majority of the members were not only Princetonians, but had studied their theology under him. They too had caught some of the spirit of leadership that made him great.

Dr. Witherspoon sent his full quota of ministers into the American church, but he did more. He gave the College national prominence. Among his graduates were a President and a Vice-President of the United States, nine cabinet officers, twenty-one United States Senators, thirty-nine United States Representatives, three Justices of the United States Supreme Court, twelve Governors of States, six members of the Continental Congress, and thirty-three Judges. Of the one hundred and eighty-nine men graduated in his first ten classes, and alumni biographical records are very incomplete at least sixty-five are positively known to have served in the Revolutionary War, twenty or more being officers. These figures do not include non-graduates, like Benjamin Hawkins and Nathaniel Macon of the class of 1777, to name but two of those who achieved prominence.

His influence was even greater in educational direction. Manuscript copies of his lectures were used in more than one new college, introduced by teachers who first heard them dictated in Nassau Hall and discussed by their author. How many private tutors and modest schoolmasters Princeton of that era sent forth into the South and Southwest we do not know; allusions to them are frequent in contemporary private correspondence; but of the nineteen of Witherspoon's graduates who reached exceptional academic distinction, thirteen became presidents of colleges in eight States of the Union; and, if we may accept a fairly common contemporary impression, the fact that a man had been graduated under

TYPICAL CLASSES

97

Witherspoon was sufficient guarantee of his training, as it was of his political faith. Princetonians of his breeding were either founders or first presidents of the following colleges in Virginia, Hampden-Sidney and Washington; in Pennsylvania, Jefferson and Washington; in North Carolina, Queen's and the University of North Carolina; in South Carolina, Mount Zion; in Tennessee, Washington, Tusculum, Greenville, and the University of Nashville; in Kentucky, Transylvania; in Ohio, Ohio University; in New York, Union; and in New Jersey, Rutgers on its revival.

The class of 1773 was typical of the Princeton classes of the time. Thirteen of its twenty-nine members became clergymen, and fifteen of the twenty-nine supplied three surgeons, six officers, and one chaplain in the Revolutionary War, three members of the Continental Congress, two United States Representatives, one United States Senator, one chief justice of a State, three State Governors, five college presidents, and two moderators of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. Prominence was awaiting several of their college contemporaries. In the class of 1770 were Frederick Frelinghuysen, colonel in the Revolutionary Army, brigadier general in the United States Army, member of the Continental Congress and of the New Jersey Provincial Congress, and United States Senator; Caleb Wallace, the Kentucky constitutional lawyer and judge of the Kentucky Supreme Court; John Taylor and Matthias Williamson, both officers in the Revolutionary War. In the class of 1771 were Gunning Bedford, Jr., the Delaware lawyer and member of Congress, H. H, Brackenridge, school-teacher, chaplain, author, and judge of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. A classmate and close friend was Philip Freneau, the future editor and

mariner, the poet of the Revolution, who scribbled verses in his navigation tables, and in his ephemeral satires and ballads sacrificed a distinct lyric gift to the sterner demands of the time. Dr. Charles McKnight, the army surgeon, belonged to this class, as did James Madison, the quiet scholar who was destined to reach the White House. And here too belongs Samuel Spring, a chaplain on Arnold's Canadian expedition, sharing the terrible trials of that experience with other Princetonians, two of whom were presidents' sons, each bearing his father's name-John Witherspoon, Jr., of 1773, a surgeon, and Aaron Burr, Jr., of 1772, a lieutenant and the future Vice President of the United States. The class of 1772 of twenty-two members furnished six army chaplains, a vice president of the United States, and one attorney general of the United States. Twelve of the twenty members of the class of 1774 served in the army, three as chaplains and the others as officers; one became a justice of the Supreme Court, and three became United States senators and congressmen. The class of 1775 of twenty-seven members produced a United States Attorney General, two members of Congress, two chief justices and three justices of State supreme courts; and among its chief distinctions were its two college presidents, Thomas Brown Craighead, who founded the University of Nashville, and Samuel Doak, the frontier missionary and scholar who packed the books for the library of Washington College in Tennessee five hundred miles over the mountains on an old "flea bitten grey horse," while he trudged behind. The log meetinghouse he had built was the first church erected in Tennessee, and his log-cabin school had become Washington College, the first institution of the kind west of the Alleghenies.

AFTER THE REVOLUTION

99

After the Revolution few military names occur in the catalogue of eighteenth-century Princeton alumni, but there are still a number of distinguished public servants, such as James Ashton Bayard (1784), the United States Senator and diplomat; Peter Robert Livingston (1784), the New York legislator and lieutenant governor; Robert Goodloe Harper (1785), the soldier, and Senator Smith Thompson (1788), Chief Justice of the New York Supreme Court, Secretary of the Navy and for twenty years a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and college presidents like Robert Finley (1787), president of the University of Georgia, and his classmate E. D. Rattoone, president of Charleston College. Through graduates like these Dr. Witherspoon lifted the College of New Jersey into a position of honorable publicity it had never before occupied. The prestige it thus acquired was to endure for a generation after his death, and was to wane only under the less favoring spirit of succeeding administrations.

LV

PRINCETON BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR

President Smith. Introduction of Science. Fire of 1802. The Trustees and Discipline. Riot of 1807. Founding of the Princeton Theological Seminary. President Green. The Cracker Era. The "Great Rebellion." President Carnahan. Lafayette's Visit. Nassau Hall Philological Society. The Lowest Ebb. John Maclean and Enlargement of the Faculty. Aaron Burr's Funeral. The Rape of the Cannon. The Law School. The Centennial. President Maclean. Fire of 1855. The Secret Society Crusade. The Civil War.

IT was a foregone conclusion that Vice-President Smith, Dr. Witherspoon's son-in-law, would be his successor, and he was elected president in May, 1795. Graduated in 1769 at the age of nineteen, he had become in 1775 the first president of Hampden-Sidney College, and four years later had joined the faculty at Princeton. During the years of President Witherspoon's congressional service the general management of the college had been left in his care, and after 1786, when he was made vice president, the details of administration had been laid entirely upon his shoulders.

A completer contrast to Dr. Witherspoon could scarcely be imagined. He was one of those men who seem born to wear academic purple. Tall and slender, he added to natural dignity and to elegance of manner a winning personality, the attraction of good looks, and the gift of a splendid voice. He was famed for his ornate eloquence, his preaching being frankly imitative of the French school of pulpit orators.

Without being trained in science he seems to have felt the lure of scientific studies, and the introduction