BOOK
NOTES: Some
books which might be of general interest to students of the "Early
Republic" period -- If you find any worth purchasing after following
one of these links, a portion will go to support of this web site:
The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by David McCullough a "story of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors,
politicians, architects, and others of high aspiration who set off for
Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to excel in their
work."
The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity by Jeffrey Sachs. From book description: "For more than three decades, Jeffrey D. Sachs has been at the forefront
of international economic problem solving. But Sachs turns his
attention back home in The Price of Civilization, a book that is
essential reading for every American. In a forceful, impassioned, and
personal voice, he offers not only a searing and incisive diagnosis of
our country’s economic ills but also an urgent call for Americans to
restore the virtues of fairness, honesty, and foresight as the
foundations of national prosperity.
|
Educational Institutions in the Early Republic
[Copyright Hal Morris 1997 - may be but not in large quantities
or for profit]
American
Literary, Scientific, and Military Academy
In Norwich VT. Now Norwich University. Gideon
Welles studied there 1824-25. Founded and initially run by Capt.
Alden Partridge, who had been fired as superintendent of West
Point, for overbearing, and at the same time sloppy, administration
and running the school as a "sort of aid society for hungry Partridges
and impecunious friends."
In the year Welles attended, the heavily promoted school's enrollment
went from 162 to 400. Meanwhile, Welles found the atmosphere rowdy and
overcrowded, the courses in the catalogue mostly nonexistent, and the library
poor and grossly misrepresented. (Source: Niven,
Welles, p17-19; and Shepard, Pedlar's
Progress)
The American Lyceum
An organization for bringing lecturers on all sorts of knowledge to
cities and towns around America.
Amherst College
Described in Abbott's
Cornerstone.
Founded (around 1820?) "to check the progress of errors which
are propagated from Cambridge (i.e. Harvard)", according to Noah
Webster.
Graduates:
Andover Theological Seminary
Boston Latin School
Boston Mechanics' Institute
Bowdoin College
Brown University
Located in Providence, RI,
where several of the earliest buildings can still be seen.
First commencement - 1769, graduating seven students.
Formerly Rhode Island College - renamed in 1804 in recognition of a
$5000 endowment by Nicholas Brown. Founded, initially as an interdenominational
college, in keeping with Rhode Island's history of religious tolerence.
Faculty:
- Jason Manning, a Baptist minister - first professor and first president,
until he died in 1791
- Jonathan Maxcy,
acting president and president from 1791-1802.
Graduates:
- 1787 - Jonathan Maxcy,
who just four years later, at the age of 24, was elected president pro
tempore, upon the death of president Jason Manning.
- 1800 - Virgil Maxcy.
A rather thorough, and nicely illustrated, history of the school can
be found at: http://www.brown.edu/webmaster/history.html
Cambridgeport - the Port
School
A co-ed secondary school, attended by Margaret
Fuller and her brother Eugene.
Cincinnati University
Columbia (New York)
The future actor James
Hackett attended for 1 year at age 15 (1815?).
Attended by Sam Ward
from 1829 (age 15) - ? "At that time [it] drowsed in Park Place,
a quiet backwater running from the park towards the Hudson River. Sam described
it as 'a kind of Sleepy Hollow in the heart of old New York, where, on
a lovely lawn, stood the houses of the president and the faculty, flanking
on either side the plain central building in their midst'" Ward went
on to say that it was governed by mostly Espicopalian trustees "as
free from receptivity to innovations, or even ameliorations, as the Admiralty
of Great Britain or the Naval Construction Board at Washington." He
also characterized the lessons as easy, requiring only two hours a day.
Cooper Union
A free educational institution founded by Peter
Cooper in 1857-59, combining practical training and scientific instruction.
Lincoln gave his famous speech
there shortly before his nomination as president.
Source (for foundation by Cooper): DAB.
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH.
Graduates:
Also figured in the Dartmouth College Case, of the early 1820s, one
of Webster's early successes, which helped establish the binding nature
of contracts, even in the case of one party being a state.
Episcopal Academy of
Connecticut
In Cheshire, CT, about 15 miles
north of New Haven. Described by Glenn Weaver in Ct Historical Soc. Bulletin,
Jan., 1962, as "America's First 'Junior College'".
Hamilton College
Hartford Female Seminary
Founded in 1823 by Catharine
Beecher, it was very successful, and became a model of what female
education could be. Angelina Grimke
visited the seminary in 1831 and considered attending, but did not. Delia
Bacon, an ill-fated protege of Beecher, did attend.
Harvard University and Theological
Seminary
Harvard was the first center of higher learning in the United States.
It is located in Cambridge MA, just across the Charles River from Boston.
The first class was started in 1628, and nine of these graduated in 1642.
The growing liberal climate of Harvard reached a point at which conservative
Congregationalists became outraged. In 1805, the Unitarian Henry Ware (senior)
became Professor of Theology at Harvard, and this soon lead to the establishment
of Andover as a bastion of orthodoxy.
Some of the more famous presidents of Harvard were Increase Mather,
Josiah Quincy, and Edward Everett (the two latter were distinguished by
being, at times, congressmen; Quincy was Mayor of Boston, and Everett was
governor of Massachusetts and Minister to Great Britain).
Harvard was, more than anything, a school for Congregationalist ministers
until well into the 19th century.
Harvard trained ministers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who left the
ministry, and others, like Theodore Parker, who did not, formed the nucleus
of the Transcendentalist movement.
Harvard Graduates
- 1763: Timothy
Pickering,
- 1777: James Freeman.
- 1779: Oliver
Everett - father of Edward.
- 1782: Stephen Van
Rensellaer.
- 1789: William Emerson, father of Ralph
Waldo Emerson.
- 1790: Josiah
Quincy
- 1792: Levi Hedge
- 1796: John Pickering
- 1798: William
Ellery Channing
- 1800: Washington
Allston
- 1806: Alexander
Hill Everett.
- 1811: Edward
Everett
- 1814: James Walker
- 1815: Convers
Francis, Jared Sparks, John
Gorham Palfrey.
- 1817: George Barrell Emerson
- 1818: William
Emerson (brother of R.W.)
- 1821: A pretty rebellious class (cf Rusk,
p71-2) with a number of expulsions.
- 1823: A catastrophic class for rioting. 43 out of 70 students
were expelled.
- John Adams 2nd,
reinstated postumously as graduate "as of 1823". He was one of
those who were expelled.
- John Marsh
- Ellis Gray Loring
was a member of this class, but left "in May 1823, when members of
his class were dismissed for resistance to college discipline".
- 1824
- 1825:
- John Howe Boardman; friend of Charles Francis
Adams "one of the great dunces at college, but maturing into an
agreeable companion) (source: Shepherd,
Cannibals of the Heart, p284)
- 1829
- 1830
- 1831: Thomas
Gold Appleton
- 1833: George Ellis
(wrote 1/2-Century
of Unitarian Controversy in 1857)
- 1843: Octavius
Brooks Frothingham.
Harvard Divinity School Graduates:
Illinois College
Headed by Edward Beecher from
1831 - ?. It became a hotbed of controversy after the killing of Lovejoy
in Alton, IL, which was partly a
response to an abolitionist meeting held in that town, of which Beecher
had a leading role. Beecher also wrote a famous condemnation of Lovejoy's
killing.
Illinois college, after that, was polarized, with much heated abolitionist
activity, so much so that the father of William
Herndon, a student there at the time, is supposed to have pulled him
out of the school to prevent Herndon's becoming a "damned abolitionist
puppy" (a doubtful story; see David Donald, Lincoln's
Herndon, pp12-13).
Knox College
Lane Theological Seminary
Middlebury College
Mount Bethel (S.Carolina)
New Jersey, College of
Norwich University
Oberlin College
and Theological Seminary
In Oberlin, Ohio, about 33 miles
southeast of Cleveland.
Had a primary and a secondary school and a "college department"
when, in 1834, it absorbed most of the Lane rebels to form a theological
seminary.
The theological seminary was financed by Arthur
Tappan, under the condition (which was accepted) that Charles
Grandison Finney be professor of theology, and that there be freedom of
speech, and acceptance of "colored students" on equal terms with
whites.
source: Thomas, Weld
Oneida Institute:
Located in the middle of Oneida County,
NY, "just east of Whitesboro, about 4 miles from Utica, NY"
[SERNETT-Smith-Green]; which places
it right on the Erie Canal, about 20 miles east of Lake Oneida
The Port School (xref)
University of Philadelphia
Phillips Academy (later: Phillips Andover)
Prep. school in Andover, MA,
about 20 miles north of Boston. Founded in 1778 by John and Samuel
Phillips (principally the latter).
Attended by Theodore Weld about
1819-20, but eyestrain led him to drop out.
Phillips Exeter Academy
Princeton University
Some early Presidents:
- Jonathan Dickenson, thru 2nd half of 1848. The first president; conducted
it in his parsonage in Elizabeth, NJ. His term ended by his death. (Source:
DAB, Article
on Aaron Burr)
- Aaron Burr (1848-57) - Son-in-law of Jonathan Edwards and father of
the better known Aaron Burr, which makes the latter a descendent of two
presidents of this college. Burr, like Dickenson, conducted the school
out of his parsonage until the completion of Nassau Hall in Fall 1756,
when he and seventy Students proceded to the town of Princeton. He died
almost exactly a year later. (Source: DAB,
Article on Aaron Burr)
- Jonathan Edwards, for a
month, in Feb.-March 1758 (Lyman Beecher
and, I presume others in the Early Republic period always called him "President
Edwards"). (Source: Miller,
Edwards)
- ?????????
- John Witherspoon,
1768 - 1792, who had been something of a radical in Scottish politics and
emprisoned for it (1745-6), was invited to America for the purpose of becoming
Pres. of this college. A signer of the Declaration of Independence, and
inspirer of the young James
Madison. He slso "introduced into American thought the Scottish
Common Sense philosophy of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, which dominated
the nation's thought for a century." (Source: p530, Sandoz,
Political Sermons..)
Graduates
Princeton Theological Seminary:
Rhode Island College
Round Hill School
"a school well known for its strict but kindly discipline, its
thorough instruction on the plan of the German gymnasium, and the
vigorous outdoor life and manly spirit it fostered" (DAB,
IV-273). Run by George
Bancroft and J.G.
Cogswell, it was here that Samuel
Ward and his brothers got their pre-college education in the late 1820s
and early 30s.
Picture of school: p117, Tharp,
Appletons of Beacon Hill
South Carolina College
Columbia, SC. From 1820 - 34,
Thomas Cooper taught
chemistry, mineralogy, and political economy there, and served as president
of the college for most of that period.
Faculty, etc.
- President: Jonathan
Maxcy, 1804-20(?).
- President: Thomas
Cooper (see above)
- Elisha Hammond,
father of James
Henry Hammond. Professor of languages, 1805-6 or 7. Supplier (of food,
etc.) from 1815-?.
- Robert Henry, lectured in logic and moral philosophy, metaphysics,
belle-lettres at various times. Briefly acting president at retirement
of Thomas Cooper, president from 1842-45.
Graduates
Transylvania University
Troy Female Seminary
Troy New York (after 1895, known as the Emma Willard School).
Union College (Schenectady,
NY)
Union Theological Seminary
In New York City(?) Founded in 1836 by New School Presbyterians.
George Lewis
Prentiss taught there after 1871, following his career as a minister.
West Point
Western Reserve College
A center, in the 1830s, or anti-slavery radicalism.
William and Mary
Gave George Wythe
the first chair of law in an American college in 1779. Bruce Baird is researching
the thesis that in some way, the student culture at William and Mary was
largely responsible for southern dueling madness.
Williams College
Yale University
Located in New Haven, CT.;
the 3rd institution of higher learning established in (what would become)
the United States. Begun in the very early 1700s. A center of controversy
in the Presbyterian church from around 1820, due to the "New Haven
Theology" of, among others, Nathaniel
Taylor. Benjamin
Silliman, an important early teacher of science, graduated, and later
taught, there.
Graduates:
Young Ladies' Academy
of Philadelphia
p181, JER 97-2: Established by John Poor sometime betw 1780 and
1787. Had 100 students in 1787. Cofounded by Benjamin Rush, and sometimes
referred to as his school. It was non-denominational. Source: JER-97-2.
[SERNETT-Smith-Green]: The
Antislavery Alliance of Gerrit Smith and Beriah Green
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