 The
Birth of Washington College
By Adam Goodheart
“It is History that, by presenting bright patterns to
the eyes of youth, awakens emulation, and calls them
forth steady Patriots to fill the offices of the State.
It is not by forming them mere scholars that the State
can become flourishing, but by forming them Patriots.”
Dr. William Smith, founder of Washington College, 1753
Washington College traces its history back to the spring
of 1782, just a few months after the American victory at
Yorktown. With the nation’s political independence
barely secured on the battlefield, a group of visionary
educators on the Eastern Shore of Maryland declared: “We
must attend to the rising generation.
The souls of our youth must be
nursed up to the love of LIBERTY and KNOWLEDGE … for
LIBERTY will not deign to dwell, but where her fair
companion KNOWLEDGE flourishes by her side.”
No new college had been chartered on the continent since
Dartmouth in 1769, in the days when Americans were
subjects of George III. Now, it was time to found an
institution that would educate its students to be not
subjects, but rather citizens of the new United States.
The prime mover behind the founding of Washington
College was Dr. William Smith. Born in Aberdeen, a
product of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith had earlier
been involved in the founding of King’s College (which
would become Columbia University) and the College of
Philadelphia (which would become the University of
Pennsylvania). As longtime provost of the College of
Philadelphia and secretary of the American Philosophical
Society, he had associated closely with Benjamin
Franklin, David Rittenhouse, Dr. Benjamin Rush, and
other leading intellectual lights of the revolutionary
generation.
Like many of his contemporaries in
the first years of national independence, Smith was
preoccupied with the question of how to render Americans
fit for self-government. As the historian Drew McCoy has
written, “Many of the Revolutionaries were inspired to
hope that the American people might … conform to the
classical notion of virtue and thus become the special
kind of simple, austere, egalitarian, civic-minded
people that intellectuals had dreamed of for centuries.”
Yet they simultaneously worried that the nation’s
fragile experiment in democracy might eventually – like
past republics – devolve into demagoguery and anarchy,
especially after George Washington and the other
unifying, inspirational figures of the Founding
generation had passed offstage.
For William Smith – as for Thomas
Jefferson, James Madison, and others – the solution was
education. But what is distinctive about Smith’s
particular vision is that it also involved a profound
faith in the instructive power of history. As early as
the 1750s, in proposing a course of study for King’s
College, he had recommended the inclusion of American
history in the curriculum (the earliest American
educator to do so), and written eloquently of how, by
studying the past, students would learn to “behold the
dreadful effects of tyranny” and “set a just value on …
civil and religious liberty.” He even promoted
historical education as an antidote to bigotry and
intolerance: “The study of history … teaches [youth], as
citizens of the world, to do impartial justice to the
virtues of every people and nation.”
And now, in the 1780s, with the American republic newly
established, these ideas took on a fresh urgency. In
order to preserve the ideals and virtues of the Founders
into the far-distant future, Smith proposed, young
Americans must be taught to keep their memory and legacy
alive. Especially, as he envisioned it, they must keep
alive the memory of George Washington, whose
self-sacrifice and disinterested public service had set
a shining example before the entire world. In July 1782,
Smith wrote to General Washington himself, who was still
encamped with his army along the Hudson awaiting word of
the final treaty negotiations across the Atlantic:
In every
possible way, your country wishes to erect public
monuments to you, even while living, and posterity,
without doubt, will greatly increase the number; but
none, it is believed, can be more acceptable to you,
than a seminary of universal learning expressly
dedicated to your name, with a view of instructing and
animating the youth of many future generations to admire
and to imitate these
public virtues and patriot-labours, which
have created a private monument for you in the heart of
every good citizen.
Washington, taking time from his military duties,
graciously consented to the fledgling college’s use of
his name, pledged a generous monetary gift to its
establishment, and extended his warm wishes for the
“lasting and extensive usefulness” of the institution.
He would later serve on Washington College’s Board of
Visitors and Governors (his only such involvement during
his lifetime), pay a visit to its campus, and, shortly
after his inauguration as President, receive one of its
first honorary degrees. This distinguished connection –
along with Washington College’s status as the first
college founded in the new nation – would remain a
central point of its institutional identity for more
than 200 years.
The new college’s location – in Chestertown, the
flourishing seat of Kent County, Maryland – must have
seemed, in 1782, ideal for an institution of national
prominence. A busy Chesapeake port, it also lay squarely
astride the main north-south overland route along the
Atlantic seaboard, halfway between the plantations of
Tidewater Virginia and the burgeoning urban center of
Philadelphia. (Indeed, Washington, Jefferson, Patrick
Henry, and others had frequently passed through town on
their way to and from sessions of the Continental
Congress.) Some of the wealthiest and most influential
citizens of the new republic, like Gen. John Cadwalader
and Benjamin Chew, had country estates nearby. The first
national Census, in 1790, would even pinpoint
Chestertown as – statistically speaking – the center of
population in the United States. The lofty ambitions of
Washington College’s founders are vividly attested by
the fact that the first college building, on a hilltop
above Chestertown, was the largest structure of any kind
in North America when it was built.
An Account of Washington College, in the
State of Maryland (Philadelphia, 1784), p.
4.
Although several other institutions claim
founding dates between 1770 and 1781, none
possessed college charters or were empowered to
grant degrees, and most were merely “log-cabin
grammar schools” that evolved much later into
full-fledged colleges, according to the
authoritative book on the subject, Donald G.
Tewksbury’s The Founding of American Colleges
and Universities Before the Civil War
(Columbia University Press, 1932). Tewksbury
accorded Washington College standing as the
nation’s tenth-oldest institution of higher
learning, directly after the renowned “Colonial
Nine.”
Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic:
Political Economy in Jeffersonian America
(W.W. Norton, 1982), p. 70.
William Smith, A General Idea of the College
of Mirania (New York, 1753), pp. 50 ff.
An Account of Washington College, in the
State of Maryland (Philadelphia, 1784), pp.
24-5.
George Washington to William Smith, August 18,
1782. George Washington Papers, Library of
Congress.
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