Harvard Or Texas A&M?!?

One of my favorite blather topics in U.S. History I at the Collegium Excellens was the founding of the colonial colleges. I loved to ask my suffering students to name the best college or university that came to mind. Some would reply: "Harvard." Others would say, "Texas A&M" and I would make a gagging gesture. No one called out the Collegium Excellens, known locally as "AC." I always maintained that "AC" meant "Almost College." If this is (fair & balanced) honesty, so be it.

[x Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society]
The Colonial Colleges: Forging An American Political Culture
by J. David Hoeveler

Nine colleges existed in the British colonies of North America when the thirteen declared their independence from Great Britain in 1776. In New England, Puritans established Harvard in 1636 and Yale in 1701. The two others from that region, Rhode Island College (Brown) and Dartmouth College, sprang from the Great Awakening in 1765 and 1769, respectively. In the Middle Atlantic colonies, Presbyterians founded the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1746 and Anglicans established King’s College (later Columbia) in 1754. Of the nine, only the College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania), 1755, had nonsectarian origins. A group from the Dutch Reformed Church started Queen’s College (Rutgers) in 1766. Anglican William and Mary, founded in 1693, alone represented the southern colonies. All were established by Christians with religious intentions (the exception, Philadelphia, came quickly under Anglican and Presbyterian domination), and all were Protestant.

All led their students though a curriculum heavily concentrated in the ancient languages and history, with philosophy, science, and rhetoric also prominent. Closer inspection, however, finds that the colleges reflected the diversity within American colonial religion and the factional politics it produced. The colleges were born “political,” and their early intellectual histories both reflected and reinforced the religious politics of colonial America.

Six of these institutions had Calvinist beginnings. Harvard was the school of the Massachusetts Bay Puritans, operating within a decade of their arrival to New England in 1630. But by the end of the century Harvard had come under liberal religious influence, much of it Anglican, and, to the great disaffection of the orthodox Mathers and others, had selected John Leverett as president in 1707. By that time, in Connecticut, a party from the orthodox group had established Yale, located first in Saybrook, in 1701. It did so with Increase Mather’s blessing. But little was certain in the early collegiate history of this country. In 1722 a shocked New England learned that a group of Yale people, led by Samuel Johnson, had announced its intention to seek ordination in the hated Church of England. Johnson’s education in Anglicanism had proceeded from his reading of books—English religious writings, science, and literature—that had arrived at Yale in 1714.

Establishing Princeton was the achievement of Calvinist Presbyterians. The College of New Jersey was the first to come from the religious movement known as the Great Awakening. That movement, in fact, served as a kind of political fault-line for all the colonial colleges. Harvard and Yale had both given the awakeners a rude reception, so now they sought a college of their own. Factionalism in the Dutch Reformed Church during the Great Awakening also led to the founding of Queen’s College in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Earlier, news of the new Presbyterian school at Princeton had spurred the New York legislature, with New York City and powerful Anglicans in the lead, to look for a college establishment of their own. King’s College resulted, but only after a war of words between Anglicans and their rivals in the city. The legislation that established King’s did not make it an Anglican college, so partisans had to work quickly to give it that identity. They did so when the socially influential Trinity Church bequeathed land to the new school. The trustees then named Samuel Johnson, by now colonial Anglicanism’s foremost apologist, as its first president.

The Awakening would eventually yield four colonial colleges. In addition to Princeton and Queen’s, Calvinists founded Rhode Island College and Dartmouth. That superficial identity, however, belies an intense and ongoing religious politics. Many of the awakeners in New England became Baptists, having concluded, as did Isaac Backus, for example, that infant baptism had no scriptural foundations. The antipaedobaptists founded new churches, all the while facing discriminatory laws in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Baptists secured their collegiate foothold with the establishment of Rhode Island College. Separatist Congregationalists, who recognized no ecclesiastical establishment and looked back to the alleged purity of the independent churches in early New England, founded Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

The early institutional histories reflect the connections between college and state. The colleges owed their legal standing to their respective colonial governments or to the British Crown, which granted them their charters. Those connections surfaced more than occasionally in the early records of these schools. Thus the Massachusetts General Court in 1699 approved a new charter with a residency law designed to remove Increase Mather from the Harvard presidency. At William and Mary, James Blair, president of that college for no less than fifty years, established a record of hardball politics in Williamsburg that led to the removal of three Virginia governors. At Princeton, Presbyterians had to use their influence against a reluctant Anglican governor to secure their charter. At Yale, President Thomas Clap, determined to resist the incursions of the Awakeners in New Haven, went to the Connecticut legislature to get a law passed against itinerant ministers; some of them had recently captured the interest of Yale students. At the College of Philadelphia, Anglican provost William Smith effected a record of political intervention and intrigue unmatched by any of his collegiate peers. He never shied from taking on the Quaker oligarchy, repeatedly allying himself with the proprietary party in the complicated mix of Pennsylvania politics. Smith paid a price for his exploits. The Quakers put him in prison! A happier political alliance prevailed in the founding of Dartmouth. That story revolved around the unlikely match between the anti-establishment leader Eleazar Wheelock and the pinnacle of the New Hampshire political dynasty, the Anglican governor John Wentworth.

The study of politics or political theory did not have a formal place in the college curriculums. Over the years, however, there developed at the colonial schools a kind of subsidiary curriculum outside the daily classroom instruction. It had three sources and immense influence. One source derived from books contributed by friends of the colleges. We see the effects most significantly at Yale, with the Jeremiah Dummer collection in 1714 and the George Berkeley donation, offered in 1733. At Harvard, tutors William Brattle and William Leverett, who began teaching in 1685, brought in books from England. These collections had a liberalizing effect. The English works challenged Puritan Calvinism, they brought students upto- date in modern science, and they likely exposed them to the English Whig political thinkers.

Politics also figured heavily in another part of the “extracurriculum”: the student theses. The reading of theses by students at annual commencement exercises dates far back in Harvard’s history. By the middle of the 18th century this practice had assumed a marked political content. The theses asked, and answered, such questions as: “Is unlimited obedience to rulers taught by Christ and His Apostles?” (1729), “Is the Voice of the People the Voice of God?” (1733), “Is it Lawful to resist the Supreme Magistrate, if the Commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved?” (1743), and, a popular topic that reflects Hobbesian and certainly Lockean influence, “Does Civil Government Originate from Compact?” (1743, 1747, 1751, 1761, 1762).

Third, at mid-century we find another interesting departure. Colonial students began to form their own societies, apparently seeking, in some cases, to take up current subjects outside their formal assignments. The Flat Hat Club appeared at William and Mary in 1750 and the Critonian and Linonian at Yale the same decade. Most famous were the two at Princeton: the American Whig and the Cliosophic, both established in 1765. These two organizations established an intense rivalry with satire and ad hominem aspersions abounding. James Madison at Princeton, a member and possibly a founder of the Whigs, at first pursued his love of literature and writing through his membership, but along the way a greater interest in politics emerged, and after Princeton it became his consuming focus.

These clubs were still forming on the eve of the American Revolution. And in fact, the colonial college—all of them—became heavily caught up in that great event. What stands out thematically in this history is the appearance of nine patriotic schools, including even the two Anglican ones. Some fell easily into the American cause, others with some tension and difficulty. We note, however, that in 1760, on the news of King George II’s death, the six colleges then in existence all memorialized the departed monarch. Thirteen years later, American collegians wore homespun to signal their support of the American boycotts of British goods. At some schools, students formed their own militias, drilling on the college premises. And the war came to the colleges. Seven of the nine would have to suspend instruction as British or American troops took over their buildings.

The contribution of the colleges to an emerging political culture in America, though, had already begun. The revolutionary years would continue it. Reference here is made to the political leaders that these schools produced. For them the collegiate experience laid foundations that expanded into patriot ideology and public service. A few examples will suggest how this was so.

Samuel Adams came from a prosperous Boston family. He took his entrance examination at Harvard, from which he graduated in 1740, by reading passages from Tully and Virgil. For his M.A. degree he read Locke, Samuel Pufendorf, and James Harrington. This training does not suggest the fiery populist leader that Adams became for the Sons of Liberty, the simple republican known to history. But at Harvard, Adams witnessed and came to admire the religious Awakening. He praised its participants for their rejection of finery and their donning of the “somber dress” of the old Puritans. When Adams took up political journalism after his graduation, his earnest writing expressed his fears of material corruption in Britain and America, citing the historical example of Rome and its trajectory from moral republic to decadent empire. Adams, a familiar face in the Boston taverns, came to respect the common people and their common ways; he became known for his “genteel poverty.” Adams’s religious Puritanism and his classical education together forged the model of a “Christian Sparta” that he held up for his fellow colonialists. Many described Adams as the Cato of the American Revolution.

Younger cousin John Adams entered Harvard with no intellectual interests at all. College changed him profoundly. He would cite as a special influence his studies with Harvard scientist John Winthrop IV, which led Adams in the direction of liberal Christianity. He may have rejected the Calvinism of some clergy he knew, but he came to appreciate the Puritans and their earlier struggles against the tyranny of monarchy and church in the Stuart era. Shifting from a possible career in the pulpit to one in law, Adams, with some Boston colleagues, formed the Sodalitas Club. Its members proposed to study law and oratory and met Thursday evenings to discuss a selected legal text from a list of classic works. Adams’s political ideas crystallized when the group examined feudal law. He presented his ideas to the club and then offered them to the world in his noted publication, his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, one of the major documents in the literature of the American Revolution. Harvard’s rational Christianity shone through in Adams’s harsh judgments of the “superstitions” that were the props of kingship and ecclesiastical oppression. Adams described the Protestant Reformation as an intellectual advance, to which his ancestral Puritans contributed. He also celebrated the Puritans for their fight against English tyranny. Adams also found instruction in ancient history, as his subsequent writings reveal. History, for him, was always a lesson book, informed by his classical education at Harvard. For every contemporary situation, it seemed, Adams could find an instructive analogy in ancient Greece and Rome.

Yale College made its connections to the Revolution through a different route. The neo-Calvinist movement known as the “New Divinity” was based in rural Connecticut, and its major advocates were Yale graduates. Samuel Hopkins, later a prominent clergyman in Newport, Rhode Island, and Joseph Bellamy, of Bethel, Connecticut, linked religion and politics in their preaching and writing. They shared with other Protestant leaders in America a conviction that not England alone but the colonies, too, had lapsed into the material comforts of empire (Hopkins strongly attacked the slave trade and the Americans’ connection to it) and stood sorely in need of a moral and spiritual recovery. Hopkins hoped that the Revolution would supply that need. Bellamy, in turn, associated liberal religion (Arminianism had always been a theological heresy at orthodox Yale) with high, fashionable living. By the middle of the 1770s Bellamy and others in the New Divinity party were urging Americans to swear off all British imports, the luxury and finery of a bloated empire, one that Bellamy judged “ripe for destruction.”

Harvard and Yale’s Puritan roots explain much about their opposition to England in the Revolutionary era. Princeton College drew also on New England and Scotch-Irish foundations, and even before the arrival of John Witherspoon from Scotland in 1768 it had evidenced nationalist sentiments. Princeton outpaced all the colonial colleges in supplying leaders for the new nation, with James Madison being the most noteworthy. He reflects, through his education under Witherspoon, an evident connection to the Scottish Enlightenment. Witherspoon had brought with him to the College of New Jersey his own collection of Scottish works, including those of David Hume, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and Adam Smith. They directly influenced Madison’s part in reconstructing American political thought, contributing new ideas about republicanism in the large-state setting and the role of factions in that arena. Those ideas, of course, had their most succinct expression in Madison’s famous 10th Federalist essay.

In the making of patriot colleges, the two Anglican schools supply the most surprising twists. One would expect William and Mary and King’s College to embody loyalist attachments to the British Crown. And indeed such feelings flourished among many at these institutions. At Williamsburg, however, a young Thomas Jefferson graduated and reinforced his college studies with lawyer George Wythe, reading Francis Hutcheson, Lord Kames, Locke, Sidney, and Coke and deriving much of the intellectual ammunition for his revolutionary politics. James Madison (later Bishop Madison, and no relation to the above) supplies another striking example. At William and Mary in 1773 the young Anglican had become professor of science, immediately upon his graduation from the college. Madison’s speeches, beginning in his undergraduate years, reverberated with Whig notions, especially Locke’s. The William and Mary curriculum had created its own subversions of its loyalist identity.

And King’s College, which had in President Myles Cooper an unabashed Loyalist, also contributed to the patriotic cause. Three King’s collegians–John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and Alexander Hamilton–represented a group labeled the “Conservative Whigs” in New York politics. Hamilton had electrified New York City audiences with his powerful attacks on the British and in 1774 and 1775, barely more than twenty years old, he engaged the Loyalist Samuel Seabury in a remarkable pamphlet exchange that furnished some of the most interesting political literature of the day. Hamilton drew on the compact theory of government and insisted that oppressive British action had dissolved the American connection. He also drew on William Blackstone to advance a theory of natural law.

College presidents by no means shunned the political arena, and often they charged into it with all their polemical weapons at hand. John Witherspoon at Princeton furnishes the fullest portrait of the activist president. In Princeton, he entertained travelers, such as John Adams and Richard Henry Lee, who were on their way to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Ultimately, he could not deny himself the opportunity to go there himself. Witherspoon became the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. After some hesitation, he brought revolutionary politics to the college campus. His pronunciation in “The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men” stands as a major piece in the sermon literature of the American Revolution. Witherspoon, though, went even further. When New Jersey insurgents moved against Loyalist governor William Franklin, they hauled him before the New Jersey Provincial Council. Witherspoon served as grand inquisitor for the proceedings.

Harvard and Yale also provided revolutionary presidents. Samuel Langdon had arrived from his pulpit in Portsmouth, New Hampshire to his new office at Harvard in 1774. Just six weeks after the fighting at Lexington and Concord the next year he gave a sermon at Harvard, one thematically rich in its references to ancient Israel, the decay of the British Constitution, the oppression of the current regime in England, and, yes, America’s own sin. Langdon urged the need to recover a more strictly biblical Christianity. At Yale, graduate Ezra Stiles had moved over to a ministry in Newport, then to Portsmouth, and back to Yale as its president in 1778. He had already become the leader among other American ministers—Congregationalists and Presbyterians mostly—in their organizing efforts against appointment of an Anglican bishop to the colonies. Indeed, the first two meetings of this Plan of Union, in 1767 and 1768, took place on the Yale campus. There, in the late 1770s, Stiles cheered the American cause at every turn and detailed in his diary the dramatic events of the British advance onto New Haven in the summer of 1779.

In the overall pattern, the older Puritan schools–Harvard and Yale–thus became readily patriotic. So too did the two New Jersey schools born of the religious Awakening–Princeton and Queen’s. The Baptist leaders at Rhode Island College, however, had mixed feelings. They saw only hypocrisy in the libertarian rhetoric of New Englanders who defended their rights against British tyranny all the while denying full equality to the Baptists in their midst. Rhode Island College president James Manning went to the second convention meeting in Philadelphia to win a resolution supporting the Baptists against New England’s Standing Order. He had no success. At Dartmouth, in turn, President Wheelock’s patriotic feelings confronted the political realities of his alliance with Anglican Governor Wentworth. He tried in vain to forge a reconciliation between patriots and English. His compromising efforts only aroused his critics, and he left office a heartsick man.

Finally, at the College of Philadelphia, Provost William Smith, an Anglican, promised loyalty to the American cause but convinced few. Vice-Provost Francis Alison, Presbyterian, led the American cause, the coleader, with Stiles, in the anti-Anglican Plan of Union. This college ultimately furnished the fullest case of state intervention in the revolutionary years. The Supreme Executive Council, created by the new Pennsylvania constitution, turned on the college trustees, citing their expressions of British loyalty, and it named Smith specifically as one of fortyone offenders. In 1779, the radical party in the state, dominated by Presbyterians, reconfigured the college. Benjamin Franklin, whom Smith had earlier driven from the trustees, now returned and resumed his position at the college, renamed by the state legislature the University of Pennsylvania.

The literature of the American Revolution, in the colleges and outside them, drew from many sources—Calvinism, the ancient classics, Whig ideology, the Scottish Enlightenment. But in its many expressions, that literature unfolded within the precise contexts of nine institutional histories. Therefore, no simple pattern prevailed. As with the thirteen colonies themselves, the colonial colleges forged an ostensible unity and shaped an American political culture. It was never an ideology and not a hegemony. Each college made its individual contribution to the pluralist American Mind.

J. David Hoeveler is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and author of Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the American Colonial Colleges (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

Copyright © 2004 Historically Speaking