Harvard, the oldest of American colleges, was founded in the beginning of the colonial days, only eighteen years after the Pilgrim Fathers landed on Plymouth Rock, and when Boston was a village of twenty-five or thirty houses, and when only twenty-five towns had begun to be settled in the colony. In 1636, six years after the settlement of Boston, the colonial legislature voted the sum of four hundred pounds (equivalent to a tax of fifty cents to every person in the colony) towards the founding of Harvard College, with the avowed purpose of training young men for the ministry. This sum was increased in 1637 by the munificence of John Harvard, who was a graduate of Cambridge, and a finished scholar and clergyman from England. He gave eight hundred pounds and his library, consisting of three hundred volumes, towards the endowment, whereupon the college took his name. "The colony caught his spirit," says Boone. "Among the magistrates themselves, two hundred pounds was subscribed, a part in books. All did something, even the indigent; one subscribed a number of sheep; another, nine shillings' worth of cloth; one, a ten-shilling pewter flagon; others, a fruit dish, a sugar spoon, a silver-tipped jug, one great salt, one small trencher salt, etc. From such small beginnings did the institution take its start. No rank, no class of men, is unrepresented. The school was of the people." There is nothing in history to parallel the heroic spirit and boldness of these early settlers in attempting to found a college, surrounded as the people were with poverty, scanty subsistence, and savage enemies. They did not realize the wisdom of their liberality and sacrifice and its influence upon the future civilization of the Western World. Harvard College was located at Cambridge, with a single building, on less than three acres of land. It was supported by government appropriations and private philanthropy. For years the college was financially embarrassed. The salaries were small, and for nearly one hundred years were paid out of the colonial treasury. The President received a salary of $600. The total grants made to the college by the colony during the first century amounted to about $8,000. The total annual income from all sources at the close of the first century of its history was but £750. Down to 1780 the total amount contributed out of the public treasury was $68,675 and 3,793 acres of land. Individuals in England and America had likewise given $90,412.
No one at this period would have dared to predict that Harvard College would have in 1892 an endowment of $12,000,000 and an annual revenue of more than $1,000,000, with seventeen departments of instruction, three hundred teachers, and three thousand students. But such has been the phenomenal growth of some of our American institutions.
Among the colonial colleges, that of William and Mary is one of the most important. As early as 1617, an attempt was made in England to raise money to found a college among the Virginia settlers. In 1619, fifteen hundred pounds were in the hands of the treasurer, and ten thousand acres of land were granted by the Virginia Company. A preparatory school was founded two years later, but owing to the Indian massacre of 340 settlers which followed, the enterprise was suspended. The effort to found a college was subsequently revived in 1660. The Virginia Assembly enacted that "for the advancement of learning, education of youth, supply of the ministry, and promotion of piety, there be land taken for a college and free school." Nothing came of this until 1688, when a subscription was taken from wealthy planters for twenty-five hundred pounds for the college. Five years later (1692) the first royal educational charter in America was granted. The college was established at Williamsburg, Virginia, and was given £2,000 and 20,000 acres of land, a tax of a penny a pound on all tobacco exported from Virginia and Maryland, and the duty on furs, skins, and liquors imported, besides other fees and privileges of the Surveyor General's office. "In its royal foundation, its generous endowment, and liberal patronage," says R. C. Boone, "it stands in sharp contrast to the early years of Harvard. This was established by the Puritans, and stood for the severest of ultra-orthodox though dissenting Protestantism; that was founded to be and was an exponent of the most formal ceremonialism of the Church of England. The one was nursed by democracy; the other befriended by cavalier and courtier. Endowment for the one came from the purses of an infant and needy settlement; the other was drawn from the royal treasury. The one was environed and shaken for a hundred years by the schisms of a controversial people; the roots of the other were deep in the great English ecclesiastical system." This college has been called a school of statesmen. It was here that Jefferson, Randolph, Tyler, Monroe, Blair, Marshall, and other prominent statesmen received their training.
The history of Yale College is full of interest. The original design of the founders of the New Haven Colony was to establish a college. A lot was set apart for this purpose as early as 1647. A plan was proposed in 1698 to found a college, and to be placed under the general care of the churches. In 1700, sixty-three years after the founding of Harvard College, a society consisting of eleven ministers met to take the initial step. At a second meeting, in the same year, each of the trustees, numbering ten of the principal clergymen of the colony, were without money, but they brought forty volumes of books, and, placing them on a table, presented them to the body, saying in substance: "I give these books for the founding of a college in this colony." This was the humble beginning of Yale College. The colony had a population at this time of fifteen thousand people, fifty of whom were college-trained men. The outlook for this college was not very encouraging, in view of their limited means and scattered population. The work, at first, lacked system and unity. In 1718, the college was permanently located at New Haven, Connecticut, and named in honor of Elihu Yale, who was born in Boston in 1648. He received his education in England, and was afterward made Governor of Madras, and, later, Governor of the East India Company. His donation to Yale College was largely in books, and amounted to five hundred pounds. This gift was followed by that of Rev. George Berkely, who gave ninety-six acres of land in Rhode Island and one thousand volumes to the library. The college received for its support, in a century and a half, $100,000 from the commonwealth of Connecticut. It has been supported chiefly by private means. In 1890, there were 143 instructors and 1,500 students. There is no college in America that has a more enviable reputation for giving a thorough Christian education to the thousands of youth who have gone forth from her halls of learning.
It is a matter of record that our ancestors showed much self-denial, courage, and genius, to turn aside from the work of organizing a new social order, and the readjustment of themselves to their surroundings in a new country to provide for the higher education of the people. The founders and supporters of these colleges, as a rule, were men of high intellectual and religious character, and worked intensely and earnestly for the highest good of society. It would prove an inestimable blessing to our nation if every American citizen were inspired with the zeal of the early colonists in behalf of the cause of higher education. They, out of their poverty, poured their gifts into the treasury of the colleges in order to leave future generations a great and glorious heritage. Gratitude should prompt us to excel them in our love for the education of the present and future generations by cheerfully giving of our abundance for the same high and holy ends.
Other colleges were founded within the century. Aside from the three colonial colleges, six more were founded prior to the Revolution, and four during the war of independence. Following the Revolution was a period of expansion, and by the close of the century there were twenty-four colleges established. These colleges, scattered throughout the Union, appeared as a galaxy of stars in the literary firmament of the nation. They were founded and located as follows:
| Institution. | State. | Date. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Harvard, | Massachusetts, | 1637 |
| 2. | William and Mary, | Virginia, | 1693 |
| 3. | Yale, | Connecticut, | 1701 |
| 4. | Princeton, | New Jersey, | 1746 |
| 5. | University of Pennsylvania, | Pennsylvania, | 1749 |
| 6. | Columbia, | New York, | 1754 |
| 7. | Brown, | Rhode Island, | 1764 |
| 8. | Dartmouth, | New Hampshire, | 1769 |
| 9. | Queen's Rutgers, | New Jersey, | 1766 |
| 10. | Hamden-Sidney, | Virginia, | 1776 |
| 11. | Washington and Lee, | Virginia, | 1782 |
| 12. | Washington University, | Maryland, | 1782 |
| 13. | Dickinson, | Pennsylvania, | 1783 |
| 14. | St. Johns, | Maryland, | 1784 |
| 15. | Nashville, | Tennessee, | 1785 |
| 16. | Georgetown, | Dist. of Columbia, | 1789 |
| 17. | University of N. Carolina, | North Carolina, | 1789 |
| 18. | University of Vermont, | Vermont, | 1791 |
| 19. | University of E. Tennessee, | Tennessee, | 1792 |
| 20. | Williams, | Massachusetts, | 1793 |
| 21. | Bowdoin, | Maine, | 1794 |
| 22. | Union, | New York, | 1795 |
| 23. | Middlebury, | Vermont, | 1795 |
| 24. | Frederick College, | Maryland, | 1796 |
It remained for the nineteenth century to exhibit in the New World an unprecedented multiplication and expansion of institutions of higher learning.
At the opening of the century there were only twenty-four colleges in the United States. Thirty years later the number had reached forty-nine. In 1850, there were 120 colleges, manned by 1,300 teachers, with 17,000 students. There were besides 42 theological seminaries, 35 medical schools, and 12 law schools.