Authors: Edmund S. Morgan
American Heroes (24 page)
Penn was not part of it. While his colony flourished, he languished in an English debtor's prison (an institution he had tried to eliminate in Pennsylvania). But Pennsylvania could not have happened without him. There, in spite of himself, he left his mark on the world. If it was not as deep a mark as he might have wished, that was because, when it came to Pennsylvania, he wished for too much. But a prophet may be forgiven for sometimes asking more of himself and others than they can give. Without Penn's prophetic vision, his colony would not have offered to the world the example that it did of religious freedom coupled with economic prosperity. And without his acceptance of so much of the world, he would not have had the opportunity to found a colony at all. Though he never became a Pennsylvanian, Pennsylvania became the testimony of William Pennâhis mark on the world and at the same time a mark of his accommodation with the world.
â1983
Ezra Stiles and Timothy Dwight
I
N THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
college presidents exerted a large influence on their students by doing most of the teaching. This is a story about the influence of two presidents of Yale in the 1790s, when Yale figured more conspicuously on the national scene than it probably ever has since then. Historians of American religion have awarded the two presidents an even larger role in those years than they deserve. How that came about is part of the story. But first a word about who the two men were.
Ezra Stiles was president of Yale from 1778 to 1795. He was a man of strong likes and dislikes. He liked Newport, Rhode Island, Yale College, and men of learning everywhere. He disliked Baptists, Quakers, Anglicans, and Timothy Dwight.
Timothy Dwight was president of Yale from 1795 to 1817. He was a man of strong likes and dislikes. He liked Greenfield, Connecticut, Yale College, and everyone who liked him. He disliked deists, democrats, andâapparentlyâEzra Stiles.
The judgment of historians, often reiterated, is that Timothy Dwight rescued Yale from a condition of infidelity and decay in which his predecessor, Ezra Stiles, had left it. When Stiles died, in 1795, one gathers from the historians, Yale was in pretty bad shape: student morale was low, discipline archaic and ineffective, and teaching uninspired; worst of all, religious infidelity was rampant among the students. Timothy Dwight changed all this. Dwight was the great opponent of infidelity. He argued and inspired and disciplined the students into a glowing body of zealous, though not fanatical, Christians. Student morale went up; learning went up; and deism went down.
The Yale episode has assumed a more than local significance in American religious history as an epitome of what shortly took place on the national scene. Christianity was at a low ebb in the 1790s, but about the turn of the century it took on new life. Led by Dwight and men like him, the revival of 1800 broke the back of deism and ushered in a half century of evangelical Christianity.
Such, I believe, is the accepted view, and historians have offered much testimony to support it. Their first witness, who sets the tone for those that follow, is a very lively, likable, and talkative old man named Lyman Beecher, who was a freshman and sophomore at Yale under Stiles and a junior and senior under Dwight. He knew both men and was therefore qualified to compare them. One day in the 1850s he did so, while sitting in the comfortable house of his daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe. He was dictating his autobiography, a rambling series of reminiscences, and his children had gathered in Harriet's house to listen and write it down. After he died, in 1863, they published it; and when scholars began to write the history of American religion, they discovered it with sheer joy. The old man had spoken, as he lived, with gusto; and his words enlivened the drab story of controversies that had lost their point for a later generation. The historians quoted him freely and effectively, and one of the passages they quoted to greatest effect was his description of his undergraduate years at Yale:
In my Sophomore year (September, 1794â'5) I did comparatively littleâ¦. In May of this year Dr. Stiles died, and Dr. Dwight became President at the next Commencement. He had the greatest agency in developing my mind.
Before he came college was in a most ungodly state. The college church was almost extinct. Most of the students were skeptical, and rowdies were plenty. Wine and liquors were kept in many rooms; intemperance, profanity, gambling, and licentiousness were common. I hardly know how I escapedâ¦.
That was the day of the infidelity of the Tom Paine school. Boys that dressed flax in the barn, as I used to, read Tom Paine and believed him; I read, and fought him all the way. Never had any propensity to infidelity. But most of the class before me were infidels, and called each other Voltaire, Rousseau, D'Alembert, etc. etc.
They thought the Faculty were afraid of free discussion. But when they handed Dr. Dwight a list of subjects for class disputation, to their surprise he selected this: “Is the Bible the word of God?” and told them to do their best.
He heard all they had to say, answered them, and there was an end. He preached incessantly for six months on the subject, and all infidelity skulked and hid its head.
The impression given here of the unhappy and ungodly condition at Yale under Ezra Stiles and its rescue by Timothy Dwight was heightened by other passages describing the college's decrepit philosophical apparatus and the inability of Stiles to make the students behave.
Few historians of American religion have overlooked these passages, and those interested particularly in the history of Yale and Connecticut have found other evidence to confirm what Beecher said. Matthew R. Dutton, who had been a tutor for four years under Dwight, was even more decided in his opinion than Beecher. In a brief biography written after Dwight's death, he wrote,
The College, when he came to its presidency, was in a dreadful state of disorder, impiety and wickedness. Infidelity was so common, and so generally thought to be an indication of genius and spirit, that an aspiring, ambitious youth hardly dared avow his belief in the Christian religion. Neither was this spirit confined to the walls of college. It prevailed alarmingly in the state and perhaps through the unionâ¦. Doctor Dwight, with his constitutional ardour and intrepidity threw himself into the gap, and stayed the progress of this overflowing scourgeâ¦. The effect of this part of his labours in college, is evident from one fact. For many years before his death, no person dared openly express the sentiments of infidelity in that seminary, lest he should be despised by his comrades, for stupidity, ignorance and depravity.
His labours were not less effectual, to purify the morals of the institution over which he watched with the affection and anxiety of a father. Several cases of exemplary punishment, at first, and a regular course of unwavering discipline afterwards, accompanied by the influence of moral persuasion and divine truth, changed that college, through the blessing of God, from a sink of moral and spiritual pollution into a residence not only of science and literature, but of morality and religion, a nursery of piety and virtue, a fountain, whence has issued streams to make glad the city of our God.
The Reverend Gardiner Spring, in a funeral oration on Dwight, made the same point. “It is a fact not to be denied,” he said, “that at the time Dr. Dwight entered upon this official charge, the College was in a state of lamentable declension. Its funds were low, its policy not the most happy, its numbers small, and its morals corrupt.”
Even more impressive than the reminiscences of old men are the letters of students written on the scene at the very time when Dwight took over from Stiles. The most striking of those that have survived is from Timothy Bishop (class of 1796) to Thomas Robbins, a classmate who transferred to Williams in his senior year:
You will easily suppose that since Dr. Dwight, a person so different from his predecessor, has been elected by the united voice of the electors, to the supreme authority, affairs have taken a quite different situation from what they were under Dr. Stiles, the government of college at present possessing more energy and claiming greater respect which however was not owing altogether to the neglect of Dr. Stiles but to his great age.
The character of Dr. Dwight is remarkable, he is the most fitted and the best qualified both for the instruction and government of this college that could be obtainedâ¦. We now see the advantages of having an able director at the head of affairs one whose commands are energetic, respected and obeyed; for if the tree is corrupt so also will be the branches. It is surprising to see what a difference there is in the behaviour of the students since last year; at present there is no card playing, at least very little of it, no nightly revellings, breaking tutors windows, breaking glass bottles etc., but all is order and quietness, more so I believe than was ever known for any length of time in this college.
The senior year formerly you know was but of very little use to the students, except only for reading the studies being of small importance having but only one recitation a day but in consequence of the new regulations it has become of as much importance as any of the four years. We have two recitations a day read disputes as was usual junior year; and four compositions a week, and six speak weekly.
Other classmates wrote to Robbins in much the same terms during the first year of Dwight's presidency. Henry Belden chided Robbins for leaving and told him that Dwight was “just such a man as every one would wish himself to be.” Charles Denison thought that “college has not, since I have been a member of it, been in so good a situation as it has during this termâ¦. All college are perfectly pleased with the President. Our class has two recitations each dayâ¦. The Pulpit is at present supplied by Dr. Dwight, which you may be sure is not displeasing to the students.” Benjamin Silliman, also of the class of 1796, and later to become Yale's professor of chemistry and natural history, likewise expressed great satisfaction with the new administration. “The President,” he wrote his mother, “gives universal satisfaction; college is in fine order; commons are decent; the weather is fine; and we have every opportunity for improvement which we can wish.”
Historians, reading such letters, have found in them ample support for the story told by Beecher, and indeed the case appears to be an obvious one: Stiles, though a learned man, must have been unsuccessful as a college president, and Dwight, in that respect at least, his superior. The evidence, to all appearances, is overwhelming. But appearances in this case are deceiving.
We might begin our examination of the evidence by noticing that Lyman Beecher's memory was faulty in some details: it can be demonstrated, for example, that the philosophical apparatus that he made so much fun of was relatively new. But we all know that memories are tricky and subject to error in much less than fifty years' time. The surprising thing is that Beecher was probably right about two important matters: the college church
was
near to extinction when Ezra Stiles died, and Timothy Dwight probably
did
allow the students to discuss the question whether the Bible was the word of God. Where Beecher erred, and where historians have erred more grievously in following him, was in the significance attached to these two facts. By placing them in their context, we may perceive that the situation at Yale in the 1790s was not quite what Beecher supposed when he recalled it fifty years later.
When Beecher said that the college church was almost extinct, he presumably meant that very few students were members of it in his day. The records of the church bear him out: although Yale students were obliged to attend the college church, few became members. Only three new members were admitted in 1792, only one in 1793, and only two in 1794. These figures, however, can be understood only in conjunction with a good many more.
The Yale College church, like many New England churches of the eighteenth century, had its beginnings in controversy, the controversy that followed the Great Awakening of 1741â42. The awakening divided New England into two hostile campsâthe New Lights, who supported it, and the Old Lights, who opposed it. Thomas Clap, Yale's rector from 1740 to 1745 and president from 1745 to 1766, had been one of the staunchest Old Lights. He had stood firmly for the Reverend Joseph Noyes, minister of New Haven's First Church, when itinerant New Light preachers denounced Noyes and split his church. Yale students, Clap saw to it, did not go wandering after strange gods; every Sunday morning, whether they liked it or not, they sat in the First Church and listened to Joseph Noyes. But by 1753 Clap himself, to the consternation of his friends, became a New Light. In order to remove Yale students from an influence that he suddenly saw as undesirable, he announced the astonishing doctrine that a college constituted a church in itself. Clap was probably the most forceful personality ever to sit in the president's chair at Yale, and in spite of the fact that Noyes was himself a member of the corporation, he carried his point. In 1757 the college church was gathered, with a professor of divinity, the Reverend Naphtali Daggett, to minister to it. It has existed ever since.
Several factors must be considered in judging the health of the Yale College church in the eighteenth century. The first is the size of membership in other New England churches of that time. One of the characteristics of the New Light churches (of which the college church, in the beginning at least, must be accounted one) was a strict standard of admission. Though there were wide variations on this point, New Light ministers generally wished to see a return to the Congregational practice of the seventeenth century, when a religious experience conveying assurance of salvation was a prerequisite of membership. Other ministers took a more liberal view, urging all persons who hoped for salvation to join. But even where the minister was liberal, congregations, whether Old Light or New, seem to have been less so; and the numbers who joined a church in full communion remained surprisingly small throughout the eighteenth century.
A small church membership did not necessarily mean an indifference or hostility to religion or to Congregationalism. New Englanders attended church in large numbers, and paid for the support of the minister, even in Rhode Island, where no law obliged them to. But few became members. The number of members in a given church was usually no more than half, sometimes much less than half, the number of families served by the church. In other words, about half of the families attending a particular church normally contained no member. The average New Englander in the eighteenth century was a churchgoer but not a church member. The number of members to be expected, therefore, in a church composed entirely of college students and faculty (the president, a professor or two, and three or four tutors) may be expected to run well below the size of the total student body.