Entry by Albert E. Van Dusen

Calvinist, poet, and educator, Dwight was graduated from Yale College in 1769 with highest honors. After two years of teaching in a New Haven grammar school, he returned to Yale for six years as a tutor. Resigning in 1777, he was appointed chaplain for General Samuel H. Parsons' First Connecticut Brigade. Forced to resign in 1778 by the death of his Tory father, he returned to Northampton where he struggled to support his family, did some preaching, and established an academy for girls as well as boys; and, to Ezra Stiles' consternation, even attracted some Yale students. Active in town affairs, he was elected twice to the General Assembly.

Deciding that politics was not for him since he did not want to be forced to sacrifice his principles for the sake of party unity, in 1783 he accepted a call to the affluent community of Greenfield Hill, Fairfield County, where he gradually succeeded not only in abolishing the Half-Way Covenant in his own church but also in others throughout New England. An eloquent and fluent speaker, he usually spoke extemporaneously. Again he founded a coeducational academy which soon gained a national reputation and attracted students from far and wide, once more even from Yale. While there, his first long epic poem, The Conquest of Caanan, was published in 1785; Greenfield Hill, in 1794; and a satire, The Triumph of Infidelity, a Poem, in 1788, thus placing him in the Connecticut Wits, a literati group devoted to the publication of patriotic belles-lettres. Always conservative in outlook, his writing and teaching were directed against the rising tide of democracy.

In 1795 he accepted the larger task of building a university and became Yale's president, marking a new era in its history. Until his death he gave Yale strong leadership, even securing much-needed money from the assembly. Although not succeeding in his desire to create a university, he increased the size and quality of both the buildings and the faculty, including the appointment of the later-renowned Benjamin Silliman as professor of chemistry and natural history, and more than doubled the size of the library. He introduced the study of law, expanded offerings in science and languages, and established a fledgling medical school. His Travels; in New-England and New-York, four volumes published in 1821-1822, is a work which still has much intrinsic historical value.

Never idle, he was active in the founding of the Missionary Society of Connecticut, the Andover Theological Seminary, the American Bible Society, and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He made Yale a place of broad intellectualism, instead of an isolated seat of learning, showing the people of the state the true value of a university in a rapidly expanding nation. A grandson of Jonathan Edwards, he succeeded in keeping the fires of revivalism burning and making Calvinism triumphant over infidelity.

For Further Reading

Cunningham, Charles E. Timothy Dwight, 1752-1817. New York, 1942.

Berk, Stephen E. Calvinism versus Democracy. Timothy Dwight and the Origins of American Evangelical Orthodoxy. Hamden, Connecticut, 1974.

Albert E. Van Dusen, Professor Emeritus of History, The University of Connecticut, and Connecticut State Historian, Emeritus

* Entry under revision.