BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES
of King's College Notables
Notable [no image available] The first individual to pledge funds for the creation of a college in New York province, James Alexander was born in Scotland in 1691. He was the descendant of Scottish nobility and well schooled in mathematics. After joining the Jacobite cause in 1715, he fled to America upon its suppression by the English crown. He was admitted to the provincial bar of New Jersey in 1723 and thereafter became a leading attorney in both New Jersey and New York. In the 1740s he moved his thriving practice to New York City, where he helped train many of the city's leading lawyers of the next generation, including William Livingston. His most famous case was his unsuccessful defense of the newspaperman John Peter Zenger, against the charge of libel. While temporarily costing Alexander his place before the New York bar, it confirmed his reputation as a forceful litigant and a courageous spokesman for freedom of the press. Alexander's civic exertions included joining Benjamin Franklin in 1747 to help found the American Philosophical Society. Two years earlier, and closer to home, he pledged L100 for the creation of a college in New York province. Although most of those individuals who came forward over the next decade were, like him, communicants of New York's Trinity Church, Alexander was less interested in establishing an "Anglican college" than assuring New York a place on the colonial cultural map alongside Boston/Cambridge, New Haven and Philadelphia, all of which were in or getting into the college business, as well as nearby Newark, where the College of New Jersey would begin classes in 1747. Unlike his onetime law student, William Livingston, he played no active role in the political controversy surrounding founding of King's College. He did, however, cast his vote in the Governor's Council against the charter that was signed by Lt. Governor DeLancey on October 31, 1754. He died in 1756. His son, William Alexander, a.k.a, the Earl of Stirling, was a King's College governor from 1762 to the close of the College in 1775. Robert McCaughey Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Vol.1
, pp. 167-68 |
President/Faculty [image available] Samuel Johnson, the first president of King's College, was born in Guilford, Connecticut,in 1696, to parents who traced their New England lineage back to 1637. His father was a prosperous farmer. Johnson attended Yale College as an undergraduate (1712-1716) and then stayed on as a tutor. In 1720 he became minister of the Congregational church in West Haven. Two years later, influenced by his extensive readings into Locke and Newton recently available in the Yale Library, Johnson and a half dozen other young Yaleys publicly expressed doubts about the legitimacy of the Congregational ordination and determined to seek ordination in England by a Bishop of the Church of England. Needless to say, Yale authorities were aghast at their apostasy. Upon his return to Connecticut in 1723, Johnson established the colony's first Anglican church, in Stratford. There, over the next three decades he became as a vigorous advocate for the Anglican cause, meanwhile providing instruction and encouragement for a dozen young men who followed him out of the Calvinist ranks of Presbyterianism or Congregationalism into the Anglican fold. The institutional vehicle for his missionary activities throughout the colonies was the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, founded in 1704 and active throughout the northern colonies. Johnson's published philosophical and apologetical writings earned him the friendship of the English philosopher and Anglican dean, George Berkeley, who visited the colonies in the 1730s, and a place in mid-18th-Century American intellectual life alongside his contemporaries Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. First and foremost a denominational polemicist, he was equally opposed to the Calvinistic Puritanism of New England's founders and to the newer "enthusiasms" of George Whitefield and the Great Awakening. As he preached it, Anglicanism represented a middle way, marked by respect for authority, good order and edifying ritual. When, in the early 1750s, the vestrymen of New York City's Trinity Church took it upon themselves to establish an "Episcopal College" in the city, Johnson was an obvious choice to head it.. The urgency among these Anglican worthies in their college-building efforts was prompted by the need to counter the influence of the recently opened College of New Jersey (later, Princeton), the creation of "New Light" Presbyterians and situated (from 1746 until 1756) just across the Hudson in Newark. Plans afoot in Philadelphia for a college also argued for action. Reluctant to uproot himself and family from familiar Stratford, combined with his dread of smallpox, which he linked to urban life, Johnson took several months to accept appointment as president after being notified of his election in November 1753. He did, however, participate behind the scences in the struggle between supporters of the College and its critics, led by William Livingston. The College opened July 17, 1754, in an unused room in a schoolhouse adjacent to Trinity Church on Rector Street, with Johnson constituting the faculty and eight "woefully unprepared" boys the student body. A charter followed soon thereafter, on October 31, 1754, though not without some attendant bitterness, especially from critics of the College in the provincial Assembly, who succeeded in witholding appropriated funds for the college for another two years.. Johnson endured as president of King's College for eight years, although for sizable periods he vacated himself from the City to lessen the risk of smallpox. He first shared teaching responsibilities with his son, William, in 1755, who died the next year of smallpox while in England seeking holy orders), then with Leonard Cutting (1756-1762), and then with the College's first professor, Daniel Treadwell (1757-60). Johnson assigned his own Elementa Philosophica (1731) to the senior class. The death of his wife of 34 years in 1759, from, wouldn't you know, smallpox and general tiredness prompted Johnson to begin looking about for a successor. In 1762, unbeknownst to Johnson, but at the urging of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Governors of King's College selected the twenty-six year old, Oxford-trained Anglican minister Myles Cooper (1737-1785) as tutor and president-designate. The presidential succession took place at the College's fifth commencement, the third to be held in the new College Hall, in 1763. Johnson thereafter returned to Stratford and resumed his place as the town's Anglican rector and leading citizen. The proximity of his older son, the attorney Samuel William Johnson [Columbia's third president, 1787-1800), remarriage (to his son's mother-in-law) and family friends brought a measure of familial comfort to his last years, even as the growing estrangement between his beloved if seldom visited Mother England ("home") and his increasingly restive and soon-to-be-rebellious neighbors proceeded apace. Johnson died in 1772, three years before the outbreak of the American Revolution which would drive nearly all of his old Anglican allies into exile and force the closing of King's College. Robert A. McCaughey Bibliography: Herbert and Carol Schneider, Samuel Johnson,
President of King's College: His Career and Writings (4 vols., 1929); Joseph J.
Ellis, The New England Mind in Transition: Samuel Johnson of Connecticut,
1696-1772 (Yale UP, 1973) |
President/Faculty Myles Cooper (1737-1885) [image available/Copley portrait] Myles Cooper, the second president of King's College (later Columbia University), was born into comfortable rural circumstances in Cumberland County, in the north of England. After local schooling, he proceeded to Queens College, Oxford, where he earned A.B (1756) and M.A.(1760) degrees. As preparation for the Anglican ministry, he became chaplain of Queens College in 1761, the same year as his ordination. In 1762, the Archbishop of Canterbury approached Oxford officials about an appropriate candidate for an administrative post at King's College, in the Province of New York, having been asked to do so by the College's Anglican-dominated Board of Governors. They recommended Cooper, then twenty-five years old, who accepted the Collge's professorship of moral philosophy after assurances that he was to be its next president. Cooper arrived in New York City in October 1762, and promptly set about to make his mark upon King's College in anticipation of his succeeding to its presidency. The incumbent, the Rev. Samuel Johnson, at sixty-six and after eight years as president, was physically ready to hand over the job, though miffed at the urgency with which Cooper and the governors wished to proceed. A month after Johnson's resignation in April, 1763, Myles Cooper became King's College second -- and last -- president. Cooper's presidency was marked by his efforts to "Oxfordize" a heretofore largely day-school experience into a primarily residential one. Students were expected in live in College rooms and to remain within the College fence after evening curfew. Changes to the classics-dominated curriculum were modest, largely away from Johnson's earlier emphasis on science in favor of "polite literature." Beginning in 1767 the College offered medical instruction, though Cooper's involvement in this initiative was modest. Similarly, he did little to stimulate enrollments or improve graduation rates, with the result that King's had the fewest enrollments and lowest graduation rate (about 50%) of the nine colonial colleges. During his 12-year presidency, King's College averaged about 5 graduates per year. A rapidly growing endowment, thanks largely early provincial backing, private benefactions and the rents on College-owned New York City properties, allowed the College to operate largely independent of tuition income. Sociable perhaps to a fault, Cooper enjoyed good wine, fine food and convivial company. A bachelor, he entertained regularly and was regarded as someone "who knows everybody." Friends insisted that "he was by no means dissipated," although his self-commissioned portrait by the then relatively unknown John Singleton Copleyo." His presidential duties did not keep him from engaging in imperial politics and ecclesiastical placehunting. As tensions increased in Crown-colonial relations, he aligned himself with defenders of the monarchy and against those New Yorkers who sought a less subordinate place within the Empire. His politics nicely matched his ecclesiastical views, where he was an active promoter of placing Anglican bishops in the colonies. Should such a bishopric be established in the southern colonies, he intimated in letters home, he would be open to such a position. Cooper's involvement with other NewYork - area Anglican ministers in defending the King and his Established Church against pamphleteering assaults by those they characterized as "Republicans and free thinkers" led to his being singled out for retaliatory action. On May 10, 1775, he was chased from his College lodgings by a mob and obliged to seek Crown protection aboard the HMS Kingfisher in New York Harbor. Ten days later he sailed for England, where he received two comfortable livings. His only subsequent contact with King's College was to petition -- unsuccessfully -- the governors for his salary between his departure and the official close of the College a year later. Cooper died in 1787, unmarried, in Edinburgh, his remains in a graveyard reserved for Anglican clerics. Robert A. McCaughey Sources: Thomas Jones, History of New York During the Revolutionary War (1879); Clarence Hayden Vance, "Myles Cooper," Columbia University Quarterly (1930), pp. 260- 271 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notable William Livingston (1723-1790) [image available] Leading opponent of the original Anglican sponsors of King's College, William Livingston was born in Albany in 1723. His family was one of New York Province's largest landowners, with links to the earliest Dutch settlers and the subsequent English mercantile elite. He followed three older brothers to Yale, from whence he graduated in 1741. He then settled in New York City where his brothers were already leading merchants, though he had decided on pursuing the law. An apprenticeship with attorney James Alexander (and defender of the newspaperman Peter Zenger) confirmed a commitment to civil libertarianism and an identification with the legislative or popular cause as against the Anglican gentry aligned with Lieutenant Governor James DeLancey and his Council.. That his branch of the Livingstons were thoroughgoing Calvinists of the Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian denominational persuasions, further fueled his antipathy to Anglicanism. Livingston was an early advocate of the plan broached in 1745 by his mentor Alexander to construct a college in New York City. He saw it as a means of promoting knowledge and as a check on the city's unruly "bashers." In 1751 he was appointed to the Lottery Commission charged with drawing upo plans for a publicly supported college. When it appeared in 1753 that the proposed college was likely to be controlled by the City's leading Anglicans and governed as an extension of Trinity Church, which had offered to provide the college with a site, Livingston moved into public opposition. His principal vehicle for doing so was a weekly journal, The Independent Reflector, that he and like-minded friends -- William Smith, jr. and John Morin Scott -- had begun publishing in late 1752. Livingston devoted six successive issues of the Reflector , beginning on March 22, 1753, to examining "our intended college" from the perspective of New York's non-Anglican majority. Although these polemical exertions on behalf of a non-sectarian institution and against an "Episcopal college" did not stop the college project from going forward, or the College taking on a distinctly Anglican character rather than becoming, as the College's president-elect Samuel Johnson accused Livingston of seeking, "a sort of free thinking latitudinarian seminary," they did turn an earlier supportive Provincial Assembly sufficiently against the College that it took no part in the granting of a royal charter in 1754 and withheld more than L6000s generated by a public lottery from the College. Not until two years after the College had opened, was a compromise reached whereby the Assembly split the lottery funds between the College and New York City, for construction of a municipal pest house. Unreconstructed foes of King's College took to referring to the division as between "two pest houses." "Relative to the affair of the College, " Livingston wrote resignedly to an ally in 1757, " we stood as long as our legs would support us, and, I may add, even fought for some time on our stumps." Livingston continued throughout the 1760s to do battle with the DeLanceys for political control of New York, until a political defeat in 1769 led him to remove himself to Elisabethtown, New Jersey and to the life of a gentlemen farmer. Soon thereafter, however, he was drawn back into revolutionary politics, first on the Essex County Committee of correspondence and then representing New Jersey at the First and Second Continental Congresses. From 1777 to 1791 he served as the first governor of New Jersey. He was also a delegate at the Federal Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, where he played an uncharacteristically subdued role in favor a strong national government. In so doing he aligned himself with William Samuel Johnson, a delegate from Connecticut, the son of his old King's College nemesis (and soon-to-be president of Columbia College) and two of King's College's most distinguished alumni, Gouverneur Morris (KC 1768) and Alexander Hamilton (a. 1774). Small world. Livingston died in 1790. Robert A. McCaughey Bibliography: Milton Klein, ed., The Independent
Reflector, by William Livingston and Others (Harvard University Press, 1963) --------------------------------------------------------------------- Notable Cadwallader Colden (1688-1776) [image available?] In 1748, Cadwallader Colden, advocated Newburgh as the site for what became King's College. He had migrated from Scotland to New York City in 1718 as surveyor general. In 1721 he was appointed to the governor's council. His scientific publications encompassed natural history, applied mathematics, botany, physics, medicine, and philosophy. He also wrote The History of the Five Indian Nations (1727) and An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter (1745, revised 1751). As Lt. Governor in the 1760s, he became unpopular when he refused to support popular agitation against the Stamp Act. Two of his grandsons attended King's College. He died in 1776, having declared his loyalty to the Crown. Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: Concise Dictionary of American Biography, fourth edition, p. 211.
Notable James DeLancey (1703-1760) [image available?] As Lt. Governor of New York in 1754, following the suicide of Governor Danvers Osborn, James DeLancey signed and issued the original charter for King's College. Born in New York in 1703, he was admitted to the bar in 1725 upon his return to America from England where he had been studying. DeLancey was appointed to the New York State Supreme Court in 1731 and became Chief Justice in 1733. He was the acknowledged leader of one of the two groupings within the province contesting for political power. His consisted mostly of merchants and Anglicans, while the other, the Livingstons, were dominated by rural landholders and religious dissenters. DeLancey's popularity diminished in 1735 when, as chief judge, he sided with Governor Cosby and pressed for the conviction of Peter Zenger. In 1753, after a political contest with Governor George Clinton, DeLancey became lieutenant governor of New York. He was an ex-officio Governor of King's College but seldom attended its meetings. His younger brother, Oliver DeLancey, was a much more active and long serving governor. DeLancey died in 1760 and was succeeded as lieutenant governor by his political rival Cadwallader Colden. Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: Concise Dictionary of American Biography, fourth edition, p. 266.
Notable Governor Charles Hardy (1716?-1780) Charles Hardy was appointed governor of New York in 1755, following on the suicide of Governor Danvers Osborn. Upon arriving in New York, he promptly subscribed L500 to the subscription for King's College, thereby identifying himself as a supporter of its cause in its struggles with an oppositional Assembly. In December 1756 he further succeeded in extracting a compromise with the Assembly, by which King's college received half of the provincial funding raised on its behalf . Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: The Dictionary of National Bibliography, Vol. VIII, pp. 1236-7.
Notable/Governor Joseph Murray 1694-1757 Joseph Murray was both the biggest individual benefactor of King's College and one of the most generous benefactors of higher education in colonial America. He was born in New York City in 1694. After studying at Middle Temple in London, he returned to New York in 1728 and appeared in most of the leading legal cases of his generation. He helped devise the 17xx Montgomerie Charter. In addition, his "Opinion Relating to the Courts of Justice in the Colony of New York" is one of the few important contributions to legal history written in the American colonies. It argues against the claim that courts of law can be established only by statute and set forth the view that "fundamental courts" are part of the constitution of England. He served as a New York delegate at the Albany Congress and was associated with the so-called DeLancey Faction. In 1751 he was appointed one of nine commissioners of the College Lottery, charged with setting up a publicly supported college in New York. Over the next three years he regularly sided with his six fellow Trinity churchmen in the commission's deliberations, including those that led to the provisions that the president of the college must be an Anglican and that Anglican prayers be used in College services. When the charter for King's College was signed on October 31, 1754, Murray became one of its twenty-four "named" governors (there were also nineteen ex-officio governors). He died in 1757, childless, but not before providing for a bequest of L8000s to the College. Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: Concise Dictionary of American Biography, fourth edition, p. 807. Notable Samuel Seabury 1729-1796 [image available?] Samuel Seabury, who in 1748 advocated Hempstead, Long Island as the site for what later became King's College in New York City, graduated from Yale in 1748. He then studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, only to change professional direction by becoming ordained an Anglican minister by the Bishop of London in 1753. As the rector of the Anglican church in Hempstead, he sent tutored several boys who later went on to King's College. Before the Revolution, Seabury produced many pamphlets in which he tried to convince Americans that their greatest freedom lay in submitting to the British government and securing change through peaceful appeals to the government. He joined the British lines on Long Island in the Fall of 1776. In 1785, he became rector of St. James' Church, New London, Connecticut, and served as bishop of Connecticut and Rhode Island until his death in 1796. Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: Concise Dictionary of American Biography, fourth edition, pp. 1027-8.
Notable John Morin Scott (1730-1784) Like William Smith, Jr. and William Livingston, John Morin Scott was and ardent critic of the founding of the founding of King's College. A Yale graduate, a lawyer, and a Presbyterian, he later helped organize the New York Sons of Liberty. He served in the Battle of Long Island in August 1776 as brigadier general. In 1777, he ran against George Clinton for position of New York governor. Scott was New York State Secretary, 1778-84, a state legislator, and a member of the Continental Congress. Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: Concise Dictionary of American Biography, fourth edition, p. 1024.
Notable William Smith (1697-1769) Along with his son William Smith, Jr., William Smith opposed the establishment of King's College under Anglican auspices. A prominent lawyer, he identified himself with the radical Presbyterian faction in provincial politics and was associated with leading cases that tried to curb the governor's prerogative. He defended John Peter Zenger in 1735. After criticizing Judge James Delancey and an associate, Smith was disbarred, only to be readmitted to practice in 1737. Smith served as provincial attorney general (1751), associate justice of the New York Supreme Court (1753-67), was involved in the founding of the first New York public school (1732), and was an incorporator of the College of New Jersey (later, Princeton). As a member of Lt. Governor James DeLancey's Council, he voted against accepting the charter for king's College signed by DeLancey on October 31, 1754. Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: Concise Dictionary of American Biography, fourth edition, p. 1077. Notable Adriaen Block (fl. 1610-24) Only two years after Henry Hudson's reconnaissance, Adriaen Block navigated the waterways around what is now New York City on behalf of Dutch merchants who were interested in establishing a fur trade. His original ship was destroyed by fire off Manhattan in 1613, and he and his crew were forced to remain on the island for the winter. Their camp became the first European settlement on Manhattan. With the help of Indians, he and his crew built the Restless, the first Dutch sailing vessel made of North American timber. Block navigated the straits off Wards Island in 1614, and named the treacherous passage that leads into the as yet unexplored Long Island Sound "Hellegat" (Hell Gate). Block Island, another of his landfalls, is named after him. Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: Jackson, Kenneth T., ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Notable William Burnett 1688-1729 Burnett was appointed colonial governor of New York and New Jersey in 1720. His statesmanlike Indian policy angered traders and their backers in the provincial Assembly. Burnett was reassigned to the position of governor of Massachusetts in 1728. Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: Jackson, Kenneth T., ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Notable Edward Hyde Cornbury (1661-1723) Cornbury was the colonial governor of New York and New Jersey from 1702 to 1708. His arrogance, vanity, and financial dishonesty caused his administration to suffer. He was responsible for the permanent ceding of land to Trinity Church, some of which the church later provided for the site for King's College. Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: Concise Dictionary of American Biography, fourth edition, p.226; see, also, Patricia Bonomi, ..... Notable James Duane (1733-1797) James Duane, who served both as a Governor of King's College (1762-1775) and as an original Trustee of Columbia College, had been as a young man a member of the DeLancey political faction. On the occasion of his marriage to Maria Livingston in 1759, he switched loyalties and went over to the Livingston camp. Despite initial reservations about independence, he joined the revolutionary cause, serving in the Continental Congress from 1774-1784. In 1784, Governor George Clinton appointed Duane Mayor of New York in 1784, making him the first City resident to hold office after the British evacuation. During five years as Mayor, 1784-1789, he played a significant role in helping the city recover from the war. He tried but failed, however, to keep the nation's capital in New York. He was more successful in reviving King's College, first, in 1784, as Columbia College at the head of the State University of New York, when it was governed as a public institution, and then in 1787 as "Columbia College in the City of New York," wherein it reverted to its earlier status as a private college serving the New York City gentry. In these efforts he was assisted by John Jay ( King's College 1764) and Alexander Hamilton, who attended the College during its last two years of existence. Duane became the U.S. district judge for New York State from 1789-1794. Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: Jackson, Kenneth T., ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Notable Benjamin Fletcher 1640-1703 Fletcher was colonial governor of New York from 1692 to 1698. He also served briefly as governor of Pennsylvania. Fletcher was identified as conservative, and was accused of excessive land grants and the protection of pirates. He pushed through the Ministry Act of 1693, which provided for the public support of the Anglican Church in New York City and three surrounding counties. He was replaced by Earl of Bellomont. Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: Concise Dictionary of American Biography, fourth edition, p.350. Notable Henry Hudson ( -1611) In the Spring of 1609, the Englishman Henry Hudson sailed from Amsterdam to the North Cape in search of a Northwest passage to the Orient. Discouraged by icebergs and snow storms, he decided to sail to America. Hudson anchored in the Bay of New York early in September 1609. He then stopped in Manhattan and on September 13-19, sailed up the what became known as the "Henry Hudson" river to anchor at a site near Albany. His explorations provided the basis of the Dutch claims to what became the Dutch province of New Netherland Eva Goldsmith Biography: Concise Dictionary of American Biography, fourth edition, p. 527. Notable Jacob Leisler (1640-1691) Leisler led the 1689 rebellion in New York following the Glorious Revolution. The overthrow of James II in 1688 and the subsequent downfall of the Dominion of New England threw colonial politics into disarray. Leisler headed the New York City militia and seized Fort James on May 31, 1689. He was chosen as "captain of the fort" in August, and he led a militantly anti-Catholic faction that supported the claims of William of Orange to the throne. Leisler was tried for his arbitrary seizure of authority and his refusal to relinquish it at the demand of the new governor. He was condemned to death for treason. New York politics for a decade thereafter was characterized by a division between Leislerians and Anti-Leislerians. Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: Concise Dictionary of American Biography, fourth edition, p. 642; Jackson, Kenneth T., ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Notable New Yorker Peter Minuit (1580-1638) As the first Director of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan Island in 1626 from the Indian sachems for trinkets that were valued at sixty guilders, or twenty four dollars. He also instituted peaceful relations with Plymouth Colony. He was dismissed in 1631 after quarrels with Dutch reformed ministers and the provincial secretary. He then led a Swedish company, which is credited with establishing New Sweden and building Fort Christina in present day Wilmington, Delaware. Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: Concise Dictionary of American Biography, fourth edition, p.772. Notable New Yorker Peter Stuyvesant (1610-1672) After serving as governor of Curacao and other islands, Peter Stuyvesant was commissioned to be director general of New in 1646. He promoted intercolonial relations with the English, drove the Swedes from Delaware, increased commerce, and stood firm against assertions of the popular will in his government. In the summer of 1664, Stuyvesant was obliged to surrender New Netherlands to the English and he withdrew from public office. Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: Concise Dictionary of American Biography, fourth edition, p. 1131.
Notable New Yorker William Vesey (1674-1746) William Vesey was a Harvard-trained Anglican convert who was ordained by the Bishop of London in 1697. He served as the first rector of Trinity Church in New York City from 1697 until his death in 1746. Vesey often engaged in controversies with the royal governors over rights he believed vested in Trinity Church and its rector. Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: Concise Dictionary of American Biography, fourth edition, p.1214. Notable John Witherspooon (1723-1794) [image available] A Scot and a Presbyterian minister, John Witherspoon became the sixth President of the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1768. During his tenure there, he increased the school's endowment, faculty, and student body. He introduced to the school's curriculum the study of philosophy, French, history, and oratory. Witherspoon was a member of various Revolutionary committees. He was elected to the Continental Congress on June 22, 1776 and was influential in both Great Britain and in America. He served in Congress from 1776-1782 and was on the Board of War and the Committee on Secret Correspondence. Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: Concise Dictionary of American Biography, fourth edition, p. 1331. Notable John Peter Zenger (1697-1746) The journalist John Peter Zenger was arrested in the Fall of 1734 for alleged libelous statements against Governor Cosby in some issues of the New York Weekly Journal, of which he was publisher. After his first lawyers, Alexander and William Smith, were disbarred, Andrew Hamilton took the case and asked the jury to inquire into the truth of falsity of the libel. The jury asserted a verdict of not guilty. This case represented the first major victory for the freedom of the press in the American colonies. Zenger was appointed public printer of New York in 1737 and New Jersey in 1738. Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: Concise Dictionary of American Biography, fourth edition, p. 1363. Faculty Samuel Clossy (1724-1786) Clossy came to New York City in 1763 and began teaching at King's College in 1764, He had trained at Trinity College in Dublin, where he had a private practice and fell victim to hospital politics. Upon his arrival in New York, Clossy began delivering anatomy lectures with dissections. In 1765, Clossy was elected Tutor and Professor of Philosophy. Two years later, along with Peter Middleton, John Jones, James Smith, and Samuel Bard, Closssy made proposals for establishing a medical school within King's College. He continued to teach regular undergraduates and medical students until the College was closed in 1776. Eva Goldsmith Source: Morris Saffron, Samuel Clossy MD, 1967. Faculty Robert Harpur (1731-1825) Harpur came to New York from Scotland (he was born in Ireland) in September 1761 and began teaching almost immediately at King's College, Professor of Math and Natural Philosophy. This, despite the fact that he was a Presbyterian. In 1762, he was made a librarian as well. Harpur resigned as professor in 1767, but remained at the college as a private tutor until 1775. Unlike his faculty colleagues, Harpur was an early and active supporter of the Revolution. In 1784, he was named Secretary of the University of the State of New York, and, in 1787, trustee and clerk of the Columbia College Board of Trustees. He resigned in 1795 to pursue land development projects upstate. Eva Goldsmith Bibliography: Faculty John Jones (1729-1791) Jones helped orgaize and became a professor of surgery and obstetrics at King's College in 1767. He received his MD in 1751 from the University of Rheimes, and in1765, published the first surgical textbook in the colonies, Observations on Wounds. In 1775, he published Treatment of Wounds. Jones and Samuel Bard secured the charter for New York Hospital in 1770, though plans for it were deferred by the Revolution. An active Patriot, Jones provided medical advice to the Continental Army and treated Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. Eva Goldsmith ? Bibliography: Faculty Peter Middleton (1730-1781) Peter Middleton came to New York City from Scotland in 1752 and founded St. Andrew's Society in 1756. A physician, he was one of six who proposed that King's College open a medical school, which it did in November 1767. Middleton was elected a Governor of King's College in 1773. He sided with the British during the Revolutionary War. Eva Goldsmith ? Bibliography: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Faculty Faculty
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