King's College Narrative #2
"A Mighty Clamour": The Contested Founding of King's College
King's College was chartered and opened for business in 1754. The fifth of nine colleges founded in the American colonies. it followed Harvard (1636), William and Mary (1693), Yale (1701) and the College of New Jersey -- later, Princeton --(1746). In its wake came the College of Philadelphia (later, Pennsylvanis) in 1755, Rhode Island College (later, Brown) in 1764, Dartmouth in 1766 and Queens ( later, Rutgers) in 1768. Thus, the founding of King's College occurred midway in the second wave of college-building in late colonial America.
The first documented mention of a college for New York was by the merchant Lewis Morris (grandfather of Gouverneur
Morris, KC 1768) in 1704, when, in support of the transfer by Governor Cornbury of
Crown-owned prime New York City real estate ["Queen's Farm"] to Trinity Church,
Vestryman Morris allowed that the land would make "a fit place for a colledge."
Once the transfer had been effected, Morris and his fellow Trinity communicants dropped
the subject and for the next forty years New Yorkers went about their business with
neither a local college or of more than a dozen college graduates in the entire Province.
The effective stimulus for establishing a college in New York came in 1745 with an
announcement of plans by "New Light" Presbyterians caught up in the Great
Awakening -- and angered with "Old Light" Yale's decidedly hostile response to
it -- to establish a college in neighboring New Jersey. Not to be outdone, the New York
Assembly promptly declared its interest in establishing a college in New York. It was one
thing for Philadelphia, still substantially larger than New York City, to have plans afoot
for developing Benjamin Franklin's "Academy" into a college, another to be
upstaged by the only recently separated New Jersey. Thus, provincial pride, far more than
the religious promptings behind the founding of Harvard and Yale, or the even more
narrowly denominational concerns prompting Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth and Rutgers, set in
motion what was to become "the College of the Province of New York." As one who
eventually came to oppose the project aptly put it in 1749, "a jealousy of our
neighbors at length gave spring to our ambitions."
The interest of New York City's Anglicans in the college project was slow to surface and still slower to coalesce. While the first offer of private support for a college in New York came from James Alexander, a member of Trinity Church, his £100 offer was a match for support he provided the founders of Princeton. (When his fellow Anglicans later dictated the terms of the charter on which the New York college would be founded, Alexander cast his vote on the Governor's Council against it.) To be sure, among those who urged rural alternatives to establishing the proposed college in New York City, were three other Anglicans. The naturalist and subsequently Lt. Governor Cadwalader Colden argued the virtues of his native Newburgh forty miles up the Hudson; the Rev. Samuel Seabury, whose church was in Hempstead, touted Long Island; the Rev. James Wetmore, with a church in Rye, recommended rural Westchester as the perfect place for a college. Local boostering, more than denominational advocacy, likely prompted all three.
Three years after the Assembly declared itself ready to support a college in New York,
public discussion of the project had all but ceased. The task of reviving it was taken up
by the 26-year-old William Livingston, a New York City attorney, Yale graduate and
Presbyterian. As subsequent events made clear, the young Livingston was a harsh critic of
the Anglican Church, of denominational colleges generally and of Anglican colleges in
particular. Indeed his efforts to derail what he later insisted on calling the
"College of Trinity Church" merit him designation as King's College's principal
"anti-founder." Yet in 1749, as evidenced in his "Some Serious Thoughts on
the Design of erecting a College in the province of New York," he supported the
allocation of public funds to support such a college. If New York's Anglicans had plans
afoot in 1749 to put their denominational mark on the proposed college, Livingston was
unaware of them.
Nor did he suspect an Anglican plot two years later, in 1751, when the Assembly appointed
a ten-member commission to manage the lottery funds collected for the college and to
settle on an appropriate site. Had he, the fact that seven of the ten Commissioners were
Anglican would have prompted the kind of outburst which later in the controversy over the
founding of King's College became his trademark. Instead, he quietly accepted a place as
one of the two Presbyterians appointed to the Commission, apparently confident that the
kind of non-denominational college he had envisaged in his 1749 pamphlet was what
everybody also had in mind.
This shared sense of civic cooperation persisted into the spring of 1752, when the vestrymen of Trinity Church offered to cede six acres of its "Queen's/King's Farm" property to the Lottery Commission as the site of the future college. Livingston accepted the offer at face value: as the the generous gift of civic-minded New Yorkers of a prime site for the proposed college, thus assuring its location in New York City, but otherwise unconditioned.
By now, however, several of the City's leading Anglicans had come to look upon the proposed college from the perspective of their unusual position in New York. Anglicans were a minority within the Province. Even within New York City, where they were concentrated, they represented only about fifteen per cent of the City's Protestant churchgoers. Presbyterians were twice as numerous, and when joined with the other dissenting denominations -- French Huguenots, Lutherans and Dutch Reformed -- they constituted the majority. Yet thanks to the Ministry Act of 1693, the Anglican church enjoyed the equivalent status of the established church within New York City and in four surrounding counties.
In practical terms this meant that the salary of the rector of Trinity Church was paid out of local taxes collected from all the city's taxpayers, while the salaries of the ministers of the other Protestant churches came exclusively from their parishioners. This arrangement was not likely to change as long as all governors appointed by the Crown to represent him in New York were Anglicans, and who, in turn, generally looked to fellow Anglicans (even fellow Trinity communicants) in filling places in the Governor's Council. This cosiness periodically manifested itself in jus such acts of gubernatorial generosity as that in 1704 when Governor Cornbury ceded much of Manhattan's West Side to Trinity Church. Only in the popularly elected and rural-dominated Assembly did the Anglican privileged minority encounter political resistance.
In addition to being religiously and politically favored, New York's Anglican community included the City's biggest merchants, busiest lawyers and largest landowners. Many of the latter traced their landholdings back to Dutch times or to the days when New York was the proprietary colony of the Duke of York and huge estates were ceded to his supporters. By the mid-eighteenth century many of these Dutch and English landholders, through intermarriage and the conversion of several Dutch Reformed families to Anglicanism, had fused into a Knickerbocker gentry, resided in New York City and owned pews at Trinity. As such, they set the standard for and controlled access to the upper reaches of New York society. Indeed, all that New York City's Anglicans lacked to complete their local cultural hegemony was a dominant role in -- if not control of -- the province's educational and intellectual affairs. Thus the belated interest in the proposed college.
There may also have been another reason, having to do with the geopolitics of American Anglicanism. Since the establishment by the Anglican hierarchy in England of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPGFP) as the foreign-missionary wing of the Church of England in 1704, the always outnumbered and occasionally beleagured Anglicans in the northern colonies had been lobbying successive Bishops of London, who had spiritual responsibility for the colonies, to provide American Anglicans with a bishop of their own and to have him reside in the colonies. It was thought that a resident bishop would strengthen the Anglicans' sometimes ignored claims to equal standing in colonies where they were in a minority. It would also facilitate the ordaining of colonists as Anglican ministers. Without a resident bishop, would-be Anglican ministers were obliged to seek ordination in England, which represented both a considerable expense, and, in the case of several colonists who perished at sea or from travel-connected illnesses, a life-threatening undertaking.
Should a bishop be sent to America, there was then the question of where he would take up residence. Here New Yorkers had reason to think they had the inside track. The province's central location among the British colonies in North America was thought to be an advantage, as was, in its lower counties, the already semi-established status the Church enjoyed. As compared with the more populous Massachusetts, Connecticut or Pennsylvania, where dissenters controlled the provincial governments, New York could be expected to be relatively welcoming. Moreover, New York City's Trinity Church, as enlarged in 1737, was one of the most impressive edifices in America, its congregation unquestionably the wealthiest. By the early 1750s, when the call for a resident bishop was renewed, Anglicans throughout the colonies agreed that New York City should host their once and future American bishop. But surely the City's claims could only be strengthened if it became home not only to the province's college but to a college under Anglican auspices.
The first public suggestion that the proposed New York college might operate under Anglican auspices occurred in the fall of 1752, not by a member of the City's Anglican community, but by a recent clerical arrival from Scotland, the Rev. William Smith. It is unclear whether he took it upon himself to take up the issue to advertise his availability for ministerial and/or educational labors [ his doing so did attract Benjamin Franklin's attention and led to his becoming the first Provost of the College of Philadelphia), or was urged upon him by less forthcoming Anglicans. The effect was much the same. In Some Thoughts on Education: With Reasons for Erecting a College in this Province, the thirty-year-old Smith implied rather than directly argued that the proposed college be put under Anglican auspices. Two weeks later, in a follow-up letter published in the New-York Mercury, Smith went further to propose that the Rev. Samuel Johnson, the best known Anglican minister in the American colonies and odds-on favorite among American-born Anglicans to become the first American bishop should one be appointed, be made president of the proposed college. As for coming up with a salary sufficient to attract Johnson away from his parish in Stratford, Connecticut, Smith helpfully proposed that Johnson be provided with a joint appointment at (and second salary from) Trinity Church.
For New Yorkers of several non-Anglican religious persuasions who had heretofore
supported the idea of a non-denominational provincial college, the cat was finally out of
the bag. Chief among those from whose eyes the scales had belated dropped was William
Livingston, the vehemence of whose subsequent opposition to what he insisted on calling
"The College of Trinity Church" can at least in part be attributed to anger with
himself for detecting the conspiracy earlier. This is not to dispute that Livingston, in
an age prone to conspiracy mongering, was one of the most so inclined; it is rather to
suggest that in this instance his congenital paranoia had a basis in fact.
From 1749 on Samuel Johnson had been kept informed of the progress of the proposed college
by New York Anglicans, among them his stepson Benjamin Nicoll,
a vestryman of of Trinity Church and member of the Lottery Commission, and by the rector
of Trinity Church, Henry Barclay, who had been a ministerial student
of Johnson's twenty years earlier. These discussions even extended across the Atlantic to
England -- where they engaged the attention of Joseph Secker, the Bishop of London, and
the Anglican philosopher- prelate George Berkeley, who pronounced Johnson, whom he had met
during his American stay in 1731-32, singularly suited to preside over a proper Anglican
college in America. By 1751 Johnson and his Anglican conferees regularly referred to New
York's proposed college in proprietary terms, occasionally as "our college."
It was only Smith's statements in the fall of 1752 that the scales dropped from
Livingston's eyes. Yet however belated his discovery of the Anglican conspiracy to hijack
the Assembly-proposed and province-backed college, Livingston was not without resources to
expose the plotters. He had in John Morin Scott and William Smith, Jr. (to be distinguished from both William Smith Sr.,
his father, and "Provost" William Smith, the Anglican minister above who later
became Provost of the College of Philadelphia), two comrades-in-ink. Scott and Smith were,
like Livingston, Yale graduates, Presbyterians, erstwhile lawyers and young men about town
with political and literary ambitions. Friends and foes alike called them "the
Triumvirate."
It also happened that Livingston's discovery of the Anglican plot coincided with the
Triumvirates' decision to launch a weekly journal. The first in America, The Independent
Reflector was consciously modeled on The Independent Whig, which was published
in England by Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, and enjoyed a wide circulation in America
before running afoul of government authorities. Although the first issue of their Independent
Reflector appeared on November 30, 1752, it was not until its seventeenth issue,
published on March 22, 1753, that Livingston and his comrades-in-print took up the matter
of the College. In so doing, as the Loyalist historian Thomas Jones recalled the moment on
the far side of the Revolution, Colonial New York would never again be the same.
In six consecutive issues of the Reflector, commencing with "Remarks on Our Intended College," and ending with "The Same Subject Continued and Concluded," Livingston hammered away on two fronts: establishing the reality of the threat of the proposed college falling "into the hands of one religious set in the Province" and thus becoming "a party-college"; proposing alternatives to avoid the college being "entirely managed by one sect." The essence of Livingston's case against the college as proposed was that it would have the use of public funds, in the form of the lottery proceeds, and monopoly privileges, in the form of a royal charter, to advance a sectarian cause. That the College would be open to all Protestants (Livingston himself favored excluding Catholics "for political reasons") would not alter the fact that the Anglicans fully expected to control its operations. Trinity's provision of a site and the likely selection of an Anglican cleric as the college's first president were in themselves enough to assure such control. "If [the college] falls into the hands of Churchmen," Livingston wrote to a Yale classmate just as his first essay appeared in February 1753, "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."
Anglican backers of the college complained mightily in private about the unfairness of the charges leveled against them by "The Reflectors." Johnson reported to his ecclesiastical authorities in England that Livingston was calling for "a latitudinarian academy," but did not take on Livingston in print. This was left to outlying Anglican ministers, among them the Reverends Thomas Bradbury Chandler and Samuel Seabury, who offered anonymous defenses of a college under Anglican direction. Most of the energy of these self-styled "Anti-Reflectors" went instead into getting the Reflector shut down. In this they were assisted by a suicide. Five days after taking up his post on October 7, 1753, Governor Daniel Osborne took his own life. This made Lt. Governor James DeLancey "the natural leader of the Church party" and bete-noire of the Livingston-led "popular" party that held sway in the Assembly, acting governor. DeLancey promptly threatened Independent Reflector's printer with the withdrawal of all provincial business if he did not cease printing Livingston's weekly. Publication ceased shortly thereafter, although Livingston kept up his barrage throughout 1753, using various public outlets, including a periodical of their own creation with the catchy name, the Occasional Reverberator.
By the fall of 1753, even as the war of words continued, the center of action shifted backed to the Lottery Commission. Here Livingston's position as the lone commissioner alert to the supposed Anglican plot, prompted him to proceed with uncharacteristic caution. At the Commission's meeting on Novemebr 22, 1753, it was Livingston who moved that Samuel Johnson be invited to New York to preside over the new college. He coupled this motion with a second, that Chauncey Whittesley, a Congregationalist minister in New Haven of his long acquaintance, be appointed "first tutor." Both motions carried unanimously and Livingston was assigned the responsibility for writing to the president- and first-tutor-elect. There then followed several months during which Whittesley begged off as first tutor and Samuel Johnson allowed himself to be persuaded to accept the presidency.
It was not until May 14, 1754, with Johnson's appointment in hand, that the vestrymen of Trinity Church responded to the "hideous clamour" produced by Livingston's attacks in the Independent Reflector. They did so by informing the Lottery Commissioners that the Church's earlier offer of land was now to be subject to two conditions: the president of the College must always be an Anglican; religious services at the College much be in accord with Anglican liturgical forms.
With half of them also vestrymen, most of the commissioners were well aware of the new conditions when they met two days later to consider them. They promptly moved to accept the conditions and to incorporate them in the draft charter then being prepared with the assistance of president-elect Johnson. Only Livingston voted against doing so, providing his fellow commissioners with "Twenty Unanswerable Objections" to the charter as revised. Taking no public notice of Livingston's objections, the Commission forwarded the draft charter to Lt. Governor James DeLancey.
Though Livingston was still far from beaten, much less silenced, the momentum following the Commission's acceptance of the Trinity conditions on May 16th was such that he could not stop its opening. Two weeks later, on May 31, 1754, Samuel Johnson placed an "Advertisement for the College of New York" in the New York Gazette, announcing plans to commence instruction on July 1st. Classes were be held in the vestry room of the new school house adjoining Trinity Church, "till a convenient place may be built." They actually got underway a week after the advertised date, on July 8, 1754, when President Johnson greeted the College's first eight students.
The College was still not out of the political woods. When the charter draft forwarded to DeLancey had been presented to his Anglican-dominated Governor's Council on June 14th; it received the ten-member Council's endorsement, but with two dissents, from James Alexander and William Smith, Sr., the latter the father of Livingston's partner at the Independent Reflector and New York City's leading Presbyterian layman. Greater opposition could be expected from the Assembly, where non-Anglicans were in a majority and where Livingston and his extended family exercised considerable influence. Accordingly, on October 31, 1754 ("Founder's Day"), DeLancey submitted the final version of the charter to his Governor's Council, secured its support (only William Smith, Sr. dissenting) and two days later signed it on behalf of King George II. He had simply bypassed the Assembly.
In the face of such executive highhandedness, the Assembly expressed its annoyance with the Governor by entering into its official record Livingston's "Twenty Unanswerable Objections." It also voted to impound the more than £7000 of lottery proceeds that it was expected to turn over to the charter-named Governors of the "College in the Province of New York… named King's College."
It took two years, a war and a new governor before the Assembly accepted the fact of the College's existence and made good on part of its original assurances of financial support. The war was that between England and France, locally referred to as the French and Indian War, which commenced in the fall of 1756; the new governor was Sir Charles Hardy, who arrived in New York in 1755 and used his first months to impress the province's two political camps of his evenhandedness. Under the proximate threat of invasion by the French along New York's exposed northern border, but also flush with wartime revenues, the Assembly accepted Hardy's call for ending the college controversy with a compromise solution. The £7000 collected for the college would be divided between King's College and New York City, which would use its share to build a municipal pest house. William Smith Sr., second only to Livingston as "anti-founder" of King's College, could not help (nor I help but repeat) describing the deal as splitting the money "between two pest houses."
With this compromise, by which the College received a one-time grant of £3000 in provincial funds, the College's financial survival was assured and the controversy over its founding ended. Even Livingston conceded as much. "Relative to the affair of the College," he wrote to a political 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." Yet a decade later he could still not let it go, nor stop reading into the controversy larger issues. "You are very severe on our famous New York College," he wrote to his son in 1768, "but I believe not more sarcastical than it deserves…. The partial bigotted and iniquitous plan upon which it was constructed deserved the opposition of every friend of civil and religious liberty; and the clamour I raised against it … has yet and probably never will totally silence." No fair weather critics for Columbia!
Robert A. McCaughey
September 27, 1999
ram31@columbia.edu