Samuel Johnson | |
|---|---|
 | |
| 1st President of King's College | |
| In office 1754–1763 | |
| Preceded by | Office established |
| Succeeded by | Myles Cooper |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1696-10-14)October 14, 1696 |
| Died | January 6, 1772(1772-01-06) (aged 75) Stratford, Connecticut Colony, British America |
| Spouses | |
| Children | William Samuel Johnson William "Billy" Johnson |
| Parent | Samuel Johnson Sr. |
| Alma mater | Yale College |
Samuel Johnson (October 14, 1696 – January 6, 1772) was a clergyman, educator, linguist, encyclopedist, historian, and philosopher in colonial America. He was a major proponent of bothAnglicanism and the philosophies ofWilliam Wollaston andGeorge Berkeley in the colonies, founded and served as the first president of the Anglican King's College, which was renamedColumbia University following theAmerican Revolutionary War, and was a key figure of theAmerican Enlightenment.
Johnson was born inGuilford,Connecticut Colony, the son of afulling miller, Samuel Johnson Sr., and great-grandson of Robert Johnson, a founder ofNew Haven Colony, Connecticut. Johnson was substantially influenced by his grandfather, William Johnson, a state assemblyman, village clerk, grammar school teacher, mapmaker, militia leader, judge, and churchdeacon.[1] His grandfather taught himEnglish at age four, andHebrew at five; he took young Samuel Johnson around the town on visits to his friends, and proudly had the young boy recite great passages of memorized scripture.[2]
After studyingLatin with local ministers and schoolmasters, includingJared Eliot, in Guilford,Clinton andMiddleton, Johnson left Guilford at age 13 to attend the Collegiate School at Saybrook, later renamedYale College, in 1710, where he studied theReformation logic ofPetrus Ramus and the orthodoxPuritan theology ofJohannes Wolleb (Wollebius) andWilliam Ames. He graduated in 1714 as class valedictorian with a bachelor's degree; three years later, in 1717, he was awarded a master's degree.
Johnson began teaching grammar school in Guilford in 1713, and continued to teach while a student a Yale and for the rest of his life, spending nearly 60 years as a teacher.
In 1714, he began to write a short work titledSynopsis Philosophiae Naturalis, summing up whatPuritans knew of natural philosophy.[3] He left this work unfinished and began working instead for his master's thesis by writing in Latin a more ambitious "encyclopedia of all knowledge", titledTechnologia Sive Technometria or Ars Encyclopaidia, Manualis Ceu Philosophia; Systema Liber Artis.[4] It was a systematic exploration of all knowledge available to Johnson based on the methods of theReformation logicianPetrus Ramus.
His work on this logical exploration of the Puritan New England Mind eventually resulted in 1271 hierarchically arranged theses. It has been called byNorman Fiering "the best surviving American example of student application ofRamist method to the whole body of human knowledge".[5]
His work on theEncyclopaidiawas interrupted when a donation of 800 books collected byColonial AgentJeremiah Dummer was sent to Yale late in 1714. He discoveredFrancis Bacon'sAdvancement of Learning, the works ofJohn Locke andIsaac Newton and otherAge of Enlightenment authors not known to the tutors and graduates of Puritan Yale andHarvard.
Johnson wrote in hisAutobiography, “All this was like a flood of day to his low state of mind”, and that “he found himself like one at once emerging out of the glimmer of twilight into the full sunshine of open day".[6] Though he finished his Latin Ramist thesis, he now considered what he had learned at Yale “nothing but the scholastic cobwebs of a few little English and Dutch systems that would hardly now be taken up in the street.”[7]
He used what he learned in the next two years to write in English aRevised Encyclopedia of Philosophy(1716). It was prefixed by a hierarchical Table or map of the intellectual world outlining the sum of all knowledge. It would be the first of a series of tables categorizing "the sum of knowledge" into ever more complex tables used for both categorizing knowledge for libraries and to define curriculum in schools. If he had published the work, it would have predated the first comprehensive English-language encyclopedia,[8]Ephraim Chambers's 1728Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, by twelve years.
In 1716, Johnson was appointed the senior tutor atYale College. Founded in 1701, Yale was located on a small neck of land inSaybrook, Connecticut. By 1716, Saybrook Point was considered too small to handle the needs of the growing school. Connecticut GovernorGurdon Saltonstall and seven Yale trustees proposed moving the college toNew Haven, Connecticut. They were opposed by three trustees, two of whom split the college, and opened a schismatic branch inWethersfield, Connecticut, taking half the students and the junior Yale tutor with them.
For over two years, Johnson was the sole member of the Yale faculty and the only administrator on-site at the college inNew Haven. Unsupervised, he took the opportunity to introduce the Enlightenment into Yale.[9] When Johnson's close friend Daniel Brown left his position as Rector ofHopkin's Grammar School and was formally hired as a second tutor in 1718,[10] Johnson found time to create the first catalog of books of Yale's expanded library, and, between 1717 and 1719, to write upHistorical Remarks Concerning the Collegiate School, the first history of Yale.[11]
Johnson's first publication was a broadside printed for the 1718 Yale Commencement,[12] which contained Latin commencement thesis. It shows that Johnson taught Locke, Newton, Copernican astronomy, modern medicine and biology, and, for the first time in an American college, algebra.[13]
The next year was one of tumult. In November 1718, Governor Saltonstall forced the schismatic Wethersfield students, including a youngJonathan Edwards, to come to New Haven. The Wethersfield students were surly and rebellious. Johnson attempted to teach them his Enlightenment curriculum, and the schismatic students complained that he was a poor teacher. They returned to Wethersfield in January, 1719. After the spring 1719 elections confirmed Saltonstall as Governor, the schismatic trustees and students gave up and returned to New Haven.
According to historianJoseph Ellis, "Johnson's presence precluded its reunification,"[14] so he was "sacrificed for college unity"[15] and lost his job as tutor. Out of a job, he designed a new curriculum for a Yale now run by his friend RectorTimothy Cutler and Tutor Daniel Brown, studied religion and philosophy, and wrote up a book onLogic(1720), which may have been used as class notes at Yale, but was not published in his lifetime.[16]
In 1720, Johnson becameCongregationalist minister of a church inWest Haven, Connecticut. Even though "he had much better offers", he took up the position for the sake "of being near the college and library".[17] There he, Yale RectorTimothy Cutler, Yale Tutor Daniel Brown, and six other Connecticut ministers, including the Rev.Jared Eliot of Clinton, and Johnson's friend the Rev. James Wetmore of North Haven, formed a group to study the Anglican divines and the "doctrines and facts of theprimitive church". Their reading and discussions led them to question the validity of their ordinations, and the book group members converted from embracing aPresbyterian polity onordination to anEpiscopal one sometime in 1722.
At Yale's September 13, 1722 commencement, in a very public and dramatic event labeled the “Great Apostasy”[18] by American religion historian Sidney Ahlstrom, the nine member group declared for theepiscopacy. After strong pressure from the Governor and their family and friends, five of the nine recanted, but Johnson, Cutler, Brown and Wetmore, refused to change their decision, and were expelled from their positions at Yale and their Congregational ministries.
Johnson along with the others left the colony in order to seek ordination in theChurch of England. As one of the now famous Great Apostates, he was greeted warmly by the Church and University establishment. On Sunday, March 31, 1723, at the church ofSt Martin-in-the-Fields, "at the continued appointment and desire of William, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, and John, Lord Bishop of London, we were ordained Priests most gravely by the Right Reverend Thomas, Lord Bishop of Norwich".[19] He was granted honorary master's degrees at both theUniversity of Oxford, where he was the first American awarded an honorary master's degree by the university, and theUniversity of Cambridge.[20]
He returned to Connecticut in 1723, under the auspices of theSociety for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, as a missionary priest. He opened the firstAnglican church built in the colony, Christ Church inStratford, Connecticut in 1724.
Charged with spreading the Anglican church in the colony, he formed parishes and openedhouse churches throughout the colony, which he then staffed with his disciples, then built physical churches in the town. He founded 25 churches in the Colony by 1752,[21] for which he has been called "The Father of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut".[22] Beginning in the 1730s, he participated in a long running pamphlet war withNew EnglandPuritans. "Johnson willingly and enthusiastically defended his beliefs in a series of three pamphlets"[23] titledLetters to His Dissenting Parishioners (1733–37), and in the next decade, was attacked, and then counter-attacked his greatest Puritan antagonist, the President of PrincetonJonathan Dickinson, in a series ofpamphlets titledAristocles to Authades(1745–57).
The debate was not only theological, but political and legal. As a minority Anglican in a Congregationalistestablished church state, he led the Anglican side against both theOld Light and New Light Puritans who dominated the elected Connecticut Assembly, struggling to emancipate his people from Puritan church taxes and laws restricting Anglican worship. He defended his American Anglican practices vigorously, and advocated for an Anglican Bishop in America. This request for a Bishop was vigorously opposed not only by New England Puritans and their supporters in England, but by Southern Anglicans who wished to preserve their independence. Johnson failed in this effort: no Church of England Bishop was ever sent to America, and there was no Episcopal Bishop untilSamuel Seabury (bishop) was ordained by theScottish Episcopal Church. In addition to dealing with the powerful Old Lights from 1723 on, after 1740 he now had to deal with theevangelical outburst occasioned by the New Light popular preacher and fellow Anglican ministerGeorge Whitefield and theGreat Awakening he unleashed.
He opened a successfulcommon school in Stratford shortly after his arrival in 1723, and boarded and tutored the sons of prominent New York families to prepare them for college.[24] He also trained Yale students for the Anglican ministry at hisparsonage in Stratford, converting many of them fromPuritandenominations, as well as training Anglicans in a kind of small seminary. Between 1724 and his death in 1772, Johnson mentored 63 Yale graduates who intended to take Anglican orders. His disciples resided in all 13 states and Canada by the time of the Revolution.[25]
Johnson was a seminal figure ofAmerican philosophy. Though busy with ministry and educational duties, and raising his family, he never stopped learning or writing, and kept to his self-appointed mission to write up the sum of all knowledge. In February 1729, Johnson noted in hisAutobiography, "came that very extraordinary geniusBishop Berkeley, then Dean ofDerry, into America, and resided two years and a half at Rhode Island". Johnson hurried to visit him, and his group inRhode Island, including the painterJohn Smybert. He became for a time a disciple of Berkeley's, and exchanged many letters with the philosopher over the years,[26] discussing Berkeley'sidealist philosophy. Before Berkeley left America in September 1731, Johnson convinced Berkeley to donate to Yale a large number of books, 500 pounds sterling, and a 100-acre farm with 100 pound sterling yearly income which would fund three scholars at the college.[27]
Johnson published the essay "An Introduction to the Study of Philosophy, exhibiting a General view of all the Arts and Sciences” in the May 1731 issue of London-based periodicalThe Present State of the Republick of Letters (1728–36). Written just as he was about to send his two Nicoll stepsons to Yale, it was a manual for teaching young menethics andmoral philosophy, things not taught at a Yale that had reverted to the Puritan curriculum after the Great Apostasy; it was the first work published by an American in a British journal.[28]
In 1740s, while Johnson's son William Samuel Johnson was attending Yale, Johnson collaborated with RectorThomas Clap to create a new curriculum, for which he revised his moral philosophy and his tables on the sum of all knowledge. He published it as a textbook titledAn Introduction to the Study of Philosophy (1743). It was three times longer than his previous essay. In large bold letters on the front page facing the title page, he proclaimed it "A New System of Morality".[29] The work "was intended from the beginning to accompany President Clap of Yale's 1743Library Catalogue of the Library of the Yale–College in New Haven."[30]
The work contains a moral philosophy textbook along with a revision of his table of the sum of all knowledge, which was used by Clap to index hislibrary catalog, and by Johnson to order a recommended reading[31] list of books to be read by Yale students included as an appendix to the textbook.[32] Though Johnson had begun replacing the Puritans' ideas of Predestination and Sin with his American Enlightenment idea of pursuing happiness as far back as his sermons in 1715,[33] the new system makes the pursuit of happiness its starting point. In its opening paragraph, reflecting the influence ofWilliam Wollaston and Berkeley, hedefines philosophy as "The Pursuit of true Happiness in the Knowledge of things as being what they really are, and in acting or practicing according to that Knowledge."[34] Going beyond Wollaston and Berkeley, "Johnson extended these men's constructions with his own unique practice-oriented ideas of perception leading to action, and a freewill model of humans with a value system focused on pursuing happiness."[35]
Its library catalog schema taken from Johnson's scheme was adopted by other colleges, and "was superior to anything untilMelvil Dewey published hisDewey Decimal Classification Scheme in 1876."[36] Johnson, who had first cataloged the Yale library back in 1719 when its books were moved from Saybrook to New Haven, and who had secured the large Berkeley donation of books, selecting which volumes would go to Yale from the wealthy philosopher's large collection, has been called “The Father of American Library Classification”.[37]
Also in 1743, for his successful missionary work and his defense of the Anglican church in America he received an honorarydoctorate of divinity from Oxford. He was only the third American to receive this honor.[38] That same year he built the second Christ Church in Stratford, startling his Puritan neighbors with Gothic-style architectural elements, heating, an organ, and a steeple with a clock and a bell, topped by a gold-brass rooster.
Johnson revised his moral philosophy textbook again, titling itEthices Elementa: or the First Principles of Moral Philosophy. According to educatorHenry Barnard, “This work had a high reputation at the time of its publication, and met with an extensive sales.”[39] He revised it again with editions released in 1752 in Philadelphia and 1754 in London. Professor Mark Garett Longaker noted that it contained "a system of morals built upon his philosophical idealism, and the conclusion of this entire system (moral, philosophical, and rhetorical) is that all human endeavor aims towards happiness, a condition realized when one fully understands and obeys God's will."[40]
Johnson had been considering a college inNew York since 1749.[41] In 1750, Johnson began to exchange a series of letters withBenjamin Franklin over the founding of a "new-model" or "English" college. Franklin admired Johnson's moral philosophy, and asked him to head up a proposedCollege of Philadelphia.[42] Johnson declined the offer, and instead worked with his wife's relations, his step-sons, former students, and the rector and vestrymen of the AnglicanTrinity Church inNew York City to found a college there.
In 1751, a board of trustees had been appointed by the New York colonial assembly to manage money raised in a lottery for a college inNew York City. In 1752, Johnson was proposed as the logical choice for its president.[43] They decided to name it King's College to help them secure an officialroyal charter fromKing George II. Johnson had recently metWilliam Smith, a young Scot immigrant tutor, at the New York City salon of Mrs. De Lancey, wife of Lt. GovernorJames De Lancey. Johnson had suggested and mentored Smith's writing of a Utopian book of college education, titledA General Idea of the College of Mirania(1753).Johnson recommenced the young William Smith to Franklin.
During thecolonial era, "The chair of moral philosophy stood above all other faculty positions in importance and prestige."[44] Selecting a moral philosophy was thus a fundamentally important consideration when founding a college. In 1752, at Franklin's urging, Johnson revised his philosophy textbook again to create a philosophy suitable for the proposed new-model colleges. Franklin took the unusual step (for him) of self-funding the domestic printing ofElementa Philosophica (1752).
Along withBenjamin Franklin andWilliam Smith, Johnson created whatPresident James Madison of theCollege of William and Mary called a new-model[45] plan or style of American college. They decided it would be profession-oriented, with classes taught inEnglish instead ofLatin, have subject matter experts as professors instead of one tutor leading a class for four years, and there would be no religious test for admission.[46] They also replaced the study of theology with non-denominational moral philosophy, using Johnson's "new system of morality" and his philosophy textbook as the core of the curriculum.
Johnson, Franklin, and Smith met in Stratford in June 1753. They planned two new-model colleges: Johnson would open King's College inNew York City, and Franklin and Smith would open the College of Philadelphia, now theUniversity of Pennsylvania inPhiladelphia. Immediately after the meeting, Smith left for London to raise funds and receive Anglican orders. Franklin and the board of trustees appointed him Provost of the College of Philadelphia when he returned. Johnson with the help of his stepson Benjamin Nicoll, his former students. who were now powerful merchants, the De Launcey-Nicoll Popular downstate majority party in theNew York Assembly, and the clergy and vestry ofTrinity Church, New York City, created a board of Governors for the new college, ensuring that it had anAnglican majority though it includedDutch Reformed Church andPresbyterian Church members. The assembly voted that a lottery be established to raise funds for the new college.
The funding was bitterly opposed in print by board memberWilliam Livingston and other Presbyterian politicians along with their Provincial upstate party allies in an intense two year newspaper war. Without funding and without an official charter, Johnson defiantly openedKing's College (nowColumbia University) in July 1754. On October 31, it finally received theRoyal charter. Itscharter promoted a college without a religious test for admission, was practice and profession oriented, public spirited, inclusive and diverse, and taught the then new disciplines of English literature and moral philosophy. It waspolytechnic in scope, teaching math, science, history, commerce, government, and nature. Colonial historian Richard Gummere noted that, "Had Johnson himself offered a specific course for each of these fields, he would have been presiding,mutatis muntandis, over the equivalent of a twentieth-century university."[47]
Johnson also presented a values-focused curriculum, proposing in theAdvertisement "in May 1754, to teach student to be “Ornaments to their Country and useful to the public Weal in their Generations” and "to lead them from the study of nature to knowledge of themselves, and of the God of nature and their duty to him, themselves, and one another, and everything that can contribute to their true happiness, both here and hereafter."[48] Once again, the pursuit of happiness was the focus of Johnson's curriculum, his table of philosophy, and his textbook.
In addition to the burden of dealing with the political Presbyterians attacking his college as a devious Anglican plot, and hence leading Presbyterian parents to refuse to send their sons to it, and the usual ramp-up problems of starting a new college, the nine-year-longFrench and Indian War coincided almost exactly with Johnson's tenure at King's College, drying up funds and draining the pool of potential students while raising fears of invasion. He also had to deal with periodic outbreaks of smallpox, during which he had to leave the college to be run by his tutors for months at a time. Yet he persevered.
In the 22-year period from 1758 to 1776, when the college closed due to theRevolutionary War, 226 men attended, and 113 graduated.[49][50] Among the 83 college students who attended King's College during Johnson's8+1⁄2-year tenure were some prominent futureLoyalists, includingAdolph Philipse, Daniel Robart,Abraham De Peyster, andJohn Vardill. But he taught many more men who became prominent Patriots, includingJohn Jay,Samuel Prevoost,Robert R. Livingston, Richard Harrison,Henry Cruger,Egbert Benson,Edward Antill,Dr. Samuel Bard,John Stevens, Anthony Lispenard, andHenry Rutgers. Among the students taught by his successorDr. Myles Cooper, wereAlexander Hamilton andGouverneur Morris.
In 1764, he returned to his ministry, replacing as Rector his successor at Christ Church, the Rev. Edward Winslow, who moved toBraintree, Massachusetts. Johnson also began working on another revision of his philosophy. This time Johnson wrote not a textbook but adialogue titledRaphael, or The Genius of the English America(c. 1764–5), which Johnson called "a Rhapsody". It begins with the arrival of "guardian or genius of New England" of a "beautiful countenance" who tellsArisctocles, named afterAristocles of Messene, and who represents Johnson, to "call meRaphael". His son William Samuel Johnson in 1765 would represent Connecticut at theStamp Act Congress, and the work hints at the controversies of the period; historianJoseph Ellis suggests that a disillusioned Johnson believed that "the underlying cause of the growing discontent between England and America was the breakdown of a sense of community".[51] Parts of the work praise the British form ofParliamentary government, while others foreshadow theDeclaration of Independence, including its core principle that, “The natural obligation to virtue is founded in the necessity that God and nature lays us under to desire and pursue our happiness.”[52] By 1767, Johnson was calling the British ministers in Parliament " a pack of Courtiers, who have no Religion at all.”[53]
In 1767, his son William Samuel Johnson, was appointedColonial Agent to Great Britain for Connecticut, and left Stratford for London, where he would remain for five years. Johnson was left in Stratford with his daughter-in-law and grandchildren. He continued to minister, teach and write. He also taught prospective Anglican priests in a kind of “little Academy, or resource for young students of Divinity, to prepare them for Holy Orders”.[54] He taught his two grandsons English and Hebrew, as his own grandfather had taught him 70 years before. He wrote for them the first English Grammar (1765) and the first Hebrew grammar (1767) published in America authored by an American. In a 1771 revised edition of Hebrew grammar, he printed his last revision of his table, presenting the sum of all knowledge.
In October 1771, just before he finished hisAutobiography, his son William Samuel returned home from London to Johnson's "great and unspeakable comfort and satisfaction".[55] Johnson died a few months later, on January 6, 1772. His protegee and friend President Myles Cooper penned the inscription which adorns his monument in Christ Church, Stratford, where Johnson was minister for most of the 47 years between 1723 and his death, minus the eight and a half years he spent at King's College in New York City.
If decent dignity, and modest mien,
The cheerful heart, and countenance serene;
If pure religion and unsullied truth,
His age's solace, and his search in youth;
In charity, through all the race he ran,
Still wishing well, and doing good to man;
If learning free from pedantry and pride;
If faith and virtue walking side by side;
If well to mark his being's aim and end,
To shine through life the father and the friend;
If these ambition in thy soul can raise,
Excite thy reverence or demand thy praise,
Reader, ere yet thou quit this earthly scene,
Revere his name, and be what he has been.
In 1725, Johnson married the widow Charity Floyd Nicoll, the mother of three young children, one of whom, William Nicoll, was heir to the vast estate of Islip Grange, inSayville, New York, then part of a 100 square mile estate onLong Island owned by theMatthias Nicoll family. Johnson acquired close contacts with the leading merchant, legal, and political families of the colonial-eraProvince of New York, many who sent their sons to board with him inStratford, to be prepared for college.[56] His first son by Charity,William Samuel Johnson, was born on October 7, 1727; his second son, William "Billy" Johnson, was born on March 9, 1731.
Johnson turned 60 in 1756. That year, he lost his first grandson. The same year, his beloved son William "Billy" died ofsmallpox on his ordination trip to England. His wife Charity died of smallpox two years later, in 1758. His stepdaughter Anna and his student and wife's nephew Gilbert Floyd died in 1759. His stepson Benjamin Nicoll, his best tutor Daniel Treadwell, and his fellow Great Apostate Rev. Wetmore died in 1760.
On June 18, 1761, Johnson married Sarah Beach, the widow of his old friend William Beach, and his son's mother-in-law, and for a brief time he was "very happy".[57]
In 1762, Johnson and the board of Governors hired theUniversity of Oxford-trained ministerMyles Cooper, a young man recommended by theArchbishop of Canterbury, as professor of moral philosophy with the expectation that Cooper would someday succeed him.[58] Johnson quickly bonded with Cooper, who "was with him as a son".[59]
On February 9, 1763, Johnson lost his second wife Sarah tosmallpox, and a few weeks after, amidst an unpleasant controversy with the Board of Governors over funding his pension, "he committed the care of his affairs to Mr. Cooper",[60] and returned toStratford, Connecticut by sleigh during a snowstorm.
Johnson published his first philosophy work in 1731 as an essay in the English JournalThe Republick of Letters; his name also appears as author in 34 books in theEnglish Short Title Catalog printed before 1800.[61] In 1874 Dr. Eben Edwards Beardsley published "portions of diary and of his correspondence with "eminent men in [America], and with Bishops and leading minds in the Church of England" inLife and Correspondence of Samuel Johnson D.D. : missionary of the Church of England in Connecticut, and first president of King's College, New York.[62] In 1929, Herbert and Carol Schneider published a four volume work of Johnson'sCareer and Writings,reprinting seven of these works. The Schneiders also published for the first time hisAutobiography, various letters, a catalog of over 1400 books he read,Synopsis Philosophiae,Encyclopedia of Philosophy,The Revised Encyclopedia,Logic,Miscellaneous Notes, selections from his textbooks on philosophy,Raphaelor the Genius of the English America, Reflections on Old Age and Death, twenty-four selectedSermons, various liturgical writings, and various documents relating to the founding of King's College and its early years. Herbert Schneider provides a bibliography of all of Johnson's writings at the end of Volume IV. Many of Johnson's sermons and diaries remain unpublished.
Johnson's major works include:
| 1715 | Encyclopedia of Philosophy in Latin (printed 1929, translation by Herbert Schneider) |
| 1716 | Revised Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1716). (printed 1929 by Herbert Schneider) |
| 1733–37 | Three Letters from a minister of the Church of England to his dissenting parishioners |
| 1743 | An introduction to the study of philosophy exhibiting a general view of all the arts and sciences, for the use of pupils. With a catalogue of some of the most valuable authors necessary to be read in order to instruct them in a thorough knowledge of each of them (a second edition was published in London in 1744) |
| 1745 | A letter from Aristocles to Authades, concerning the sovereignty and the promises of God |
| 1746 | A sermon concerning the obligations we are under to love and delight in the public worship of God |
| 1746 | Ethices elementa. Or The first principles of moral philosophy. And especially that part of it which is called ethics. In a chain of necessary consequences from certain facts (also printed in 1929 in Schneider) |
| 1747 | A letter to Mr. Jonathan Dickinson, in defence of Aristocles to Authades, concerning the sovereignty & promises of God. |
| 1747 | A Sermon Concerning the Intellectual World (published in Schneider, republished in Michael Warner,American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr., The Library of America, 1999). |
| 1752 | Elementa philosophica: containing chiefly, Noetica, or things relating to the mind or understanding: and Ethica, or things relating to the moral behavior (2 editions, one printed by Benjamin Franklin, one edited by Provost William Smith and printed in London; also printed in 1929 in Schneider) |
| 1753 | A short catechism for young children, proper to be taught them before they learn the Assembly's, or after they have learned the church catechism (2 editions) |
| 1754 | The Elements of Philosophy: containing, I. The most useful parts of logic, including both Metaphysics and Dialectic, or the Art of Reasoning: with a brief Account of the Progress of the Mind towards its highest perfection |
| 1761 | A Sermon on the Beauty of Holiness, in the worship of the Church of England |
| 1764-5 | Raphael, or the Genius of the English America,(printed in 1929 in Schneider) |
| 1767–71 | An English and Hebrew grammar, being the first short rudiments of those two languages, taught together. To which is added, a synopsis of all the parts of learning. (3 editions) |
| 1768 | The Christian Indeed; Explained, in Two Sermons, of Humility and Charity. Preached at NEW-HAVEN, June 28, 1767. |
Johnson has not garnered anywhere near the attention of his student and great rival, the Puritan theologianJohnathan Edwards; he received, for example, only two pages compared to sixteen on Jonathan Edwards in Sydney Ahlstrom's classic workA Religious History of the American People.[63] But he has been admired for his missionary work, his educational ideas, and his philosophy. Johnson has been called "a towering intellect of colonial America, a man of great curiosity and philosophical interests",[64] "the most erudite colonial Anglican theologian of the eighteenth century",[65] "The Founder of American Philosophy",[66] the "first important philosopher in colonial America and author of the first philosophy textbook published there",[67] "the first to give to education that thought and attention which his countrymen have continued to devote to it",[68] the "Father of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut",[69] and "The First Psychological Author in America".[70] His works and his list of books read between 1719 and 1755 have been used to trace the evolution of the American colonial mind by Norman Fiering and Joseph Ellis. He is the subject of two 19th-century biographies, each of which went to two editions; three 21st-century books; a number of book-lengthdissertations; and is the focus of two 21st-century books.
Johnson was among the few colonial Americans whose cultural and intellectual achievements garnered notice in Great Britain. He was a friend of both Bishop George Berkeley and his son, the Rev. George Berkeley, Jr. The author of the English Dictionary, Samuel Johnson of London, was a warm friend of his son William Samuel[71] and "knew of" the other transatlantic Dr. Johnson.[72] The American Dr. Johnson corresponded regularly with English archbishops and bishops, colonial governors, college heads in England and America, and the secretaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.[73]
His influence in the British American colonies was even greater. He was well known at Yale, where he tutored, co-administered the Berkeley scholarship program from its inception in the 1730s, and partnered with President Clap to create an Enlightenment curriculum and reform the college in the 1740s. He created the Anglican church in Connecticut, beginning with parishes founded in 1723 in New Haven, North Haven, and West Haven, and a church he built in 1724 in Stratford. By the time of his death in 1772, there were forty-three churches in the colony.[74] His Anglican disciples had spread out through all thirteen colonies and Canada by 1776. Johnson noted in a 1752 letter toBenjamin Franklin that he had "the great Satisfaction to see some of them in the first pulpits not only in Connecticut but also in Boston and York and others in some of the first places in the Land."[75]
Johnson new-model college reforms spread quickly. Rhode Island College, which is nowBrown University, opened in 1764 as anondenominational college in the "new-model" style not far from where Johnson took philosophical walks with Berkeley.[76]
In 1774, members of the board of trustees of theCollege of William and Mary, includingBenjamin Harrison,Thomas Jefferson,Peyton Randolph,George Wythe, andThomas Nelson, Jr., who later passed theLee Resolution and theDeclaration of Independence at theSecond Continental Congress inPhiladelphia, proposed to reform the college on the new-model plan of Johnson, Franklin, and Smith, which they accomplished in 1777.[77] During the Revolutionary War, Johnson's protégé, Provost William Smith, would found two more colleges in Maryland:Washington College on the east shore andSt. James College on its west shore.
While Johnson'smoral philosophy had been taught at Yale since the early 1740s, his most influential textbook on philosophy was his 1752Elementa Philosophica, a revision and major expansion of his 1731, 1743, and 1746 textbooks on moral philosophy, to include metaphysics and science, made at the request of Benjamin Franklin. In 1752, Franklin printed a fine if expensive first edition in Philadelphia, while a lower-cost second edition printed in London in 1754 appeared with Johnson's corrections and an introduction byDr. William Smith, provost of the College of Philadelphia. It has been estimated that about half of American college students between 1743 and 1776 were taught Johnson's moral philosophy.[78]
According to Colonial College historian J. David Hoeveler, "In the middle eighteenth century, the collegians who studied" the ideas of the new-model colleges "created new documents of American nationhood."[79] Three members of theCommittee of Five who edited theDeclaration of Independence were connected to Johnson: his educational partner, promoter, and publisherBenjamin Franklin ofPennsylvania; his studentRobert R. Livingston ofNew York; and his son's legal and political protégée and Yale treasurerRoger Sherman ofConnecticut. Indeed, it has been estimated that fifty-four percent of the contributors to the Declaration of Independence between September 5, 1775, and July 4, 1776, and fifty percent of the men who debated and passed it between June 28 and July 4, 1775, were connected to Johnson or his moral philosophy, making it the dominant morality at the Congress.[80]
Johnson taught many students in his fifty-nine–yearlong career as a teacher in Connecticut and New York. His most important pupil was one of the founders of the American Republic: Johnson was the father of Dr.William Samuel Johnson, aFounding Father of the United States, who attended theStamp Act Congress, theContinental Congress, theUnited States Federal Constitutional Convention, and was the firstU.S. Senator from Connecticut at the1st United States Congress, "the only man who attended all four united congresses"[81] that founded America. He followed his father's footsteps, attending Yale and becoming president ofColumbia College. A lawyer often called to argue in interstate disputes and a colonial agent to England from 1767 to 1772, he is best known as the chairman of theCommittee of Style that wrote the U.S. Constitution:edits to a draft version are in his hand in theLibrary of Congress.
Johnson's missionary efforts in Connecticut have thrived and expanded. Christ Church, Stratford, remains an active and successful parish. A third church building was built in 1858 in theCarpenter Gothic Style to replace Johnson's 1743 building; but the bell and the golden "brass" rooster weather vane that Johnson donated to the second 1743 church were installed in its steeple, and still call people to worship today. Out of this one church, Johnson founded 26 other churches in Connecticut colony himself, and he lived to see forty-three total founded in the state, with seventeen more founded by his disciples before his death in 1772. Today, there are more than one hundred seventy Episcopalian parishes in the state, serving a membership of nearly sixty thousand people.[82]
Johnson closed his Stratford Common School in 1752, but his name is memorialized in theStratford Academy's Johnson House, the facility for grades three (3) through six (6). Its motto isTantum eruditi sunt liberi "Only the educated are free".
The college he founded, King's College, was renamed by the New York Assembly after the Revolutionary War, and is now Columbia University. For over two hundred years, "Columbia has been a leader in higher education in the nation and around the world."[83] In one ranking in 2008, it was tied with two others as the top ranked American university.[84]Nobel Prize winner, Columbia president, and American philosopherNicholas Murray Butler summed up Johnson's impact as an educator and philosopher: "Suffice it to say here that Samuel Johnson was, with all his obvious limitations, a very remarkable man. No one but a remarkable man could have had his career, have rendered his public service, or have had his vision of what world-wide illumination might follow from the flickering little candle which he lighted in the vestry room of Trinity Church during the summer months of 1754."[85]
In 1999, Johnson's "Sermon Concerning the Intellectual World" was published in Michael Warner'sAmerican Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr., an anthology of just fifty-eight American sermons from colonial times to theCivil Rights Movement.[86]
In 2006, the Columbia University Engineering Alumni Association (CEAA) created theSamuel Johnson Medal for Distinguished Achievement Beyond the Realm of Science or Engineering. The medal seeks to commemorate Samuel Johnson's life and emphasis on a well-rounded person applying their training in fields beyond their formal education. The Samuel Johnson Medal honors the highest achievement across the entire arc of human endeavor wherever rigor and methodical thinking and actions are applied beyond the traditional fields of science and engineering. Such fields may include education, law, public affairs, business, social sciences, architecture, and the arts, whether in commerce, public service, or academia.[87][88]
Johnson's moral philosophy did not long outlast the Revolution in college classrooms, as "Scottish realism became the academic prop of American higher education" all the way through "the middle of the eighteenth century".[89] However, Johnson's moral philosophy, defined in his textbookElementa Philosophica as "the Art of pursuing our highest Happiness by the universal practice of virtue",[90] influenced the core documents of the American Republic, and hence his work is still active in the governing and culture of America as embodied in the phrase,"life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness". Dr. Samuel Johnson, along with Dr. Benjamin Franklin and Dr. William Smith, may be considered one of the “Founding Grandfathers” who "first created the idealistic moral philosophy of 'the pursuit of Happiness', and then taught it in American colleges to the generation of men who would become the Founding Fathers."[91] Today, there is once again a great deal of intellectual activity on the philosophy ofhappiness.[92]
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