Dictionary of Early American Philosophers

John R. Shook, John R. Shook

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441167316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

The Dictionary of Early American Philosophers, which contains over 400 entries by nearly 300 authors, provides an account of philosophical thought in the United States and Canada between 1600 and 1860. The label of "philosopher" has been broadly applied in this Dictionary to intellectuals who have made philosophical contributions regardless of academic career or professional title. Most figures were not academic philosophers, as few such positions existed then, but they did work on philosophical issues and explored philosophical questions involved in such fields as pedagogy, rhetoric, the arts, history, politics, economics, sociology, psychology, medicine, anthropology, religion, metaphysics, and the natural sciences. Each entry begins with biographical and career information, and continues with a discussion of the subject's writings, teaching, and thought. A cross-referencing system refers the reader to other entries. The concluding bibliography lists significant publications by the subject, posthumous editions and collected works, and further reading about the subject.

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WADDEL, Moses (1770–1840)

Moses Waddel was born into an Irish immigrant family on 29 July 1770 in Rowan County (now Iredell County), North Carolina. He attended an outstanding Presbyterian school in that county, Clio’s Academy. Completing this school’s courses by the age of fourteen, Waddel started a grammar school himself, and then in 1786 he went to Greensboro, Georgia and opened another school by 1788. In January 1791 he entered the senior class at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, where Drury LACEY was the president and professor of philosophy. Graduating with his BA by September of that same year, he studied some additional theology and received his license to preach in 1793.

In 1794 Waddel opened his Carmel Academy in Appling, Georgia where he taught for many years. Among his successful students during that period, besides the numerous ministers, doctors, lawyers, judges, and legislators, was Andrew Jackson (later a U.S. President) and John C. CALHOUN (later a U.S. Senator and Vice President). Waddel married Calhoun’s sister, but she died in childbirth and he remarried. However, his connection with South Carolina was established, and in 1804 he moved to the Abbeville District of South Carolina to operate his school near Willington. Willington Academy launched the careers of another generation of eminent men and acquired a reputation as one of the finest academies in America. Waddel was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity from South Carolina College at Columbia in 1807.

Waddel’s fame as an educator drew the attention of other colleges. He accepted the appointment of President and professor of moral philosophy at the University of Georgia in 1819. This college, also known as Franklin College at that time, had been closed since the departure of President John BROWN in 1816. With Waddel’s arrival, the college was able to recover and prosper, becoming notable for his firm administration, classical curriculum, and religious instruction in ethics. During his presidency, he hired two prominent scholars to join him on the faculty: Alonzo CHURCH and Stephen OLIN. Church arrived in 1819 as professor of mathematics and became university President when Waddel retired in 1829. Olin was hired in 1826 as Professor of Belles-lettres and Ethics, and he subsequently was the President of Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

Waddel wrote one book in his lifetime, a work of fiction titled Memoirs of the Life of Miss Caroline Elizabeth Smelt (1818) which recounts the religious sentiments of a young girl on her death bed. Published in America, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, and France, this book became widely popular and had multiple editions. After leaving the University of Georgia, he went back to Willington where his sons were running the academy and resumed the ministry. In 1839 he returned to Athens, Georgia to live with his son, James P. Waddel, who was a professor at the university. Waddel died there on 21 July 1840.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Memoirs of the Life of Miss Caroline Elizabeth Smelt (New York, 1818).

Other Relevant Works

Waddel’s papers are in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Further Reading

Amer Nat Bio, Dict Amer Bio, WWWHV

Howe, George. History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina, 2 vols. (Columbia, S.C., 1870, 1883).

Hull, Augustus Longstreet. A Historical Sketch of the University of Georgia (Atlanta, Georgia, 1894).

MacLeod, James L. The Great Doctor Waddel: A Study of Moses Waddel, 1770–1840, as Teacher and Puritan (Easley, S.C., 1985).

Sprague, William Buell. “Moses Waddel, D.D.,” in Annals of the American Pulpit, vol. 4 (New York, 1858), 63–71.

Waddel, John N. Memorials of Academic Life: Being an Historical Sketch of the Waddel Family (Richmond, Virginia, 1891).

John R. Shook

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WADSWORTH, Benjamin (1669–1737)

Benjamin Wadsworth was born on 28 February 1669 in Milton, Massachusetts. He went to Harvard College in 1686, where William BRATTLE and John LEVERETT were doing most of regular teaching during President Increase MATHER’s absences, and Charles MORTON was teaching physics and logic. After graduating in 1690 with the BA degree, Wadsworth remained in residence at Harvard for additional study of theology. In 1693 he was awarded the MA degree, received a license of preach, and became an assistant at the First Church in Boston. In 1696 he was elevated to join the two other pastors there. Wadsworth was a popular preacher and dozens of his sermons were published. He also joined the Fellows of Harvard, sitting among that body from 1697 to 1707 and from 1712 to 1725.

In 1725 Wadsworth was elected President of Harvard College, succeeding Leverett, and he held this position until his death. He inherited the services of career tutors Henry FLYNT (for math and philosophy) and Judah Monis (for Hebrew), and the Hollis Professor of Divinity, Edward WIGGLESWORTH. The college enjoyed further growth during his administration. Thomas Hollis, a London merchant, endowed a second faculty position in 1727, the Hollis Professorship of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, and Isaac GREENWOOD was appointed. The year of 1727 was also notable for a failed attempt by Reverend Timothy Cutler to gain membership to Harvard’s Board of Overseers. Cutler had been President of Yale but he converted to the Church of England and received his own church in Boston. Cutler then tried to gain membership in Harvard’s Board of Overseers. In a remarkable display of Puritan solidarity, colonial officials decided that only Congregational ministers could lead Harvard. Wadsworth died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 27 March 1737. The next President of Harvard was Edward HOLYOKE.

During Wadsworth’s administration, religious awakenings in New England were starting to divide Congregationalists. A reinforcement of student discipline and curriculum standards seemed necessary, and revised college laws were established in 1734. The curriculum was defined: “The Undergraduates shall be brought forward by their respective Tutors, in the knowledge of the three learned Languages, viz. Latin, Greek, and Hebrew (excepting as to the Hebrew, those that shall be obliged to attend the Hebrew Instructor), and also in the knowledge of Rhetorick, Logick, natural Philosophy, Geography, Ethicks, Divinity, Metaphysicks, and in the elements of the Mathematicks. And the Tutors shall take care to instruct their pupils in such authors as the President and major part of the Tutors shall agree upon; excepting Ethical and Theological authors shall be such only as shall be allowed by the Corporation.”

Wadsworth made no significant modification to the instruction in scholastic metaphysics, and strict Calvinism prevailed a while longer, as William Ames’s Medulla Theologica (The Marrow of Theology) prevailed. However, the study of ethics was changing in the 1730s. Henry More’s Enchiridion Ethicum (An Account of Virtue) had been used since Harvard’s founding. Many ministers preferred biblical recitation (Cotton MATHER labeled More’s book as “paganism”), and the study of ethics is about good works, not faith alone. More’s Platonic approach kept ethics separate from theology, anticipating eighteenth century moralists offering a secular ethics and a utilitarian outlook. Although John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding was not taught at Harvard until the 1740s, Francis Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) appeared at Harvard under Wadsworth, and thereafter More was displaced by new British and Scottish thinkers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Way of Life opened in the everlasting covenant: or, The duties & benefits of the Covenant of Grace, set forth in sundry sermons (Boston, 1712).

Twelve Single Sermons on various subjects, tending to promote godliness, and quicken persons to walk in the way of Salvation (Boston, 1717).

A Course of Sermons on Early Piety (Boston, 1721).

Other Relevant Works

Wadsworth’s papers are at Harvard University in Massachusetts.

Further Reading

Appleton’s Cycl Amer Bio, Nat Cycl Amer Bio

Morison, Samuel Eliot. Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636–1926 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).

Pierce, Benjamin. A History of Harvard University from its foundation in the year 1636, to the period of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1883).

Sprague, William B. “Benjamin Wadsworth, D.D.,” in Annals of the American Pulpit, vol. 1 (New York, 1857), 31–33.

John R. Shook

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WAIT, Samuel (1789–1867)

Samuel Wait was born on 19 December 1789 in White Creek in Washington County, New York. By 1809 his family lived in Middletown, Vermont, but his desire to join the clergy brought him back to Washington County to study languages and religion at Salem Academy. In 1815 he was licensed to preach, and he was ordained at his church in Sharon, Massachusetts in 1818. In 1819 he went to Philadelphia where Reverend William STAUGHTON was privately teaching theology. In 1822 Wait was a member of the first class of students when Columbian College (now George Washington University) opened in Washington, D.C. with Staughton as its first President and Professor of Philosophy. Although Wait completed its courses in 1825, the college did not have a charter to award degrees at that time, but Waterville College in Maine awarded him an MA degree in that year. After tutoring at the college for a year, he traveled widely to preach.

Wait accepted a ministerial offer from the Baptist church in New Bern, North Carolina in 1827. In 1830 Wait organized the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina to support missions and higher education for ministers. At that time there were only five Baptists ministers with some college education in the entire state. Prejudice against the Baptists in the state legislature long delayed the granting of a charter to open a college, but a close vote finally permitted a charter and Wait was able to found Wake Forest Manual Labor Institute in Wake County in 1833. By 1838 the growing college received a new charter and a new name: Wake Forest College. The prescribed manual labor for all students had been abandoned, the college acquired a few slaves, and the curriculum conformed to the typical pattern of languages, mathematics, a little science, and plenty of doctrinal instruction. In addition to Wait’s duties as President, he taught some classes in literature, moral and intellectual philosophy, politics, natural theology, and evidences of Christianity. The philosophical and theological views of Staughton and Francis WAYLAND were dominant. Wait also served as the minister of local churches.

Because he was a northerner, Wait disliked slavery and refused to join the growing religious chorus defending slavery in the South. Unlike other Southern college presidents of that era, Wait judged that clergy should not use their pulpits, or their classes, to profess their own views, and clergy should not try to exert influence over politics. He was saddened by the north-south division of the Baptist Church in 1845, and he declined an opportunity to join the administration of the new Southern Baptist Convention. Wait resigned from Wake Forest in 1845 but he served as the president of the college’s board of trustees until 1865. Wake Forest awarded its first honorary Doctor of Divinity degree to Wait in 1849. For a couple of years he was the minister to churches in Caswell County, North Carolina. In 1851 Wait became the President of the Oxford Female College in Oxford, North Carolina, and held that position until retiring in 1856. He then returned to live near Wake Forest, where he contributed to local Baptist activities until his death on 28 July 1867. Wait’s account of the early years of Wake Forest College was published after his death.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wait published no literary writings.

Other Relevant Works

Wait’s papers are at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

“The Origin and Early History of Wake Forest College,” The Wake Forest Student, vol. 2 (September 1882): 11–17, 49–68.

Further Reading

Amer Nat Bio, Appleton’s Cycl Amer Bio, Dict Amer Bio, Nat Cycl Amer Bio, WWWHV

Paschal, George W. History of Wake Forest College (Wake Forest, N.C., 1935).

Wait’s papers are at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, W. Ronald. “Samuel Wait,” in Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, vol. 6 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996).

John R. Shook

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WALKER, David (C.1796–1830)

The February 27, 1830, edition of the Niles’ Register featured an article containing the following words: “The Legislatures of two states have been frightened by a few dozen pamphlets, written by a negro, who deals in old clothes!” What was it about this thrift shop owner that commanded so much media attention? Particularly, what kind of pamphlet could have frightened politicians in Georgia and Louisiana to the extent that they enacted ha...