VOLUME II
INTRODUCTION
THE CLASSICAL CURRICULUM OF THE EARLY AMERICAN COLLEGE
Not every young man who completed the course of studies
at a Latin grammar school or under the tutelage of a local minister attended
college in early America. Those who did not pursue the full course of studies
offered by an early American college formed a highly literate segment of
the American population. But those who completed their studies through
the collegiate level constituted the heart and soul of a truly intellectual
and elitist stratification of American society - an especially important
consideration in the late eighteenth century when this group of individuals,
moreso than any other group, was called upon to create and administer a
new government.
Not all young men who presented themselves for admission
to an early American college were equal in academic ability or preparation.
In fact, basic admission requisites were even waived in some instances,
as happened in the case of a George Harston at Princeton who was "admitted
to study with the sophomore class, without being considered as a candidate
for a diploma, unless he acquire a competent knowledge of the Greek language,
with which he is totally unacquainted."1
Regardless of the differences of natural ability
and preparation of the entering students, the president and faculty of
the early American colleges, by and large, could be reasonably sure of
the following general characteristics in the first year students, newly
arrived on his campus:
1. a student body accustomed to hard and disciplined study which
included
a 6 A.M. to 5 P.M. school day, lasting
six days per week, for nearly ten
months out of the year.
2. a student body accustomed to lengthy lectures some of which lasted
three to four hours, frequently delivered in
Latin.
3. a student body accustomed to extensive memory work and much oral
recitation.
4. a student body accustomed to a strictly regulated social environment.
5. a student body which valued dearly its own books and was granted
admission to the institution's highly prized
library as a matter of
privilege.
6. a student body which was universally familiar with the Latin language
and grammar and occasionally acquainted with
Greek grammar, less
frequently familiar with Hebrew grammar, and
trained in the principles
and use of classical metrics and rhetoric.
7. a student body which had a homogeneous literary background -
i.e., virtually an identical exposure to a common
set of ancient writers.
8. a student body exposed to a corpus of classical literature which
was
not considered as antagonistic to, but complementary
to its already
firm grasp of biblical literature.
9. a student body weaned on a body of ancient literature which emphasized
the personal and intrinsic values of respect
for authority and elders,
filial duty, temperance, frugality, self-discipline,
agrarian simplicity, and
religious piety, as well as being exposed to
the public values of service
to church and state, patriotism, military courage,
and hatred of tyranny,
among other values.
10. finally, the college president, although one or two generations
older
than the young freshman in his college,
could easily relate to the
intellectual training of that student, since
it was, in all likelihood,
identical to that which he had received as a
youth, and to that which,
in all probability his own teacher had received
in his youth.2
The early American college that the aspiring and
ambitious 18th century American student entered was one that
took as its model the European university system. It borrowed from those
universities many practices which contributed to an intensive "classical
atmosphere" on the early American collegiate campus. Among these practices
was recording, in Latin, the institution's disciplinary code which, at
some of the colonial colleges, entering students were required to translate
into English either as part of their admission examination or shortly after
enrollment as a part of a translation exercise.3
Faculty lectures at some of the early American colleges were even delivered
in Latin and students were expected to speak in the Latin tongue at all
times, in and out of the classroom. Any violation of this regulation resulted
in a student fine. At those institutions where the practice of mandatory
conversation in Latin was not faithfully maintained, the college often
resorted to awarding annual cash prizes to promote the use of the Latin
tongue in conversation. All students were expected to keep a "commonplace
book" of the eloquent expressions and wise maxims they encountered in their
reading of the traditional classical authors. These "commonplace books"
were also subject to periodic examination by the faculty. Furthermore,
many philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, natural science and divinity textbooks
were written in Latin, and it was assumed that the student had a sufficiently
facile reading knowledge of Latin to readily understand these text books.
Since one of the primary goals of a college education in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, both in Europe and America, was the attainment
of skill in public speaking, the American college student honed his oratorical
abilities by intensively studying and implementing the principles and techniques
of classical rhetoric which were extensively described in the treatises
of Quintilian and Cicero. By engaging in Latin debates (disputations) and
by preparing speeches (declamations) in Latin and English, at least on
a monthly basis and sometimes as frequently as on a weekly basis, the early
American college student achieved high levels of oratorical skill.4
Finally, in his senior year the student spent several months preparing
Latin disputations and declamations which comprised an extensive part of
the elaborate and formal commencement exercises, which frequently lasted
for a whole day and were a much anticipated and extremely well attended
community event.5
Similar to the development and structure of the Latin
grammar school curriculum in the colonies, the curricular format of the
early American college was also not an original creation by the colonists.
It was borrowed from the European university system, especially the English
university system, whose undergraduate curriculum during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries concentrated on training students in the Seven
Liberal Arts. This educational tradition, which can be traced through the
Middle Ages back to Antiquity itself, consisted of the trivium (grammar,
logic and rhetoric) and the quadrivium
(mathematics, astronomy,
theology and music). The common understanding of the trivium was
that grammar meant the study of the three languages (Greek, Latin and Hebrew)
and that logic and rhetoric were defined almost exclusively as "Classical"
logic and rhetoric.6
The deliberate American imitation of the English
university system is evidenced in the Latin address (here translated) of
the President of Harvard College in the seventeenth century when he presented
the graduates to the Board of Overseers for acceptance:
Honourable Gentlemen and Reverend Ministers, I present to you
these youths, whom I know to be sufficient in learning as in manners
to be raised to the First Degree in Arts, according to the custom
of
the Universities in England.
As late as 1764, the College of Rhode Island (Brown
University) also deliberately asserted its imitation of the English university
model when in its charter it stated:
And they are hereby authorized & empowered by their President &
in his Absence by the Senior Fellow or one of the Fellows appointed
by themselves at the Anniversary Commencements or at any other
times and at all Times hereafter to Admit to & Confer any & all
the
Learned Degrees which can or ought to be given and conferred in
any of the Colleges and Universities in America, Europe &
particularly in the University of Cambridge & Edinburgh in Great
Britain.7
During his first year of study then at a colonial
college, the newly arrived student was called upon to begin, or as was
most commonly the case, to improve his skills in the Greek language, and
to substantially advance his study of logic and rhetoric, to which he may
have been minimally introduced in the late years of his Latin grammar school
education. He was also called upon to reread in college many of the Latin
authors whom he had encountered in his Latin grammar school experience.
Among those Latin authors most commonly read in the first year of college
were Virgil, Cicero (orations), Caesar, Horace, Livy and Sallust. During
the second and third years of college, the Latin authors most frequently
read were: Cicero (philosophical essays), Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, Quintilian,
Terence and Tacitus. Finally, the fourth year was often considered as a
review year, designed to prepare the student for the final, public examinations.
Once again, many of these same classical authors were reread.
Unlike the curricular rigidity demonstrated by the
early American Latin grammar schools, the colonial colleges were considerably
more flexible in their course offerings and areas of academic concentration.
As a result of this variety, not all of the Latin authors previously mentioned
were studied in each of the early American colleges in exactly the same
sequence, but it is worthy to note that after four years of study the graduate
of any one of the different early American colleges had a familiarity with
the vast majority of the same Latin authors as did his fellow graduates
at any other early American college.
Because of the scarcity of records or the incomplete
nature of existing records, the details of the classical component of the
American collegiate curriculum in the seventeenth century cannot be known
with the same degree of certainty as the details of the curricula of American
colleges in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However,
the following list is a reasonably accurate description of the Harvard
curriculum around 1690:
First Year
Second Year
Third Year
Fourth Year
Cicero
Logic
Meletemata
Geometry
Virgil
Wollebius
Physics
Astronomy
Homer
Herebrand -
Ethicks
Grammar
Greek Testament
Meletemata
Geography
Logic
Greek Catechism
Greek
Metaphysics
Natural
Philosophy
Forsahe
Hebrew
Wollebius -
Ames'
Medulla
Rhetorick
Disputations
Divinity
Disputations
Logic
Disputations
Hebrew
By 1787, Harvard's records are much more explicit about which specific
classical authors were studied in its undergraduate curriculum:
First Year
Second Year
Third Year
Fourth Year
Sallust
Continue
Continue
Continue
Livy
Classical
Classical
Third Year
Virgil
authors of
authors of
Studies
Tully (orations
first year
second year
& de oratore)
Speaking and
Livy
Caesar (com-
Declaiming
Terence
mentaries)
Algebra
Greek Testament
Horace
Chronology and
Divinity
Homer
History
Chronology and
Xenophon (Anabasis)
Hebrew or French
History
French
Hebrew or French
Rhetoric
Speaking and Declaiming
Arithmetic
Chronology and History
Hebrew or French
The earliest descriptions of the curriculum at Yale,
founded in 1701, are not much more detailed than those of early Harvard.
In fact, as late as 1778 the Yale curriculum appears to be described in
such a way that its sole objective was the desire to satisfy the traditional
seven liberal arts curriculum, less music, of the European university system:
First Year
Second Year
Third Year
Fourth Year
Virgil
Greek Testament
Trigonometry
Locke
Cicero (orations)
Horace
Greek Testament Wollebius
Greek Testament
Grammar
Cicero (de oratore) Natural
Religion
Arithmetic
Logic
Geography
Philosophy
Ames
Medulla
Algebra
Grammar
Greek
Testament
Geometry
Ethicks
Rhetorick
Catechism
Mathematics
By 1824, Yale's records become much more complete, when at least for
the first three years of instruction, the following classical authors were
included in its course of studies:
First Year
Second Year
Third Year
Livy - five books
Horace - Odes
Cicero - de oratore
& Satires
Adam's-
Tacitus -
Roman
Histories
Antiquities
Cicero -
Germania
Greek Anthology
de officiis
Agricola
Xenophon -
de senectute
Homer - Iliad
Cyropaedia &
de amicitia
Greek Anthology
Anabasis
Greek Anthology
Sophocles
Herodotus
Demosthenes
Euripides
Thucydides
Xenophon -
Lysias
Memorabilia
Isocrates
Plato
Aristotle
The most definitive description of an eighteenth-century
collegiate curriculum, and, it should be added, the most classical of all
of the curricula of early American colleges was that of King's (Columbia)
College whose 1763 curriculum included:
First Year
Second Year
Third Year
Fourth Year
Sallust -
Cicero -
Cicero -
Cicero -
Historia
officia
orations
Tusculan
et alia
de oratore
Disputations
Caesar -
Quintus Curtius
Commentaries
Ovid -
Terence
Quintilian -
Livy
Metamorphoses
Ovid -
Institutio
Tacitus -
et alia
Epistles
Oratoria
Histories
Virgil -
Virgil -
Eclogues
Georgics
Esop-Fables
Pliny -
Lucan -
Epistles
Pharsalia
Lucian -
New Testament
Catullus
Dialogues
New Testament
Epictetus
Tibullus
Juvenal
Grotius -
Xenophon -
Propertius
Persius -
De veritate
Institutio
Satires
Cyri &
Horace
Plant.
Com.
Latin Grammar
Anabasis
Aristotle -
Homer -
Odyssey
Greek Grammar
Farnab. Epig.
Ethics &
Sophocles
English and Latin
Greek Grammar
Poetics
Euripides
themes
Latin Grammar
Plato -
Aeschylus
Cornelius Nepos
Wallesius -
Dialogues
Thucydides
Logic
Xenophon -
Herodotus
Sanderson -
Memorabilia Longinus-
Composition
de sublimitate
Theocritus
Johnson -
Homer
Demosthenes
Noetica
Compendium Orations
Rhetoric
Ethicae
Dionysius
Latin and
Metaphysics Halicarnassus
English themes
Syllogistic Isocrates
and verse
disputations Hebrew
Grammar
Latin and Biblical
Hebrew
English themes Grotius
Latin and Pufendorf
English verses Hutcheson
Moral
Philosophy
Latin and
EnglishVerses
Disputations
LatinThemes
Fifty years later, in 1811, Columbia had retained,
virtually intact, the same list of classical authors included in its 1763
curriculum, with only the sequence altered in which these authors were
studied:
First Year
Second Year
Third Year
Fourth Year
Cicero -
Virgil -
Cicero -
Classical
Letters
Georgics
de oratore
authors at
to Atticus
Livy
Terence
discretion
Sallust -
Horace -
Quintilian
of Provost
entire
Odes and Epistles
Horace -
Horace-second time Mathematics
Satires
Greek
Demosthenes
Natural
Anthology
Philosophy
Homer
Longinus-entire
Astronomy
Xenophon -
Herodotus
Sophocles
English
Memorabilia
Composition
Greek and Roman
Greek and Roman Criticism
Lucian
Antiquities
Antiquities
Grammar
Double Translations
Double Translations
Double Translations Declamations
History and
Latin Verse
Latin Composition
Latin and Greek
Chronology
Roman Antiquities
in prose and verse
Composition in
Moral
prose and verse
Philosophy
Similar listings for the majority of
other 18th century American colleges evidence the constancy
of the classical curriculum at the collegiate level. What can easily be
lost sight of is that this extraordinary homogeneity of curricular content
among early American colleges did not prevent each college from making
a deliberate and conscious effort to establish its own personality or academic
specialty. The College of New Jersey (Princeton), for example, was especially
dedicated to the study of natural science, as well as to the classics,
while Yale was committed to Hebraic and theological studies, in addition
to its traditional classical courses. However, no matter what the special
characteristic was of any of the early American colleges, there was found
in each a universal and unswerving adherence to the study of the classical
languages and literatures. Among the Latin authors read, the following
list indicates those authors and those individual works which were most
commonly studied in American colleges from 1650 to 1850:
Catullus
Juvenal
Caesar-Commentaries
Livy
Cicero-Orations:
Lucan
Catilinarians
Nepos
pro Milone
Ovid-Metamorphoses
Letters: Epistles to Atticus
Persius Essays
Propertius/Tibullus
de officiis
Quintilian
de oratore
Sallust-Historia
de senectute
Tacitus-Histories
de amicitia
Agricola
Tusculan Disputations
Germania
Terence
Horace-Odes
Virgil-Aeneid
Satires
Eclogues
Epistles
Georgics
The stability of the early American collegiate
curriculum, with its deep rooted classical bias, and its universal acceptance
of that tradition by the public for more than two hundred years, from the
founding of the colonies through the early Republic, seem to indicate that
early American colleges had a very clear idea of their goals and raison
d'etre. For example, in its 1701 charter Yale succinctly states its
purpose: "to educate a succession of Learned and Orthodox men who would
benefit the colony through Publick employment both in Church and Civil
State."8 The same purpose is stated
more abundantly by one of the original trustees of the College of New Jersey
(Princeton) in the late 1740s:
Tho' our great Intention was to erect a Seminary for educating
Ministers
of the Gospel, that we might have a sufficient Number of pious &
well
qualified Men to supply the demands of our Churches, & propagate
the
kingdom of the Redeemer among those who have hitherto lived in darkness
and ignorance, yet we hope it will be a means of training up men
that will
be useful in the other professions - ornaments of the state as well
as
the church....
It undoubtedly must have been difficult for the early
American college student to grasp how he would one day be useful to the
church and to state as he labored over his Latin, Greek and Hebrew in what
he must have interpreted as insurmountable assignments, as, for example,
those which a student at Princeton describes in a letter in 1803:
Dear Father:
I arrived here on Tuesday, the 10th instant, and on Wednesday I stood,
together with four others, a severe and close examination for about
five
hours. We were examined on Horace, Lucian, Arithmetic and Kennet's
Antiquities and should have been in English Grammar. My being admitted
into the Sophomore class was not owing so much to my real knowledge
as
to my own dissemblance and presence of mind and the benevolence
of Dr.
Thompson whose favour I had acquired beforehand. But now I am advanced
to severe study for instead of fifteen lines in Lucian I have to
recite fifty
or sixty in Xenophon, a book which I never saw until I came here,
and
instead of forty in Virgil have about 600 in Horace, etc.9
Whether or not the early American college student
appreciated the rigor of the training which he was receiving during his
undergraduate stay is a moot question, since the results of that educational
process speak for themselves. Simply stated, early American collegiate
education, with its pronounced classical bias, successfully met the stated
goals of Yale and Princeton and of all of the other colleges, namely,
to prepare young men for service to church and state. There is no
better testimony of this success in meeting its stated purpose than the
record of accomplishment of the 469 graduates of Princeton during the presidency
of the Rev. John Witherspoon (1769-1794). Several of Princeton's graduates
from that era entered the clergy and, of the remainder, Princeton happily
numbered 50 state legislators, 12 governors, 30 judges, 3 Supreme Court
judges, 10 cabinet officers, 39 U.S. representatives, 21 U.S. senators,
1 vice-president, and one president (James Madison). For those Princeton
graduates who did not enter public life, the value of their classical education
was not wasted but increased in merit throughout the lifetime of the graduate:
Throughout life the graduate continued grateful to the college
for the
intellectual fields which it had opened to him. Perhaps he did not
deserve
the reputation for erudition which he enjoyed among his neighbors,
for
his scholarship was neither deep nor broad, but when tired out with
the
supervision of the plantation, or weary with the problems and conflicting
interests of political life, he might turn again with a sigh of
relief to his
Homer or his Horace. The chief and the most lasting benefits of
his
studies at Princeton were the enriching of his character and mind,
the
introduction they gave him to Greek and Latin literature and art,
to
natural science, to philosophy and history.10
As we look back from the vantage point of the twentieth-century
upon the liabilitiesand merits of the classical curriculum in the early
American college, we can immediately recognize the personal values of self-discipline,
perseverance and industry which the collegian derived from his mode of
studies. But he also was exposed to an educational process which continually
reinforced norms of excellence for him in the use of language, both in
written and oral expression, and in the cultivation of moral and literary
taste.
All of these qualities were consciously perceived
by our forefathers and they are crisply summarized by Professor Kingsley
of Yale in the early 1820s when a heated faculty debate on the retention
or modification of the classical curriculum took place at that institution:
Familiarity with the Greek and Roman writers is especially adapted
to
form the taste, to discipline the mind, both in thought and diction,
to the
relish of what is elevated, chaste and simple. The compositions
which
these writers have left us, both in prose and verse, whether considered
in regard to structure, style, modes of illustration or general
expression,
approach nearer than any others to what the human mind, when thoroughly
informed and disciplined, of course approves and constitute what
is most
desirable to possess, a standard for determining literary merit.11
The "Reading" selections of Volume II are selected from those
Latin authors who were read primarily at the collegiate level in early
America. Cicero's
de officiis, Horace's Odes and Epistles,
Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Virgil's Aeneid, Eclogues and Georgics
are omitted since, although these works were frequently reread in college,
they were first read in the Latin grammar school and have been included
in Volume I. Also, since the sequence of study of classical authors often
varied in the early American colleges, the Latin authors included in this
section are presented according to the two genres which were most extensively
studied: historical and rhetorical.
Endnotes
1. See Princeton University Faculty
Minutes 1787-1810, entry for May 11, 1803. Princeton University Archives.
2. In 1910 President Eliot of Harvard
University, in an address commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Boston
Latin Grammar School, underscored the constancy and uniformity of classical
curriculum of the early American Latin grammar school when he stated: "Sixty
years ago, when I entered it (1844), the subjects of instruction were Latin,
Greek, mathematics, English composition and declamation, and the elements
of Greek and Roman history. There was no formal instruction in the English
language and literature, no modern language, no science, and no physical
training, or military drill. In short, the subjects of instruction were
what they had been for two hundred years." See Pauline Holmes, A Tercentenary
History of the Boston Public Latin School, 1635-1935 (Greenwood Press,
Publishers; Westport, Connecticut 1970; reprint of 1935 publication by
Harvard University Press) p. 275.
3. An example of a mid-eighteenth century
Latin regulation for students at Yale College can be found in Walter C.
Bronson, The History of Brown University 1764-1914 (Brown University
Press; Providence, Rhode Island 1914) pp. 112-13. The regulation forbids
a student to drink tea with others outside of his own chamber room, at
the penalty of one shilling: Et si quis, in aliquo Coetu extra Cubiculum
suum, Theam potaverit, mulctetur uno Solido. Harvard College's laws
were also written in Latin, and revised from time to time; see Samuel Eliot
Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, Part II (Harvard
University Press; Cambridge, Massachusetts 1936) p. 477.
4.The emphasis on the study of rhetoric
and oratory was universal in the early American college. Some idea of the
extent to which oratorical exercises were conducted in the early American
college can be gained from the following description of the curriculum
at the College of New Jersey in 1764: "The Senior year is entirely employed
in reviews of composition. They now revise the most improving parts of
the Latin and Greek classics; part of the Hebrew bible, and all the arts
and sciences. The weekly course of disputation is continued, which was
also carried on through the preceding year. They discuss two or three theses
in a week; some in the syllogistic, and others in the forensic manner,
alternately; the forensic being always performed in the english tongue.
A series of questions is also prepared, on the principal subjects of natural
and revealed religion. These are delivered publicly on Sundays, before
a promiscuous (i.e., indiscriminate) congregation, as well as the college,
in order to habituate them early to face an assembly, as also for other
important and religious ends, to which they are bound conducive. There
is likewise a monthly oration day, when harangues, or orations of their
own composition, are pronounced before a mixt auditory. All these compositions
before mentioned, are critically examined with respect to the language,
orthography, pointing, capitalizing, with the other minutiae, as well as
more material properties of accurate writing. Besides these exercises in
writing and speaking, most of which are proper to the Senior class, on
every Monday three, and on the other evenings of the week, excepting Saturdays
and Sundays, two out of each of the three inferior classes, in rotation,
pronounce declamations of their own composing on the stage. These too are
previously examined and corrected, and occasion taken from them early to
form a taste for good writing. The same classes also, in rotation, three
on Tuesday evenings, and two on the other evenings, with the exceptions
just mentioned, pronounce, in like manner, such select pieces from Cicero,
Demosthenes, Livy, and other ancient authors." An Account of the College
of New Jersey, printed by James Parker 1764, Woodbridge, New Jersey,
pp. 24-26. Princeton University Archives; the parentheses are mine.
5. For a most interesting description
of the pomp and cimcumstances, and even rowdy disturbances, which accompanied
the commencement exercises of an early American college, see Ashbel Green's
early nineteenth century narrative of his visitation to Harvard College
during commencement week, Joseph H. Jones, The Life of Ashbel Green
(Robert
Carter and Brothers; New York 1849) pp. 234-37.
6. For a thorough discussion of the
English university system as a backdrop to the development of the American
university system, see Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard
College (Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Massachusetts, second
printing 1968) pp. 1-116.
7. See Louis F. Snow,
The College
Curriculum in the United States (Teachers College, Columbia University,
New York 1907) p. 20.
8. See Warch, School of the Prophets,
pp. 186-87.
9. Louis F. Snow, The College
Curriculum in the United States, p. 177. See also Francis L.
Broderick, "Pulpit, Physics, and Politics: The Curriculum of the College
of New Jersey, 1746-1794," William & Mary Quarterly 6, (1949),
pp. 42-68.
10. Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Princeton
1746-1896 (Princeton University Press; Princeton, New Jersey 19460,
p. 214.
11.Louis F. Snow,
The College Curriculum
in the United States
