Chapter I: Education.

With the exception of the group which settled Plymouth, the founders of New England included in their ranks a remarkably high proportion of university men. The settlers of Plymouth, mostly village and country folk of no particular education,¹ lost rather than gained educationally during the years of their hardships in Holland (which was one reason for their desire to leave), so that when the Mayflower crossed the seas it carried but one man of university training, and even he did not have a degree. William Brewster had entered St. Peter’s, or Peterhouse, Cambridge, December 3, 1580,² and had there spent a year or two before leaving for active life as a private secretary or confidential servant to William Davison, later Secretary of State, and then busy helping to carry out Queen Elizabeth’s designs in Scotland and Holland. Until Ralph Smith, the first settled minister of Plymouth, arrived in 1629, Brewster was the only university man in the colony.³ In the thirty years that followed less than a score of university men came to the colony, and of these only three remained and followed their calling. “Able men, like Norton, Chauncy, Hooke, and Williams, tarried but a short time and went to wider fields.”⁴ “Prior to 1650 Harvard College neither received from Plymouth nor contributed to that place more than one or two persons.”⁵ The other settlements presented a striking contrast to Plymouth. Even before Winthrop

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came in 1630, university men had settled on the shores of Massachusetts Bay,⁶ and with Winthrop, or following him in the next ten or fifteen years, were Oxford and Cambridge men to the number of nearly one hundred⁷ out of a total population of not more than 25,000.⁸ Of these at least fifty were the possessors of advanced degrees, and half a dozen had been appointed Fellows. Nearly every college of each university was represented here, and among the colonists were men who had been in Cambridge when Milton was studying there, although no one who was in Christ’s College with him. Thomas Shepard, John Norton, Abraham Pierson, John Harvard, Henry Dunster, and Roger Williams may be mentioned among the contemporaries of Milton and Jeremy Taylor, and of these Williams was, at a later period at least, a personal friend of Milton’s.⁹ The friendship may well have dated back to college days.

Such an unusual proportion of university men gave to the young colony a cultural tone unique in the history of colonization. And if it must be acknowledged that a dozen of the men included in the figures given above left the universities without qualifying for degrees, among them John Winthrop, Harry Vane, Richard Saltonstall, and Giles Firmin, the list may be supplemented by such names as Nathaniel Eaton, who studied at Franeker,

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Rolland;¹⁰ John Winthrop, Jr., who studied at Dublin, was admitted to the Inner Temple as lawyer in 1625,¹¹ and later spent fourteen months touring the Continent, spending three months in Constantinople, and visiting practically all the countries of Europe on the way;¹² Henry Whitfield, who studied “at the university, and then at the Inns of Court;”¹³ Thomas Parker, who, withdrawing from Oxford on the exile of his father, studied at Dublin under Dr. Usher, and at Leyden under Dr. Ames, and “proceeded master” before the age of twenty-two with “the special esteem of Maccovius, a man renowned in the Belgick universities;’’¹⁴ and Dr. Robert Child of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, “a gentleman that hath travelled other parts before bee came to us, namely Italy . . . . he tooke the degree of Doctor in Physick at Padua.¹⁵

Many of these men were recognized by their contemporaries in England and on the Continent as scholars of ability. That several were elected Fellows at the universities has already been noted. Charles Chauncy, later president of Harvard, was elected professor of Hebrew, and served as professor of Greek, in Trinity College, Cambridge.¹⁶ Thomas Fuller classed Thomas Shepard, Thomas Hooker, Nathaniel Ward, and John Cotton among “the learned writers of Emmanuel College,”¹⁷ and of John Norton’s answer to Apollonius he wrote, “ . . . . of all the Authors I have perused concerning the opinions of these Dissenting Brethren, none to me was more informative, then M^r John Norton, (One of no less learning then modesty) . . . . in his answer to

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Apollonius.”¹⁸ Henry Dunster was an Oriental scholar of reputation, as is shown by his correspondence with Ravius.¹⁹ The esteem in which many of the colonists were held is further shown by the fact that three New England ministers, John Davenport, John Cotton, and Thomas Hooker, were invited to sit in the Westminster Assembly,²⁰ and that several were recalled to high positions in England, as was Hugh Peter, who became Cromwell’s chaplain. Of this more will be said later.²¹

It is not surprising that a colony comprising so many educated men should take an active interest In the problem of the training of the young men whom they brought with them. Some were trained, as was Thomas Thacher, by residing with and studying under some minister of scholarly repute. Thacher, the son of a minister of Salisbury, England, had been offered his choice of either university, but had preferred the more congenial atmosphere of New England, where he came in 1635. He “was now cast into the family and under the tuition of that reverend man, Mr. Charles Chancey; . . . . Under the conduct of that eminent scholar, he became such an one himself.”²² But such methods did not satisfy the colony, and in 1636 the General Court voted £400 for the establishing of a college. When John Harvard, the first minister in the colony to die without leaving dependents, bequeathed to the college in 1638 his

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library and one half of his estate,²³ the beginning of college education in America was made possible. The first teacher appointed, Nathaniel Eaton, had been educated in Holland, at Franeker. When he proved unsatisfactory for reasons other than scholastic,²⁴ Henry Dunster was appointed in his place, and under him the first class of nine completed its course in 1642. For a colony only twelve years old this was no small achievement.

The course of studies was similar to that of the English universities, including Logic, Physics, Ethics, Politics, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee, and Syriac, with especial emphasis on Rhetoric, it being required that “every scholler . . . . declaime once a moneth.”²⁵ Much Latin and some Greek were required for admission,²⁶ and the college rules stipulated the use of Latin for all conversation in the college. Under such scholars as Dunster and Chauncy the standards were undoubtedly as high here as in England.²⁷ On both sides of the water the chief purpose of the universities was to train men in divinity, and

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liberal learning suffered common neglect.²⁸ Harvard at least attempted to give as much culture as the English universities, for, in the study of Greek, for example, the requirements were: Etymologie, Syntax, Prosodia and Dialects, Grammar, Poesy, Nonnus, Duport, Style, Composition, Imitation, Epitome, both verse and prose.²⁹ One form of literary activity practised at the English universities, the writing and production of plays, was, of course, totally missing at Harvard.

That the education to be gained at Harvard even in its earliest days was the equivalent of that of Cambridge and

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Oxford is best shown by the careers of some of its earliest graduates. Sir George Downing, of the first class, rose to distinction under Cromwell, acting as his minister at The Hague, a position which he retained under Charles II, who knighted him in 1660, and made him a baronet three years later.³⁰ Benjamin Woodbridge of the same class became one of the chaplains in ordinary to Charles II after the Restoration, and was given the choice of being canon of Windsor if he would conform,—which he refused to do.³¹ Henry Saltonstall, also of the first class at Harvard, was given recognition at Oxford. Among the incorporations of 1652, according to the record in Wood’s “Athenæ Oxoniensis,” appears, “June 24, Henr. Saltonstal, a Knight’s Son, Fellow of New Coll. by the favor of the Visitors, and Doct. of Phys. of Padua, was then incorporated. The said degree he took at Padua in Oct., 1649.” Samuel Mather, the first graduate to be made a Fellow of Harvard, became chaplain to Thomas Andrews, Lord Mayor of London, about 1650. He was admitted by Cambridge, Oxford, and Trinity, Dublin, “ad eundem,” and by the latter was offered a “baccalaureatus in theologia” which he declined, although he accepted an election as Senior Fellow. He also served as chaplain in Magdalen, Oxford, preaching sometimes in St. Mary’s.³² Increase Mather became a Master of Arts at Trinity, Dublin, and was well received by the scholars there, being offered a fellowship which he declined.³³ Before returning to Boston at the age of twenty-two,³⁴ he served for a time as chaplain at Guernsey.³⁵

With the graduates of Cambridge and Oxford who returned to England when the Puritans came into power, went a number of Harvard men other than those mentioned above, all of whom seem to have been equipped to succeed

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in England. One of them, Nathaniel Mather, wrote back to his relatives in New England, in 1651, “Tis incredible what an advantage to preferm^t it is to have been a New English man.”³⁵ It is with natural pride that Cotton Mather remarks, “From that hour [the time of the founding of Harvard] Old England had more ministers from New, than our New-England had since then from Old.”³⁶

The satisfactory condition of scholarship at Harvard is further shown by the fact that “in several instances youth of opulent families in the parent country were sent over to receive their education in New England.”³⁷

Colonial interest in education was not limited to the higher education of the college, as is shown by the law passed in Massachusetts in 1647:³⁸

. . . . every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall then forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read, whose wages shall be paid either by the parents or masters of such children, or by the inhabitants in general . . . . where any town shall increase to the number of 100 families or householders they shall set up a grammar

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school, the master thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the university. . . . .

Before this law was passed many towns had made provision for grammar schools.³⁹ Just how zealously the law was enforced it is impossible to determine, but there are records of towns being fined for failure to provide schools, as well as records of towns fining men for not teaching their children or apprentices to read and write.⁴⁰ The grammar school were supplemented, as in England, by dame schools. The established endowed grammar schools of England were probably superior to the colonial schools, but not as numerous in proportion to the population, for England had no compulsory school law until two hundred years later, and illiteracy was common.⁴¹

Before 1645, also, two books for school use had been printed at Cambridge. One of these, of which no copy has survived,⁴² is referred to as “The Spelling Books,” printed by Stephen Day between 1642 and 1645. The other is John Cotton’s catechism entitled “Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes in either England Drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments for their soul’s nourishment.”⁴³ Such catechisms,

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it must be remembered, were commonly used as primers or first readers in day schools in both Old and New England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The shifting of religious education to Sunday and the Sunday-school was the work of the nineteenth century.

All the above evidence would seem to indicate that, as far as the possibilities and benefits of a satisfactory education were concerned, the early colonists and their children were under no serious disadvantage in comparison with those whom they had left behind in England.