Ezra Stiles

Ezra Stiles (December 10, 1727[1] – May 12, 1795) was an American academic and educator, Congregationalist minister, theologian and author. He was seventh president of Yale College (1778–1795), and one of the founders of Brown University.[2][3]

This article is about Ezra Stiles. For other uses, see Ezra Stiles (disambiguation).

Ezra Stiles
Stiles, 1770–1771, by Samuel King
7th President of Yale University
In office
1778–1795
Preceded byNaphtali Daggett
as pro tempore
Succeeded byTimothy Dwight IV
Personal details
Born(1727-12-10)December 10, 1727
North Haven, Connecticut Colony
DiedMay 12, 1795(1795-05-12) (aged 67)
New Haven, Connecticut
ChildrenBetsey Stiles; Ruth (Stiles) Gannett; Emilia (Stiles) Leavitt; Polly (Stiles) Holmes; Isaac Stiles
Signature

Early life
Yale College diploma, Ezra Stiles, Class of 1746

Born the son of the Rev. Isaac Stiles in North Haven, Connecticut, and Kezia Taylor (1702–1727), the daughter of poet Edward Taylor. Ezra Stiles graduated from Yale in 1746. He studied theology and was ordained in 1749, tutoring at Yale from that year until 1755. At one point he nearly became an Anglican: the Samuel Johnson in a letter to Archbishop Seeker of Canterbury on April 10, 1762, confided that Stiles "was once on the point of conforming to the Church, but was dissuaded by his friends, and is become much of a Latitudinarian."[4] Styles resigned from the ministry in 1753 to study law and practice at New Haven, but returned to the cloth as a Congregationalist minister two years later. Historians Helen A. Lane and Marion B. Walkden report that he was the first minister of the Dighton Community Church in Massachusetts. They state:

Ezra Stiles, first settled minister of the church, was later made president of Yale College. Driven out by the British in March of 1776, he arrived in Dighton with his family and several of his former Newport congregation. Among them was William Ellery, singer (sic) of the Declaration of Independence. Ezra as minister of the half finished church at Lower Four Corners was paid about three hundred dollars, house, and wood. While minister of the Dighton Church, Ezra Stiles received on July 13th a copy of the Declaration of Independence to be read to the congregation. It was brought to him by Mr. Channing, father of the famous preachers. Among Rev. Stiles’ many friends were Benjamin Franklin, Robert J. Payne, General Stark, John Adams, President Langdon of Harvard, and many leaders of the Revolutionary War period.[5]

In 1768, he was elected to the revived American Philosophical Society.[6] In 1784, Stiles was elected an honorary member of the Society of the Cincinnati of Connecticut, one of the first so honored, for his ardent support of the Patriot cause.

Newport life
Ezra Stiles by Reuben Moulthrop

Trinity Church, the Anglican Church in Newport, Rhode Island, asked him to become its minister, but he turned the offer down. Instead, in 1755, he became pastor of the Second Congregational Church, also in Newport, where he also served as Librarian of the Redwood Library and Athenaeum. He kept an informative diary of his life and distinguished acquaintances in Newport, including his association with Aaron Lopez. Newport's Ezra Stiles House is on the National Historic Register.

Ezra Stiles House in Newport, Rhode Island

From time to time, Stiles invested with the merchants and sea captains of his congregation; in 1756, he sent a hogshead of rum along on a voyage to Africa and was repaid with a 10-year-old male slave, whom he renamed "Newport". Around the same time, he wrote a joint letter with fellow Newport minister Samuel Hopkins condemning "the great inhumanity and cruelty" of slavery in the United States.[7]

Foundation of Brown University

In 1764, Stiles helped establish the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (the original name for Brown University) by contributing to the drafting of its charter and by serving with 35 others—including Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery, Samuel Ward, the Reverend John Gano, the Reverend Isaac Backus, the Reverend Samuel Stillman, and the Reverend James Manning—as a founding fellow or trustee.[8] In drafting the charter, Stiles combined broad-minded public statements defining Rhode Island College as a "liberal and catholic institution" in which "shall never be admitted a religious test" with private partisanship: his draft charter packed the board of trustees and the fellows of the college with his fellow Congregationalists, but the Rhode Island Assembly caught on to his plan, and changed his numbers to increase the number of Baptists, Episcopalians, and Quakers, reflecting the more ecumenical character of the state.[9]

Biblical scholarship

Stiles struck up a close friendship with Rabbi Haim Isaac Carigal during the latter's six-month residence in Newport in 1773. Stiles' records note 28 meetings to discuss a wide variety of topics from Kabbalah to the politics of the Holy Land. Stiles improved his rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew, to the point where he and Carigal corresponded by mail in the language.

Stiles' knowledge of Hebrew also enabled him to translate large portions of the Hebrew Old Testament into English. Stiles believed, as did many Christian scholars of the time, that facility with the text in its original language was advantageous for proper interpretation.

American Revolution
Ezra Stiles's map of the British forces invading New Haven, Connecticut, July 1779

Before Regular troops of the colonial army arrived in Newport in late 1776, Stiles left. He became Pastor of the Congregational Church at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1777.

As a pastor Stiles, defended the monarchy as the best form of government in his sermon, entitled The United States elevated to Glory and Honor, to the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut in 1783. He stated that "a monarchy conducted with infinite wisdom and infinite benevolence is the most perfect of all possible governments."

Yale presidency
Letter from Stiles to George Washington announcing the awarding of an Honorary degree to Washington by President and Fellows of Yale College, 1781

In 1778, he was appointed president of Yale, a post he held until his death. Stiles freed Newport on June 9, 1778, as he prepared to move to New Haven; he would in 1782 hire his former slave for $20 a year and the indenturing of Newport's two-year-old son until age 24.[10] As president of Yale, Stiles became its first professor of Semitics, and required all students to study Hebrew (as Harvard students already did); his first commencement address in September 1781 (no ceremonies having been held during the American Revolutionary War) was delivered in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. By 1790, however, he was forced to face failure in instilling an interest in the language in the student body, writing

From my first accession to the Presidency ... I have obliged all the Freshmen to study Hebrew. This has proved very disagreeable to a Number of the Students. This year I have determined to instruct only those who offer themselves voluntarily.

The valedictorians of 1785 and 1792, however, did deliver their speeches in Hebrew.

Stiles was an amateur scientist who corresponded with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin about scientific discoveries. Using equipment donated to the college by Franklin, Stiles conducted the electrical experiments in New England, continuing a practice first begun by his predecessor, President Thomas Clap. He charged a glass tube with static electricity and used it to "excite the wonder and admiration of an audience".[11] He shocked 52 people at once, fired spirits of wine and rum, and caused counterfeit spiders to move about as if they were alive. These were all experiments that had been performed before, and "Stiles seems to have had little genius for pushing back the frontiers of knowledge" and his observations "disclosed nothing new".[12] He was more a learner and teacher than an experimenter. Nevertheless, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1781.[13]

His book The United States elevated to Glory and Honor was printed in 1783.[14] Here he advocates the realisation of James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana]] across North America by White European's – whom he regarded as descendants of Japhet – imagining the remaining Native Americans and African Americans "may gradually vanish", and thus ensure that "an unrighteous SLAVERY may at length, in God’s good providence, be abolished and cease in the land of LIBERTY." This constitutes a form of providentialism and a fore-runner of christian identitarianism.[15]

Legacy at Yale
Frontispiece, The Annals or History of Yale College in New Haven, in the Colony of Connecticut, by Yale President Thomas Clap, 1766. Volume carries notation: "Given to the Library of Yale College by Ezra Stiles 1785."

Yale's legacy from this interest of Stiles' includes a portrait of Carigal by artist Samuel King. The idea that the Hebrew words "Urim" and "Thummim" (אורים ותמים) on the Yale seal are there because of Ezra Stiles is a false myth. Indeed, the Hebrew on the Yale seal appears on Stiles' own master's degree diploma from Yale in 1749, decades before he became president of Yale College.[16]

In 1961, Yale named a new residential college in his honor: Ezra Stiles College, noted for its Eero Saarinen design, particularly the building's lack of right angles between walls.

His upholstered armchair is currently in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. The chair was made in Newport, Rhode Island.[17]

Personal life

Stiles married twice (Elizabeth Hubbard and Mary Checkley Cranston) and had eight children. Stiles' son Ezra Stiles, Esq., was educated first at Yale College, then at Harvard College, where he studied law, graduating in 1778. Ezra Stiles, Jr., subsequently settled in Vermont, and served to establish the boundaries between Vermont and New Hampshire. He died prematurely at Chowan County, North Carolina, on August 22, 1784, and his two daughters by his wife Sylvia (Avery) Stiles of Vermont (and formerly of Norwich, Connecticut) had their uncle Jonathan Leavitt appointed their guardian.[18]

His daughter Emilia married Judge and State Senator Jonathan Leavitt of Greenfield, Massachusetts. His daughter Mary married, in 1790, Abiel Holmes, a Congregational clergyman and historian and a 1783 graduate of Yale College. By his second marriage to Sarah Wendell, Abiel was the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

References
  1. Holmes, Abiel (1798). The Life of Ezra Stiles ... President of Yale College, p. 9.
  2. Welch, Lewis et al. (1899). Yale, Her Campus, Class-rooms, and Athletics, p. 445.
  3. Edmund S Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1962), 205.
  4. Johnson, Samuel, Samuel Johnson, President of King's College; His Career and Writings, edited by Herbert and Carol Schneider, New York: Columbia University Press, 1929, Volume 1, p. 321
  5. http://dightoncommunitychurch.com/churchhistory.html
  6. Bell, Whitfield J., and Charles Greifenstein, Jr. Patriot-Improvers: Biographical Sketches of Members of the American Philosophical Society. 3 vols. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1997, I:119, 149, 152, 155, 156, 477, 487, 505, II:13, 209, 217, 219, 276, III:16, 52, 189, 296–392, 297, 431, 481, 604, 607, 608, 613.
  7. Dugdale, Antony; J. J. Fueser; J. Celso de Castro Alves (2001). "Ezra Stiles College". Yale, Slavery, & Abolition. The Amistad Committee. Retrieved December 12, 2012.
  8. "Brown University Charter" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on February 2, 2012.
  9. Hoeveler, David J., Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges, Rowman & Littlefield, 2007, p. 191
  10. Saillant, John, Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 131
  11. Morgan, Edmund, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795, University of North Carolina Press, 2014, p. 91
  12. Ibid
  13. "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter S" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved July 28, 2014.
  14. "The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor".
  15. Guyatt, Nicholas (2007). Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607-1876. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-86788-7.
  16. Oren, Dan A. (2001) Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale, Revised edition, p. 347.
  17. "Upholdtered armchair, RIF5502". The Rhode Island Furniture Archive at the Yale University Art Gallery. Retrieved February 4, 2020.
  18. The Stiles Family in America, Genealogies of the Connecticut Family, Henry Reed Stiles, Doan & Pilson, Jersey City, 1895

Further reading
Academic offices
Preceded by
Naphtali Daggett, pro tempore		 President of Yale College
1778–1795		 Succeeded by
Timothy Dwight IV
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