Timothy Dwight IV
From Free net encyclopedia
Current revision
Timothy Dwight (May 14, 1752–January 11, 1817) was an American Congregationalist minister, theologian, educator, and author. He was the eighth president of Yale College, from 1795 to 1817.
He matriculated at Yale College at age 13, and received honorary degrees from Princeton University in 1787 and Harvard University in 1810. He served as President of Yale College from 1795 to 1817.
Dwight was the eldest son of Northampton, Massachusetts merchant Timothy Dwight III (a graduate of Yale (1744). His mother was the third daughter of theologian Jonathan Edwards. He was remarkably precocious, and is said to have learned the alphabet at a single lesson, and to have been able to read the Bible before he was four years old.
Dwight graduated from Yale in 1769. For two years, he was rector of the Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven, Connecticut. He was a tutor at Yale College from 1771 to 1777. Licensed to preach in 1777, he was appointed by Congress chaplain in General Samuel Holden Parsons's Connecticut Continental Brigade. He served with distinction, inspiring the troops with his sermons and the stirring war songs he composed, the most famous of which is "Columbia".
On news of his father's death in the fall of 1778, he resigned his commission and returned to take charge of his family in Northampton. Besides managing the family's farms, he preached and taught, estabilshing a school for both sexes. During this period, he served two terms in the Massachusetts legislature.
Declining calls from churches in Beverly and Charlestown, he chose instead to settle from 1783 until 1795 as minister in "Greenfield Hill," a Fairfield, Connecticut parish which would become Southport. There he estabished an academy, which at once acquired a high reputation, and attracted pupils from all parts of the Union. Dwight was an innovative and inspiring teacher, prefering moral suasion over the corporal punishment favored by most schoolmasters of the day.
In 1777, Dwight married Mary, the daughter of New York merchant and banker Benjamin Woolsey]. This marriage connected him to some of New York's wealtiest and most influential families. Woolsey had been Dwight's father's Yale classmate, roommate, and intimate friend.
Dwight was the leader of the evangelical "New Divinity" faction of Congregationalism -- a group closely identified with Connecticut's emerging commercial elite. Although fiercely opposed by religious moderates -- most notably Yale president Ezra Stiles -- he was elected to the presidency of Yale on Stiles's death in 1795. His ablity as a teacher, and his talents as a religious and political leader, soon made the college the largest institution of higher education in North America. Dwight had a genius for recognizing able proteges -- among them Lyman Beecher, Nathaniel W. Taylor, and Leonard Bacon, all of whom would become major religious leaders and theological innovators in the ante bellum decades.
Dwight was as notable for his political leadership as for his religious and educational eminence. Known by his enemies as "Pope" Dwight, he wielded both the temporal sword (as head of Connecticut's Federalist Party), and spiritual sword (as nominal head of the state's Congregational Church). He led the effort to prevent the disestablishment of the church in Connecticut -- and, when its disestablishment appeared inevitable, encouraged efforts by proteges like Beecher and Bacon to organize voluntary associations to maintain the influence of religion in public life. Fearing that the failure of states to establish schools and the rise of "infidelity" would bring about the destruction of republican institutions, he helped to create a national evangelical movement -- the second "Great Awakening" -- intended to "re-church" America. Dwight was a founder of the Connecticut Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and Andover Theological Seminary.
Dwight was well known as an author, preacher, and theologian. He and his brother, Theodore, were members of a group of writers centered around Yale known as the "Hartford Wits." In verse, Dwight wrote an ambitious epic in eleven books, The Conquest of Canaan, finished in 1774 but not published until 1785, a somewhat ponderous and solemn satire, The Triumph of Infidelity (1788), directed against David Hume, Voltaire and others; Greenfield Hill (1794), the suggestion for which seems to have been derived from John Denham's Coopers Hill; and a number of minor poems and hymns, the best known of which is that beginning "I love thy kingdom, Lord". Many of his sermons were published posthumously under the titles Theology Explained and Defended (5 vols., 1818-1819), to which a memoir of the author by his two sons, W. T. and Sereno E. Dwight, is prefixed, and Sermons by Timothy Dwight (2 vols., 1828), which had a large circulation both in the United States and in England. Probably his most important work, however, is his Travels in New England and New York (4 vols., 1821-1822), which contains much material of value concerning social and economic New England and New York during the period 1796-1817.
Dwight died of prostate cancer, and was buried in New Haven's Grove Street Cemetery. Dwight left eight sons: Timothy (1778-1884), a New Haven merchant and philanthropist; James (17__-18__); Benjamin Woolsey Dwight (1780-1850), a New York physician; educator and theologian Sereno Edwards Dwight (1786-1850); and clergyman William Theodore Dwight (1795-1865). Dwight's grandson and namesake, "Timothy Dwight the Younger" (1828-1916), served as Yale's president, 1886-1899. His nephew, Theodore Dwight Woolsey (1801-1889), served as Yale's president between 1846 and 1871. Another nephew was Theodore Dwight (1796-1866), an author.
Although long dismissed by historians as a reactionary who contributed little to American life, recent scholarship, as it engages the central importance of religion in our culture, is coming to acknowledge his significance as a religious leader and educational innovator. His influence on the thousands of young men who passed through Yale during his presidency is incalculable.
Further reading
See W. B. Sprague's Life of Timothy Dwight in vol. iv. (second series) of Jared Sparks's Library of American Biography, and especially an excellent chapter in Moses Coit Tyler's Three Men of Letters (New York, 1895).
See also Yale Biogaphies and Annals, vol 3, 321-333; Charles E. Cunningham, Timothy Dwight, 1752-1817 (New York, 1942); Peter Dobkin Hall, "The Civic Engagement Tradition," in Mary Jo Bane, Brent Coffin, & Richard Higgins, Taking Faith Seriously (Cambridge, 2005). For selections of Dwight's writings and an evaluation of his significance, see Documentary History of American Philanthropy and Voluntarism [1]
Template:Start box Template:Succession box Template:End box
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition{{#if:{{{article|}}}| article {{#if:{{{url|}}}|[{{{url|}}}}} "{{{article}}}"{{#if:{{{url|}}}|]}}{{#if:{{{author|}}}| by {{{author}}}}}}}, a publication now in the public domain.