CHAPTER 1

Experimentation in Antebellum Higher Education

The conclusion of the American Civil War is often characterized as a watershed moment in the nation’s transition to modernity. It marked the victory of the northern capitalist economy, free labor, and bourgeois values; the industrialization of production; the rise of science and new technologies; the expansion of a national bureaucracy; federal sponsorship of internal improvements in transportation, commerce, and defense; and the final subjugation of a retreating frontier. The land-grant college movement is usually folded into this narrative as a manifestation of a shift to modern higher education. Specifically, the land-grant colleges and universities represent the rise of federal involvement in higher education, the triumph of science (especially applied science) in the curricula, expanded access, and utilitarianism. Such interpretations have led historians to view higher education as being disconnected from antebellum society, in which the nineteenth-century colleges are viewed as bastions of aristocratic privilege and rearguard defenders of conservative culture in the face of an incipient bourgeois order.1
Revisionist historians have challenged the traditional view of antebellum higher education. In the decades prior to the Civil War, the American college was more innovative than has traditionally been assumed, as even stalwart purveyors of the classics, such as Yale College, expanded the curriculum to embrace new scientific disciplines. The rise of scientific study in American colleges proved a critical development, for some science faculty, notably Benjamin Silliman (b. 1779, d. 1864), would go on to educate a generation of future scientists and academic leaders. Westward expansion and the development of transportation and trade networks prompted a market revolution, in which the logic of markets transformed the social, cultural, and economic patterns of living among a heretofore subsistence-minded, agricultural population. Individuals embracing this market mentalité would ultimately look to higher education for skills and knowledge to enhance their ability to produce marketable goods and services. In response to these demands, new institutional forms—lyceums, agricultural colleges, mechanics’ institutes, polytechnics, and multipurpose colleges—arrived with missions to offer higher education with clear, marketable ends. American higher education was also altered in the antebellum era through the influence of European universities and scholars. With limited options for doctoral education in the United States, American students traveled abroad to study chemistry, botany, geology, and natural philosophy. Upon returning, these individuals were pivotal in establishing “schools of science” at Yale, Harvard, and Dartmouth and in bringing a scientific outlook to the new state agricultural colleges in New York and Pennsylvania. Whether as appendages to traditional colleges or as independent scientific schools, these institutions were premised on elevating American science to the European standard.2
All of these developments occurred prior to the Morrill Act of 1862 and are a reminder of the institutional diversity that anteceded land-grant colleges. This chapter explores each of these developments to illustrate that the land-grant idea was far from original but was in fact a reform movement indicative of a period of higher education innovation.

Science and the American College

Benjamin Silliman entered Yale University in 1796, where he received BA and MA degrees. Upon graduation, he was content to follow his late father into the law as a gateway to a position of authority. He penned his mother that “in a country like ours this profession is a staircase by which talent and industry will conduct their possessor to the very pinnacle of usefulness and fame.… This pinnacle is constantly in my eye.” Silliman practiced the law for a few years until President Timothy Dwight IV of Yale invited his former student to return to New Haven.3
President Timothy Dwight was a staunch Federalist and a leading defender of Connecticut’s established Congregational Church, and he recruited tutors with orthodox beliefs on religion and the social order. As a minister, theologian, and educator, Dwight was appalled at the destabilizing excesses and infidel philosophies of the French Revolution and Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. Yale remained a stronghold of federalist principles and Calvinist orthodoxy, where tutors schooled future gentlemen in Latin and Greek through a classical course in logic, grammar, rhetoric, and mathematics, but Dwight was also excited by the discoveries of chemistry pioneers Joseph Priestly and Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and insisted that scientific studies be added to the curriculum. Like many religious leaders of the era, the Yale president was able to incorporate the expanding natural sciences into his worldview. Dwight rejected claims that science and religion were incompatible, and he enthusiastically embraced a moderate enlightenment in which science could illuminate the breadth and complexity of God’s creation.4
In July 1801, Benjamin Silliman, then a tutor in his second semester, walked across the Yale courtyard with President Dwight to discuss a teaching offer from the University of Georgia. Dwight discouraged his departure and exclaimed that his young disciple was needed in New Haven for an “effort which would promise … usefulness [and] reputation … [in a] field [that] will be all your own.” As Silliman stood bewildered, the president played on the young man’s dreams of grandeur: “Our country, as regards the physical sciences, is rich in unexplored treasures, and by aiding in their development you will perform an important public service, and connect your name to the rising reputation of our native land.” With these words, Silliman was persuaded to become the first professor of natural science at Yale, a task for which he was woefully ill prepared.5
Silliman was educated within the confines of a classical curriculum that stressed logic, grammar, rhetoric, moral philosophy, and the ancient languages. While it was the proper education for one looking to the learned professions or public life, it offered Silliman little exposure to the scientific and mathematical subjects needed to teach chemistry. To prepare for his duties, he traveled to Philadelphia, where he spent two years under the tutelage of chemists at the University of Pennsylvania’s Medical College. Having mastered the basics, Silliman departed for advanced study at the University of Edinburgh’s renowned medical college, and during breaks, he visited laboratories and attended scientific lectures in England, Holland, and Scotland.6
With no men of science on the faculty of American colleges, aspiring botanists, chemists, and natural philosophers had few choices for academic preparation beyond private tutoring or study abroad. Indeed, Benjamin Silliman’s European journey was a rite of passage for the first generation of American science professors. Benjamin Smith Barton returned to the University of Pennsylvania from the University of Edinburgh in 1789 well versed in scientific methods and with five thousand plant species to supplement his courses in applied botany and materia medica. Columbia sought to advance the scientific orientation of its medical college by hiring alumnus David Hosack as a botanist. Like Silliman, Hosack had a classical education, which left him with a “total ignorance of botany.” In 1792, he went abroad to attend the University of Edinburgh before studying with a botanist at the University of Cambridge. At Harvard, in 1804, William Dandridge Peck became the university’s first professor in natural history. The Harvard Corporation allotted $2,100 to send Peck to Europe “to acquaint himself with the object and the manner of instruction as it is given in the seminaries where the knowledge of nature has been cultivated with the greatest ability and effect.” The novice botanist traveled to the herbarium of Professor Carl Thumberg at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, explored the garden and laboratories at the University of Kiel in Germany, and visited the medical garden at the University of Leyden in Holland. Peck concluded his trip with a yearlong sojourn to the botanical epicenter of Jardin des Plantes in Paris.7
FIGURE 1. Benjamin Silliman, Yale College professor and scientist, in 1825. John Trumbull, 1825. Oil on wood. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
Inspired by formative journeys abroad, the pioneering professors of natural science returned home with a reformer’s zeal. Silliman, Hosack, Peck, and Barton organized laboratories and academic coursework in botany, chemistry, geology, materia medica, and natural philosophy. American colleges remained committed to the classical course, but there was no ignoring the advances in science bubbling across the Atlantic. Embracing a moderate enlightenment, the theological leaders of American colleges incorporated the natural sciences into their Christian worldview. Pre-Darwinian science need not challenge established authority but could become part and parcel of acceptable learning for Christian gentlemen. In the antebellum era, then, several classical colleges hired scientists and increased curricular offerings in the natural sciences. Some graduates who partook of this scientific fare became the presidents and first faculty of the schools of sciences, land-grant colleges, and research universities that surfaced later in the century.

The Market Revolution

Gordon Wood explains how the War of Independence shattered traditional hierarchies that separated gentlemen from commoners, but of course it did not extinguish pockets of privilege and power that could be accrued through learning and wealth. In the early years of the United States, young men pursued a liberal education for cultural refinement and entrance into a latent aristocracy of state and church leaders or as members of the learned professions. The classical studies of language, rhetoric, and logic could serve one well in an oral culture where facility in debate and syllogistic exchange brought success in the statehouse, the courtroom, and the public square. For the 1–2 percent of white males who enrolled in higher education during the period, a classical education was indeed useful for public life. This group would represent a stable clientele demanding traditional academic offerings well into the nineteenth century.8
Notwithstanding the persistence of traditional curricula, American higher education would change—albeit slowly, belatedly, and reluctantly—in response to dramatic changes in the American economy. Charles Sellers writes in The Market Revolution that the new nation would undergo a “generation of conflict over the republic’s destiny … [as] history’s most revolutionary force, the capitalist market, was wresting America’s future from history’s most conservative force, the land.”9 The political liberalism unleashed by revolution morphed into an ascendant economic liberalism where individuals pursued social progress through buying and selling on the markets that began to imbue society. While there were indeed transatlantic markets and an established merchant class in the eighteenth century, transportation improvements into the continental interior during the early nineteenth century greatly expanded domestic market activity. The development of turnpikes, canals, improved river navigation, and the National Road spurred new domestic trade networks and introduced marketable goods and a market mentalité deeper into the hinterland. As John Lauritz Larson has argued, the difference that separated “colonial merchant capitalism from its mature, modern successor was the extent of penetration into the daily lives of ordinary people.”10 Farmers began shelving subsistence planting in favor of cultivating profitable crops or manufacturing homemade handicrafts for market, and they became active consumers of both necessities and luxuries. In the past, knowledge of traditional practices was the key to maintaining farm and home, but in a world of market exchange, access to new knowledge and inventions could increase product yields, spur entrepreneurial ventures, and increase profits. The wealthy were intent on benefiting from the new markets as well; they transformed landed wealth into capital, built large factories, enjoyed the benefits of economies of scale, and donned new identities as bourgeoisie. Indeed, as a class, the bourgeoisie sought to harness “useful” knowledge to increase productivity and market returns.11
The market revolution changed standards of utility and the meaning of useful knowledge, and reframed the debate around the purpose of higher education. Critics of the American college arose to dismiss the classical curriculum as antiquated for this emerging socioeconomic order. Frederick Rudolph links a host of 1820s curricular innovations at places like Union College, Miami University of Ohio, the University of Vermont, and Amherst College with public demands for “something more meaningful and useful for contemporary life.” For example, he highlights partial programs where students could elect courses outside the fixed curriculum or pursue “English-scientific” programs emphasizing “English language instruction, modern languages, applied mathematics, and political economy.” To reformers, the classics were a relic of a bygone world, whereas the parallel English-scientific, literary-scientific, and all other iterations signaled, in the words of Rudolph, that the “colleges were being adapted to new goals and new social and economic facts.”12
At Yale, faculty members responded to these demands from “different quarters … that … colleges must be new-modeled.” In a rebuff to proponents of utilitarianism, the faculty penned a resounding defense of the classical curriculum, popularly referred to as the Yale Reports of 1828. This manifesto was published in Benjamin Silliman’s Journal of Science and the Arts, where it was read far and wide by academic audiences and provided a distinction between “liberal” and “useful” studies. The colleges should not, according to the committee, “make the ludicrous attempt” to mimic the grand, graduate-education designs of the German universities but instead remain committed to undergraduate study, which provided “the foundation of a superior education.” In other words, the American college should be a repository of general knowledge and culture and a prerequisite to graduate or professional study. The Yale Reports contended that a college curriculum should be grounded in classics and careful study of ancient languages to nurture “discipline of the mind,” a loosely defined concept referencing aptitude in reasoning, focus, and logic. Useful or practical knowledge was termed the “furniture of the mind.” Whether in business or commerce, agriculture, or mechanics, the Yale Reports stated that this “furniture” should be pursued outside the college. For such practical accruements, “the young merchant must be trained in the counting room, the mechanic, in the workshop, the farmer, in the field.” As for the scientific and mathematics courses introduced by Benjamin Silliman and his compatriots at the beginning of the century, “these could nurture discipline of the mind if approached in a theoretical manner.” The writings of Isaac Newton and the discoveries of Priestly could help develop analytical and logical reasoning, but scientific applications to practical prob...