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COVER STORY
STAND COLUMBIA: THE FOUNDING OF KING'S COLLEGE
BY ROBERT McCAUGHEY
Providence has not called us alone
to found a University in
New York, Nor to urge the slow, cold councils of
that city.
— William Samuel Johnson (son) to Samuel
Johnson (father), 1753
The clamour I raised against [the
College] … when it was
first founded on its present narrow principles,
has yet and
probably never will totally silence.
— William Livingston to William Livingston
Jr., 1768
Columbia College, founded as King’s College
in 1754, had a long and eventful history before
it was even officially established and ready to
accept students. In anticipation of Columbia’s
250th anniversary, Robert McCaughey,
Anne Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard,
undertook six years ago to write an interpretive
history of the University. The result is Stand,
Columbia (Columbia University Press, 2003, $39.95),
which traces the evolution of Columbia from its
beginnings as Tory redoubt in revolutionary America
through its Knickerbocker days down to the Civil
War, its emergence as America’s first multiversity
by the early 1900s, through its multiple crises
in the 1960s and on to its current position as a
global university at the outset of the 21st century.
The following excerpt from the first chapter details
the events that led to the College’s founding.
PROLOGUE
Columbia’s has been a disputatious history.
Even the designation of its pre-founder has two
opposing candidates. The one far more often cited
for this distinction has been Colonel Lewis Morris
(1671–1746), a considerable presence in the
public life of both early 18th century New York
and New Jersey. The claims of his being the pre-founder
of Columbia turn on a 1704 letter he wrote to the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign
Parts (SPGFP), the missionary arm of the Anglican
Church established in 1701 in London, where he writes:
“New York is the centre of English America
and a fit place for a Colledge.”

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Lewis
Morris (1671–1746), prominent landowner
and officeholder; early proponent of a college
in New York. The painting is an oil by John
Watson.
SOURCE : BROOKLYN MUSEUM OF ART
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Lewis Morris, the first lord of Morrisania Manor
(now much of the Bronx), makes for the relatively
more attractive pre-founder. This is in part because
of his reputation as the early leader of New York’s
“Country” party and doughty champion
of the popular cause in the colonial assemblies
of New York and New Jersey against the “Court”
party centered in the Governor’s Council aligned
with a string of supposedly corrupt and power-grabbing
governors. His being the grandfather of the King’s
College graduate (1766) and revolutionary statesman
Gouverneur Morris (1752–1816) and ancestor
of numerous other Morrises and Ogdens who figure
in Columbia’s subsequent history further strengthens
his case. Mid-19th century Columbia Trustees Lewis
M. Rutherford and Gouverneur M. Ogden were direct
descendants.
Morris’s recommendation of New York City
as “a fit place for a Colledge” occurred
in the middle of delicate negotiations involving
the 32-acre “Queen’s Farm” on
Manhattan’s West Side, running east to west
from Broadway to the Hudson River and north to south
from modern-day Fulton Street to approximately Christopher
Street. ... Named the King’s Farm —
for King William — when it was laid out in
1693 and renamed Queen’s Farm on Anne’s
accession to the throne in 1702, the farm was assumed
to be in the gift of the Royal Governor of New York.
It became a source of political conflict in 1697
when Governor John Fletcher (1692–98) leased
it to Trinity Church, New York’s first Anglican
parish, for seven years. The City’s non-Anglicans,
who constituted a substantial majority, thought
the royal authorities had already been more than
generous to Trinity Church in providing its rector,
through the Ministry Act of 1693, with a salary
derived from general tax revenues, and, in 1796,
with a royal charter for the church itself. Meanwhile,
the City’s Dissenting majority were expected
to make do without either public support for their
ministers or the security of a royal charter for
their churches.
New Yorkers opposed to the lease had looked to
Fletcher’s successor, Governor Richard Coote
(1698–1701), the Earl of Bellomont, a Whig
and “no friend of the Church,” to take
back the land when the lease expired. But before
Bellomont could do so, he died in 1701. His successor
was Edward Hyde (1702–08), the Earl of Cornbury,
a “stalwart Churchman” and cousin of
Queen Anne. Shortly after his arrival in New York
in May 1702, Governor Cornbury took up the matter
of the farm.
The rector of Trinity Church, the Reverend William
Vesey (1696–1742), and most of the church’s
vestrymen hoped the new governor would simply deed
the farm permanently to the church for whatever
uses it deemed fit. Although himself a vestryman,
Morris seems to have wanted it to go to the SPGFP
and made his point about New York being “a
fit place for a Colledge” as an argument for
the society’s acquiring the farm. Indeed,
his letter may have been intended to thwart Cornbury’s
already announced plan, which was to cede the farm
to Trinity Church.
Evidence of Cornbury’s intentions is contained
in the records of Trinity Church for February 19,
1703: “It being moved which way the King’s
farme which is now vested in Trinity Church should
be let to Farm. It was unanimously agreed that the
Rector and Church wardens should wait upon my Lord
Cornbury, the Govr to know what part thereof his
Lordship did design towards the Colledge which his
Lordship designs to have built.”
While Morris’s letter has been described
as having been written in 1702, a few months before
the Trinity Church entry, it now seems clear that
it was not written until June 1704, more than a
year later. But even assuming the earlier date,
the letter was written after Cornbury’s assumption
of his governorship and almost certainly after he
had revealed his own plans for the farm. Moreover,
Morris only mentioned a possible use for a portion
of a piece of property over which he had no control
— only designs — whereas Cornbury had
it in his gift to dispose of the property as he
saw fit. The Trinity Church entry makes clear that
his “design for the Colledge” was already
well known and that the church recognized the need
to be responsive to it. Thus Cornbury’s claim
to being the pre-founder of New York’s first
college seems at least as strong as that of Morris.
Why, then, is he so seldom mentioned in this regard?
…
Before proceeding to the actual founding of New
York’s “colledge,” three points
of a more general nature might be made about Morris’s
endorsement of the idea. The first is the stress
he put on geographical location. By the “center
of English America,” Morris was reminding
his London correspondents of New York’s advantageous
location between the Crown’s New England colonies
and those to the South around Chesapeake Bay, in
the Carolinas and the West Indies. Should someone
in England wish to underwrite a college for all
of English America, or establish permanent military
presence there, or install a bishop, where better
than New York?

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The
Ratzer map of Lower Manhattan (1757) shows
the original location of King’s College
in the upper-right corner of the middle-left
pane.
SOURCE: Paul E. Cohen and Robert T. Augustin,
Manhattan in Maps: 1527–1995 (New York:
Rizzoli, 1995), 74 |
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The second is the already alluded to point that
the idea for a college was linked to a New York
City real estate transaction. New York City real
estate and the political economy of New York City
play a central role throughout all of Columbia’s
history, if somewhat diminished after 1985 with
the sale by the University of the land upon which
Rockefeller Center stands.
The third point is that Morris’s endorsement
occurred more than four decades before another New
Yorker is again heard on the subject of a college
— and a full half century before the colony
acquired its own college. Morris did not exactly
start a rush to college-building among his fellow
New Yorkers. Then again, he had more than one purpose
in mind. New Yorkers usually do. …
COLLEGE ENTHUSIASM
New York’s focus on the commercial main chance,
its religious pluralism and demographic character
all likely contributed to the nine-decade lag between
its establishment as an English colony and the emergence
of any sustained interest in a college. The Puritans
of Massachusetts Bay had allowed only six years
to lapse between settlement in Boston and the 1636
founding of Harvard College. They did so, as they
stated in the first fundraising document produced
by an American college, New Englands First Fruits,
both “to advance Learning and perpetuate it
to Posterity” and so as not “to leave
an illiterate Ministry to the Churches, when our
present Ministers shall lie in the Dust.”
Not trusting Anglican Oxford or even the more Puritan-leaning
Cambridge to train their Congregational clergy and
magistrates, they invented the local means to do
so.
A similar impulse prompted the establishment in
Virginia of the College of William and Mary in 1693,
by which time Virginian Anglicans had tired of their
reliance on the dregs of the English episcopacy
to fill their pulpits and sought (unsuccessfully,
as it turned out) to provide themselves with a learned
homegrown clergy. And so it was again, in 1701,
when an increasingly Arminian-leaning Harvard no
longer met the religious standards of Connecticut’s
unreconstructed Calvinists, many of them Harvard
graduates, that the “Collegiate School”
that would become Yale College came into being.
Its opening ended the first wave of college-making
in pre-Revolutionary America.
More than four decades passed between the founding
of the first three American colleges and the next
six, which together constituted the nine colleges
chartered prior to the Revolution. For much of that
intervening time, three seemed enough. Even with
William and Mary’s early slide into a grammar
school, Harvard and Yale seemed fully capable of
absorbing the limited demand for college-going that
existed throughout the northern colonies, while
the occasional Southerner resorted to Oxford, Cambridge
or the Inns of Court for his advanced instruction.
What restarted colonial college-making in the
1740s — what Yale’s worried Ezra Stilles
called “college enthusiasm” —
was the Great Awakening, a religious upheaval within
American Protestantism that divided older churches,
their settled clergy and their often formulaic liturgical
ways from the dissident founders of upstart churches,
their itinerant clergy and their evangelical enthusiasms.
The first collegiate issue of the Great Awakening
was the College of New Jersey (later, Princeton),
which was founded in 1746 by “New Light”
Presbyterians of New Jersey and New York. They did
so in protest against “Old Light” Yale’s
hostility to the preaching of the English itinerant
George Whitefield and his even more flamboyant ministerial
emulators. These included Gilbert Tennent (1703–64)
and his brother William (1705–77), founders
of Pennsylvania’s “Log College,”
from which Princeton traces its prehistory. The
subsequent foundings of the College of Rhode Island
(later Brown) by Baptists in 1764, of Queens College
(later Rutgers) by a revivalist wing of the Dutch
Reformed Church in 1766 and of Dartmouth by “New
Side” Congregationalists in 1769 are all the
products of the mid-century religious ferment that
seized the dissenting branches of American Protestantism.
Two other colleges founded in this second wave
of colonial college-making reflect more secular,
civic considerations. There is some merit to the
case made by University of Pennsylvania historians
in claiming Benjamin Franklin as founder, if less
for a founding date of 1740. The latter claim —
which would have Penn jump from sixth to fourth
in the precedence list of American colleges —
requires dating its founding to the Presbyterian-backed
Charity School built in Philadelphia in 1740. It
is this soon-moribund institution that Franklin
transformed into the municipally funded Philadelphia
Academy in 1749 and that was chartered in the spring
of 1755 under joint “Old Light” Presbyterian
and Anglican auspices as the College of Philadelphia.
By then, however, New Yorkers had sufficiently bestirred
themselves to have anticipated their Philadelphia
rivals by some months in the chartering of yet another
college, to whose history we now turn.
The founding of Harvard in 1636 and Yale in 1701
had set no competitive juices flowing among New
York’s merchants. But the announcement in
the summer of 1745 that New Jersey, which had only
seven years before secured a government separate
from New York’s and was still considered by
New Yorkers to be within its cultural catch basin,
was about to have its own college demanded an immediate
response.
On March 13, 1745, James Alexander (1691–1756),
a leading New York City attorney and pew holder
of Trinity Church, altered his will to offset his
earlier £50 contribution to the construction
fund for the proposed college in New Jersey, where
he had extensive land holdings and a growing legal
practice, with a commitment of £100 to support
a similar college in New York. The following October,
on the very day that the New Jersey Assembly approved
a charter for the College of New Jersey, the New
York Assembly took up discussion of a college of
its own. In December, the Assembly, with the backing
of Governor George Clinton (1741–53), authorized
a provincial lottery to raise £2,250 “for
the encouragement of learning, and towards the founding
[of] a college.”

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The
Novi Belgii map of New York, New Jersey and
Pennsylvania (1685) illustrates Morris’
contention that New York was the “center
of English America.”
SOURCE: Paul E. Cohen and Robert T. Augustin,
Manhattan in Maps: 1527–1995 (New York:
Rizzoli, 1995), 33 |
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The Assembly’s actions in support of a new
college left unaddressed the matters of its site
and denominational auspices. The first prompted
three separate proposals in the months following
the establishment of the lottery. The first came
from the scientist and provincial officeholder Cadwallader
Colden (1688–1776), who recommended as a site
for the college his adopted Newburgh, 40 miles up
the Hudson. The Reverend James Wetmore weighed in
shortly thereafter in favor of establishing the
college in the Westchester village of Rye, adjacent
to the Boston Post Road. The Reverend Samuel Seabury
(1729–96) then called for its establishment
in the Long Island village of Hempstead.
Although all three were Anglicans, Wetmore and
Seabury being Anglican clergy, none seems to have
been as interested in pressing specifically Anglican
auspices for the college (although they may have
assumed them) as they were in assuring it a rural
setting well removed from New York City. With the
last of these proposals, Seabury’s in 1748,
public discussion of the college all but ceased.
Momentarily embarrassed three years earlier by the
New Jersey initiative and still more recently by
Franklin’s efforts at college-making in Philadelphia,
most New Yorkers seemed once again preoccupied with
their various commercial enterprises to the exclusion
of any culturally uplifting projects. Not so William
Livingston (1723–90).
WILLIAM LIVINGSTON: ANTI-FOUNDER
Columbia’s story often departs
from the typical collegiate saga. So with its founding.
Most are recounted in terms of the determined and
ultimately successful efforts of a founder, founders
or benefactors. So it is with John Harvard’s
timely benefaction of £800 in 1638 to the
Massachusetts General Court to support its fledgling
college in Cambridge. So it was with those 10 Connecticut
clergymen and the benefactor Elihu Yale who were
instrumental in the founding of Yale, or with Benjamin
Franklin and the University of Pennsylvania or,
in the case of the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock (1711–1779),
the founder of Dartmouth. Yet the story of Columbia’s
founding is less about the successful efforts of
its founders than
about the ultimately unsuccessful efforts of a band
of gentlemen determined to prevent its founding.
Pride of place among Columbia’s “anti-founders”
belongs to William Livingston.

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William
Livingston (1723–90)
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Livingston was an odd duck —
a tall, hawk-faced, dark complexioned cultural uplifter
and moral scold in a city full of roly-poly, flush
faced, live-and-let-live money makers. The Loyalist
historian Thomas Jones described him as having an
“ill-nature, morose, sullen disposition.”
Born in Albany in 1723, he was the grandson of Robert
Livingston (1673 –1728), the first lord of
Livingston Manor, whose 160,000 acres on the east
bank of the Hudson above Poughkeepsie made him New
York’s second largest landowner. Family ties
extended back to the earliest Dutch settlers (among
them the Van Rensselaers, who owned the largest
of the New York patronships) and forward to the
subsequent English mercantile elite centered in
Albany and New York City.
William followed three brothers to
Yale, graduating in 1741. He then settled in New
York City where, his brothers already leading merchants,
he turned to the law. In 1745, he entered into an
apprenticeship with the City’s leading attorney,
James Alexander, whose defense a decade earlier
of the newspaperman Peter Zenger against charges
brought by Governor William Cosby (1690–1736)
and his attorney general James DeLancey, had made
him a leader of New York’s “Country”
party and enemy of the DeLancey-led “Court”
party. Livingston’s early professional association
with Alexander likely reinforced in him a personal
commitment to civil libertarianism. His family’s
position in colonial New York politics, however,
identified him with the popular cause of the elected
Assembly, which rural landowners controlled and
which was perpetually at odds with the Governor’s
Council, dominated by urban merchants.
Livingston demonstrated throughout
his life a streak of perverse independence. Early
in his legal apprenticeship, he took it upon himself
publicly to reprove the socially pretentious wife
of his mentor, James Alexander. He thereafter shifted
his legal apprenticeship to William Smith Sr. (1697–1769)
whose politics, like Alexander’s, aligned
him with the popular or anti-Court cause. That William’s
branch of the Livingstons consisted of either thoroughgoing
Calvinists of the Dutch Reformed or, as in his case,
the Presbyterian persuasion, further fueled his
antipathy to the Anglican elite of the City. Indeed,
Livingston’s lifelong anti-Anglicanism was
exceeded only by his rabid anti-Catholicism, both
of which he readily accommodated within an even
more comprehensive anti-clericalism.
Livingston initially looked upon
Alexander’s 1745 proposal to construct a college
as socially uplifting. It was of a piece with his
own efforts three years later to interest New York’s
young professionals in forming a “Society
for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge” as
an alternative to their degenerating into tavern-frequenting
“bumper men.” In 1749, hoping to revive
a flagging project, he anonymously published Some
Serious Thoughts on the Design of Erecting a College
in the Province of New York. In it, he included
among the many benefits to be derived from a college
its deflecting the city’s unruly young from
“the practice of breaking windows and wresting
off knockers.”
In the fall of 1751, the New York
Assembly appointed a 10-member Lottery Commission
to manage the lottery funds already accrued to the
College — some £3,443.18s — and
to decide upon an appropriate site. Livingston was
named one of the 10 commissioners, in recognition
of his ongoing interest in the project and his family’s
standing in the Assembly. He was the only Presbyterian
commissioner, with two others Dutch Reformed, and
the remaining seven Anglicans (including five members
of Trinity Church). This lopsided arrangement (Anglicans
represented barely 10 percent of the province’s
population) would subsequently be cited as evidence
of the prior existence of a secret plot by Anglicans
to use public funds to create a “College of
Trinity Church.” It is noteworthy, however,
that Livingston, suspicious by nature, quietly took
up his commission and turned to the task of bringing
a college of the New York Assembly’s conceiving
into being.
In March of 1752, the vestrymen of
Trinity Church offered the Lottery Commission the
northern most six acres of its Queen’s Farm
property as the site for the new college. No conditions
then being set on the offer, Livingston joined the
other commissioners in accepting it. That also settled
the matter of the college’s location, with
all 10 commissioners concurring that it would be
in New York City on the site provided, which was
seven blocks north of Trinity Church and just above
the moving edge of commercial development.
Still undecided was the matter of under whose auspices
the college would be established. Livingston assumed
that the College, as the creation of the popularly
elected Assembly, would be publicly directed and
nonsectarian. In contrast, the Anglican commissioners
assumed that that the College would be established
under religious auspices, and that in New York,
where Anglicanism enjoyed a legally privileged and
semi-established position, this would mean Anglican
auspices. Neither faction could have imagined that
the sorting out of this local matter would provide
the first airing for arguments that would shape
both sides of the subsequent ideological debate
over the American Revolution.
On October 24, 1752, another William
Smith (1721–1803), this one an Anglican Scot
and newcomer to New York employed as a tutor by
the DeLanceys, published Some Thoughts on Education:
With Reasons for Erecting a College in This Province.
The college he proposed would be under Anglican
control and incorporated with a royal charter. When
these assumptions were repeated two weeks later
in a letter to the New-York Mercury, Smith added
the suggestion that the Reverend Samuel Johnson
(1696–1772), a prominent Anglican minister
from Stratford, Conn., be appointed head of the
college. As to the source of a salary sufficient
to attract Johnson to New York, Smith helpfully
proposed that Johnson might be given a joint appointment
at Trinity Church. The cat was out of the bag.
SAMUEL JOHNSON AND THE ANGELICAN
PROJECT
William Livingston was second to no
man in divining conspiracies where none existed.
In the case of a college for New York, however,
paranoia was warranted. For several years prior
to 1752, a quiet plan had existed among New York
Anglicans to use the Assembly’s funds to found
a specifically “Episcopal College.”
William Smith likely happened upon the plan during
his job hunt in New York City, and either wrote
Thoughts on Education to ingratiate himself with
the Anglicans privy to the plan or was recruited
by these same folks to write it.

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The
Reverend Samuel Johnson, a painting by
Thomas McIlworth, hangs in the King’s
College Room in Low Library.
SOURCE: Columbia University Archives, Columbiana
Collection, BEQUEST OF GERALDINE CARMALT
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There is no question that Samuel Johnson
was in on the plan. As early as 1749, he was regularly
and proprietarily discussing the establishment of
a college with his stepson Benjamin Nicoll (1720–60),
a Trinity vestryman and later a Lottery Commissioner,
and the Reverend Henry Barclay (1715–1764),
the rector of Trinity Church and Johnson’s
sometime ministerial student in Connecticut. These
discussions extended across the Atlantic to England
and included both the Bishop of London, Joseph Secker,
who oversaw the religious welfare of the American
colonies, and the eminent philosopher and Church
of Ireland prelate, George Berkeley, whom Johnson
had befriended during his stay in Newport in the
1730s, and who pronounced Johnson singularly suited
to preside over “a proper Anglican college”
in America.
Berkeley’s estimate of Johnson’s
standing was widely shared by American Anglicans.
He was the best known Anglican minister in the colonies
by virtue of seniority, his role as mentor for many
of the next generation of ministers, his activities
as senior missionary in the Society for the Promotion
of the Gospel, and his apologetical writings in
defense of the Church of England. Along with Benjamin
Franklin and Jonathan Edwards, Johnson was one of
only three mid-18th century Americans whose writings
received any serious attention in England.
He was moreover the best credentialed,
if least original, of the three.
Unlike Edwards, a Dissenter and a
religious “enthusiast,” or Franklin,
a free-thinking autodidact who in the early 1750s
had yet to win his way into English intellectual
circles, Johnson was an ordained minister of the
Church of England, the recipient of an M.A. from
Oxford in 1722 and of a doctorate from Oxford, awarded
in absentia in 1748 upon the appearance in England
of his philosophical treatise Elementa Philosophica.
(Franklin published the American edition of Johnson’s
book, which lost money.) Johnson had the further
distinction of being the first American to have
a non-scientific article appear in an English learned
journal. Johnson, in turn, was all-out Anglophile.
Despite his family’s three generations in
Connecticut, the first two as Puritans, he regularly
referred in his ecclesiastical correspondence to
America as “these uncultivated parts”
and to England as “home.”
Johnson’s life prior to his
involvement with King’s College was marked
by a single act of religious rebellion, though,
as befit the man, even this in the cause of a higher
orthodoxy. He was born in 1696 in Guilford, Conn.,
the son of a prosperous farmer and deacon of the
local Congregational Church. At 15, he proceeded
to Yale College, from which he was graduated in
1715. For the next three years, he served as a tutor
at the College, studied for the Congregational ministry
and acted as a substitute preacher until he was
called to be the settled minister of the Congregational
Church of West Haven. During this period, he and
several other Yale friends, influenced by their
exposure to Locke, Newton, and Anglican apologists
by way of a 1718 gift of books to the Yale Library,
found themselves questioning all manner of locally
accepted doctrine. In particular, Johnson became
concerned about the legitimacy of his own recent
ordination by the members of his congregation. Further
discussions with a missionary from the Anglican-sponsored
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel convinced
him that only ordination by an Anglican bishop would
do. When Johnson and five other Yaleys, including
the just-installed President Timothy Cutler, voiced
these views at Yale’s 1722 Commencement, their
apostasy became a matter of public record and local
scandal.
Johnson resigned his West Haven pulpit,
bade his congregation farewell and proceeded to
England to secure a proper ordination. Upon his
return to Connecticut in 1723, he established the
colony’s first Anglican church at Stratford.
Over the next three decades, he was a vigorous advocate
for the Anglican cause, meanwhile providing instruction
and encouragement for some dozen young men who followed
him out of the Calvinist ranks into the Anglican
fold. By 1750, Johnson-trained ministers were rectors
of many of the Anglican churches in New England,
New York and New Jersey. First and last a denominational
polemicist, Johnson was as opposed to the Calvinistic
Puritanism of his New England ancestors as he was
to the newer “enthusiasms” of the English
revivalist George Whitefield and such native-born
Great Awakeners as Jonathan Edwards and Gilbert
Tennent. His Anglicanism represented a middle way,
marked by respect for authority, good order and
edifying ritual, without the emotional excess and
egalitarian leanings of evangelical revivalism.
Others called it “a gentleman’s way
to salvation.”
Thus, when New York’s Anglicans
determined to provide denominational auspices for
the college, Johnson was a natural choice to head
it. Why Johnson might wish to do so was another
matter. At first, he expressed reluctance to exchange
the comforts of his Stratford parsonage for the
stress of a new job in New York City. His older
son, William Samuel Johnson, gave voice to familial
reservations when he reminded his father that “Providence
has not called us alone to found a University in
New York. Nor to urge the slow, cold councils of
that city.” Johnson assured his son that he
would not resign his Stratford pulpit until installed
as president.
Johnson’s interest was almost
certainly linked to the impact a successfully established
Anglican college in New York might have on a campaign
he had been waging throughout his ministerial career:
to convince the ecclesiastical and political authorities
in England that the colonists needed an American
bishop. Understandably, this was a minority view
among American colonists, most of whom, dissenters
from the Church of England, felt themselves well
rid of the ecclesiastical authority vested in bishops.
That it had been English Dissenters who had effectively
blocked Parliament from sending a bishop to the
colonies in the early 1740s made the need for such
a bishop in Johnson’s mind more palpable.
Once installed, he could ordain young men, avoiding
the costs and dangers of a sea voyage to England.
One of Johnson’s favorite arguments with English
ecclesiastical authorities was that five of the
11 colonists sent to England for ordination between
1720 and 1750 had been killed in transit or by disease
in England. This was to be the fate of his younger
son, Samuel William, in 1756.
Johnson further argued that a resident
bishop could settle the jurisdictional questions
that inevitably arose among the scattered American
Anglican clergy, represent the Anglican cause in
colonies where Dissenters held political sway and
everywhere insist upon the Anglicans’ right
to religious practice, all tasks that by default
regularly fell to him. And finally, the presence
of a locally installed bishop would provide the
occasions for the ritual pomp and sartorial elegance
that American Anglicans otherwise missed in the
“uncultivated wilderness.” Only “the
awe of a bishop,” Johnson wrote in 1750, “would
abate enthusiasms.”
Where such a bishop would reside
was not as contentious as one might think. It was
generally agreed that he should take up residence
where Anglicanism enjoyed a legally protected and
socially privileged position. This eliminated all
of New England, and Boston, where Dissenters exercised
local authority, and also Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia,
where William Penn’s charter enshrined the
principles of full religious toleration. The Anglican
Church was officially established in the southern
colonies, but practice had rendered the local Anglican
practices barely distinguishable from those of the
Dissenters. And anyway, the Southern colonies lacked
a city of sufficient size to provide the entourage
appropriate to a bishop of the Church of England,
and they were at too great a remove from the rest
of American Anglicandom.
This left New York City, as Lewis
Morris had it, “in the centre of English America,”
where Anglicans enjoyed local status as the established
church. (The Ministry Act of 1693 so provided for
the five lower counties of New York, with the rest
of the Province operating on a “local option”
arrangement.) Trinity Church was the largest and
grandest church in the colonies (and the only one
possessed of an organ), as well as a separate chapel,
St. George’s, and another chapel (St. Paul’s)
on the drawing board. The City’s leading families
were nearly all either Anglican or Dutch Reformed-on-the-way-to-becoming-Anglican.
New York already was the seat of royal government
for the colony and headquarters for His Majesty’s
Army in North America. Accordingly, the establishment
of an Anglican college in the City would, rather
like the completion of a skating rink or bobsled
run in a competition to become the next Olympics
site, sew up New York’s case as British America’s
first Anglican see.
Who the first American bishop should
be was also a question about which there was not
much controversy, and especially should he be an
American. Apparently Johnson never mentioned the
possibility of his own appointment when pressing
the case in his frequent communications with the
Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury, who
would make the appointment. But other American Anglicans
were less circumspect, and Samuel Johnson was their
odds-on favorite. Thus, his acceptance of the presidency
of the proposed college for New York would not only
help the cause of the college and advance the case
for an American episcopacy, but it would also confirm
his position as bishop presumptive.
"A HIDEOUS CLAMOUR"
The privately hatched plans for “an
Episcopal College” already were well advanced
when, in the fall of 1752, William Livingston divined
it. For his part, the timing was fortuitous. For
some three years, Livingston had been discussing
the possibility with two fellow attorneys, like
him Yale graduates and Presbyterians, John Morrin
Scott (1730–84) and William Smith Jr. (1728–93)
[this William Smith was the son of the lawyer William
Smith Sr., and no relation to the Reverend William
Smith] of publishing a weekly newspaper in New York
along the lines of the Independent Whig, a London
weekly published in the 1720s by the Whig essayists
Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard. Like Livingston,
Scott and Smith wished to turn their spare time
to cultural and political purposes, and the idea
of a weekly brought the three into such protracted
and noteworthy company that they were long thereafter
referred to as “the Triumvirate.”
The Independent Reflector was launched
in November 1752. By then, Livingston and his comrades-in-ink
already had settled on its first major editorial
cause. “If it falls into the hands of Churchmen,”
Livingston wrote privately to a Dissenting friend
on the eve of publishing his first assault upon
the College, “it will either ruin the College
or the Country, and in fifty years, no Dissenter,
however deserving, will be able to get into any
office.”
The Independent Reflector had been
in print for three months before, in its 17th number
of March 22, 1753, it offered “Remarks on
our Intended COLLEGE.” Prior to doing so,
it had attracted a considerable readership and some
notoriety for its editorial support for the Moravian
minority in New York and for jibes at the office-mongering
proclivities of the DeLanceys. And when it did turn
to the College, in numbers 17 through 22, the essayist
(assumed to be Livingston) began civilly enough.
He supported the idea of a college and that it be
located in or near New York City. He called for
an expansive curriculum, such to render its graduates
“better members of society, and useful to
the public in proportion to its expense.”
Otherwise, “we had better be without it.”
He went on to castigate both Harvard
and Yale for inculcating their impressionable students
in “the Arts of maintaining the Religion of
the College” and made similar animadversions
against the English universities when they justified
the polygamies of Henry VIII and the “jesuitically
artful” projects of the popish James II. By
contrast, he concluded with respect to New York’s
proposed college, “it is of the last importance,
that ours be so constituted, that the Fountain being
pure, the Streams (to use the language of Scripture)
may make glad the City of our GOD.”
In the second number, “A Continuation
on the Same Subject,” Livingston went to the
heart of his complaint with the prospect of a college
in the control of a single religious denomination.
By listing English and Dutch Calvinists, Anabaptists,
Lutherans, Quakers and his recently championed Moravians
along with the Anglicans, he implied that each of
New York’s religious sects had an equal claim
— and thus no sustainable claim — to
the sole governance of the College. And should such
solitary rights of governance be conferred on any
one of these sects, he warned, the College would
instantly become “a Nursery of Animosity,
Dissention and Disorder.” Moreover, no one
would attend but the children of the governing sect,
limiting both the college’s enrollment and
its potential for advancing the public good. New
Yorkers not of that sect, he prophesied, would repair
elsewhere for college, never to return.
The result would be a “Party-College,”
made all the more unacceptable to those not of that
party by the public funds that went into its creation
and maintenance. Surely, Livingston asked rhetorically,
the Legislature could never have intended its proposed
college “as an Engine to be exercised for
the purposes of a party”? What it must have
intended was “a mere civil institution [that]
cannot with any tolerable propriety be monopolized
by any religious sect.” Such a college, in
contrast to a “party-college,” would
attract students from the neighboring colonies,
among them New Englanders averse to the region’s
prevailing Calvinists and Pennsylvanians of all
denominations but one (“I should always, for
political reasons, exclude Papists”). Such
a vast “importation of religious refugees”
to flow from the establishment of a nonsectarian
college in New York, could not be other than “commendable,
advantageous and politic.”
In a third essay, “The Same
Subject Continued,” Livingston argued against
positing the governance of the college in a corporation
created by a royal charter. To do so would remove
the college from legislative scrutiny and public
oversight would be lost. Instead, he proposed in
his fourth essay, “A Farther Prosecution of
the Same Subject,” that the College be incorporated
by an Act of the Assembly. The logic for doing so
Livingston presented succinctly: “If the Colony
must bear the expense of the College, surely the
Legislature will claim the superintendency of it.”
To the argument that superintending an educational
institution was not the proper business of the legislature,
he responded by asking: “Are the rise of Arts,
the Improvement of Husbandry, the Increase of Trade,
the Advancement of Knowledge in Law, Physic, Morality,
Policy, and the Rules of Justice and civil Government,
Subjects beneath the Attention of our Legislature?”
In his fifth essay, Livingston stipulated
11 terms of incorporation. Chief among them: the
Trustees to be elected by the Legislature; the President’s
election by the Trustees to be subject to legislative
veto; the faculty to be elected by the Trustees
and President; students to “be at perfect
liberty to attend any Protestant Church at their
pleasure”; Divinity not to be taught as a
science.
The sixth and last essay appeared on April 26, 1753,
in which Livingston made direct appeals to the respective
“Gentlemen of the CHURCH of ENGLAND,”
“Gentlemen of the DUTCH CHURCH,” “Gentlemen
of the English PRESBYTERIAN Church,” “my
FRIENDS, in Derision called QUAKERS,” as well
a collective appeal to “Gentlemen of the FRENCH,
of the MORAVIAN, of the LUTHERAN, and the ANABAPTIST
Congregations,” attempting in each to show
that their best interest would be served by all
having “an equal share in the Government of
what equally belongs to all.” But he could
not let the “Gentlemen of the CHURCH of ENGLAND
… the most numerous and richest Congregation
in the City,” off without noting that unlike
those of the other persuasions, they had the singular
backing of “the Mother Church of the Nation”
and were “at the least risk of being denied
your just Proportion in the Management of the College.”
This is as close as Livingston ever came to identifying
the Anglicans as those intent upon creating “an
Academy founded in Bigotry, and reared by Party-Spirit,”
but left no doubt as to which Gentlemen he had in
mind.
Supporters of an Anglican-controlled
college grumbled in private during the six-week
assault on them and their eminently reasonable plans
for the College. What Livingston had proposed, Johnson
reported to his ecclesiastical superiors in London,
was nothing short of “a latitudinarian academy”
that would exclude religion from its curriculum
and churchmen from its governance. Public responses
were few and scattered, mostly in the form of anonymous
letters in the New-York Mercury written by the Reverends
Thomas Bradbury Chandler, James Wetmore, Samuel
Seabury and Henry Barclay. All subscribed to the
view that all proper colleges possessed a religious
character and that, given the favored place of the
Anglican church in New York, not to mention its
established status in the mother country, New York’s
college should be Anglican. All also demonstrated
a profound discomfort at having to confront their
polemically more effective critics in print. Johnson
said he left the “writing in the church’s
defense” to his New York promoters, who were,
he assured the archbishop of Canterbury, “endeavoring
not without some success to defeat their pernicious
scheme.”
The prolific William Smith came forth
with A General Idea of the College of Mirana
in April 1753, just as the Independent Reflector
series wound down. But he did not directly engage
Livingston’s arguments so much as describe
a model two-track curriculum for a very different
kind of college from the one Livingston had in mind.
The first track was designed for those students
destined for the learned professions, “divinity,
law, physic, and the chief officers of the state,”
and would include instruction in dancing and fencing.
The second track for those aspiring to the mechanical
professions “and all the remaining people
of the country,” would have less Latin and
be spared instruction in dancing and fencing. Before
setting sail for England to take holy orders, the
still unemployed Smith commended to his readers
the Anglican liturgy for all college services. Samuel
Johnson was sufficiently impressed with Smith’s
good sense to suggest to his New York co-conspirators
that “he would make an excellent tutor.”
Too late. Smith by then had already been approached
by Benjamin Franklin about a professorship at the
Philadelphia Academy, and it was to Philadelphia
that he went upon his return to become the Provost
of the College of Philadelphia.
Rather than mount a full-scale counterattack
against the radical ideas advanced by Livingston,
the self-described “Anti-Reflectors”
put their energies into behind-the-scenes campaigns
to get the Independent Reflector shut down.
Help came in the form of a suicide. Five days after
taking his post as Governor of New York on October
7, 1753, Sir Danvers Osborne took his own life.
This brought to power the Acting Governor James
DeLancey, the “natural leader of the Episcopal
party” and the bete noir of the Livingston-led
“popular” or “country” party.
DeLancey promptly withdrew all provincial business
from the printer of the Independent Reflector, which
soon thereafter ceased publication. Although Livingston
and William Smith Jr., persisted through 1753 in
their attacks on “The College of Trinity Church,”
using several public outlets, including a periodical
of their own with the catchy title The Occasional
Reverberator, the backers of the college pressed
on through the fall of 1753.
As the war of words continued, the
center of action shifted to the Lottery Commission.
There, Livingston’s position as the lone commissioner
favoring a legislatively directed college put him
at a disadvantage. With neither an alternative site
to propose nor a presidential candidate of his own,
he proceeded with uncharacteristic caution. On November
22, 1753, he moved that the Lottery Commissioners
elect Samuel Johnson as their unanimous choice to
preside over the new college. He then proposed that
Chauncey Whittelsey be elected as the college’s
“first tutor.” Both motions were adopted
and Livingston was assigned the responsibility of
informing the president- and first-tutor elect.
Lacking a credible nominee to bring forward, Livingston
conceded the number one spot to assure getting his
own man in as number two.
And who, pray ask, was Chauncey Whittelsey?
First, he was not an Anglican clergyman but an “Old
Light” Congregationalist merchant residing
in New Haven. Second, he had been Livingston’s
tutor at Yale and an occasional correspondent since.
There might also have been a third credential, though
allowing so requires extending to Livingston a sense
of humor not evidenced in the historical record
or suggested by his grim visage. As Livingston and
others, including Johnson, who followed Yale affairs
well knew, Whittelsley had played a small but memorable
part in Yale’s encounter with the Great Awakening.
In 1740, in the immediate wake of George Whitefield’s
visit to New Haven, during which he warned against
“the dangers of an unconverted ministry,”
David Brainerd, a particularly exercised undergraduate
(and nephew of Jonathan Edwards) felt moved to conduct
a survey on the state of the souls of his teachers.
Most passed muster, but Tutor Chauncey Whittelsley,
he sadly reported to Yale’s indignant President
Thomas Clap, did not have “any more grace
than the chair I then lean’d on.” Just
the man for New York’s intended college.
As it turned out, Livingston’s
efforts to plant Whittelsey came to naught when
Johnson, in the politest letter imaginable, frightened
him off with a description of his expected duties.
By then, that is the spring of 1754, Johnson had
pretty much completed haggling with the Lottery
Commissioners over the terms of his appointment.
Too far committed to back off now, especially when
his salary demands were met, he nonetheless extracted
two further concessions from the Commissioners upon
his acceptance of the presidency: the right to take
a year’s leave of absence from his Stratford
parish rather than resign immediately; and explicit
authorization to leave New York whenever smallpox
threatened the City. Both bespoke serious reservations
about his new home, which would only increase with
time.
On May 14, 1754, shaken by the “hideous
clamour” produced by Livingston’s attacks
on the college, the vestrymen of Trinity Church
informed the Lottery Commission that their earlier
gift of land for the intended college was now subject
to two conditions: 1. The president of the College
must always be a member of the Church of England;
[and] 2. Religious services at the College must
be conducted in accord with Anglican liturgical
forms.
Should College authorities ever fail
to meet either of these conditions, it was made
clear by the vestrymen that the land upon which
the College sat would revert to Trinity Church.
In that half of its members were
also Trinity vestrymen, the Lottery Commission could
not have been taken by surprise by the new conditions.
A majority promptly voted to accept both, with only
Livingston arguing against them as effectively creating
“a College of Trinity Church.” Taking
no public notice of Livingston’s “Twenty
Unanswerable Questions,” the Commissioners
incorporated both conditions into the draft charter
for the college being prepared by attorneys and
Trinity Churchmen John Chambers and Joseph Murray,
in consultation with President-elect Johnson and
the favorably disposed Acting Governor James DeLancey.
Although Livingston was still far
from beaten, the momentum behind the college was
now such that he could not stop its opening. On
May 31, an “Advertisement for the College
of New York,” signed by Samuel Johnson, appeared
in the New York Gazette. After setting
out the admission requirements and proposed curriculum
“for the intended Seminary or College of New
York,” Johnson proceeded directly to assure
non-Anglican parents of prospective students that
“there is no intention to impose on the scholars,
the peculiar tenets of any particular sect of Christians.”
Instead, the College would seek “to inculcate
upon their tender minds, the great principles of
Christianity and morality in which true Christians
of each denomination are generally agreed.”
Johnson sought to soften the new
stipulation as to the use of Anglican prayers in
college services by assuring that college prayers
would be drawn directly from Holy Scriptures, thereby
minimizing denominational offense. And then a final
ecumenical reassurance:
The chief thing that is aimed at in this
college is to teach and engage the children to
know God in Jesus Christ, and to love and serve
Him in all sobriety, godliness, and righteousness
of life, with a perfect heart, and a willing mind;
and to train them up in all virtuous habits and
all such useful knowledge as may render them creditable
to their families and friends, ornaments to their
country, and useful to the public weal in their
generations.
The advertisement stated that classes
were to commence on July 1, in the vestry room of
the new school house adjoining Trinity Church, “till
a convenient place may be built.” A half century
after Lewis Morris declared “New York a fit
place for a Colledge,” New York would finally
have one.
From Stand, Columbia by Robert
McCaughey © 2003 Columbia
University Press. Reprinted with permission
of the publisher.
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