American Heroes by Edmund S. Morgan Read Free Book Online

first six years there were no college buildings other than the rector’s house. But there was a library.
    The men who founded the college had realized that it might exist without buildings but not without a library, and they had contributed from their own private holdings enough volumes to get it started. It was not much of a library, consisting as it did of old dog-eared volumes that had come over with the first settlers and had already served two generations of ministers in Connecticut without generating new ideas in anybody. For thirteen years these books continued to serve, but in 1714 one of the well-wishers of the college arranged an extraordinary donation.
    Jeremiah Dummer, a New England boy and a Harvard graduate, moved to England in 1708 and acted there as agent for the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Although his official duties did not require it, he also became an ardent propagandist and solicitor for both Harvard and Yale. Dummer recognized that what Yale needed more than anything else was books, and, since England was full of authors and patrons of authors, he undertook to persuade them to donate some of their favorite works to the college in the New World. There was an exotic attractiveness to the idea of planting civilization in the wilderness, and the English intellectuals were so moved by Dummer’s appeal that no fewer than 180 of them contributed, including such leading figures as Sir Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, Sir Hans Sloane, and Richard Steele. They sent more than 500 volumes, of which the first shipment, packed in nine boxes, arrived in September 1714.
    The unpacking of the crates must have been a moment of singular excitement and curiosity for students and faculty. Here was an enormous variety of riches: Newton, Locke, and Boyle, Defoe, Addison and Steele, Sherlock, Tillotson, Chillingworth, Stillingfleet—names that had hitherto meant nothing in Connecticut and not much in the rest of New England were suddenly present in the original. None of those who first opened the volumes and leafed through them could have recognized the full dimensions of what had happened. A century of English literature, science, philosophy, and theology was spread before them. It was as though a group of men today had studied nothing but the textbooks of a hundred years ago and were suddenly confronted for the first time with Darwin, Marx, Hegel, Freud, and Einstein, all at one blow.
    For many, of course, it was simply too much to comprehend. To be handed a hundred years’ work to do may not be an altogether pleasing experience. And it was a long time before the full effect of the new books was felt. But New England was never the same after their arrival, and we can see the leaven beginning to work at once.
    We can see it, for example, in a boy who rode down from Windsor to enter college two years later. In his sophomore year he discovered John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding. By his own account, he found “more satisfaction and pleasure in studying it than the most greedy miser in gathering up handfuls of silver and gold from some new discovered treasure.” This was Jonathan Edwards, who would probably have changed any world he lived in. But the starting point of the revolution that Edwards made in New England religion was that volume of Locke. He saw that New England theology, as he had learned it from his father’s sermons at Windsor, would not stand before the new philosophy of John Locke.
    He went on to recast the Calvinism of his father to fit the new philosophy, and the result was a wholly different theology, which came to be known in New England as the New Divinity. It won Edwards worldwide fame, and it split New England Puritanism wide open. It lost Edwards his pulpit at Northampton, and it won him the presidency of Princeton. A hundred years later people were still arguing hotly about what it meant.
    It took Edwards a lifetime to work out his theology after