American Heroes

by Edmund S. Morgan

  The records of admissions are pretty complete from the time of the church’s formation in 1757 to about 1774 and again from 1780 to about 1810. What they show is an average of about three admissions a year during the first eighteen years of the church’s existence (1757–74). Under Stiles the average was about six admissions a year, double what it had been under his predecessors, and incidentally more than double the rate of admissions of men to the New Haven First Church during this period. During the first fifteen years under Dwight, the average was still higher, almost ten a year. The increase corresponds roughly to the increase in college enrollment during the years concerned.

  The average figures are somewhat deceptive, because of the periodic revivals. The first revival in the college church occurred under Stiles in 1784, when twenty-four students joined the church. Under Dwight revivals occurred in 1802, 1808, and 1812. In the 1790s, however, there was no revival under either Stiles or Dwight. In the last four and a half years of Stiles’s administration, a total of fifteen students were admitted; in the first four and a half years of Dwight’s administration, fourteen. Thus during the years when Lyman Beecher was at Yale, the membership of the college church remained about even. It was nearly extinct when he entered under Stiles, and it was even more nearly extinct when he graduated under Dwight. Near-extinction was, in fact, its normal condition, in which it remained during the early years of Dwight’s presidency.

  It was not until 1800 that admissions showed a rise, and not until 1802 that a revival can be detected. This was long after other Connecticut churches had begun to experience the great revival of that period. The movement that has been called the second Great Awakening struck Connecticut heavily in 1799. Though historians, led perhaps by Beecher’s reminiscences, have sometimes given Dwight credit for helping to start it, the fact is that the revival spread from other churches to the college and not vice versa. Religion at Yale, as measured by membership in the college church, did not show any improvement as a result of the change from Stiles to Dwight.

  There can be no doubt that infidelity existed at Yale in the 1790s. It existed also in the 1780s and to a lesser degree in earlier and later decades. Adolescence is generally a time for questioning the principles of one’s elders, and doubtless many Yale students went through a period of skepticism about Christianity. Ezra Stiles himself did so in the 1740s, and so have many other Yale students before and since; but that Yale was more infidel than the rest of the nation in the eighteenth century is very unlikely. It is true that the 1780s and 1790s saw the rise of deism in Connecticut and in the country at large to a degree never before known. But there is no contemporary evidence to suggest that Yale was a center of this sentiment. On the contrary, the principal criticism leveled against the college until the reform of its charter in 1792 was the fact that it was governed by clergymen, and no one suggested that the clergymen were leading the students toward deism. One might add that the proportion of those students who became ministers was larger under Stiles than under Dwight.

  But statistics are cold and tricky. They may fail to reveal the spirit that pervades a place. What about the strikingly different way that Stiles and Dwight handled infidelity? Under Stiles, Beecher tells us, the students “thought the Faculty were afraid of free discussion,” while Dwight dumbfounded them by letting them discuss the question “Is the Bible the word of God?”

  That Dwight presided over such a discussion is highly probable, for reasons that will become apparent. That this discussion surprised the students is highly improbable.

  The episode Beecher described was a formal disputation, and he did not mean, I am sure, to imply that disputations were novel. They had been in use since the Middle Ages and were still a regular and important part of the curriculum throughout the eighteenth century. In their junior and senior years students at Yale (as in other American colleges) were required to apply their learning to the defense of various assigned propositions. Half the class took the negative, half the affirmative, and the tutor (for the juniors) or the president (for the seniors) presided, awarding the decision to the side that marshaled its arguments the more skillfully. This was a weekly exercise, in which Stiles had participated as a student in the 1740s and Dwight in the 1760s.

  The disputations were of two kinds, forensic and syllogistic. The latter were in Latin, intended as exercises in formal logic; the forensic disputations were in English and designed to develop rhetorical abilities as well as to train the student in clear thinking. Before Stiles’s time the propositions for both types of debate tended to be universal questions of philosophy or religion: whether the mind always thinks, whether polygamy is lawful, whether virtue would be eligible if there were no life hereafter, whether miracles in themselves prove a divine revelation, whether human laws bind the conscience, whether deception is ever lawful. Propositions such as these were debated year in and year out. When Stiles became president, he continued to assign them as syllogistic topics and occasionally as forensic ones, but he generally reserved forensic debates for subjects of more immediate and compelling public interest.

  Since public events continually suggested new issues, the subjects of forensic debates under Stiles frequently changed from year to year. He recorded many of them in his diaries. Unfortunately he failed to do so in the last years of his life, while Beecher was a student, but the notebook of Thomas Robbins, a junior, containing forensic topics for 1794–95, has survived. It reveals how fearful the faculty may have been during Stiles’s last year of allowing students to discuss controversial issues. The propositions debated forensically by the junior class, from December 1, 1794, to April 21, 1795, were as follows:

  Ought a man to be punished for a crime committed when in a state of intoxication.

  Whether a man ought to be imprisoned for debt.

  Ought a man to be put to death for any crime except murder.

  Whether Democratic societies are beneficial.

  Would foreknowledge encrease our happiness.

  Whether physical knowledge is favourable to morality.

  Ought property to be a necessary qualification for publick office.

  Whether the interest of money ought to be regulated by law.

  Would it be just and politick for the United States to emancipate all their slaves at once.

  Whether raising money by lotteries is politic.

  Whether representatives ought to be directed by their constituents.

  Whether it was right to confiscate the estates of the refugees, last war.

  Can universal salvation be proved from scripture.

  Whether theatres are beneficial.

  Is a republican preferable to a monarchical government.

  Is the observation of the Sabbath a temporal benefit.

  Whether the Indian War is just on the part of the United States.

  Whether those who have suffered by the western insurrection ought to have restitution made by government.

  Is our method of electing members of Congress and our Upper House preferable to that of other states.

  Whether the Clergy ought to be exempt from taxation.

  Can the various complections of the human species be accounted for from natural causes.

  Whether it would be best for the United States to adapt their spelling to their pronunciation.

  Whether the discovery of the mines in South America have been advantageous.

  Whether sumptuary laws are beneficial.

  Whether the principles of the French Revolution are just.

  Whether a destitution of property ought to exclude a man from voting.

  Whether an insurrection of a minority against a majority can ever be justified.

  Whether a discovery of a mine would be beneficial to the United States.

  Whether self-love is the sole incitement of action.

  Whether a time ought to be fixed when a person shall act for himself.

  Ought the study of the dead languages to make a part of a liberal education.

 
Whether representation ought to be according to population.

  Are commercial towns in danger of being too populous for the good of community.

  Whether a publick is preferable to a private education.

  Whether the Senate and Congress have sufficient reason for holding their debates in private.

  Ought persons to be allowed to set up trades without serving an apprenticeship.

  Would it be politic for this state to diminish their number of representatives in the assembly.

  Whether corporations of mechanics ought to be encouraged.

  Would it be politic for this state to turn out the Upper House of our Assembly.

  Whether divorces ought ever to be granted.

  The particular proposition that is supposed to have astounded the class half a year later under Dwight is not here; but that proposition, in one form or another, had actually been debated at Yale for at least forty-five years. It was one of the old, standard topics, and is in one of the first student notebooks of disputations at Yale that I have been able to discover, that of Eleazar May in the class of 1752. May debated it on December 31, 1750; and as it happened, the instructor who presided over the argument was young Ezra Stiles, then serving as a college tutor. Ammi Robbins, father of the boy who recorded the topics listed above for 1794–95, debated the proposition in 1758. Stiles noted it in his diary as a subject for the seniors in 1778, 1780, 1781, 1787, and 1788. Eli Whitney debated it in 1790 and 1791 and Thomas Robbins’s notebooks show it as the subject of an English composition for the juniors on April 19, 1795, less than a month before Stiles’s death. When Dwight selected it as a topic for disputation by the same class some six months later, the students could scarcely have been surprised, except perhaps at being allowed to worry that same old topic once again.

  Thus Beecher’s recollections on these two matters, the state of the college church and the subject of the seniors’ first disputation under Dwight, though probably correct as to facts, are wholly misleading about the significance of the facts. How, then, does it happen that Beecher’s general impression was supported by so many other witnesses?

  The strongest corroborative testimony is that of the students’ letters written in 1795 and 1796. These are inescapable, contemporary sources, and they speak so highly of Dwight that they inevitably cast his predecessor in the shade. At least one deliberately contrasts the two men, much to the detriment of Stiles. Was Beecher right, after all, in his general impression? Though the letters actually say nothing and imply nothing about infidelity under Stiles, they do give a glowing picture of the improved student morale, not to say morals, under Dwight.

  Before deciding that Beecher was right in general if wrong in particular, one should consider the fact that Beecher, like the authors of the contemporary letters, formed his impressions as a student. Fifty years later he remembered how he felt as a student, and there can be no doubt that the students at Yale gave Dwight an enthusiastic reception. Historians, most of whom teach in colleges and universities, know something at first hand of student fashions and student enthusiasms. Students as a class are surely fickle. Few historians, I believe, would be ready to turn over the choice of a college president, or even of a faculty member, to their students.

  Unhappily when historians read the letters of an eighteenth-century student, they do not always employ the same perspective. The expiring condition of the college church and a debate on the divinity of the Scriptures assume a different significance when placed in the context of what came before and what came after. By examining a larger number of student letters, we may gain a similar perspective on them. It is not even necessary to read very far in order to observe the rapidity with which student feeling vibrated from enthusiasm to discontent and back again.

  The most enthusiastic letter about the improved morale of the college under Timothy Dwight was written by Timothy Bishop to Thomas Robbins on January 11, 1796. Within three months Bishop had begun to cool off. When he wrote to Robbins again on April 14, 1796, he said that things were still, on the whole, going well, “but there are some individuals in the class who are very negligent in their studies and likewise in their attendance upon the exercises of College more so I believe than they ever have hitherto been. Day after day and week after week will pass away when these persons will scarcely look into a book or attend once upon the exercises of college.” Benjamin Silliman, who had written his mother so happily in December 1795, had a different story on July 4, 1796:

  The students are making a great rout, about commons—petitions, remonstrances, and resolves, have been sent into the corporation (which were yesterday sitting). I believe they have at least been saved the mortification of a refusal, and I believe nothing more. A large number of our stout-hearts have given out, that if they cannot obtain leave from the corporation to live out, they will take it from themselves.

  Similar alternations of sentiment could be cited from almost any student correspondence. Mills Day on July 12, 1802, writes his brother Jeremiah of the great religious revival at Yale and of his own thoughts of joining the church; but by December 24, 1802, he says,

  The students in the lower classes have become rather unruly. Mr. Knight was rusticated for 2 months for rolling a barrel down stairs against the tutors door and afterwards denying it before the Authority. About the same time the bell rope was cut, the Bible and Psalm book concealed and a dead duck put under the cushion in the desk. Soon after Tutor Stuart had 5 or 6 of his window glass broken; and last evening a piece of gammon hung on his door and over it a paper on which was written “Turkeys for sale, 3 pence per pound.” I have not yet been detected in any of these tricks nor do I know that they even mistrust me.

  By this time both the students and the faculty seem to have lost the zeal for study that prevailed in the first months under Dwight. In the same letter Mills Day writes, “We recite lessons but four or five times in a week. The rest of our time is spent in writing, attending the other collegiate exercises, or in such other employment as we chose to be engaged in. Altho’ we have no less than five professors appointed to instruct us in the various branches of science we enjoy the benefit of none of them at present.”

  Twenty years earlier or twenty years later, student correspondence tells much the same story. Jedidiah Morse wrote his parents from Yale on August 21, 1781, “since I have been a member of College prospects were never more promising, pleasant, and agreeable; a laudable ambition prevails; Virtue and Piety flourish; and Literature is in its Meridian splendor.” On January 6, 1782, however, “Religion in this otherwise flourishing society is at a low ebb—I wish it was in my power to inform you otherwise….” By the following August 1782, college had been disturbed by the revelation of student debauchery too shocking for Morse to describe, but on June 20, 1783, a “Seriousness considerable prevails in College—one we hope is happily converted. God only knows how far it may spread.” This was the beginning of the religious revival of that year.

  College authorities learned to take these sudden shifts in their stride. Ezra Stiles was not unaware in 1795 of the low student morale that Beecher remembered, nor was he complacent about it. But Stiles knew what Beecher did not, that this kind of thing was part of any college president’s life. On February 12, 1795, three months before his death, Stiles wrote to Professor Eliphalet Pearson of Harvard in saner words than Beecher or any other student could have used: “Our college has been in a Tumult, nor is yet calm, altho’ I hope we are quieting. The abolition of the Winter vacation by the Corporation last fall, has occasioned it. But we shall get along. I hope matters are tranquil at Harvard.”

  The fact is that neither student recollections nor student letters can furnish an accurate guide to the condition of a college. Lyman Beecher remembered that student morale was bad at the time that Stiles died and that it improved when Dwight took over. His memory played tricks on him in providing details to substantiate the impression, but the impression itself was correct. What Beecher could not have understood was that mor
ale would probably have picked up under the continued ministrations of Ezra Stiles as readily as it did under those of Dwight.

  There remains the testimony of Matthew Dutton and Gardiner Spring, but these men may be quickly dismissed. Both were writing eulogies of Dwight after his death in 1817, and though they knew Dwight in his later years, they did not know Stiles. Dutton had been only twelve years old and a resident of Watertown, Connecticut, at the time when Stiles died and Dwight became president in 1795. Dutton did not enter Yale until he was twenty-three, in 1806. Gardiner Spring was ten years old in 1795 and a resident of Newburyport, Massachusetts. He did not enter Yale until 1800. Both Spring and Dutton therefore spoke from hearsay. Neither knew at first hand what he was talking about.

  But is it not remarkable that two men speaking from hearsay (Dutton and Spring) and one (Beecher) speaking from memory, perhaps overlaid with hearsay, should have recorded the same impression, that Ezra Stiles was incompetent, especially as an opponent of infidelity, and that Dwight was competent and inspiring? Where did this unanimous impression come from? Could it have arisen entirely from the faulty perspective of students?

  No final answer is possible here. But having seen more substantial evidence dissolve under scrutiny, we may perhaps be permitted to speculate about this. We know that there was no love lost between Stiles and Dwight. The details of the feud are hard to get at because the crucial documents have been lost or destroyed, but we know that they disliked each other. We know also that a change took place in the religious atmosphere of New England during the years when Dwight was president of Yale. Whether or not Dwight had anything to do with it, there was a great revival of religion about the turn of the century. We know that Dwight fancied himself as a crusader against infidelity. He would hardly have been averse to taking credit for the awakening.

  We know also that from an early date Dwight opposed the French Revolution, while Stiles went to his grave in 1795 still confident that the French had ushered in a new era of freedom. We know that Dwight, like most of the New England clergy, became an ardent Federalist, while Stiles gave every sign of gravitating toward the Jeffersonians. We know that Dwight looked on all supporters of Jefferson and all supporters of the French Revolution as infidels; he even propagated the rumor, which was utterly false, that a secret society of deists, linked with the French Jacobins, was seeking the overthrow of government in the United States.