 306, 466–67.
44 Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Crowell, 1976), 221–22.
45 John Trumbull, The Progress of Dulness, or the Rare Adventures of Tom Brainless (Carlisle, 1797 [1772]), quotes pp. 9, 12, 19; on student political involvement, Robson, Educating Republicans, 83.
46 Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Crowell, 1976), 219–235, quotes, 231; Philip Freneau, A Poem, The Rising Glory of America, Early Americas Digital Archive (2003).
47 William G. Rothstein, American Physicians in the 19th Century: From Sects to Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 26–38; Humphrey, King’s College, 233–38. Between 1749 and 1800, 122 Americans attended medical school at Edinburgh, 49 from Virginia: William Frederick Norwood, Medical Education in the United States before the Civil War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), 27.
48 Cheyney, University of Pennsylvania, 96–104; Norwood, Medical Education, 63–78.
49 Humphrey, King’s College, 238–63; Norwood, Medical Education, 109–12.
50 Humphrey, King’s College, 247–48, quotes pp. 242, 248; Norwood, Medical Education, 75–76, 111; Cheyney, University of Pennsylvania, 103.
51 Rothstein, American Physicians, quotes pp. 34, 36.
52 Humphrey, King’s College, 238; George W. Corner, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), 81.
53 Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D.D., LL.D., 3 vol. (New York: Scribner’s, 1901), I, 46. A college was proposed for Western Massachusetts in 1862 but squelched by the opposition of Harvard: Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith, eds. American Higher Education: A Documentary History, 2 vol. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), I, 131–33.
54 Events at Yale are described most fully by Louis Leonard Tucker, Puritan Protagonist: President Thomas Clap of Yale College (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 201–62; also, Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).
55 Many new-light congregations formed during the Awakening reverted to Baptism under local ministers and resented the Congregational Standing Order, of which Yale was a part.
56 A.Z. [Benjamin Gale], The Present State of the College of Connecticut Considered (1755).
57 Kelley, Yale, 67.
58 George W. Pierson, The Founding of Yale: The Legend of the Forty Folios (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
59 James Axtell, The School upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 238–42.
60 Beverly McAnear, “The Selection of Alma Mater by Pre-Revolutionary Students,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 73, 4 (Oct. 1949): 429–40. More than 75 percent of Yale students were from Connecticut, and many more came across the sound from Long Island. Later, Yale graduates would fan out across the new nation and send sons and students back to alma mater.
61 Ezra Stiles, Literary Diaries, II, 336; Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), 99.
62 Overseers included liberal Boston ministers Jonathan Mayhew and Charles Chauncy: Morison, Three Centuries, 89. Quincy, History of Harvard, II, 123: by “influences of the period” Quincy meant “impulses given to science and literature in England, during the reign of Queen Anne.”
63 Quincy, History of Harvard, II, 123–36: “Many other improvements, in the collegiate textbooks, exercises, and principles of discipline, may be traced to this period, and to the influence of the able men, who then guided the board of Overseers” (p. II, 136).
64 Siegel, Governance and Curriculum at Harvard, 253–68, quote p. 261; Quincy, History of Harvard, II, 130–34, 496–97.
65 This confidence was manifest most notably in the 1760s campaign for the appointment of American bishops—a movement that greatly antagonized moderate dissenters with whom Anglicans had most in common: May, Enlightenment, 81–87.
66 Stephen Brobeck, “Revolutionary Change in Colonial Philadelphia: The Brief Life of the Proprietary Gentry,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 33, 3 (July 1976): 410–34; Harold E. Taussig, “Deism in Philadelphia during the Age of Franklin,” Pennsylvania History, 37 (1970): 217–36. Francis Alison charged that potential Presbyterian ministers were converting to Anglicanism: Trinterud, American Tradition, 212–17.
67 Geiger and Sorber, “Tarnished Icon: William Smith and the College of Philadelphia,” 1–31.
68 Humphrey, King’s College, 119–25, quotes pp. 119, 122.
69 McCaughey, Stand Columbia, 27.
70 Humphrey, King’s College, 126–30, quote p. 130.
71 Ibid., 140–151, quote p. 141.
72 Susan H. Godson et al., The College of William & Mary: A History, 2 vol. (Williamsburg: College of William & Mary, 1993), I, 101–26; Hoeveler, American Mind, 283–89; Robert Polk Johnson, “The Reform of the College of William and Mary, 1763–1780,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 115, 3 (June 1971): 187–213.
73 Thomson, “Reform of William & Mary,” 201–5.
74 Hoeveler, American Mind, 181–212.
75 Herbst, From Crisis to Crisis, 110–13; Richard P. McCormick, Rutgers: A Bicentennial History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1966), 3–24; William H. S. Demarest, A History of Rutgers College, 1766–1924 (New Brunswick: Rutgers College, 1924).
76 Herbst, From Crisis to Crisis, 123–27; Walter C. Bronson, The History of Brown University, 1764–1914 (Providence: Brown University, 1914), 1–75.
77 Bronson, History of Brown, 44–50; Under Manning (1766–1791) CRI graduated 165 students; 43 became clergy, 26 Congregational and 12 Baptist: Martha Mitchell, ed., Encyclopedia Brunoniana (Providence: Brown University Library, 1993), 362–63.
78 Colin G. Calloway, The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 1–14; James Axtell. “Dr. Wheelock’s Little Red School,” in Axtell, The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 87–109.
79 Most fully recounted in Leon Burr Richardson, History of Dartmouth College, 2 vol. (Hanover: Dartmouth College, 1932).
80 Wheelock wrote in 1761: “None know, nor can any, without Experience, Well conceive of the Difficulty of Educating an Indian.” By 1771 he had succeeded with “40 Indians who were good readers, writers and were instructed in the principles of the Christian religion…. [But] not more than half preserved their character unstained. The rest are sunk into as low, savage and brutish a way of living as they were before … and six of those who did preserve a good character are now dead.” Ibid., I, 39, 78.
81 Ibid., I, 122–28, 219–21 et passim; Bobby Wright, “For the Children of the Infidels? American Indian Education in the Colonial Colleges,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 12, 3 (1988): 1–14.
82 Calloway, Indian History, 15–95. The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge supported Indian education in America from ca. 1730 until this mission was legally terminated in 1924: “Scottish money, raised by Samson Occom and controlled by the SSPCK, kept Dartmouth in the business of educating Indians” (p. 37).
83 Stiles, Diary (May 24, 1779), 338–39. Student notes for 1773 report “President Manning’s lectures in philosophy touched briefly on psychology, intellectual and moral philosophy, ontology, and natural philosophy, and that this instruction was completed in only a few days more than a month”: Mitchell, ed., Encyclopedia Brunoniana, 432.
84 Bronson, History of Brown, 38, 102–3; Richardson, Dartmouth, I, 119–21, 175, 203.
85 Aaron Burr was succeeded in 1758 by Jonathan Edwards, who died within months from a small-pox inoculation. Samuel Davies (1759–1761) was followed by Samuel Finley (1761–1766), both trained in log colleges. Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 16–27.
86 David Freeman Hawke, Benjamin Rush: Revolutionary Gadfly (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), 56: Rush called Rev. Francis Alison, Professor at the College of Philadelphia, “an enemy to vital religion” (ibid.). John Maclean, History of the College of New Jersey, 1746–1854, 2 vol. (New York: Arno Press, 1969 [1877]), I, 285–99.
87 On Witherspoon: Noll, Princeton, 28–58; Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal (New York: Teachers College Press, 1971), 103–45; Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, Princeton, 1746–1896 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996 [1946]), 48–108; Broderick, “Pulpit, Physics, and Politics.”
88 Noll, Princeton, 47; May, Enlightenment, 62–64.
89 Robson, Educating Republicans, 44–46, 58–70.
90 John Witherspoon, Address to the Inhabitants of Jamaica, and Other West-India Islands in Behalf of the College of New Jersey (Philadelphia, 1772), reprinted in Hofstadter and Smith, American Higher Education, I, 137–46.
91 Data on enrollments are available for 1775 (table 1) and 1800 (Colin B. Burke, American Collegiate Populations), participation rates calculated by the author for 3-year cohorts. The 1 percent figure matches that derived by Phyllis Vine Ehrenberg, Change and Continuity: Values in American Higher Education, 1750–1800, PhD Diss., University of Michigan, 1974.
92 Walter Crosby Eells, Baccalaureate Degrees Conferred by American Colleges in the 17th and 18th Centuries, Circular No. 528, Office of Education (May 1958). All degree and population data from this source.
93 Beverly McAnear, “The Selection of an Alma Mater by Pre-Revolutionary Students,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 73, 4 (Oct. 1949): 429–40; Richard A. Harrison, “Introduction,” in Richard A. Harrison, ed., Princetonians, 1776–1783 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), xxviii–xxx.
94 McAnear, “Selection of an Alma Mater”; Richardson, Dartmouth, I, 239–45: these student debtors largely repaid the college.
95 Conrad Edick Wright, Revolutionary Generation: Harvard Men and the Consequences of Independence (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 30–58.
96 McAnear, “Selection of an Alma Mater,” 436.
97 Quoted in Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993), 195; Wright, Revolutionary Generation, 22–25.
98 The most widely cited figure for the affordability of colonial colleges comes from an offhand estimate by Jackson Turner Main: “perhaps one in ten—could afford to send a son to college” (The Social Structure of Revolutionary America [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965], 247). The remainder of the paragraph qualifies this statement by noting wide variability across the colonies. His later study of Connecticut notes, “a college degree was available to young men of ordinary, though not really humble means” (Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985], 330).
99 These percentages are for known fathers’ occupations: James McLachlan, “Introduction,” Princetonians, 1748–1768: A Biographical Dictionary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), xxii; Harrison, “Introduction,” Princetonians, 1769–1775, xxiv–xxv; Wright, Revolutionary Generation.
100 Eells, Baccalaureate Degrees, 46; Ehrenberg, Change and Continuity, 214–19; David F. Allmendinger Jr., Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life in Nineteenth-Century New England (New York: St. Martin’s, 1975).
101 Wood, Radicalism, 197.
102 Wright, Revolutionary Generation, 45, 70; Gordon, College of Philadelphia, 116–31.
103 Morgan, Stiles, 322; Bailey B. Burritt, Professional Distribution of College and University Graduates, U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin, 1912, No. 19.
104 Burritt, Professional Distribution.
105 For the role, or absence, of merit in early colleges: Joseph F. Kett, Merit: The History of a Founding Ideal from the American Revolution to the Twenty-First Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 68–91.
106 A list of eminent graduates and office holders was published by president John Maclean: History of the College of New Jersey, 1746–1854, 2 vol. (New York: Arno Press, 1969 [1877]), I, 357–62: This list became the basis for Woodrow Wilson’s famous address, “Princeton in the Nation’s Service” (see chapter 9); Robson, Educating Republicans. 58–70.
107 These conclusions reflect the findings of a prosopography exercise by the author’s graduate seminar in colonial higher education, Penn State, Spring 2010.
108 Leon Jackson, “The Rights of Man and the Rights of Youth” in Roger L. Geiger, ed., The American College in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 46–79; for colonial colleges as “total institutions,” Ehrenberg, “Change and Continuity,” 151–200.
109 Axtell, School upon a Hill, 219–23.
110 Jackson, “Rights of Man”; Axtell, School upon a Hill, 224–30.
111 Cf. Morgan, Stiles.
112 Siegel, Governance and Curriculum at Harvard, 301–8; Morison, Three Centuries, 138–41.
113 Edward B. Coe, “The Literary Societies” in William L. Kingsley, Yale College: A Sketch of Its History, 2 vol. (New York,1879), 307–23; J. Jefferson Looney, Nurseries of Letters and Republicanism: A Brief History of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society and its Predecessors, 1765–1941 (Princeton: Princeton University, 1996).
114 Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Crowell, 1976), 220; Coe, “Literary Societies,” 312.
115 Thomas S. Harding, College Literary Societies: Their Contribution to Higher Education in the United States, 1815–1876 (New York: Pageant Press, 1971), 21; Humphrey, King’s College, 200.
116 Robson, Educating Republicans, 57–93; Hoeveler, American Mind, 241–81, 307–12.
117 Wertenbaker, Princeton, 55–58.