If there was ever an apt occasion to become an American college president, it was not in the late 1770s. Years into the war, the normal hum of academic life had to compete with the strange din of battle. In New Haven, rumors about the latest casualties arrived at the start of the week, only to be disproven at the end. Contradiction dominated the day. There was a surplus of horses that did not behave, and yet a shortage of those that did. There were few places to lodge, but plenty to catch on fire. Men were shot at in the night when they refused to give answers to the sentry at the gate. And, to make matters worse, smallpox was pestering the local community like an unwelcome guest refusing to leave. With the college temporarily shuttered, boys searched for places to live and doctors to inoculate them. Fifteen miles west of New Haven in Huntington and recovering from his inoculation, Yale student Elijah Backus was less than sanguine about his condition:
The melancholy, the mournful, and the death-like aspect of this place, the dismal looking flags that were hung in the air to keep of all comers to our habitation, attended with the sickness with which I was afflicted, made the place destined to be the receptacle for persons in my condition appear more like the infernal regions than any other place I ever had any idea of.Footnote 1
For Backus, the contemporary conditions reminded him of hell. But even then, hell needed a leader. And so when the boy recovered and classes resumed, a new president arrived to lead Yale through these tough times.
Ezra Stiles had waited for this opportunity for years. In the learned languages of Latin and Greek that he had maintained since his school days, Stiles thanked God and those who had elected him to the post.Footnote 2 “Unless rumor has deceived me, I have heard the approval and voice of almost the entire Republic of Letters of New England.”Footnote 3 He then turned to the students and alumni gathered before him for a brief programmatic remark in Latin:
Let it be your earnest effort and mine that the fame of Yale college become so remarkable in its studies of the best arts, the culture of polite letters, and the honor of very solid erudition that we would not be a source of shame for any sister academy, but rather they would revel in the honor of our friendship. Nay, let's try to outdo all academies when it comes to the glory of learning—and believe that we can do this—so much so that our university would shine with splendor among all other American academies like a moon among lesser lights.Footnote 4
These were bold words for any president, especially one about to inherit a troubled, war-torn institution.Footnote 5 Imaginably satisfied after his speech, Stiles reclined in his special presidential seat. More academic pageantry commenced. Students stood up. Students sat down. Caps were put on. Caps were taken off. Stiles then delivered yet another Latin oration upon “the Encyclopaediea of literature,” which lasted thirty-four minutes by his count.Footnote 6 The voluble Latin-speaker closed with a prayer and invited everyone to dinner. “All was conducted without any Indecency, and with Propriety & Academic Decorum,” the newly minted president recounted in his diary.Footnote 7
Was Stiles serious? It would be difficult enough to steer one institution through the war, so why all this bluster about sister academies and wider fame? This article will critically examine for the first time just what Stiles meant, on the level of both principle and practice. For Stiles offers a tantalizing case study of a much wider intellectual world that he was preoccupied with his entire life, a republic not precisely of place, but rather of paper: the Res Publica Litterarum (Republic of Letters). A long-standing theme of research in the European world, this concept of scholarly community has largely gone overlooked in the American context.Footnote 8 An imperfect but illustrative example of the gap between early modern European and early American scholarly trends is the recently formed Brill (the Netherlands) journal Erudition and the Republic of Letters, a testament to the vitality of early modern intellectual history at this time. Of the twenty issues in the past five years, richly researched articles have focused on most corners of Europe and beyond, into China, the Ottoman Empire, and Latin America. Yet consideration of colonial or early national American sources or involvement in the learned community has occupied just a few scattered footnotes.Footnote 9
Granted, select intellectual historians have alluded to the Republic of Letters in early North America.Footnote 10 These accounts, however, mostly use the concept as a substitute for “learned men.” Like its Latin derivate litterae, “letters” of course can refer to epistles, as well as to scholarship more generally. This latter application of the term, perfectly reasonable and generative of serious study, has focused on intellectuals in the newly formed United States, eschewing the wider connotations that the Renaissance Republic of Letters evoked. This is not to say that early Americanists are entirely wedded to the narrower framework of the nation-state, for they too have extra national concepts. But as early modern historian Karel Davids provocatively points out, even promising concepts frequently take on a more modest scope in colonial American scholarship: “The ‘Atlantic’ or ‘transnational’ dimension barely seems to extend beyond the borders of the Anglo-American world and the networks of knowledge are centered on Britain.”Footnote 11 In other words, for Americanists, the Republic of Letters, even if occasionally acknowledged to be global, mostly morphs into the strictly American learned community.Footnote 12
On the other hand, some historians of early modern Europe have gone in the exact opposite direction as they attempt to transplant this framework of intellectual community to select examples in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America. These studies have alluded to the Republic of Letters to refer to European scholarly practices in toto.Footnote 13 In other words, here the concept has gone from too narrow to too expansive. Different historians have therefore tinkered with the Republic of Letters like the controls of a camera, zooming both in and out. The snapshot scholarship emerging from these different points of reference has provided important glimpses into early North American intellectual culture, albeit with inevitable blurry spots.Footnote 14 What is lacking is a sharp image of what an eighteenth-century American could or did aspire to more broadly in a truly transnational intellectual world. This article will provide just that, a glimpse into how Ezra Stiles conceptualized the Republic of Letters in his own time and on his own terms. Detailed analysis of Stiles bridges the historiographic gap between early Americanists, often unaware or simply uninterested in the wider early modern world of learning, and early modern Europeanists, rarely sensitive to the “microclimates” of intellectual activity across the Atlantic.Footnote 15 Stiles offers a fruitful entry into considering this historical blind spot of transatlantic intellectual activity not just in name, but in practice, for the Republic of Letters activated his imagination in ways remarkable. In short, he was obsessed with this scholarly community and rarely forwent an opportunity to talk and write about it. A consideration of Stiles's scholarly ambitions, especially in connection with the colonial colleges, also challenges regnant historiographic assumptions that early American universities were soporific, parochial places whose leaders only woke up to the ideal of research and international exchange in the nineteenth century.Footnote 16
Although this minister intellectual is not quite a household name, Stiles has received a fair deal of scholarly attention, most of which focuses on his efforts to promote the study of Hebrew as well as his vision for an enlightened Christianity.Footnote 17 Edmund Morgan, author of the largest and most substantive work on Stiles to date, attempted to make sense of the man as an intellectual whole. Overall, Morgan was not impressed. While acknowledging Stiles's learnedness, Morgan tended to downplay his originality and impact. In fact, Morgan made no bones about critiquing Stiles's academic ego and vanity, frequently dismissing Stiles's visions of intellectual societies and global comradery as “day-dreaming” that he indulged privately, but retreated from publicly.Footnote 18
Stiles's plans were not mere pipe dreams, but strategic proposals for himself, his university, and his newly formed nation in the Republic of Letters. To get at the heart of this vision, this article will dig into hundreds of pages of Stiles's never-before-translated manuscripts, consider his correspondence both near and far, and dive deep into early modern periodicals and publications. In short, we shall critically trace the development of Stiles's lifelong fixation with the Republic of Letters not simply as an ideal but as something that he also tangibly, albeit imperfectly, worked towards. Ironically, Stiles's sustained and self-conscious effort to insert American intellect into the early modern Republic of Letters came only as this community itself was changing. In fact, early modern historians have long since recognized that the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed declining appeals to the Republic of Letters, especially as the largely Latinate manuscript community morphed into more nationally focused intellectual centers. In this sense, Stiles attempted to play a part in a performance that had already arrived at its last act. What hindered his efforts further was his overwhelming preoccupation with the university. As president of Yale, Stiles sought to connect and promote the colonial colleges as the arteries through which the blood cells of American intellect flowed into the heart of the Republic of Letters. He rapidly vamped up communication between schools and drastically increased the awarding of honorary degrees as a means to render visible intellectual connections. This vision, however, failed to sufficiently accommodate the increasing premium placed on publication and the importance of the individual, not merely the institution. It is my intent neither to celebrate nor to chastise Stiles, but to take him seriously, for he provides the clearest account yet of where an American scholar could aspire—and where he ultimately was—in the early modern intellectual community that was the Republic of Letters.
The Republic of Letters before Stiles
Ezra Stiles no more invented the Republic of Letters than George Washington invented politics. The idea for this scholarly community dated at least back to Renaissance scholars such as Erasmus, who envisioned a world where like-minded men—and some women—could pursue intellectual exchange across religious, national, and political borders.Footnote 19 As with many societies, lofty ideals did not always align with lived realities.Footnote 20 Still, the underlying vision of this wide-ranging scholarly republic remained alluring enough for many early modern intellectuals to routinely evoke. To consider North American participation in the Republic of Letters before Stiles, however, presents something of a conundrum. In short: can we say that those who never mentioned this community considered themselves members of it? There are, of course, all sorts of groups that one might be a part of, and yet never discuss, nor perhaps even realize membership in. While explicit North American mentions of the Republic of Letters only appear to take off in the eighteenth century, it is important to consider some of the seeds of the idea before Stiles. For this eighteenth-century minister did not invent the world around him from the ground up. Like a resourceful carpenter, Stiles built upon a preexisting intellectual foundation, repurposing raw scholarly materials to accommodate his vision.
Rather than single out any one individual as an early example from whom Stiles drew inspiration, it is best to consider the intellectual environment that allowed him to conceptualize learned connections necessary for the Republic of Letters in the first place.Footnote 21 Here, the broad-pan focus of the early modern Europeanist has much to offer, especially as it relates to wider intellectual traditions. Indeed, it is easy to take for granted the translatio studii, that movement of learning from one location to another. It appears self-evident that the so-called New World would have new schools. And yet, when we dig into the fine-grained foundations of early education in North America, we begin to realize how tirelessly early colonists labored to promote intellectual connections between mother country and colony. To do so was not always easy. Far from simply a present-day phenomenon, the engine of the mind has always stumbled along, driven by the real-world fuel of economics. Grammar schools and colleges have forever been expensive, their value not always clear.Footnote 22 Dutch colonists in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam complained that the “bowl has been going round a long time for the purpose of erecting a common school and it has been built with words, but as yet the first stone is not laid.”Footnote 23 Likewise, a 1667 Connecticut boy solemnly detailed in his diary that he “sought for admission into [Harvard] colledge, could not obtain it, pecuniae deerant [the funds weren't there].”Footnote 24 Meanwhile, opponents to schools questioned why the work of the muses mattered.Footnote 25 Often on the defense, university men argued for the value of their schools in all manners and means. Schools, so they argued, were helpful for the state, the church, the government; they produced ministers, doctors, politicians, and lawyers.Footnote 26 But there was also another reason, which early colonists occasionally articulated to themselves, but was also reflected in actual day-to-day realities of the schoolroom: the purported need to maintain a connection to European learning.Footnote 27
As much as seventeenth-century Puritan colonists critiqued supposedly corrupted schools back home in England, they quickly filled their New England schools with a similar curriculum.Footnote 28 In principle, the chief aim was to produce pious Christians. In practice, the day-to-day classroom sought, often above all else, to perpetuate fluency in Latin, the lingua franca of late-day humanism and the Republic of Letters. Concerned parents and siblings warned fresh college students that they could never aspire to any intellectual achievement without mastery of Latin.Footnote 29 Furthermore, it was the type of command of the language that mattered. Rote, repetitive, dull—these are the descriptions that often come to mind when historians summarize a colonial classical curriculum. Nonetheless, a recently resurgent interest in neo-Latin texts in New World contexts has demonstrated the extent to which early North American teachers churned out original Latin poetry and attempted to replicate humanist pedagogy.Footnote 30 There even exist records of seventeenth-century Harvard students receiving fines for daring to speak English on campus. Students studied early modern authors like Erasmus and Corderius (Mathurin Cordier), alongside classical ones like Virgil and Terence. The emphasis rested not as much on mastering the content of the texts, as much as on mining Latin literature for phrases to employ in one's own writing.Footnote 31 It was not for nothing that as a student at Harvard young John Winthrop (1714–79), a future professor and scientist with whom Stiles would correspond, extracted a particularly to-the-point quotation from an early modern language work: “The only Latin exercise that will be of great use in the whole course of life is to write a Latin letter handsomely.”Footnote 32 Select colonial students—English and Native American—actually wrote Latin letters locally and internationally (to Britain).Footnote 33
Again, some failed to see the point in such classical study, while others even poked fun at it.Footnote 34 And yet, as the place of Latin appeared to wane in schools at the turn of the eighteenth century, parents and students sought to bolster the curriculum. In 1714, Cotton Mather worried “whether the speaking of Latin [has] not been so discountenanced, as to render our Scholars very unfit for a Conversation with Strangers.”Footnote 35 Lest we dismiss Mather's fear as completely ungrounded, there is in fact one case of a Dutch visitor in 1690 who found himself unable to communicate effectively in Latin with Harvard students.Footnote 36 A future generation of college students, attending Harvard at precisely the same time as Stiles did Yale, took matters into their own hands. In a time of an increasing bourgeois public sphere and the rise of learned societies, these teenage boys founded a club to improve their Latin.Footnote 37 One speaker wistfully resolved (in Latin, of course), “it is necessary that I use all my efforts for everything promoting the republic of letters everywhere, by this and whatever sort of way.”Footnote 38 Another compared the victories of wartime heroes to intellectuals:
Likewise in the Republic of Letters with a similar trust, and similar aid, those eager for knowledge offer a helping hand in turn to others eager for knowledge, and some encourage others for attempting new discoveries, in natural affairs, in the moral life, the civil, the religious, and the learned, until they are crowned with the prize of serene knowledge.Footnote 39
This was the intellectual world that Stiles came to age in, a world where some students used their humanistic education to imagine themselves in societies and scholarly republics.Footnote 40
Stiles's innovation was to connect, more overtly than any other colonial intellectual, to my knowledge, his humanist practices with a humanist persona. Like Janus, the identity that Stiles and his like-minded friends forged for themselves was two-sided. The eighteenth-century scholar took pleasure in eventually viewing himself as a citizen of a new nation. Still, Stiles never forwent identifying in decidedly older terms, as a late-day Renaissance man, a phrase we use in wishy-washy ways today, but which had much more specific connotations for an aspiring early modern scholar. Stiles's trifecta study of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew that rendered him a homo trilinguis, the grand (though perhaps not so grand) tour that he embarked on through New England, and his pedagogical platform of κύκλοπαιδɛία (i.e. universal knowledge): these were the bread and butter in the pantry of the ideal Renaissance intellectual. Just as fourteenth-century humanist Francesco Petrarch penned letters to the classical authors of centuries past, Stiles likewise did not talk about “reading” ancient works. Plato, Paul, Cicero—these were “departed friends” with whom Stiles thought he could “personally converse.”Footnote 41 When the Massachusetts Historical Society, of which Stiles was a corresponding member, opened in the late eighteenth century to collect and preserve American manuscripts, the short-lived newspaper touting the holdings (ambitiously titled American Apollo, after the head of the muses) confidently referred back to Poggio Bracciolini, that famed Renaissance book hunter who built a reputation on recovering classical texts and resuscitating ancient authors.Footnote 42 And finally, as Stuart McManus has shown in a rich bibliography of American neo-Latin texts, Stiles wistfully equated himself to the best humanist orators of centuries past.Footnote 43 What made these astounding comparisons possible, what allowed them to make sense for Stiles, was his own conviction that the Republic of Letters was alive and well in his day—and that Americans like him could take part in it.
The seed of a vision
It took time for Stiles to articulate clearly where he saw himself and his country fitting in a global scholarly community. Indefatigably ambitious and wide-ranging as he was, young Ezra Stiles tended to talk off-topic. As a tutor at Yale from 1749 to 1755, he had plenty of opportunity to indulge this habit. A staple speech, such as one commending newly graduated bachelor's students, could quickly run to over a dozen pages, as Stiles, like a cannon equipped with a seemingly endless supply of rounds, fired off a barrage of oratorical flares.Footnote 44 The bigger the ceremony was, the bolder the speech became. In 1752, the twenty-five-year-old tutor composed a whopping twenty-five-page Latin oration to celebrate Yale's fiftieth anniversary.Footnote 45 The better part of that speech ostensibly had very little to do with Yale, as Stiles took his audience on a whirlwind tour through a global history of academies and universities, through China, Greece, Rome, Persia, Palestine, and every corner of Europe, focusing on Confucius, Alexander, Avicenna, Hermes Trismegistus, Cicero, Newton, Boyle, and Huygens, among a dozen others. Without, it seems, reading these speeches, Morgan pointed out the inextricable self-importance.Footnote 46 Nonetheless, if we simply dismiss rather than dig into Stiles's orations, if we bemoan—di boni!—yet another turgid Latin composition, we fail to understand what Stiles was up to. As a tutor, Stiles began to experiment with where he imagined New England to fit into the grand scheme of learned history, as well as the Republic of Letters. When the time came to deliver an oration in honor of Benjamin Franklin in 1755, he landed precisely on that vision.
In 1753, Franklin (in absentia) received an honorary degree of master of arts from Yale. It would not be until 1755 that the polymath would turn up in New Haven, furnishing Stiles an opportunity to prepare another oration. Stiles began work on the speech early. Sketching out drafts of his oration three months before the visit, the Yale tutor worked at honing his message. After all, Stiles was not just concerned with praising one man, which he could accomplish easily enough, but rather with communicating what that man meant. The opening paragraph of the first draft reveals precisely what was on his mind: “The sciences and arts so long ago cultivated among Europeans, are recently, however, being cultivated by us, a fact which American academies amply demonstrate. A case in point is Cambridge, New Haven, New-Caesarea [the original name for the city], or rather Philadelphia, and Williamsburg, and that New York academy [King's College] which now sprouts up.”Footnote 47 Again, like his previous orations, the initial iteration of this panegyric to Franklin curiously failed to front and center Franklin. Likely realizing the problem, Stiles recentered the praise of the polymath inventor of electricity in future iterations of the speech. Nonetheless, he always cued the beat of his oratorical drum to a broader melody.
For Stiles, Franklin meant that North Americans were coming of age in the Republic of Letters. “Your praises have flown across the entire globe. Triumphantly, you traverse the world, and with your unique fame dwell among the noblest, learned men of the land and of all peoples.”Footnote 48 Citing other scholars, Stiles acknowledged that some investigated the natural sciences before—and after—Franklin. But those Europeans (Europaei) supposedly would have learned little about the laws of electricity were it not for “our in fact immortal American philosopher Franklin” (“noster immortalis Franklin Philosophus reapse americanus”).Footnote 49 The timing of Stiles's oration, in 1755, was, of course, years before America would exist as a nation proper. But like Cotton Mather's appeal to the Magnalia Christi Americana, political realities in no way hindered Stiles from envisioning intellectual unity between colonies—a unity that, as Stiles so wished, could extend more widely into the Republic of Letters. Indeed, Stiles portended future American advancement in a global intellectual world:
In fact, scholarship and patrons of learning only recently existed among these deserts, these American wildernesses. When learning was first brought from Europe, when it first crossed over the Atlantic ocean, for a long time we were teeny-tiny children [infantuli]. Now, however, we are men. Nay, great men, exulting in you. Nor do we doubt that soon we will have Newtons, Halleys, Berkleys, and Lockes. For if anyone would now look upon America, especially New England, he would see the study of the liberal arts and sciences cultivated and flourishing in no small part among us … The virgin now returns, and Saturn's reign resumes [Virgil, Eclogues, 4.6].Footnote 50
Stiles's words drip with confidence. The mention of New World Lockes and Newtons serves to precisely reify his programmatic point: Franklin is the beginning, but ideally not the end of American involvement in the Republic of Letters. By invoking Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, the then Yale tutor lays out his plan for a bold future. While this reference to a classical author might seem, on first glance, uninteresting and elusive from the vantage point of a twenty-first-century reader, the audaciousness of the quotation cannot be stressed enough. Indeed, in all of classical Latin literature, this was perhaps the most aggressively optimistic allusion an early modern intellectual could make. In his Fourth Eclogue, Virgil predicted the return of the so-called Golden Age. Generations of Christians had even wistfully interpreted this poem to foreshadow the coming of Christ.Footnote 51 Stiles therefore lucidly emphasizes the advent of an allegedly new intellectual order.
While we might well dismiss such high rhetoric as airy ambition, it is important to consider the subtle pragmatics that accompanied this dream. In practice, Stiles sought to plant the seed of Benjamin Franklin's fame into the garden of the colonial universities, and from there to grow the fruits of American intellect that would be transported into the Republic of Letters. His process was multi-step: (1) find the best talent, (2) assemble said talent, and (3) promote the intellectual A team at the global level. It is for the reason that even in the version of the oration that Stiles read, he still focuses heavily on the different university presidents and institutions throughout colonial America and even Barbados (he admits that he “passes over other academies in the French and Spanish provinces, those located and recently established in Quebec and Quito”).Footnote 52 Likewise, the very Latin wording of Franklin's honorary degree artfully illuminates Stiles's effort to tie American intellect up with the university. According to the diploma, Franklin's reputation had “shown throughout the entire learned world and has merited being honored with the highest distinction from the Republic of Letters.”Footnote 53 Who was it honoring Franklin? Yes, it was the Republic of Letters in that broad connotation of international learned men. But in the stricter sense, it was, in fact, Stiles, the man who prepared the degree and offered the praise. It was the universities, for Stiles, that would provide the best chance of further American recognition in the Republic of Letters. And yet, as we shall see, this vision, as shiny and superlative as it was, concealed a number of contradictions and cracks.
The potential and problems of Stiles's Republic of Letters
Stiles was evidently satisfied with the intellectual platform he had articulated in the oration to Franklin. It appears that sometime after delivering the speech, he drafted a clean copy.Footnote 54 Though the oration would not appear in print until well after Stiles's death (we shall return to the stumbling block of Stiles's publication record later), he continued to develop a clear strategy to augment American intellectual status internationally.Footnote 55 The most important prongs of his plan were to make both visible and audible that seemingly imperceptible feeling of intellectual connection. The honorary degree appeared one of the most expedient and efficient approaches to achieve the task. Even as a minister and not serving in an official post at a university from 1755 to 1778, Stiles still sought to broker intellectual relationships between universities.
When he received word in 1771 that attorney general of Rhode Island and personal friend Henry Marchant planned to make a tour through Europe, Stiles was elated. With sure excitement, he drafted out an ambitious itinerary for Marchant. In Rotterdam, Marchant was to “view the statue of Erasmus at the house in which he was born.” In Leiden, he was, of course, to “visit the university” and “take down the names of professors.” Stiles clarified that at any university, he should “mark those of eminence, the Geniuses & the men of profound erudition, & the branch of Literature for which they are distinguished.”Footnote 56 The advice, longing and lengthy, went on for twenty-four pages. (In Italy, “don't neglect Bologna,” Stiles warned. “There is a famous university.”)Footnote 57 This was the trip that Stiles would have liked to make himself! Despite the evident personal desire in the letter, Stiles also wanted to ensure that he could advance the intellectual status of his fellow clergymen. Like a military commander, the eighteenth-century minister had a clear mission in mind: Operation Obtain Honorary Degrees.
Figure 1. Ezra Stiles, “A Plan for Making the Tour of Europe in Less than Three Months, with the travel of Less than Two Thousand English Miles,” Ezra Stiles Papers, Gen MSS 1475, Box 54, 2336, [8–9]. The trip that Stiles envisioned for Marchant lays bare the learned connections (note the dotted lines that jump out across the map) that the Yale president yearned to forge in Europe.
In several separate copies of a letter for Marchant to ferry, Stiles creatively addressed a Latin epistle to “the most famous and respected professors of theology in either Leiden University, or Utrecht University, or Geneva University, or finally in any reformed university where Mr. Marchant crosses in his travels.”Footnote 58 The origin mattered here less than the product: doctorates of theology for two fellow Connecticut ministers.Footnote 59 Stiles reminded any reader of his letter about the intellectual and religious goodwill between Protestant New Englanders and Europeans. Here, as was the case often throughout Stiles's life, his conception of the Republic of Letters and the Protestant International were interrelated if not sometimes outright interchangeable.Footnote 60 What better way to strengthen Protestant bonds, Stiles asked, than with an honorary degree? Stiles explained that diplomas could be passed along to Marchant and carefully conveyed back to Connecticut. The minister clarified that he sought these degrees gratis. Though Stiles had been informed by a friend a decade earlier that it was practically impossible to obtain an honorary degree abroad without a donation of at least twenty-five pounds, he appealed to history to make his bargaining case.Footnote 61 Citing the example of a sixteenth-century German professor who received an honorary degree from Cambridge University, Stiles specified his request: “academic honors for true literature flourishing freely and far away, not to be purchased or contaminated with any suspicion of a price or gold.”Footnote 62 There is no evidence that this plot yielded any results, quite possibly because Marchant never ventured past England and Scotland during his trip.Footnote 63 Nonetheless, Stiles remained fixated on honorary degrees because of the concrete way they rendered and reified links between the scholarly Old and New Worlds.
In fact, throughout his life, the aspiring scholar kept detailed tabs on every new degree Franklin garnered: one from William and Mary in 1756, the University of Edinburgh in 1759, Oxford University in 1762, among others.Footnote 64 Jealousy did not motivate this academic account keeping as much as did pride.Footnote 65 For Stiles, the accumulation of degrees from far and wide meant the instantiation of his university-grown Republic of Letters. To be sure, honorary degrees had existed before the eighteenth century.Footnote 66 Stiles in fact was well aware of this, as his diary betrays meticulous research into the history of awarding degrees in New England.Footnote 67 Yet again, the innovation here did not emerge ex nihilo. Instead, like a biologist in a lab, Stiles had identified a dormant allele in the academic genome of American universities. The college president sought to reactivate and thereby replicate the hitherto sporadic practice of honorary degrees, supercharging the very nature of the university as an institution that judged scholarly worth and connected intellectuals across territories. In its roughly first seventy-five years, Yale awarded three honorary doctor of divinity degrees. During his seventeen-year presidency, Stiles handed out no fewer than sixteen of these. The figures for other degrees at the time, such as doctor of law, are just as striking. Before Stiles, there had been one honorary doctor of law from Yale. During his reign, the president doled out twenty-four more, to both American and international scholars.Footnote 68 In letters to degree recipients, like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, Stiles mused that “some men by their Merits call upon themselves the Attention of the whole Republic of Letters.”Footnote 69 The linkup between the degree, the university, and the Republic of Letters was more than just rhetorical convenience; Stiles's was a coordinated effort to associate the three.
Rarely did an opportunity go by during his presidency when he failed to lay bare yet again his platform for American involvement in the Republic of Letters. In short, Stiles consistently evoked this imagined, international, intellectual community. When reviewing the latest mathematical textbook of the time for a local journal, Stiles breezily portended that it would “probably gain a very general Reception and Use throughout the Republic of Letters.”Footnote 70 When delivering future commencement orations, Stiles explicitly greeted other American and European universities: “Hello American sister academies; Hello Cambridge … Hello William and Mary.” Initially, the Yale president penned a greeting to all other universities “throughout the United States” (“per status foederatos”), but crossed it out, instead writing, “everywhere throughout Europe and everywhere throughout the Republic of Letters.”Footnote 71 It is important to note that comparable commencement orations before Stiles never included such greetings. Colonial Harvard College commencement speakers appealed to local civil and religious leaders (and, occasionally, to English monarchs in absentia), but not to other colleges across colonies.Footnote 72 Stiles made it a part of everyday habit to invoke wider intellectual communities like the Republic of Letters. When inaugurating a new building at Yale, he confidently proclaimed, “Peace be within thy Walls o Yale, and prosperity within thy Places! … May thy renown & Glory be diffused thro’ the Republic of Letters & be Commensurate with the expansion of Knowledge & Science & with the Duration of Liberty & the United States.”Footnote 73 Here was a vision for American involvement in a wider intellectual world.
Stiles did not keep these ideals merely to himself. Given that the universities were important components of the plan to promote his new country in the Republic of Letters, Stiles dutifully kept up to date on other institutions near and far.Footnote 74 Though he never travelled abroad, the Yale president made frequent itineraries throughout North America, visiting and taking meticulous notes on every university he visited.Footnote 75 Stiles corresponded with various university presidents throughout the new nation, always careful in his letters to mention his wide network of other correspondents who were university presidents.Footnote 76 By 1779, Stiles had proudly recorded in his diary the names of “presidents of Colleges with whom I have been personally acquainted” (sixteen, by his tally!).Footnote 77 The timing of Stiles's presidency was fortuitous because in the early Republic, as one Princeton president would famously remark, colleges were rising “like mushrooms” in American soil.Footnote 78 Just as he mapped out the universities in Europe, Stiles also traced all the new institutions sprouting up on American shores.Footnote 79 His goal, vividly expressed in his letters, was to connect the universities in intellectual exchange.Footnote 80
Figure 2. Ezra Stiles, “Map of Locations of Colleges in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia,” Ezra Stiles Papers, GEN MSS 1475, b. 87, f. 3204. Beyond keeping in touch with university presidents, Stiles also mapped new colleges springing up in the early republic.
Stiles in fact made this clear when he corresponded with other American university presidents, like James Madison, president of William and Mary College in the late eighteenth century; John Wheelock, president of Dartmouth College; or John Willard, president of Harvard.Footnote 81 Noting that God's providence had placed the pair of presidents “in two sister Seats of Literature in America,” but likewise acknowledging the “ineffable contempt” between colonial universities, Stiles offered a proposal to Madison:
We hope the time is now come, when all will unite in viewing Things in a more liberal & generous Light. We are rather to glory that an Infant Republic of Letters is to be found in America. The infant Seminaries, Colleges & Universities here, I think, should cultivate a mutual Intercourse & honorable Friendship with one another. Tho’ I have never as yet seen this done, yet nothing shall be wanting on my part to establish such an honorable connextion & harmony.Footnote 82
According to the Yale president, with constancy and coordination, “as many capital Literary Characters may be produced from 100 students educated in Amer. as the Europ. Colleges.”Footnote 83 Madison responded favorably to Stiles's request that college leaders correspond more frequently and promote American intellect abroad so that “Europe shall behold America not only as a new start in the political horizon but the literary also.” Madison added that “surely it belongs to our Colleges & Universities to lay the Foundation from which the future glory of America shall arise.”Footnote 84 With such brevity and grace, Madison told Stiles precisely what he wanted to hear, either unwilling or unable to perceive the inbuilt problems with the dream.
Never mind the abundance of national pride in this vision for American involvement in the Republic of Letters, a community that supposedly cared not for national origins.Footnote 85 In many ways, the Yale president played on a productive contradiction of the mid-eighteenth-century Republic of Letters more broadly, one which Lorraine Daston has described as patriotic cosmopolitanism. “So long as glory was a good treasured by nation and savant alike, and so long as intellectual glory could be transmuted into national glory, even the thoroughly local academies could be turned into cosmopolitan ends.”Footnote 86 Instead, the difficulty with Stiles's vision was subtler and yet all the more sharp: early modern universities were not the primary loci that celebrated members of the Republic of Letters identified with. As Laurence Brockliss succinctly puts it, “The educational institutions of eighteenth-century Europe are not renowned for their contribution to the advance of science and learning.”Footnote 87 In fact, it was even something of a trope for an early modern intellectual, be he a budding alchemist or historian, to frame his university days in begrudging terms.Footnote 88 The supposedly real work of the mind happens after and outside the university. To be sure, there were institutions famed for their research productivity, such as Leiden University, which Stiles recognized and evoked, unsuccessfully, in a bid to secure funding for professors in 1783.Footnote 89 But what made Leiden famous was not the awarding of honorary degrees or the number of students, a statistical preoccupation that Stiles maintained throughout his life. Rather, it was, as scholars like Anthony Grafton and Peter Burke have explained, the “brain drain” of the university that mattered, the rich resources dedicated to attracting preeminent philologists and humanists who could focus their time on producing scholarship rather than lecturing.Footnote 90 The intellectual connections that Stiles forged were simply not the same.
This is not to say that Stiles, to put it crudely, was all talk and no game. He had his hand in just about every American academic society that sprang up in the second half of the eighteenth century.Footnote 91 He helped establish and wrote the charter for Brown University.Footnote 92 He placed several of his fresh Yale tutors into presidential positions at other new colonial American universities.Footnote 93 Like a good university president, he was never not fund-raising, always seeking books and scientific apparatus for his students (some of these efforts helped secure donations not simply for Yale, but for other institutions like Harvard and Princeton).Footnote 94 But when it came to hunting down and entangling intellectuals within the university, an honorary degree was not a professorial post that could generate explicit association of scholar with university. In some sense, the whole premise of an honorary degree conceals a fatal flaw with Stiles's dream. The recipients of law or theological doctorates honoris causa more often than not receive such praise precisely because they have conducted apparently worthwhile lives outside the academy. To consider Benjamin Franklin as the American par excellence in the Republic of Letters, as Stiles did throughout his whole life, curiously undermines the very contention about the importance of the university. Franklin, as is well known, was an autodidact, a man of no formal university training. Furthermore, to make a university degree the passport of entry into the Republic of Letters actually hindered a large portion of possible American participation in this intellectual community. Fewer than one in a thousand men in eighteenth-century North America held a college degree.Footnote 95 There was also, of course, another substantial portion of the population explicitly excluded: women.
We need not project any contemporary preoccupations onto Stiles to understand how his plan struggled to accommodate roughly half the eighteenth-century population. Stiles well understood that select women could be regarded as members of the early modern Republic of Letters.Footnote 96 On numerous occasions over a period of ten to fifteen years he corresponded with famed historian Catherine Macaulay, whom he also referred to in one of his published sermons as the “ornament of the Republic of Letters.”Footnote 97 Stiles directly secured donations from Macaulay of her works to stock a Connecticut library, and late in his life read Macaulay's Letters on Education, which advocated for robust women's schooling.Footnote 98 Macaulay served as a clear case in point of a woman intellectual who, though she could take no part in the early modern university, still garnered great fame for herself and her country in the Republic of Letters. Even if much more modest, other colonial American women highlighted to Stiles an intellect that could not be accommodated in his vision of a university-centric intellectual community.
In the fall of 1754, precisely around the time when Stiles was composing his first oration for Franklin and rendering his intellectual plan visible (as discussed above), nine-year-old cousin Alethea Stiles wrote to him. Alethea thanked Stiles for the “pretty presents” he had sent her, but had a bone to pick with the then Yale tutor:
My brother is glad of the book you sent him and says he will learn it. He talks a great deal about going to the college. And why may not I go to college? For my father says one Jenny Cameron put on jacket and breeches and was a good soldier. And why may not I do so and live at college? I have learned Eutropius and am now in Justin.Footnote 99
With her reference to Jenny Cameron, a Scottish woman rumored to have taken part in the Jacobite Rising of 1745, the younger cousin highlighted the precedent for transcending traditional gender roles.Footnote 100 This was no fleeting remark of hers, for Alethea kept at it. She sent Stiles detailed digests of her readings in Roman history.Footnote 101 And, in a remarkably adroit move at the age of eleven, she passed along a stitched wallet with an accompanying original Latin letter.Footnote 102 Both opponents and proponents of women's education in early national America agreed on this: the study of the classics had been the traditionally distinguishing factor of men's education.Footnote 103 To delve into classical history and culture was acceptable, but to start learning the languages, as Caroline Winterer has lucidly shown, was a risky endeavor.Footnote 104 Alethea Stiles, however, shattered the paradigm. She showcased to Stiles that she could accomplish fine needlework and fine Latin work as well. Whatever amounted to Alethea's efforts? Stiles apparently responded, but unfortunately no such replies survive today.Footnote 105
Nonetheless, it might not be too far-fetched to suppose that the cousinly correspondence made an impression. During his presidency, Stiles began to directly address learned women in his Latin commencement orations.Footnote 106 As private academies took off in the mid- and late eighteenth century, including both coeducational institutions and those tailored only to young women, Stiles provided a fitting question for Yale students to ponder: “whether female academies would be beneficial.”Footnote 107 The most concrete action that he took to address how women could partake in a local learned community, let alone the Republic of Letters, was characteristically consistent with his previous plan: to award an honorary (non)degree. When twelve-year-old Lucinda Foote passed the Yale entrance examination with flying colors in 1783, Stiles conferred on her a piece of parchment, much more modest than an actual degree, but containing some of the same language in Latin:
Let it be known to you that I examined 12-year-old Miss Lucinda Foot and that she's made remarkable progress in the learned languages, in Latin and Greek, so much so that I found her to smoothly translate and expound, both words and sentences, parts in Virgil's Aeneid, in selections from Cicero's orations, and in the Greek Testament. I completely affirm that, were it not for the reason of her sex, she would be fit to be admitted as a student at Yale university in the recent class. Given from the library of Yale College, 22 December 1783. Ezra Stiles, President.Footnote 108
In just about every way, this (non)degree was superfluous.Footnote 109 Stiles eagerly recorded the details in his diary, unable, it appears, to witness the inextricable irony. The Yale president believed firmly that his nation's best bet to promote its intellectual character locally and abroad was to be forged at the universities. Therefore, anyone of any intellect, even those whom the university explicitly excluded, had to be connected somehow to the institution. Stiles rarely stopped to consider whether it still made sense to place such stark importance on the university as the broker of American brainpower. Late in his life, though, and especially after his death, it would become clear that it did not. Even when the Republic of Letters appeared to be functioning well for Stiles, there were hints of a chilly reception yet to come.
Clues in the letters
Despite the underlying tensions in his blueprint for further American involvement in the Republic of Letters, Stiles still sought to advance his cause in that tangible, titular way: by sending letters. It was not for nothing that the student who delivered a congratulatory oration to Stiles upon his election to the Yale presidency ended the Latin speech by hoping for increased “epistolary exchange between foreign academies, and benevolent friends of learning throughout the whole world.”Footnote 110 Throughout his life, the eighteenth-century scholar penned letters across the colonies and the Atlantic, to correspondents in at least Britain, Scotland, Germany, Portugal, Russia, and the Netherlands. Extant letters of Stiles's (including those sent or received, as well as drafts) number around a thousand.Footnote 111 This is almost certainly a fraction of all the epistles he ever sent. Unfortunately, many of the letters Stiles composed in the 1780s and 1790s, when he was president of Yale and probably most prolific in his correspondence, are lost.Footnote 112 Nonetheless, those letters that do survive provide a vivid portrait of the potential and problems in Stiles's international intellectual endeavors.
No set of epistles showcases Stiles's Republic of Letters functioning at its best—and yet foreshadowing failure—than his 1794 correspondence with Christoph Daniel Ebeling.Footnote 113 A professor of history and Greek at Hamburg University, Ebeling had begun, twenty years prior, researching for a massive, multivolume Erdbeschreibung und Geschichte von Amerika (Description of the Land and History of America).Footnote 114 A project of this size required mounds of manuscript, masses of information. In other words, it was the perfect opportunity to tap into the Republic of Letters for intellectual exchange and assistance. Ebeling first touched base with Joel Barlow, a promising graduate of Yale living nearby in Germany whom Stiles knew.Footnote 115 In the letter accompanying Ebeling's, Barlow explained the plan to write this German-language history of the United States, adding that “every such attempt to instruct the European world in whatever concerns America, deserves our warmest encouragement.”Footnote 116 So Barlow's words fell like music on Stiles's ear, for he undoubtedly agreed.
Ebeling laid the flattery on even thicker. Feigning bashfulness, the Hamburg professor doubted whether to even write in the first place. But “Mr. Barlow, whose friendship I am so fortunate to enjoy as he lives near Hamburg since some months, assured me that you would kindly pardon the boldness of a stranger, whose ardent desire to describe America in such a manner as would not be entirely unworthy of its happy state makes him wish for the best materials he may be able to find.”Footnote 117 Ebeling noted that there was simply no better person than Stiles to help with such a task: “To whom should I rather apply than to you, reverend sir, whose merits are not unknown even to us, distant so many thousand leagues from you?”Footnote 118 With the captatio benevolentiae completed, the professor dug into the nitty-gritty and explained the scope of his project. For every single American state, Ebeling planned to describe the climate, minerals, and meadows; the government, constitutions, and courts; the army, churches, and tax structures; the colleges, academies, and learned societies, among dozens of other topics. Together, these meticulous histories would counter “the many imperfect and false accounts Europe has of your country.” We can imagine that Stiles could not have been more ecstatic upon receiving this epistle. Here was a German scholar, a university professor mind us, asking for the Yale president's apparently unique help to promote America's cultural and intellectual character in Europe.
Stiles penned no fewer than eighty pages back to Ebeling. Statistics, original source extracts, analyses, and lists: the Yale president had much to offer. Among many other topics that Stiles covered, he noted the establishment and encouragement of schooling. Education “has been all along carried unto such effect, that it is a very rare thing indeed to find a person of either sex in New England who cannot write & read: and all are possessed of Bibles.”Footnote 119 When it came to the history of Yale, Stiles was more precise. The college leader detailed the names of every Yale president since its founding (his own name included, of course), as well as the growth in the student population (again, culminating in Stiles's own presidency).Footnote 120 Ebeling appeared content with the information he had received and the contact he had made. Navigating the Republic of Letters with true dexterity, the Hamburg professor used each contact as a springboard to connect with yet someone else. In Ebeling's letter to Thomas Jefferson, he began by mention that “your worthy country men Mr. J. [Jeremy] Belknap and president Stiles of Yale College have exhorted me, to beg Your kind advice in an arduous task I have undertaken.”Footnote 121 The Republic of Letters here was functioning like a well-oiled machine. And yet the medium might have been the real message.
Though Ebeling wrote his letter to Stiles in English, he reiterated that the entire history of the United States would be published for a German audience and thus written in their tongue, a language Stiles did not know (“I wish you read German, in order to peruse my book yourself,” Ebeling remarked).Footnote 122 Ebeling was not unique in this regard, as early modern scholars have long noted that the eighteenth century witnessed a departure from Latin as the universal language of science and scholarship.Footnote 123 While Stiles still professed the value of Latin as an international language, even arguing in 1778 that it was the means to communicate with other oppressed and afflicted European nations, he also recognized the rise of the vernaculars in learned discourse.Footnote 124 On several occasions, the Yale president heralded to an American audience that English would soon become the world's learned language.Footnote 125 But, as his contact with the Hamburg professor laid bare, that time had yet to fully come. The point here is not that Stiles was some stubborn ignoramus. After all, the Yale president knew many languages, which he cleverly incorporated in his response to Ebeling. (Though complaining he did not have enough free time to dedicate to his academic and linguistic pursuits, Stiles mused, “Γηράσκω δ’ αιɛί πολλά διδασκόμɛνος כִּי עֶזְרָא הֵכִין לְבָבוֹ לִדְרוֹשׁ אֶת תּוֹרַת יְהוָה וְלַעֲשֹׂת וּלְלַמֵּד בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל חֹק וּמִשְׁפָּט” (“I grow old always learning many things, for Ezra prepared his heart to seek out God's Torah and to perform and teach in Israel his decree and law”).)Footnote 126 Rather, the Hamburg professor's request for Stiles to contribute to a work he could not even read suggests that the universalism of the early modern Republic of Letters was fading. The move from classical Latin to myriad vernaculars meant that there no longer was a single entry point into the world's scholarship. The singular door (ianua or porta) of knowledge that early modern Latin textbooks touted had morphed into many linguistic hurdles. Despite acknowledging his correspondent's linguistic limitation, Ebeling took great pains to show off the robust rise in German-language works.Footnote 127
In response to Ebeling's proud tallying of all the German books that went on sale at the famed Leipzig Book Fair the year prior, Stiles could only nod with agreement. “I am astonished at the number of books & authors now figuring among the Germans … In Industry and Literary Application, it seems to me they must surpass the whole collective Republic of Letters.” It was a shame, Stiles admitted, “which I greatly regret” that he knew no German.Footnote 128 Here, the actual shame was not simply that the Yale president had yet to learn his German conjugations and declensions, but that he had yet to write much of anything for any book fair. Indeed, Stiles recognized the booming worlds of print and periodicals, but rarely contributed to them. In his biography of the eighteenth-century Yale president, Morgan summed up Stiles's publication record thus: “Stiles, in short, was one of those scholars who never cease to gather materials for a book but cannot bring themselves to write it. Though his reputation for learning remained enormous during his lifetime, and deservedly so, he left behind a pitifully small number of publications to sustain it after his death.”Footnote 129 Albeit somewhat harsh, this assessment could not have been more correct. While Morgan ended his biography with Stiles's death, if we trace for the first time the Yale president's scholarly reception into the early nineteenth century, we are able to witness in tragic detail how Stiles failed to accommodate his vision for the Republic of Letters to contemporary scholarly realities.
Conclusion
In 1795, just as he was planning to pen another letter to his transatlantic correspondent, Ebeling learned that Stiles had died. As it had done since its founding, New England's intellectual and religious community hurried to commemorate the deceased minister and Yale president. Celebration, however, was not the only treatment that Stiles received. Nothing casts the gap between ideal and reality in greater relief than the different ways the learned world remembered Stiles shortly after his death. In the fragmented and faded remnants of the Republic of Letters, Stiles received some praise close to home. But there was also scorn, from near and far. For someone who had labored his whole life to be considered a member of the scholarly republic and promote his fellow citizens in it, Stiles would be judged on new terms and, in the twist of true tragedy, considered precisely the problem with American intellectuals in the Republic of Letters.
To begin with the praise: shortly after Stiles's passing, newspapers around the country printed and reprinted fond obituaries. Stiles was remembered for his intellect, contacts, and connections.Footnote 130 One mourning author mentioned, “His mind … was peculiarly calculated for the duties of that exalted office which he sustained in the republic of letters, and in which he became significantly instrumental in promoting the happiness of his country and of mankind.”Footnote 131 A yale graduate (the same one who delivered the congratulatory oration to Stiles in 1778) argued that the fallen president exhibited “the polished urbanity of the gentleman. Acknowledged eminence in the republic of letters introduced him to an extensive circle of correspondents in the old and new world, and gave him peculiar advantages for promoting the interests of science.”Footnote 132 Abiel Holmes—student, tutor, and son-in-law to Stiles—similarly praised the deceased man in a massive biography published just years later:
Viewing all institutions for the promotion of knowledge, as constituting one grand republic of letters, he conducted as a citizen of this extensive community; and his superiority to local and vulgar prejudices evinces the real greatness of his soul. In this trait of his character he resembled that truly noble emperor, who said: “As I am Antoninus, Rome is my city, and my country; but, as I am a MAN, the WORLD.”Footnote 133
More than any individual obituary, Holmes's biography spread the memory of Stiles's intellectual and religious passion. The work even received positive reviews in English and German periodicals.Footnote 134 A Yale student under Stiles also noted laconically, but no doubt lovingly, in a 1799 diary entry, “Finished reading the Life of President Stiles. It is a very valuable piece of biography.”Footnote 135
As clearly witnessed above, much of this admiration connected Stiles to his transatlantic intellectual efforts. Writing a few years later, a Princeton divinity professor would make this point even more cogently. In his retrospective look at the eighteenth century, Samuel Miller mused that “the last century is not only distinguished by numerous discoveries, and by rich additions to the general stock of science, but also by the rise of several nations from obscurity in the republic of letters, to considerable literary and scientific eminence.”Footnote 136 Among other countries, there was America, and among the individuals who helped accomplish this supposed maturation into scientific renown was Ezra Stiles.Footnote 137 Another student of Stiles's reiterated the point several decades later, arguing that Stiles “has done more than any other person to explain and recommend to the respect of mankind, the wisdom of the institutions of New England.”Footnote 138 It would seem that the Yale president had made his dream come true. Nonetheless, if we are to take the transnational discourse of the Republic of Letters seriously, we must consider Stiles's reception beyond his home country.
Writing from Hamburg in a German periodical, Ebeling too produced an obituary for this “upstanding, learned, and extremely active man” (“rechtschaffnen, gelehrten und äußerst tätigen Mannes”).Footnote 139 The German professor emphasized his personal, albeit brief, connection to Stiles: “I have to add, based on my own experience, that I also mourn the loss of this worthy man—because I had the chance to get to know his worth through active demonstrations.”Footnote 140 Ebeling likewise highlighted the Yale president's erudite contacts, while also subtly provincializing them. Stiles apparently “maintained an extensive correspondence with the learned men in North America, as well as various men in England. He was also a member of the most distinguished academic societies in the United States.”Footnote 141 The effort to bind Stiles up with intellectual ties connected only by Britain and America is no coincidence. As historians like Kaspar Eskildsen have argued, eighteenth-century German scholars largely sought to create their own national republic of scholarship, failing to believe in the wider Republic of Letters, a term conspicuously absent in Ebeling's obituary.Footnote 142 Even with evidence to the contrary (Ebeling himself wrote from Germany!), the Hamburg professor portrayed Stiles as a participant in a narrower intellectual world. Ebeling's obituary also betrays the contemporary preoccupation with publication in learned periodicals, a scholarly fixation that would spell doom for Stiles. For it was not the number of honorary degrees or letters sent or contacts forged between universities that mattered most. It was, quite simply, the individual scholarly output that could make or break intellectual reputation.
Ebeling provided a descriptive bibliography of Stiles's publications. The number of items on the list? Just two. First, there was the president's Latin inaugural oration, which the Hamburg professor succinctly, though not too flatteringly, summed up as “40 pages in which he tries to provide a kind of overall survey of the sciences.”Footnote 143 The latinity of the speech, Ebeling bitingly added, “is a considerable way off from the classical [standard].”Footnote 144 Intellectual quips quickly lose their sting over time, but this assessment of Ebeling's would not be too far off from dismissing someone's academic writing today as “not scholarly enough,” or, worse yet, “poorly written.” More criticism followed. On the one English sermon that Stiles published, Ebeling reminded his German audience that “according to our conceptions of eloquence, this speech is too packed with erudition and too exhaustively learned in its treatment.”Footnote 145 In terms of serious scholarship, Ebeling could find little. The obituary ended on an underwhelming note: “It cannot be determined from these writings in which scholarly fields Stiles was mostly engaged. There are no essays of his in the collections of the academic societies of which he was a member.”Footnote 146
On the one hand, Ebeling was demonstrably mistaken, but, on the other hand, the blunder did not matter. The Yale president had published at least one other Latin oration, as well as his roughly 350-page history of three Puritan judges involved in the trial and killing of Charles I.Footnote 147 Furthermore, by digging hard enough through newspaper and periodical databases available in our current digital age, we can turn up a few other select essays and reports of Stiles's.Footnote 148 Nonetheless, it makes little sense from the vantage point of today to prove the early modern Hamburg professor wrong. Glory, fame, and renown in the Republic of Letters—however sought-after they were, these were prizes that required readership. Like the tired cliche about a tree in the forest, without the knowledge of Stiles's publications, they may as well have not existed for Ebeling and his German audience. Publication in periodicals mattered. Indeed, there was a reason why the eighteenth-century French scientist François Rozier wrote to the American Philosophical Society in 1773, observing that “men of learning do not cease to complain of the slow communication of discoveries and news relative to the arts and science.”Footnote 149 Rozier promised that if contributions could be solicited for his learned periodical, “all Europe will be informed in the space of three months or less.”Footnote 150 By failing to partake in the learned periodicals of his day, Stiles failed to be noticed.
Later biographical entries, including one in the early nineteenth-century, massive, multivolume Dictionnaire universel, historique, critique, et bibliographique, approached closer to the truth about Stiles's scholarly output, but one that was no more satisfying: “He left behind more than forty manuscripts, one Ecclesiastic History of New England, which had not been completed.”Footnote 151 Likewise a mid-nineteenth century Dutch history of the United States—De Kerk, School, en Wetenschap in de Vereenigde Staten van Noord-Amerika (The Church, School, and Science in the United States of North America)—had much to say about many American authors and their publications, but on Stiles it only mentioned in passing that he was an “outstanding mathematician” (“voortreffelijken wiskundige”).Footnote 152 In the coming decades, the largest reception that any of Stiles's writings garnered was a letter to Benjamin Franklin, whose select epistles were translated into at least French, German, and Dutch.Footnote 153 Again, the individual mattered here, not the institution. Stiles's effort to grow the Republic of Letters from the universities was not the object of praise. Unfortunately for the deceased president, neither were his writings.
In fact, some would soon critique Stiles for being a poor example of American ingenuity and literature. An 1807 article in the Edinburgh Review, one of the most prominent learned journals of the time, had little nice to say about the “few specimens of the finer arts which from time to time come across the Atlantic.”Footnote 154 Mockingly citing a paragraph of Ezra Stiles's, whose works were apparently “not sufficiently known,” the reviewer sought to showcase the poor state of American writings.Footnote 155 In an article that appeared in a New York magazine months later, an unamused American author dismissed the “fashion” in British journals “to sneer mightily and to make themselves merry at the state of literature in America, which they pronounce to be very coarse and very superficial.”Footnote 156 The disgruntled writer referred to the offhanded citation of Stiles, which was supposed to demonstrate that “sentiments so small, and a style so tedious, are not only tolerated, but encouraged in this country.”Footnote 157 Instead of defending the former Yale president, the essayist simply dismissed him: “But all the world knows, that Dr. Ezra Stiles never was remarkable for the vigour of his intellect, or the refinement of his taste; he was a good, plain, matter-of-fact man, who collected together a multitude of miscellaneous matters, and told them to his friends and the public, in no very connected series, or elegant arrangement.”Footnote 158 In other words, Stiles was faulted for an apparent lack of originality and style. Tragically, he was accused of being a poor intellectual example for his country. And even more tragically, at least some of his countrymen agreed. Conveying information to friends, long a staple of the Republic of Letters, no longer mattered as much as individual intellect and publications.
Stiles's vision, both for himself and for his country, did not come to fruition in the eighteenth century or the early nineteenth. Another anonymous writer in an early nineteenth-century publication forcibly questioned, “What men of letters has America ever produced, whose names have been advantageously heard of beyond the precincts of their own country?”Footnote 159 This writer conceded the example of Benjamin Franklin, but again bitterly inquired, “What other American name has been heard of as worthy of a place in the republic of letters?”Footnote 160 This was no passing remark, for early national Americans often noticed the criticism directed at them. An anonymous “Americanus” in 1800 would even complain of too harsh treatment of America's place in the intellectual world: “there is an American size of genius, corresponding to our youthful standing in the republic of letters, which can no more be estimated by transatlantic proportions than a yard measure among the inhabitants of Lilliput by a measure of the same denomination of Brobdingnag.”Footnote 161 With the fantastical and piercing comparisons, this author acknowledged that his nation at the turn of the nineteenth century was still young in the transnational scholarly world. Stiles had sought to bring American involvement in the Republic of Letters to age, but it never developed widely enough to garner recognition.
In the ensuing decades after Stiles's death, few would even believe in the possibility of a Republic of Letters, past or present. Writing from Göttingen in 1816, George Ticknor, a to-be Harvard professor, solemnly reflected that this imagined community had never existed: “the thing itself remained as unreal as Sidney's “Arcadia,” or Sir Thomas More's “Utopia.”Footnote 162 In fact, as Caroline Winterer elucidates in her recent American Enlightenments, many Americans doubted their own intellectual standing: “Long after the Revolution, Americans languished in their own minds—and those of European nations—as a second-tier intellectual backwater.” According to Winterer, “it would be the new American aristocracy of wealth created by the Industrial Revolution that would pump enough money into U.S. universities and libraries to bring them to greatness in the twentieth century.”Footnote 163 Herein lies the great irony of Stiles's lifework.
Even before the founding of the new nation, the aspirant intellect had been plotting to launch American scholars onto the international scene. As president of Yale during the very early years of the republic, Stiles sensed an opportunity to connect American universities into the Republic of Letters. On the one hand, his vision was decidedly ahead of the times, originating far before the recognizable plans for the modern American research university in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But, on the other hand, his university focus failed to appreciate the increasing premium placed on publication and the place of individuals over institutions in the Republic of Letters. Stiles had believed firmly and fervently his entire life that the early modern, humanistic Republic of Letters was not just real, but ready to welcome him and his fellow Americans once and for all. Unfortunately, that never fully happened for Stiles. And so as the curtain closed on the Republic of Letters, arguably the most persistent ploy to inset America into the scholarly performance came to an incomplete end.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost: grates persolvere dignas, hoc opus est. Thank you to Joanne Freeman, Mark Peterson, Lawrence Brockliss, Anja Silvia-Goeing, Eva Landsberg, Zachary Brown, Andy Juchno, Tyler Trudeau, Victoria Morehead, Alex Zhang, Jane Coppock, Christian Flow, Elliott Cramer, Daniel Graves, and Aron Ouwerkerk for many helpful comments on earlier versions of this article and/or fruitful conversations on the topic. The Modern Intellectual History editorial board, especially Angus Burgin, and the three anonymous reviewers provided invaluable feedback as well. A word of appreciation also to Dirk van Miert, who was kind enough to have me present some of this preliminary research at his SKILLNET (Sharing Knowledge in Learned and Literary Networks) conference on the Republic of Letters in 2019.
