USA > Connecticut > Tercentenary pamphlet series, v. 3 The Beginnings of Roman Catholicism in Connecticut > Part 35
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who a few years later urged the students to revolt. Furthermore, a considerable body of the Congregational ministers was extremely hostile to Clap on certain ecclesi- astical questions.
Opposition to President Clap's religious program found indirect expression in student conduct. Restless- ness was in the air in June, 1764. Despite the Laws, hard drinking was prevalent. This led to an order that the tutors "constantly visit the Chambers three times a day" and that "Executive Authority" should search them once a week for concealed liquor. Tavern keepers were warned not to sell strong drink to students. Further signs of growing insubordination appeared in the large number of delinquent college bills. The Corporation voted to dismiss the worst offenders and to warn the seniors that their degrees would not be granted if their bills remained unpaid. In order to make a show of fair- ness, it also voted that rusticated or dismissed students might have the right of petitioning for readmission on the grounds of unjust punishment. In September, how- ever, after a disturbing summer, the Corporation deemed it wise to augment its police power by ordering that tutors should lodge and board within the college. Further attempts were made to curb the consumption of strong drink and the circulation of "lacivious" books.
The college year 1764-1765 opened quietly enough, but there were soon cases of petty insubordination. Among these, as the grace book of the faculty records, was an amusing instance of failing decorum at commons. The episode is eloquent equally of poor commons and of the futility of the harsh disciplinary methods of Presi- dent Clap:
Whereas Yesterday at Dinner Bulkley 2ª sent several Pieces
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of Cheese across the Hall for which indecent Action & Waste of the Cheese, he was then reprimanded by Mr. Lyman. And presently after as the Tutors were going out at the Hall-Door, the s'd Bulkley violently threw a hard Piece of Cheese at Mr Lyman which passed near by his Head & struck the Side of the Door. The s'd Bulkley being sent for, said that he threw the s'd Piece of Cheese at Hunn. And Hunn being sent for said that he was at that Time at the opposite Part of the Hall. The s'd Bulkley offered nothing further in Extenuation of his Crimes.
More serious matters lay ahead, however. The admin- istration always dreaded commencement time on account of the disorders incidental to the occasion. Attracted by the student demonstrations such as exploding fire- crackers, firing pistols and guns, illuminating the college, and indulging in noisy processions and "prohibited shows" of various sorts, the town rowdies sometimes invited themselves to the fun-making. Fights and riots often ensued. This year, the increasing unpopularity of the college induced the Corporation to move com- mencement up to July 31 with a view to avoiding trouble. On the evening before commencement, nevertheless, a mob composed of students and townspeople assaulted the president's house "by throwing great stones against it with violence which broke about 30 squares of glass damnified the window sashes and clapboards broke off and carried away the gates, and other enormities did then and there commit whereby the president was slightly wounded." As a result of this outrage the Corporation brought action for damages against two civilians who had been concerned in the riot and expelled the student who had caused injury to the president. But the end was not yet.
The rising tide of protest at the alleged maladminis- tration of Yale College reached its height in the spring
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of 1766. There were many small causes of resentment- poor commons, increased tuition, excessive fining-but the main cause was the personal unpopularity of Presi- dent Clap, who ruled the affairs of the college in a high- handed way. Doubtless, too, a sympathetic excitement was induced in the students by colonial agitation against British encroachments on American liberty. There was less violence than during the preceding summer, but the students were even more determined to thwart the administration. They refused to pay their bills; they cut classes indiscriminately; and they baited the tutors. In his diary, the language of which testified to the need of instruction in composition, Joseph Wadsworth, a stu- dent, noted that Quarter Day, March 20, was "very still and peicable, except Mr [Tutor] Johnson's windows was broke." Some attempt was made to keep up a show of the old discipline, but it became more and more feeble. On March 28 Wadsworth gleefully recorded in his diary: "In the After Noon I, with sundry others of my class was sent for by the President for being absent 64 times from Prayers this [Quarter] but we was none of us fined." On April 3 nature herself seemed to have conspired with the rebels for there was an earthquake at two o'clock "which gave Old College a considerable of a shock." Six days later the malcontents informally expressed their con- tempt for the administration by posting publicly a couple of abusive letters. More conventional means of protest were adopted also, for a petition signed by most of the upperclassmen was presented to the Corporation, citing grievances. On April 22 the students were invited to express themselves freely on the subject to the mem- bers of the Corporation. But from the deposition of the classes, the Corporation concluded that few even of the small number who pretended to have grievances were
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able to support their charges. Inferring that the difficul- ties had "arisen very much from the Spirit of the Times," it took no action of consequence but to grant a slightly earlier dismissal for the spring recess. Although the agenda called for the discipline of several students, some of whom had confessed, the Fellows determined not to "proceed to Judgment" until their next meeting. Evi- dently the Corporation was finding it expedient to act with caution.
The administration was now further embarrassed by the withdrawal of tutors Austin and Johnson, who had been virtually forced to resign by student hostility. Their windows had been broken; their lives were threatened. They wished to escape. Moreover such was the reign of terror inaugurated by the students that they laid "Great Discouragment in the way of others undertaking the sd office." Consequently it was found necessary to disband the underclassmen and to allow them to carry on their studies with whatever ministers they pleased. The seniors were to stay on and prepare for their degrees if they cared to do so.
The seriousness of these indications President Clap could no longer ignore. Right though he conceived his administration to be, he could not with a clear conscience remain in office until Yale College should actually dis- integrate. At a meeting of the President and Fellows on July 5, 1766, therefore, he "gave in a Paper ... represent- ing that in Consideration of his long and fatiguing Serv- ice in this College, and that the state of his health was not as firm as formerly, he was desirous to resign his Office as President." The Corporation, still loyal to him, accepted his resignation, but it asked him to stay on until the approaching commencement, and it ordered spread upon the minutes a number of panegyric remarks
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concerning President Clap's "great good and long serv- ice" to the college.
After the resignation of President Clap the Corpora- tion proceeded to order discipline for the more vicious of the insurgents, and it iterated that no man should receive his degree at the commencement unless he had met his financial obligations. Attendance at college became almost nil. One alumnus, Chauncey Whittelsey, wrote on July 7 that "Alma Mater ... seemed just to breath [sic] but ready to expire." In this emergency the Rever- end James Lockwood of Wethersfield, one of the Fellows, was invited to assume the presidency; but he declined, pleading, among other things, "a feeble constitution." Shortly thereafter Naphtali Daggett, professor of divin- ity, was unanimously elected president pro tempore. He remained in office until 1777. Before he was through, Acting President Daggett was also to experience the keen edge of student criticism, but in the meantime the college regained some stability, which it retained until the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.
VII
Nor long after this stormy civil war over the administra- tion of Yale College, there occurred a bloodless revolu- tion of very moderate proportions, which brought about the reform of some of the defects in the curriculum. The two movements were not dissociated, for President Clap had not only administered "justice" with an iron hand, but he had insisted upon the maintenance of outworn modes of education. There had long been developing a conviction that the course of study and methods of teaching suffered from their allegiance to out-of-date English methods of education. John Trumbull, perhaps the most distinguished critic of the college during this
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period, summarized these abuses in his Essay on the fine arts and in his satirical poem, The progress of dulness. These works, although published in 1770 and 1772-1773 respectively, were based largely upon Trumbull's experi- ence as an undergraduate during the years 1763-1767. He found that the college threw far too much emphasis upon so-called "solid learning," which included mainly the dead languages, logic, mathematics, and theology. He complained that "the meer knowledge of antient languages, of the abstruser parts of mathematics, and the dark researches of metaphysics" too often passed for education. He deplored the time spent on "Geometrical labours for the quadrature of the Circle." He deplored also the attention which divines of the day gave to "virulent controversies" of no real moment while the youth of the land remained largely uninstructed. Actual instruction he found so lax and standards so low that in his opinion "a fellow, without any share of genius, or application to study [might] ... be admitted to the right hand of fellowship among ministers of the gospel." He made the drastic criticism that "except in one neighbour- ing province, ignorance wanders unmolested at our col- leges, examinations are dwindled to mere form and ceremony, and after four years dozing there, no one is ever refused the honors of a degree, on account of dul- ness and insufficiency." His contention was that it would be far more beneficial to the college if some of the solid branches of learning were lopped off and more oppor- tunity given for the growth of "oratory, the grammar of the English tongue, and the elegancies of style and composition."
The proposals of Trumbull do not sound very radical. Yet they were new at Yale, and to change the curriculum officially was for a time impossible. Consequently what
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was immediately accomplished was brought about quite informally by the tutors and the more articulate of the students. It happened that in the late 'sixties there were several more than usually enterprising undergraduates at the college, among them John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight (later president of Yale), Buckingham St. John, Joseph Howe, and David Humphreys. By their enthu- siasm for writing and public speaking, which they prac- ticed sedulously, these men stimulated the undergraduate taste for literary art. Oratory enjoyed a renaissance in the fall of 1767, when Tutor Stephen Mix Mitchell2 consented to help the students extracurricularly. At about this time, too, there was some reduction of the unfortunate "senior discipline," for Eleazar Wheelock, shortly to become first president of Dartmouth College, wrote to a resident of Yale in the fall of 1767: "I am glad to hear that the freshmen are not worried and plagued of late with that worse than hoggish kind of discipline from their superiors as I think you call them." The Corporation cooperated with the move toward democ- racy and emphasis upon studies instead of social rank, to the extent of putting into effect an alphabetical arrangement of students' names. The salutary effect of this simple move may be learned from a letter written by a member of the sophomore class: "There appears a laudable ambition to excel in knowledge. It is not he that has got the finest coat or largest ruffles that is esteemed here at present. And as the class henceforward are to be placed alphabetically, the students may expect marks of distinction to be put upon the best scholars and speakers." A new literary society also sprang into exist- ence in 1768, the Brothers in Unity. The aim of this
2 Later United States senator and chief justice of the supreme court of Connecticut; grandfather of Donald Grant Mitchell.
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society, which was fathered by David Humphreys, later an aid and friend of Washington, was partly social; but it had a very definite cultural object, which was to "promote the intellectual improvement of its members by the study and practice of forensic debate, by exercises in composition and elocution, and by the delivery at stated times of written orations and poems."
Through student initiative, therefore, and through the cooperation of a staff of tutors somewhat more pro- gressive than those of the preceding decade, a good beginning was made toward fostering humane letters at Yale. A few years later, when Dwight and Trumbull became tutors and Joel Barlow added his ebullient spirit to the student group, still more was done toward culti- vating the arts. The tutors gave unofficial instruction in their spare time, and they stimulated undergraduate effort by their own practice. It was inspiring to have poets as tutors. During his incumbency John Trumbull wrote one of the most celebrated American poems of the eighteenth century, The progress of dulness. Compounded largely of invective and humor, this work shocked a Puritan public nursed in the belief that poetry should be confined to sacred and elegiac themes; but it delighted the undergraduates. Dwight was composing his glittering epic, The conquest of Canaan, which was destined upon its publication ten years later for an undue meed of fame. Barlow was trying his poetical wings for his later ascent into the "sublime" periods of The Columbiad-whither few readers in later days have cared to follow him. These alert young men were not great poets, but they were among the best that America had yet nurtured; and they were highly valuable representatives of the muse and of enlightenment at Yale in the eighteenth century.
Even dramatic performances, despite their prohibition
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in the college Laws, began to thrive. In 1771 and 1772 the Linonian Society produced (among other plays less worthy of remembrance) Steele's Conscious lovers and Farquhar's Beaux' stratagem. Indeed theatrical per- formances enjoyed such favor that alarmed friends of the college voiced complaint. Nehemiah Strong, one-time professor of mathematics, asserted a few years later that the students were giving themselves too much to "the rapturous transporting Displays of the Stage . .. which are calculated only to warm the imagination." Jonathan Welles, formerly a tutor at Yale, grieved to observe that the students had "left the more solid parts of Learng & run into Plays & dramatic Exhibitions chiefly of the comic kind & turn'd College . .. into Drury Lane."
During the decade of this little revolution (roughly from 1767 to 1777), the administration did practically nothing to promote the movement, but it did not attempt to arrest progress. Acting President Daggett, a man of modest abilities, was quite content to allow the brisk young tutors considerable freedom. Indeed, in 1776-a memorable date-the Corporation first took cognizance of the studies which were becoming popular by voting, at the request of the senior class, that Timothy Dwight might be allowed to instruct them in "Rhetorick, History, and the belles lettres." With characteristic caution, how- ever, it added the proviso that this might be done only with the "approbation of the Parents or Guardians of the said class."
Thus, timorously, Yale College experimented with subjects which are among the staples of college education today. If the progress it made now seems to have been very slight, it must be remembered that the problems of Yale in the eighteenth century were not comparable to those of a modern liberal college. Its matriculants were younger
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and their preparation was less uniform than now. Then the college was expected to give its students a suitable mental discipline, but it felt even more obligated to establish in them good moral character and sound religious habits. Moreover, since prospective divinity students outnumbered students planning to enter other professions (medicine and law were next in order), the curriculum was shaped largely to meet their needs. After graduation a majority of them retained a connection with the college for three years in order to secure their master's degree. The preponderance of theological studies in the curriculum at Yale and elsewhere was, therefore, natural. Nor is it accurate to refer all of Yale's preoccupation with religion to the influence of New England Puritanism: education had been the handmaid of religion in Europe long before John Calvin was born. Neither was Yale alone in insisting upon religious or- thodoxy: the degree of "liberalism" that obtained at Princeton in 1757 may be surmised from its selection of Jonathan Edwards for the presidency.
Yet, whatever its aims and obligations, a college may be criticized for defects in its administration and in its curriculum. The riots that occurred during the presi- dency of Clap were crude signs of something inherently wrong in the government of Yale College at the time. As for the curriculum, it was already growing antiquated in 1750. Even students of theology were not being well served by the restricted course of study laid out for them. At best the instruction tended to train the memory and develop precision. Reasoning was encouraged somewhat but, although students were encouraged to draw correct inferences from premises, they were seldom taught to examine the basic propositions. Premises, like many other things, were to be accepted on authority. There
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was less attempt to stimulate the imagination than to train the "judgment." In short the curriculum suffered from undue regimentation in a generation when the atmosphere was instinct with freedom and critical investigation.
VIII
FORTUNATELY, signs of progress, which had appeared intermittently during the régime of President Daggett, increased as the century drew toward a close. Ezra Stiles, who assumed the presidency in 1778, was a scholar of international repute, an able executive, and a liberal in religion. The range of his scholarly interests was exceedingly wide, and he was an active correspondent with learned men in many parts of the world. He was an inveterate diarist and annalist; and his Itineraries and Literary diary, though rather heavily freighted with statistics and antiquarian lore, still bear the stamp of his strong personality. His administration was often stormy but never chaotic. Inclined to be a stern discipli- narian (Lyman Beecher said that, in this respect, Stiles was the last of the old régime), he too discovered that college students can become "a Bundle of Wild Fire"; but his innate common sense tided him over most of his administrative difficulties. In religion he was convinced that it is idle to try to maintain orthodoxy by banning books that question it. On one occasion he had protested against President Clap's attempt to bar certain deistical books from the library; for, said Stiles, in such cases 'the only way is, to come forth into the open field, and dispute the matter on even footing." He further mani- fested his catholicity by attending frequently services in churches of other denominations than his own. He was inclined to be liberal, too, with respect to the contact
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between college and state. That closer relationship which President Clap had so fought against, President Stiles readily assented to in part. Accordingly in 1792 by an act of the general assembly membership in the Yale Corporation was granted to the governor, the deputy- governor, and the ten assistants. A scholar of distinction, a wise administrator, a man of strong character, Ezra Stiles served Yale College brilliantly and substantially for seventeen years. Yale prospered under his adminis- tration.
Upon the death of Stiles in 1795, the presidency passed to Timothy Dwight, one of the most honored presidents in the early history of Yale. Despite a weakness for ceremonial, Dwight was a progressive administrator who did much to broaden the scope and influence of the insti- tution. The evolution of Yale College into Yale Univer- sity during the nineteenth century was, of course, a long process (the name Yale University was first used officially in 1887), but the beginnings of the transformation were definitely observable at the end of the eighteenth century.
The first century of the college had been a difficult one. Limited funds, inadequately prepared students, admin- istrative difficulties, and political unrest impaired the efficiency of the institution and delayed the development of a strong curriculum. Surviving its gravest crisis in 1766, however, Yale gradually secured stability and, under two particularly able men, Stiles and Dwight, it concluded its first century with a record of definite achievement and with promising auspices for the century to come.
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TERCENTENARY COMMISSION OF THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT
OUI
SUSTINET
TRANSTULIT
COMMITTEE ON
HISTORICAL PUBLICATIONS
LVI The Clergy of Connecticut in Revolutionary Days ALICE MARY BALDWIN
PUBLISHED FOR THE TERCENTENARY COMMISSION BY THE YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1936
The Printing-Office of the Yale University Press
TERCENTENARY COMMISSION OF THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT
COMMITTEE ON HISTORICAL PUBLICATIONS
LVI The Clergy of Connecticut in Revolutionary Days ALICE MARY BALDWIN
T
I HE story of the nonconformist clergy of Connecticut in the American Revolution is a dramatic tale of men who were convinced of the eternal righteousness of their cause, who knew their power and believed in their responsibil- ity-men whose lives were inextricably inwoven into the life of their community whether in peace or in war, and whose knowledge, convictions, and acts were of great significance in those days of conflict.
To understand the part played by the ministers one must first forget the populous, industrial state of the twentieth century with its large cities, good roads, auto- mobiles, radios, and daily press, and turn back one hundred and sixty years to a Connecticut of about seventy towns and villages ranging in population from two or three hundred to five, six, or seven thousand, a large number having less than fifteen hundred inhabitants. Its people were for the most part farmers, its roads were poor, books were hard to obtain, and newspapers were
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small and published weekly in three or four towns only.
Theology and the church were then of far greater importance in the life of the average man than today. Every village or, in the larger towns, every parish had its meeting house, and the people were taxed for its sup- port and for the support of the minister who was chosen, according to the law of the colony, by the voters of the town rather than by the church members. The great majority of the people were Congregationalists, or Presbyterians, as they were sometimes called. A few were Anglicans or Baptists. In the eastern counties especially were some Separate congregations made up for the most part of humble, uneducated men and women who refused to accept the so-called ecclesiastical consti- tution of the colony and who vainly petitioned the assembly for relief from taxation for support of the regu- lar clergy or Standing Order.
The choice of a minister in those days was a serious matter. At his installation he was given a home and land, received a stated salary, small though it often was, and sometimes, in addition, a sum of money to induce him to settle. Each parish took its time about selecting its pastor, minutely investigated his life, character, and training, carefully tested his theology, and was deeply concerned over the method of his ordination and installation.
The pastor so chosen settled down among his people to live and work with them, and there he frequently re- mained throughout a long life, baptizing the babies, teaching the children the catechism, watching them grow to manhood, often preparing the brighter boys for college, marrying them, reproving their errors, sharing their festivities, and helping them in sickness and in sorrow. The parish of North Haven, for example, num- bered at the time of the Revolution less than thirteen
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hundred souls, and of these Benjamin Trumbull, their minister from 1760 to 1820, said that over a thousand came under his pastoral care. Ammi Ruhamah Robbins was pastor from 1761 to 1813 at Norfolk, which in 1774 had nine hundred and sixty-nine inhabitants. In The clergy of Litchfield county Arthur Goodenough said of him, "He ruled the old men, being at once their counselor and boon companion. The youngmen were his children. . . . I was the hundred and thirteenth boy whom he had fitted and entered at some collegiate institution." Among other famous teachers were Joel Bardwell of Kent, James Lock- wood of Wethersfield, and Elizur Goodrich of Durham, who is said to have prepared three hundred boys for college in twenty years.
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