Abstract
The College of William and Mary, the Anglican Church, and the royal governors were the most prominent figureheads of crown authority in the colony, but the college was the weakest of the three. The institution was continuously financially fragile and in need of funds to build and maintain its facilities, recruit faculty members and meet operating expenses. Its urgent need for funds was not resolved after the War for Independence and the institution faced decades of difficult circumstances and financial uncertainty.
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Parke Rouse, Jr., James Blair of Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1971): 43-4; Susan B. Godson, The College of William and Mary: A History (Williamsburg, 1993) I: 3-39; Cal. S.P. Col. Ser., 1689-1692, J. W. Fortescue, ed. (London, 1901): 297; W.M.Q., Second series, 10 (1930): 239-42, Letter of James Blair to Governor Francis Nicholson, London, 3 December 1691.
R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb, Trinity College Dublin, 1592-1952: An academic history (Cambridge, 1982): 1-2. J. V. Luce, Trinity College Dublin: The First 400 Years (Dublin, 1992): 1-4.
Susan Myra Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company of London (Washington, DC, 1933), 3: 102.
H. R. McIlwaine, Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1619-1658/59. (Richmond, 1915) I: 8.
William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 (Charlottesville, 1969 edition) II: 25, 37, 56.
George MacLaren Brydon, Virginia’s Mother Church and the Political Conditions under which It Grew (Richmond, 1947) I: 289-91. Cal. S.P. Col. Ser., 1689-1692: 452-54; Godson, College of William and Mary: 4, 7-15.
Godson, College of William and Mary: 167-68. The College was not the only colonial collegiate institution in such financial circumstances, for it was a common experience among all of the colleges. See Beverly McAnear, ‘The Raising of Funds by the Colonial Colleges’, The Mississippi Valley Historical Review. 38 (1951): 591-612. For the desperate financial conditions at Harvard see Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936 (Cambridge, 1936): 153-60.
Ann D. Gordon, The College of Philadelphia, 1749-1779: Impact of an Institution (New York, 1989); Edward Potts Cheney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740-1840 (Philadelphia, 1940); Albert Frank Gegenheimer, William Smith, Educator and Churchman, 1727-1803 (Philadelphia, 1943). William Smith (1727-1803) was born in Aberdeen, Scotland and graduated from King’s College, Aberdeen, A.B., 1744. He was the founder and first president of the College of Philadelphia (1754-79).
David C. Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, 1746-1800 (New York, 1976); Robert A. McCaughey, A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754-2004 (New York, 2003).
Godson, College of William and Mary: 112-19. For problems of student discipline at Yale in the 1760s see Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale, A History (New Haven, 1974): 66-7.
Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936 (Cambridge, 1936): 108.
James McLachlin, Princetonians, 1748-1768: A Biographical Dictionary (Princeton, 1976): 666. Richard A. Harrison, Princetonians, 1769-1775: A Biographical Dictionary (Princeton, 1980): Ibid. Princetonians, 1776-1783: A Biographical Dictionary (Princeton, 1981): 460-63, 543.
Conrad Edick Wright, Revolutionary Generation: Harvard Men and the Consequences of Independence (Amherst, 2005).
The Writings of George Washington, John C. Fitzpatrick, ed. (Washington, DC, 1940) 37: 497-98. Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography (New York, 1951) 3: 272-73, 312-323.
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© 2013 James B. Bell
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Bell, J.B. (2013). The College of William and Mary Faces an Unknown Future, 1776. In: Empire, Religion and Revolution in Early Virginia, 1607–1786. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137327925_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137327925_13
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