Timothy Dwight IV

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Timothy Dwight IV : biography

May 14, 1752 – January 11, 1817

Timothy Dwight (May 14, 1752 – January 11, 1817) was an American academic and educator, a Congregationalist minister, theologian, and author. He was the eighth president of Yale College (1795–1817).Welch, Lewis et al. (1899).

Legacy

Dwight’s 1785 poem The Conquest of Canaan is considered to be the first American epic poem.Ehrlich, Eugene and Gorton Carruth. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982: 54. ISBN 0-19-503186-5

In the twentieth century, Yale named Timothy Dwight College for him and his grandson.

In 2008, The Library of America selected Dwight’s account of the murders of Connecticut shopkeeper William Beadle for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.

Early life

Timothy Dwight was born May 15, 1752 in Northampton, Massachusetts. The Dwight family had a long association with Yale College, as it was then known. His paternal grandfather Colonel Timothy Dwight, was born October 19, 1694, and died April 30, 1771. His father, a merchant and farmer known as Major Timothy Dwight, was born May 27, 1726, graduated from Yale in 1744, served in the American Revolutionary War, and died June 10, 1777. His mother Mary Edwards (1734–1807) was the third daughter of theologian Jonathan Edwards. He was 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. He had 12 younger siblings, including journalist Theodore Dwight (1764–1846).

Dwight graduated from Yale in 1769 (when was only 17 years old). 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 March 3, 1777, Dwight married Mary Woolsey (1754–1854), the daughter of New York merchant and banker Benjamin Woolsey (1720–1771). This marriage connected him to some of New York’s wealthiest and most influential families. Woolsey had been Dwight’s father’s Yale classmate, roommate, and intimate friend.

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, establishing a school for both sexes. During this period, he served two terms in the Massachusetts legislature.

Notes

Career

Dwight first came to public attention with his Yale College "Valedictory Address" of 1776, in which he described Americans as having a unique national identity as a new "people, who have the same religion, the same manners, the same interests, the same language, and the same essential forms and principles of civic government."as cited in The Quest for Nationality: An American Literary Campaign, Spencer, Benjamin T., Syracuse University Press, 1957, p. 3

Declining calls from churches in Beverly and Charlestown, he chose instead to settle from 1783 until 1795 as minister in "Greenfield Hill," a congregational church in Fairfield, Connecticut. There he established 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, preferring moral suasion over the corporal punishment favored by most schoolmasters of the day.

He received honorary degrees from Princeton University in 1787 and Harvard University in 1810.

In 1793 Dwight preached a sermon to the General Association of Connecticut entitled a "Discourse on the Genuineness and Authenticity of the New Testament" which when printed the next year became an important tract defending the orthodox faith against Deists and other skeptics. 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. Shortly afterwards, he was elected an honorary member of the Connecticut Society of the Cincinnati.