Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson (1696-1772), American clergyman and educator, was the first Anglican minister in Connecticut and first president of King's College, later Columbia University.

Samuel Johnson was born in Guilford, Conn., on Oct. 14, 1696. His father was a deacon. A precocious student, Samuel acquired a fondness for Hebrew at the age of 6. He was unable to enter grammar school until the age of 11, but at 14 he was admitted to the Collegiate School (now Yale) at Saybrook, Conn. Even before graduating in 1714, he began teaching school at Guilford. When Yale moved to New Haven in 1716, he was made a tutor. For the first 2 years he taught the three lower classes alone, introducing students to the works of two prominent Englishmen - philosopher John Locke and scientist and philosopher lsaac Newton.

However, Johnson's relations with his students were unhappy. A student contingent presented a petition complaining of the "Public Expositions & Disputations & Managements of the Tutors" Johnson was singled out as the worst. Although the Yale Corporation found him guiltless, he tendered his resignation in September 1719 and accepted a call to the pulpit of neighboring West Haven.

Johnson continued to use the growing resources of the Yale library, which had recently acquired the latest English works, including several volumes of liberal Anglican theology. He read and discussed these works with his classmate Daniel Browne and with Yale's new president, Timothy Cutler, and the three developed doubts concerning the validity of the "Congregational Way." In September 1722 the three men announced their misgivings at commencement, launching the "Great Apostasy." Soon after, they sailed to England, where they obtained Anglican ordination. A year later Johnson returned to Stratford, Conn., as the first Anglican minister to the colony and remained the only one for 3 years. On Sept. 23, 1725, he married Charity Nicoll, a widow, and became guardian of her two sons.

The work of propagating and defending the Anglican persuasion in New England consumed 30 years of Johnson's life. As the acknowledged intellectual and ecclesiastical leader of the movement, he was asked to become the head of the new King's College in New York City in 1753. In 1754 he moved his family to New York and began a decade as president of the college.

In a colonial culture of rampant denominationalism, King's College was chartered as a nonsectarian institution with a mixed board of trustees. The only Anglican requirements were that the president always be of the Church of England and that the daily prayers be conducted from the Book of Common Prayer. On Sundays the students attended the church of their choice.

The enrollment was small - only eight boys graduated in the first class of 1758 - and the fees were the highest in the Colonies. The boys' median age at entrance was 15, and the attrition rate was high. But this was fertile ground for Johnson. As he advertised in the New York Gazette in 1754, "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."

Johnson taught the first-year class himself so that he might "carry them through the New Testament in its Greek original, and not only make them understand the words but the things, explaining all difficult passages, and giving them a clear understanding of the whole scheme of Christianity." And he ensured that his graduates would have a greater understanding of the "New Philosophy" than he had by devoting three-fourths of the sophomore and junior class curriculum to mathematics and science.

Unfortunately Johnson's personality and probably his well-known disparagement of colonial culture robbed him of success. "He did not figure greatly as a president," wrote President Ezra Stiles of Yale, "but it does not seem to have been for want of Learning. Dr. Johnson was an excellent Classical Scholar - he had few equals in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. He was good at the Sciences, easy and communicative, was eminent in Moral Philosophy," as he demonstrated in his book Elementa philosophica (1752). Nevertheless, Stiles concluded, "Some Geniuses, with half the Observation and Reading of Dr. Johnson, would make ten times greater Men."

When Johnson's second wife died of smallpox in 1763 - a previous outbreak had carried off his first wife, son, and stepdaughter - he lost the heart to continue and retired to his parish in Stratford. He died on Jan. 6, 1772.

Further Reading

Herbert and Carol Schneider edited Samuel Johnson, President of King's College: His Career and Writings (4 vols., 1929). Johnson's work as president of King's College is recounted in Horace Coon, Columbia: Colossus on the Hudson (1947). His importance as a philosopher is ably discussed in Robert Clifton Whittemore, Makers of the American Mind (1964).

Additional Sources

Carroll, Peter N., The other Samuel Johnson: a psychohistory of early New England, Rutherford N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978.

Johnson, Samuel (1696-1772) American philosopher. A symptomatic figure rather than an independently important philosopher, Johnson was born in Connecticut and taught at Yale. He was instrumental in founding the university of Pennsylvania and Columbia university. His career shows a gradual evolution from narrow New England Calvinism, under the impact of Locke, Newton, and above all Berkeley, with whom Johnson became friendly during the latter's visit to Rhode Island. Johnson became an enthusiastic immaterialist, and defender of free will, tempering the harsh doctrine of predestination even to the point of joining the Church of England. See also plenitude, principle of.

For other persons named Samuel Johnson, see Samuel Johnson (disambiguation).

Rev. Dr. Samuel Johnson

The Reverend Doctor Samuel Johnson (14 October 1696 – 6 January 1772) was a clergyman, educator, and philosopher in colonial British North America. He was a major proponent of both Anglicanism and the philosophy of George Berkeley in the colonies, and served as the first president of the Anglican King's College (the predecessor to today's Columbia University).

Contents 1 Life 2 Works 3 Books on Samuel Johnson 4 Notes 5 External links

Life

Anglicanism portal

Born in Guilford, Connecticut, he graduated from the Collegiate School (now Yale University) in 1716. Johnson first became Congregationalist minister of a church in West Haven, but influenced by the writings of John Locke and Isaac Newton, he and a group of other Collegiate School graduates began to express doubt in the legitimacy of their Congregational ordination. As a result, Johnson left the colony in order to seek ordination in the Church of England. Upon his return to Connecticut, he opened the first Anglican church in the colony at Stratford in 1724 and strenuously polemicized, under the auspices of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, against both the Congregationalists of New England and the new evangelical outburst occasioned by popular preacher George Whitefield and the Great Awakening he unleashed.

He remained in Stratford until 1754, when the vestrymen of the Anglican Trinity Church in New York City considered him the logical choice to serve as after the first president of King's College. Though reluctant to leave his family in Connecticut and fearing the smallpox epidemics he considered endemic of urban life, Johnson ultimately took up the post, assisting in behind-the-scenes maneuverings to ensure the college would be explicitly Anglican, rather than nonsectarian. In the early years of the institution, Johnson was the sole instructor, primarily teaching classics and philosophy. His first class consisted of eight boys he considered "woefully unprepared". Owing to his fear of smallpox, of which his son William had died while in England, Johnson was frequently absent from the city, and increasingly shared his teaching responsibilities. When his wife died of smallpox, Johnson began to seek a means to leave his post, although the Governors of King's College and the Archbishop of Canterbury had already maneuvered to replace him with the Oxford-trained minister Myles Cooper. Johnson left the post in 1763 and returned to his ministry at Stratford, where he died. Cooper penned the inscription which adorns his monument in the town:

If decent dignity, and modest mien,
The cheerful heart, and countenance serene;
If pure religion and unsullied truth,
His age's solace, and his search in youth;
In charity, through all the race he ran,
Still wishing well, and doing good to man;
If learning free from pedantry and pride;
If faith and virtue walking side by side;
If well to mark his being's aim and end,
To shine through life the father and the friend;
If these ambition in thy soul can raise,
Excite thy reverence or demand thy praise,
Reader, ere yet thou quit this earthly scene,
Revere his name, and be what he has been.

Portrait of Johnson as Columbia University president from 1754-1763 in the Columbia Trustees Room

Johnson was the father of William Samuel Johnson, a Founding Father of the United States who attended the United States Constitutional Convention. He followed his father's footsteps, attending Yale and becoming president of Columbia College.

Works

Johnson was among the few colonial Americans whose cultural and intellectual achievements garnered notice in Great Britain. He was a friend of and often corresponded with the Irish philosopher George Berkeley, and became the chief promoter of his philosophy of immaterialism in colonial America. In 1731 Johnson published his Elementa Philosophica (eng. Compendium of Logic and Metaphysics), and in 1746 his Ethica (eng. System of Morality). In 1752, Benjamin Franklin printed both in a single, expanded volume, a third edition of which appeared in 1754 with Johnson's corrections and an introduction by Dr. William Smith, provost of the College of Philadelphia. In 1757 a London publisher printed his English and Hebrew Grammar, to which was appended a "Synopsis of all the Parts of Learning".

Academic offices
Preceded by None; Position created	President of King's College 1754 – 1763	Succeeded by Myles Cooper

Books on Samuel Johnson

• Ellis, Joseph J., The New England Mind in Transition: Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, 1696-1772 (Yale University Press, 1973)
• Herbert and Carol Schneider, Samuel Johnson, President of King's College: His Career and Writings (4 vols., 1929)

Notes

See also: Ivy League Presidents

External links

• Columbia Encyclopedia article on Samuel Johnson
• Biographical Sketches of King's College Notables
• Life and Correspondence of Samuel Johnson, D.D. Missionary of the Church of England in Connecticut and First President of King's College, New York, By E. Edwards Beardsley, D.D. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1874.

v • d • e Presidents of Columbia University S. Johnson · Cooper · B. Moore* · Clinton* · W. Johnson · Wharton · B. Moore · Harris · Duer · N. Moore · King · Barnard · Low · Butler · Fackenthal* · Eisenhower · Kirk · Cordier · McGill · Sovern · Rupp · Bollinger * indicates acting president or chancellor

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