USA > Connecticut > Connecticut as a colony and as a state; or, One of the original thirteen, Volume IV > Part 16
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But the superficial views of buildings and growing num- bers and elaborate appliances for education are not those by which the friends of Yale wish her to be judged. They are worthy of note mainly because they are tokens of something far deeper, the undying affection of the graduates, whose loyalty is her best endowment, and which seeks its expres- sion in giving the best that each can offer, be it trilobite or scholarship or gate or massive building. And this loyalty
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is rooted in the conviction that the years spent within college walls have meant more than what is gained by study alone, or by social advancement, or by the formation of life-long friendships, valuable as these are. There has been the feeling that that which ought to be the aim and result of education, character, has been developed by the indefinable influence of a hundred elements of Yale's life in the past and present. The "Yale spirit," acknowledged to be really unique, has not acquired its name without cause. To learn to not sulk under defeat, but to win from it lessons for future victory, to subordinate the individual interest to the good of society, to concentrate all the intensity of human nature on the accom- plishment of a selected aim; these are things that will gov- ern a man's career in life. The charter of 1701 distinctly stated the object of the collegiate school to be the preparation of young men for "public service in both church and state;" and the responsibilty towards public affairs has not been neglected. President Woolsey's last public prayer, that the faculty might always feel that "life was higher than learn- ing," has not been without answer. The lectures of Mr. Jus- tice Brewer of the Supreme Court, and of Bishop Potter, are tokens of the present administration's constant and con- sitent effort to promote good citizenship, and to inspire men with such ideas as will make the political fabric stronger for their being interwoven with it.
Yale's part in the history of missions must not be neglected. What Edwards and Brainard and Eleazar Wheelock did for the Indians is known to all. Although the American Board of Foreign Missions got its charter (after much opposition there) in Massachusetts. Yet Connecticut, through Yale men, had really an equal influence in its founding. In 1809, the great Hebrew scholar Moses Stuart urged its formation; and
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on Sept. 10, 1810, the Board was legally organized in Farm- ington, in the house of the Rev. Dr. Noah Porter, a distin- guished Yale graduate and member of the Corporation, the father of President Noah Porter.
The meeting was presided over by Governor Treadwell, class of 1767, one of the foremost men of New England then, and serving for years as the first president of the Board; while four-ninths of the original members, including Presi- dent Dwight, were Yale men, as were eight of the twenty- six corporate members in 1813; and the efficient treasurer for many years was Jeremiah Evarts, whose sagacity and energy did much to build up the Board.
Among the hundreds of her sons whom Yale has sent to the field are many whose names will never die in missionary annals, and some who have turned the course of nations. Such was Asa Thurston, the most athletic man of his time in college, whose stalwart form drawn up in wrath struck dismay to the savages who had presumed to alarm his wife, the man who remained on the Sandwich Islands for forty-eight years without returning, and from whom Kamehameha II. and Kamehameha III. imbibed those advanced ideas which have borne such fruit; Hiram Bingham, Jr., who with his wife toiled for eighteen years to give the Bible to the Gilbert Islanders, to whom they were the first missionaries; Samuel Robbins Brown, who left an indelible impress on two great nations of the Orient, China and Japan; in the first, by bringing to this country Yung Wing, who became an honored graduate of Yale, and, as the friend of Li Hung Chang, effected an immeasurable revolution in ideas by establishing the Chinese Educational Commission; in the second, by trans- lating the Bible with Hepburn into Japanese, and, by his Christian diplomacy inducing Japan to send her princes to
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us for education. He ranks with Verbeck in the opening of Japan; and one effect of his life work is seen in the large numbers of Japanese students who resort to Yale.
In later times, Frederick D. Greene was chief in securing sympathy and funds for the Armenian sufferers.
Among Yale's great missionary scholars have been Dr. Eli Smith, the "polyglot of Turkey;" David T. Stoddard, the brilliant scholar who refused invitations to join four Ameri- can faculties, and devoted himself to the Persian Bible and Grammar; Stone who did a like work for the Zulus; Jessup in Syria; Pratt and Blodgett and White and Neal in China, Learned in Japan, and Scranton in Corea. In all, Yale men have translated the Bible into forty languages.
The missionary physicians have done wonders; Peter Par- ker, who "opened China to the Gospel at the point of his lancet," and Frank Van Allen, who so won the Hindus that they built for him one of the first hospitals in India, are examples.
In India, too, the Humes have done their great work, Rob- ert Hume's relief measures during the famine of 1900 being on such a scale that a million dollars passed through his hands, and that he won the gratitude of millions of sufferers, causing Queen Victoria to give him the Kaisar-i-Hind gold medal.
Yale's missionaries have done some important diplomatic service, as Peter Parker, who secured at the ports permission to build hospitals and houses of worship; Dr. Blodgett, who influenced the Chinese emperor to favor foreigners; H. A. Homes, Secretary of Legation at the Sublime Porte. Dr. S. Wells Williams, who although not a graduate of Yale, was closely identified with her as a professor later, served nine terms as U. S. chargé d'affaires in China, and secured the famous "toleration clause" of the treaty of Tientsin,-a
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clause which went into the British treaty, and since then has protected missionaries of every nation.
If courage has been needed, the Yale missionaries have not lacked it : such were Dyer Ball, whom the Chinese said "lived the Gospel;" Sherwood Eddy, holding his own among fierce Moslems; and Yale's martyr in the Boxer War, Horace Tracy Pitkin, who left wealth and culture to try to uplift China's millions, and gallantly died a dreadful death while protecting his fellow-countrywomen.
In Home Missions, the deeds done have been just as effectual, if not as picturesque; and in the development of Young Men's Christian Associations, Yale has been prom- inent. Her own is the largest college association in the coun- try. It sent James B. Reynolds abroad to promote these associations among European universities, with such effect that in 1901, the World's Student Christian Federation comprised 62 I associations in the United States, and 1,400 in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australasia. Gaylord in Paris, Hubbard in China, have established them; and to Dr. Frank K. Sanders, at the present time Dean of the Yale Divinity School, is owing the origin of these now extremely influ- ential associations in Asia, since he formed the first one in Ceylon.
The unobtrusive missionary work done in New Haven by Yale undergraduates under the Young Men's Christian Association is full of direct and reflex benefit. For years the Yale Mission, which was started by Yale's famous pitcher, Stagg, has done acceptable organized work in city missions, boys' and men's clubs, Sunday Schools, and industrial classes ; and has now reached the dignity of rearing its own building, paid for by graduates and undergraduates, mostly the lat- ter.
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From the Divinity School, the students go out for definite assistance to pastors and missions of city churches, thus plac- ing such pecuniary relief as they may require on self-respect- ing business grounds of payment for service actually ren- dered.
Even a cursory glance at a Triennial Catalogue gives an idea of the part that Yale graduates have had in the world's work.
In the educational field, the number of professors and teachers whom she has sent out is too great for even a rep- resentative selection ; but such names as Moses Stuart, Ethan Allen Andrews, Noah Webster, James E. Worcester, Henry Barnard, James Kingsley, James Hadley, F. A. P. Bar- nard, Samuel Johnson, Jonathan Dickinson, Noah Porter, Thomas A. Thacher, Thomas H. Gallaudet, must not be passed; while she has supplied presidents to other colleges beyond any other institution-the number, including most of her own, far exceeding one hundred, and nearly doubling that of Harvard even. Among her religious leaders she has sent out Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Bellamy, Samuel Hop- kins, Samuel Seabury, Timothy Dwight, Lyman Beecher, Gardiner Spring, Nathaniel W. Taylor, Leonard Bacon, and Horace Bushnell, thus providing America with the two men who stand without dispute at the head of her religious think- ers, Edwards and Bushnell.
Of physicians and surgeons, a great company have dis- tinguished themselves : Stearns, Knight, Mason Fitch Cogs- well, Stillé, the Iveses, McClellan, Lusk, the Delafields, Beard, Prudden, McLane, Welch.
Among her great jurists are Chancellor Kent (who ranks next to Marshall), Oliver Wolcott, William Samuel John- son, Philip and William Livingston, Abraham Baldwin, Jere-
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miah Mason ( Webster's great friend and opponent), Chan- cellor Runyon of New Jersey, John M. Clayton (of Clayton- Bulwer treaty fame), Lyman Hall, Charles J. McCurdy (who made a memorable improvement in our law by securing for accused persons the privilege of testifying for them- selves), Lewis Morris, Morrison R. Waite, Roger Bald- win (who secured freedom for the Amistad captives). Oliver Ellsworth was for three years a Yale student, being grad- uated from Princeton.
The mass of her writers on special lines is so vast that selection is difficult; but among purely literary men may be mentioned Joel Barlow, John Pierpont, Nathaniel P. Willis, John G. C. Brainard, James G. Percival, George W. Smal- ley, Isaac H. Bromley, Edward Rowland Sill, Edmund Clar- ence Stedman, Donald G. Mitchell, while James Fenimore Cooper received from Yale all the academic education that he had.
For her own State she has provided twenty-five governors, and a very large number for others,-including New York's great governor, who came so near being President, Samuel J. Tilden,-besides Hunt for Porto Rico and Taft for the Philippines. In the Senate, the names of Henry C. Dawes, the friend of the Indian, and for years the Dean of the Senate, and Orrin S. Ferry, occur at once; and the list of public offices held by her sons would be too long to give here.
When so many have been patriotic in time of war, it is hard to name individuals; but Yale can never let die the memory of Nathan Hale; Theodore Winthrop, the first Union soldier to die in battle, John Griswold and Henry Camp, Edward Blake and Henry Dutton, all "knightly sol- diers;" or Ward Cheney and George Miller, who died in the Spanish war, while Generals Wooster and Humphreys and
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Huntington did great service in the War of the Revolution.
The world knows her men of science; Jedidiah Morse, the "Father of Geography," and his illustrious son, Samuel Finley Breese Morse of telegraph fame; Manasseh Cutler and David Bushnell, early workers; Benjamin Silliman, the great pioneer of chemical science in this country; Elias Loomis and William Chauvenet, the famous mathematicians; Lyman and Newton, the astronomers, Dana, the great geologist and friend of Agassiz; John P. Peters, the explorer of Nippur; Marsh, one of the few great paleontologists of the world; Josiah Willard Gibbs, the mathematical physicist, in the judgment of many of the best European observers "the greatest scientific discoverer that America has produced."
Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin, and Eli Whit- ney Blake, of the stone-breaker, both epoch-making inventions, Ethan Allen Andrews, of Latin Dictionary renown, James Hadley, the Greek scholar; Edward Elbridge Salisbury, a pio- neer in Sanskrit; J. Hammond Trumbull, the only master of the aboriginal language; and many other linguistic schol- ars, were Yale graduates. So too were Henry Ellsworth, our first Commissioner of Patents, who did much to help Morse secure government support for the telegraph; Joshua Leav- itt, the great reformer; Poole, whose Index has been a boon to every user of libraries or writer of articles, and Theodore Hinsdale, a brilliant member of the class of 1821, who was cut off in his prime, and yet lived long enough to originate in 1837 the famous Connecticut Joint Stock Act, which was in principle "copied by almost every State in the Union and by the English Limited Liability Act of 1855; and has had effects upon the industrial development of the world quite beyond calculation."
In the Cabinet have been Postmasters-General Meigs,
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Granger, and Bissell; Noble, Secretary of the Interior; Bad- ger, Williams, and Whitney, Secretaries of the Navy; Wayne McVeagh, Attorney-General; Alphonso Taft, Secretary of War and Postmaster-General; and his son, William H. Taft, our present Secretary of War; besides the brilliant John C. Calhoun, Secretary of War, Secretary of State, and Vice- President; and the great Secretary of State Evarts, to whom we owe untold benefits gained by his diplomatic ability during the matter of the Alabama Arbitration, Johnson's Impeach- ment, and the Electoral Commission.
Among foreign ministers have been Silas Deane, our first to France; Joel Barlow, to France, and David Humphreys, to Spain; Ashbel Smith, to France and England; Edwards Pierrepont, to the latter country; Ralph Ingersoll, Alphonso Taft, and Cassius M. Clay, to Russia; Charles J. McCurdy, to Austria; Peter Parker, to China; Wayne McVeagh, to Turkey and Italy; Yung Wing, from China to the United States; Theodore Runyon, William Walter Phelps, and Andrew D. White, the last, one of the foremost living diplo- mats, to Germany.
In the United States Supreme Court she has had Henry Baldwin, William Strong, Waite, and Shiras; and she has Brown and Brewer at the present time.
From Stephen Johnson, who had a deep influence in pro- moting the Revolution, the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Lyman Hall, Wolcott, Philip Livingston, and Lewis Morris, and the members of the Constitutional Con- vention in 1787, Johnson, Ingersoll, Livingston, and Bald- win,-to Judd, Attorney-General in Hawaii; Hunt, Gov- ernor of Porto Rico, and Taft in the Philippines,-Yale men have proved themselves able statesmen, and have been in the front of civilizing forces.
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Yale has been conservative as becomes a large body; but she has not been a laggard in the march of improvement. She was the first to give the degree of Doctor of Philosophy; the first to have organized courses for graduate study; the first to have a Scientific School, an Art School, a School of Agri- culture, a School of Music, a School of Forestry. Benjamin Silliman's work in establishing, in 1818, the "Journal of Science," was of the greatest importance in the advancement of scientific intercourse.
In the old laboratory, and since then in the Sloane Phys- ical Laboratory, has been made a long-continued series of observations on atmospheric electricity which were published in connection with the United Signal Service, now the Weather Bureau; and there were worked out most important experiments on the cathode discharge and the analysis and spectroscopic examination of the gases contained in meteor- ites. The Sloane Physical Laboratory was the first building in this country especially devoted to physics, Harvard's being begun before this was quite finished; and it was an interest- ing sequence of the cathode experiments that in that build- ing was accomplished the first reproduction in this country of the phenomena of the Roentgen ray.
In President Hadley's administration has been an evident aim to bind closer the ties between graduates and under- graduates, to develop ideas of civic responsibility both in the arrangements of courses and in the moral tone of the stu- dents, ideas of civic responsibility,-in short, not to produce scholars simply, but men.
Yale has passed the limit of a retreat for scholarly recluses, if indeed it was ever such; and has become an energizing force of national reputation, doing its part in the uplifting and regeneration of the world.
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CHAPTER XII
CONNECTICUT'S NATIVE SONS AS COLLEGE PRESIDENTS
T HOSE who have established or promoted insti- tutions of learning have ever been accounted benefactors of mankind; and of such men the State has supplied great numbers.
The memorable work at Princeton of the elder Aaron Burr, whose mental endowments were inherited by his son without his virtues, and of Jonathan Edwards, whose name, says Hallock, "contributed more to the fame of Princeton on the Continent than the name of any other official connected with its history," have been recounted on other pages. It is well known that Christian work for the Indians resulted in the founding of Dartmouth by Eleazar Wheelock, and of Hamilton, by Samuel Kirkland. Of equal moment were the pioneer labors of Manasseh Cutler for Ohio University; of Aaron Chapin, first president of Beloit College for thirty-six years; of Caleb Pitkin, the projector of Western Reserve College, and George E. Pierce, its first president who was a college graduate; of Theron Baldwin and Julian Sturtevaut, the founders of Illinois College, the latter teaching there for fifty-six years, and Edward Beecher, who was its first president.
The names of the Johnsons, father and son, who shaped the early history of King's, now Columbia, College, are also prominent. The minds of the Dutch and English settlers of New York had not been so firmly set on colleges as on more lucrative enterprises; so the middle of the eighteenth cen- tury had passed before an effectual movement was made to establish such an institution. Trinity Church was very gen- erous in offering a large plot of land on the west side of Broadway, and as the project assumed definite shape, the eyes of its planners turned to the Rev. Dr. Samuel John- son, as eminently fitted for the president. As a leader of
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the rising Episcopal Church in America, he satisfied the stip- ulations that accompanied the gift of Trinity Church and were a part of the charter of the college, that the president should be "in communion with the Church of England, and that the morning and evening service of the college be the liturgy of the Church." His personal character and his attainments as a classical scholar, particularly in Hebrew, had given him an established reputation. At first he demurred at the undertaking, serious indeed for one no longer young: neither was he anxious to leave his pleasant home in Strat- ford; but in 1753 he consented provisionally, and in 1754, a charter having been secured, he definitely accepted. The charter liberally admitted on the Board of Governors, the ministers of the Reformed Protestant Dutch, the Ancient Lutheran, and the Presbyterian churches in New York; and Dr. Johnson's prospectus for pupils invited confidence in the conduct of the new college. He described it as designed "for the best good of the rising generations," and promised to be liberal in religious matters, to teach the learned languages, the "principles of goodness," the arts "of reason- ing exactly, of writing correctly, of speaking eloquently," (the college that can do those three things now will achieve a great deal), to lead them from the study of Nature to the knowledge of themselves and of the God of Nature, and their Duty to Him, themselves, and one another." At first he constituted the entire teaching force, instructing his class of ten youths in the "Vestry-room of the school-house adja- cent to Trinity Church;" but in 1755 his son William assisted him, and they did all the teaching satisfactorily. Soon Mr. Cutting was secured as a tutor; and later, Daniel Treadwell, a Harvard graduate, was appointed to take
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charge of Mathematics and Natural History, and became the first professor in the college.
Dr. Johnson made great efforts to secure donations from England; but not with so great success as at home later, although in one instance he had a notable gift of 1,500 volumes from Dr. Bristow. These, with many others that would now be extremely valuable, including the gift from the University Press at Cambridge of a copy of every book that it printed, suffered greatly during the Revolution; and while some vanished utterly, others reappeared after an unex- plained seclusion of thirty years.
Small-pox was then an ever-present and justly dreaded danger, being frequently epidemic. The only real safeguard was to have passed through the risk and horror of the dis- ease, vaccination not having come into use, and the proper sanitary precautions not being understood or practiced. Dr. Johnson, not having had the disease, stood in great fear of it, and made it a condition of accepting his office, that "he should be allowed to retire to some place of safety in the country when the small-pox prevailed." The time arrived for claim- ing his privilege in 1757, when small-pox raged in New York, and Dr. Johnson, finding it so near to him on all sides that he and his family were shut up in the college quarters, fled to Stratford, where he was obliged to remain for more than a year, before the disease had abated sufficiently to permit his return. He came back in time to deliver an elegant and learned Latin oration at the first Commencement, in June 1758. In the next year he was driven to Stratford again by another outbreak of the same disease, and during this period the malady bereaved him of one of his family, his step son Benjamin Nicoll, one of the most energetic supporters of the
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college. This great blow was followed by the death of Pro- fesor Treadwell.
On his return, although he said the "city appeared to him like a kind of wilderness," he plunged into work to retrieve the losses caused by his prolonged although enforced absences. In 1760 he delivered a Latin address at the opening of the new College Hall, admired by all who saw it for its architec- tural excellence and its charming situation, one hundred and fifty yards from the bank of the Hudson. Being on an eminence, "totally unencumbered by any adjacent buildings," it commanded a prospect of magnificent sweep up the river and down to the Narrows. He secured from England Dr. Myles Cooper, who taught, and became his successor when in 1763, his wife having succumbed to the dreaded small-pox, he resigned and retired to live in Stratford with his son dur- ing his honored old age. A bell, organ, and many books had been secured, besides a royal brief by which collections were authorized in Great Britain for the colleges in New York and Pennsylvania; the iron crown which surmounted the steeple of College Hall is still preserved, but the name of King's disappeared during the war which was at hand. Dr. Samuel Johnson had many difficulties to encounter, and some- times his classes melted away before they could be gradu- ated; but he left the college with over thirty students. It is interesting to note that his frequent trips to Stratford were generally made by water. And in 1764 he appears as one of the contributors for completing the steeple and erecting a spire on the Chapel at Yale, his own old college home.
The last degree of King's College was given in 1776, and then, through the British occupancy of New York and the troubles of the war, it fell into a state of decay, and was not revived till 1784, when Dr. Samuel Johnson's son, William
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Samuel Johnson, the pride of the Fairfield County bar, was unanimously called to be its head. He was the first president under its new name, Columbia, as his father had been the first of King's. William Samuel Johnson was a graduate of Yale, which had given to him her first degree of LL.D., as she had given her first degree of divinity to his father. The son had had wider opportunities than the father, was of dis- tinguished ability, and gave a fresh impulse to the half- extinct institution. With Sherman and Ellsworth, he formed the great trio sent by Connecticut to the Constitutional Con- vention, that meeting-place for the greatest minds of the land; and he rightly felt that duty called him to its sessions as much as to the class-room.
The first Commencement of Columbia, in 1789, was graced by the presence of Washington, of Adams, and of the U. S. Senate and House. Medical instruction was connected with the institution, leading to the College of Physicians and Surgeons; in 1793 James Kent, afterwards the great Chan- cellor, was made Professor of Law; the Legislature granted money for books, apparatus, buildings and salaries, and pros- perity smiled in various ways. President Johnson, the famous lawyer and orator, instructed in "grammar and proper pro- nunciation," and in fact, paid much attention to the cultiva- tion of graceful and forcible language and of literary taste. The influence of his reputation and example were of the greatest benefit to the college during his term of sixteen years. In 1800 he resigned, and retired like his father to their beloved Stratford, where he passed the remainder of his life, with mind vigorous till his death in his ninety-third year.
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