No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
On February 3, 1803, the brand new building that was to revivify both student and academic life at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, burned to the ground. It was a devastating loss felt by the whole community. Yet Charles Nisbet, the college's principal for seventeen years, reported the event to a friend in sardonic fashion. The trustees had urged that Dickinson emulate Princeton, the more successful Presbyterian-backed enterprise in New Jersey. “We have now attained a pretty near conformity to it,” he wrote, “by having our Building burnt down to the ground [the same fate having overtaken Princeton's newly rebuilt college some months before] …. But it could not stand, as it was founded on Fraud & Knavery. The Trustees, in order to procure money for finishing this Building, sold the Certificates that furnished the salaries of the masters…. This awful Visitation of Divine Providence has taken more from them than all they have taken from me, tho' I do not think it will awaken them to do more justice.” While money was a constant source of contention between Nisbet and the trustees of Dickinson, they had taken much more than that from the Scottish cleric. Their knavery had included thwarting his godly mission to educate part of the post-Revolutionary generation of Americans. And it was not just the trustees; the students themselves, and their parents as well, had done their part to frustrate him. In fact, all of American culture, or so Nisbet thought, had prevented him from enlightening the wilderness.
1 Nisbet, Charles (hereafter CN) to Alexander Addison, Carlisle, 12 Feb. 1803, Addison Papers, Darlington Library, University of Pittsburgh (hereafter UPitt).Google Scholar
2 Wood, Gordon S., The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992), 28, 37, 195–203, 246–47, 349.Google Scholar
3 For Rush on education, see Hawke, David Freeman, Benjamin Rush: Revolutionary Gadfly (Indianapolis, 1971), 296–98, 311; D'Elia, Donald J., “Benjamin Rush, America's Philosopher of Revolutionary Education,” in The Boyd Lee Spahr Lectures in Americana (Carlisle, Pa., 1970), 4: 57–84; Rush, Benjamin, “Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,” Essays Literary, Moral, and Philosophical, 2d ed. (Philadelphia, 1806).Google Scholar
4 Sellers, Charles Coleman, Dickinson College: A History (Middletown, Conn., 1973), 63–75.Google Scholar
5 Benjamin Rush to CN, Philadelphia, 27 Aug. 1784, The Letters of Benjamin Rush, 1 vol. in 2, ed. Butterfield, Lyman (Princeton, 1951), 1: 335–39 (hereafter Rush Letters); John Dickinson to CN, Philadelphia, 25 Oct. 1784, part 1, 94, Rush Papers, Dickinson College Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (hereafter HSP). For Smith's views, see Kraus, Michael, “Charles Nisbet and Samuel Stanhope Smith—Two Eighteenth-Century Educators,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 6 (Nov. 1944): 17–36.Google Scholar
6 BR to CN, Philadelphia, 5 Dec. 1783, 19? Apr., 27 Aug. 1784, Rush Letters, 1: 315–16, 321–25, 335–39; BR to CN, Philadelphia, 30 Aug. 1784, Dickinson College Archives, Carlisle, Pa. (hereafter DCA); BR to CN, Philadelphia, 28 Nov. 1784, in Memoir of the Rev. Charles Nisbet, D.D.: Late President of Dickinson College Carlisle, by Samuel Miller (New York, 1840), 116–18.Google Scholar
7 Registers of the Acts of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Scottish Record Office, General Register House, Edinburgh, 1766–1768, 166, 539, 605; 1776–1778, 165–75.Google Scholar
8 Miller, , Nisbet Memoir, 74–77; Registers of the Acts of the General Assembly, 1766–1768, 539, 605; 1772–1775, 217–18, 499–501, 643–44; 1776–1778, 190, 382; 1779–1781, 46–48; Donovan, Robert Kent, “The Popular Party of the Church of Scotland and the American Revolution,” in Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment , ed. Sher, Richard B. and Smitten, Jeffrey R. (Princeton, 1990), 91–93.Google Scholar
9 Nisbet made clear his views on the desirability of mixed government and the dangers of republicanism in his moral philosophy lectures, delivered annually at Dickinson. For a typical rendering, see Nisbet, Charles, “Questions and Answers on Moral Philosophy,” 317–29, Grace Doherty Library, Centre College, Danville, Ky. On patronage, see Miller, , Nisbet Memoir, 19; Memorial for David Doig Esq. Provost and the other Magistrates and Town Council of Montrose to the Right Honourable James Stewart McKenzie of Rose-haugh Esq. Lord Privy Seal of Scotland, ms. 17601, folder 140, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; Registers of the Acts of the General Assembly, 1769–1771, 503–8; 1776–1778, 165–75.Google Scholar
10 CN's thoughts are evident in Lady Leven's responses to them: Countess of Leven to CN, Melville House, 20 Nov. 1784, in Miller, , Nisbet Memoir, 108–11.Google Scholar
11 John Dickinson to CN, Philadelphia, 29 Sept. 1784, DCA; Charter of Dickinson College, microfilm, DCA, 18–19; Herbst, Jurgen, From Crisis to Crisis: American College Government, 1636–1819 (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 2–4, 143–47, 194–96; Horn, David B., A Short History of the University of Edinburgh, 1556–1889 (Edinburgh, 1967), 71–75; Grant, Alexander, The Story of the University of Edinburgh during Its First Three Hundred Years, 2 vols. (London, 1884), 2: 4–8.Google Scholar
12 BR to CN, Philadelphia, 19? Apr. 1784; John Dickinson to CN, 29 Sept. 1784; Trustees' Meeting, 28 Sept. 1784, Proceedings of the Trustees, microfilm, DCA.Google Scholar
l3 The best current analysis of Charles Nisbet's disillusionment with American culture is Smylie, James H., “Charles Nisbet: Second Thoughts on a Revolutionary Generation,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 98 (Apr. 1974): 189–205. Smylie focuses on Nisbet's unhappiness with America's political and religious culture and does not treat his career at Dickinson. For an analysis of Nisbet's American career in all its dimensions, see my Pelican in the Wilderness: The American Odyssey of Charles Nisbet, 1785–1804 (forthcoming).Google Scholar
14 For an account of the following events much more sympathetic to the trustees, see Bonar, James A., “‘We Have Honestly Aimed at Doing Good’: Trusteeship at Dickinson, 1783–1816,” in Spahr Lectures, 4:85–140.Google Scholar
15 CN to BR, Carlisle, 15 July 1785, Rush Corresp., vol. 41, pt. 1, 136, HSP; Horn, , Short History of Edinburgh University, 40–41; Morgan, Alexander, ed., The University of Edinburgh: Charters, Statutes, and Acts of the Town Council and the Senatus, 1583–1858 (Edinburgh, 1937), 164–66.Google Scholar
16 CN to BR, Carlisle, 23 July 1785, Rush Corresp., vol. 41, pt. 1, 137, HSP.Google Scholar
17 Plan of Education, 1785, DCA. Trustees' Meeting, 9 Aug. 1785, microfilm, DCA.Google Scholar
18 CN to Lord Buchan, Carlisle, 15 Dec. 1785, in Miller, , Nisbet Memoir, 139–42; CN to BR, Carlisle, 9 Jan. 1786, Rush Corresp., vol. 41, pt. 1, 173, HSP.Google Scholar
19 CN to BR, Carlisle, 30 Jan. 1786, Rush Corresp., vol. 41, pt. 1, 176, HSP; CN, “Present State of Dickinson College,” 25 Sept. 1799, DCA; CN to Rev. James Paton, Carlisle, 10 June 1787, in Miller, , Nisbet Memoir, 166–75.Google Scholar
20 Bonar, , “We Have Aimed Honestly,” 102–8.Google Scholar
21 Ibid., 108–10. Trustees occasionally addressed students, urging them to study and to be aware of the advantages of republican government. See, for example, Carlisle Gazette, 29 Mar. 1797.Google Scholar
22 CN to Rev. James Paton, 10 Jan. 1787; CN, “An Address to the Students of Dickinson College, September 26, 1787,” DCA; see also, CN, “To the Graduates at 2d Commencement, May 7th, 1788,” Young Papers, Centre College.Google Scholar
23 CN, “State of Dickinson College, to be presented to the Trustees, at their Annual Meeting, 5th June, 1789,” DCA; CN to William Young, Carlisle, 9 June 1792, DCA; CN to Rev. Dr. Ashbel Green, Carlisle, 5 August 1793, HSP; Trustees' Meeting, 16 Apr. 1794, 26 May 1795, 26 Apr. 1796, microfilm, DCA; CN to Alexander Addison, Carlisle, 23 Feb. 1797, UPitt.Google Scholar
24 Horn, , Short History of Edinburgh University, 40–41, 43; for autobiographical commentary on the college career of a Nisbet contemporary which illustrates the rather unstructured nature of the curriculum, see Somerville, Thomas, My Life and Own Times, 1741–1814 (Edinburgh, 1861), 10–19.Google Scholar
25 For an extended comment on the influence of the wilderness on Dickinson and on other colleges founded during the two decades after the Revolution, see my “College Founding in the New Republic, 1776–1800,” History of Education Quarterly 23 (fall 1983): 323–41, revised and expanded somewhat in Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution, 1750–1800 (Westport, Conn., 1985), 187–226.Google Scholar
30 CN to Joshua Wallace, Carlisle, 8 June 1793, Wallace Papers, vol. 6, 28, HSP; CN to Rev. Ashbel Green, Carlisle, 5 Aug. 1793, HSP; CN to John Witherspoon, 3 Dec. 1793, in Miller, , Nisbet Memoir, 229–32.Google Scholar
31 CN, The Usefulness and Importance of Human Learning, A Sermon Preached before the Trustees of Dickinson College: Met at Carlisle, May 11, 1786; and published at their desire (Carlisle, Pa., 1786), 7–17, 18 (quotation).Google Scholar
32 See the discussion of this issue in Educating Republicans, 194–95. My analysis here reflects a revision of the contention that students sincerely held these views.Google Scholar
33 Tyler, Samuel, Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney, LL.D., Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (Baltimore, 1872), 41. Taney, of course, was a Jacksonian Democrat. Six other pre-1800 Dickinson graduates served in Congress, four as Democratic Republicans, two as Federalists. Reed, George Leffingwell, ed., Alumni Record, Dickinson College (Carlisle, 1905), 38–51; Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1774–1961 (Washington, D.C., 1961).Google Scholar
34 CN, “Present State of Dickinson College,” 19 June 1798, DCA; CN, “Present State of Dickinson College,” 29 July 1799; CN to Rev. Jedediah Morse, Carlisle, 4 Jan. 1800, Dreer Collection, American Clergy, HSP.Google Scholar
35 CN, Usefulness of Human Learning, 25 (quotation). On Pennsylvania politics during the 1780s, see Wood, Gordon S., The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969), esp. 226–37, 438–46; Arnold, Douglas M., “Political Ideology and the Internal Revolution in Pennsylvania, 1776–1790” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1976); Ryerson, Richard A., “Republican Theory and Partisan Reality in Revolutionary Pennsylvania: Toward a New View of the Constitutionalist Party,” in Sovereign States in an Age of Uncertainty , ed. Hoffman, Ronald and Albert, Peter J. (Charlottesville, Va., 1981), 95–133; Main, Jackson Turner, Political Parties before the Constitution (Chapel Hill, 1973), 51–70, 177–88, 193–201, 206–11.Google Scholar
36 CN to Lord Buchan, Carlisle, 15 Dec. 1785; CN, “An Address to the Graduates of Dickinson College, September 26, 1787,” DCA.Google Scholar
37 Ibid. Google Scholar
38 For the fight over the Constitution and Carlisle and Nisbet's role in it, see Cornell, Saul, “Aristocracy Assailed: The Ideology of Backcountry Anti-Federalism,” Journal of American History 76 (Mar. 1990): 1148–72; CN, “To the Graduates at 2nd Commencement, May 7th, 1788.” Google Scholar
39 CN to Lord Buchan, Carlisle, 22 June 1791, DCA; CN to Rev. Jedediah Morse, 4 Jan. 1800.Google Scholar
40 CN to Earl of Buchan, 20 Mar. 1790, quotation from 22 June 1791, DCA; CN to Alexander Addison, Carlisle, 11 May 1792; CN to Samuel Ingham, 14 Jan. 1793; CN to Joshua Wallace, 8 June 1793.Google Scholar
41 CN to Alexander Addison, 11 May 1792.Google Scholar
42 Ibid.; CN to Lord Buchan, Carlisle, 15 Oct. 1794, DCA.Google Scholar