Two Brides for Apollo: The Life of Samuel Williams (1743-1817)

By Robert Rothschild

Samuel Williams (1743-1817) was a minister, astronomer, newspaper editor, surveyor, social historian, and philosopher. While a student at Harvard, he assisted John Winthrop on an expedition to Newfoundland to observe the 1761 transit of Venus. Following Winthrop as Hollis Professor of Natural Philosophy, Williams modernized the teaching of science at Harvard, taught such illustrious students as John Quincy Adams, and led a Harvard expedition to observe the solar eclipse of 1780. He was a major force in the founding of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, contributing many of its first scientific papers. To escape a charge of forgery Williams fled to Vermont by night on horseback. There he preached the Enlightenment view that mankind could achieve the greatest happiness in a life based on the God-given power of reason. Williams founded and edited the Rutland Herald, wrote one of the first histories of the American Revolution, and one of the first state histories, The Natural and Civil History of Vermont. He was co-founder of the University of Vermont and taught astronomy there. Superior surveying skills enabled him in 1806 to add 600 square miles of Canadian-claimed territory to the state of Vermont. In 1970, the American Philosophical Society published Williams's Philosophic Lectures, yet Williams has remained little known. The author hopes this book will correct this.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 10, 2009
• ISBN: 9780595617616

Robert Rothschild

After a wartime career as a physicist, Bob Rothschild, Harvard '39, has pursued a lifetime interest in the history of science, especially astronomy, while simultaneously managing his own business. A part-time resident of Islesboro, Maine, he became involved in a 1980 Harvard re-creation of Samuel Williams's historic expedition to observe the 1780 solar eclipse and found controversial anomalies that led to his study of Williams's life and to this book.

Book preview

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List of Illustrations

Prologue

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1    The House of Warham

Chapter 2    Harvard

Chapter 3    Transits of Venus

Chapter 4    Expedition to Newfoundland

Chapter 5    The Young Minister

Chapter 6    The Scientist

Chapter 7    Politics Intervenes

Chapter 8    O Jerusalem

Chapter 9    Revolution

Chapter 10   A Distant War

Chapter 11   The Call to Harvard

Chapter 12   Sun, Moon, and Smoke

Chapter 13   Return to Penobscot

Chapter 14   Darkness at Noon

Chapter 15   Return to Harvard

Chapter 16   Cursed Be Politics!

Chapter 17   Scandal

Chapter 18   A New Life in the Republic of Vermont

Chapter 19   The University

Chapter 20   The History of Vermont

Chapter 21   The Minister Turns Publisher

Chapter 22   The Williams Legacy

Epilogue

Endnotes

*Endnotes with substantive content have boldface markers.

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Figure 1 Only known representation of Samuel Wiliams

Figure 2 Intersecting planes of the orbits of Earth and Venus

Figure 3 Obtaining the distance between Earth and Venus

Figure 4 Eighteenth-century sloop

Figure 5 View from Ladies Lookout

Figure 6 Photo of a transit of Venus

Figure 7 The black dot problem

Figure 8 The four contacts of Venus with the limb of the Sun

Figure 9 Newburyport Marshes Passing Storm by Martin Johnson Heald

Figure 10 James Ferguson’s globes

Figure 11 Stages of a total solar eclipse

Figure 12 Map of upper Penobscot Bay

Figure 13 French map of east Penobscot Bay

Figure 14 1780 drawing of the observation site as seen from the cove

Figure 15 Instruments used by the eclipse expedition in 1780

Figure 16 1776 map showing the barn where the eclipse

instruments were housed

Figure 17 Williams’s drawing of the eclipse

Figure 18 James Winthrop’s sketch of the eclipse at maximum

Figure 19 Williams’s certificate of election to Mannheim Academy

Figure 20 Cartouche of map of 1711 with beavers

Figure 21 Portrait of Governor Charles K. Williams

by Benjamin Franklin Mason

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(How I came to write this book and thanks to those who helped me to do it)

In 1965 my late wife, Maurine, and I sailed our yawl, Amistad, into the beautiful harbors of the Maine coast in quest of an island home. We chose Islesboro in Penobscot Bay, where we found a wonderful old cottage. Some years later, the Harvard History of Science Department wrote to the Islesboro Historical Society, of which my wife had become president, about a proposed trip to bring a few students to the island in October 1980. The purpose was to commemorate the bicentennial of a significant event in the history of American astronomy: the October 1780 Harvard expedition to observe for the first time on American soil a total eclipse of the Sun.

Twenty-first century residents of Islesboro, Maine, like to say that their island is about the same size as Manhattan—fifteen miles long, though narrower. The island lies about four miles off the west shore of Penobscot Bay which it divides. The narrow neck in the middle is only a hundred yards wide; from it you can see both the East Bay and the West: Bounty Cove on one side, and on the other, Carrying-place Cove. It has a permanent population of a few hundred and about twice that in summer. The 1780 expedition found itself near The Narrows, where, two centuries later, the 1980 group encamped for the week’s duration of their stay. The spot had been marked some years earlier with a granite monument commemorating the eclipse and its viewers.

The 1980 visit came under the same auspices as the original: Harvard College and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Joining these now was the Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments in which are preserved hundreds of instruments used in Harvard laboratories over the centuries, among them, the astronomical instruments used in observing the 1780 eclipse. The purpose of the visit was to give the students field experience with antique instruments and to compare the results of their observations with modern data of latitude, longitude, and magnetic variation. My interest in astronomy had always been casual (though I had been a physicist both at Harvard and for some years after). Nonetheless it sufficed to make me a slightly informed and hugely interested spectator. That week spent looking over the shoulders of the students and their teachers initiated a twenty-five-year obsession with the life of the Harvard astronomer who led that first expedition, the Reverend Samuel Williams, Hollis Professor of Natural Philosophy.

The eclipse of October 1780 took place in the midst of the wartime struggle to control the Maine seacoast. Revolutionary forces had gained control of all of it except for the British base at Penobscot, which nonetheless had been chosen for the Harvard expedition. Who Williams was, how he came to be the leader, what motivated him to choose enemy territory, risking his life and the lives of his colleagues and his crew and the safety of the precious philosophical apparatus, and what high purposes might have justified such risks: these are the questions that initially led to my interest in his 1780 expedition to my island but that ultimately led to researching Williams’s whole life and telling his story.

From their boat in 1780 Williams and his helpers had to bring the apparatus to a clearing where a level platform and a tent could be set up to protect it. This was an extremely difficult and precarious operation, and to protect the instruments, the 1980 expedition decided to bring them to the island by van. The students were, however, able to replicate many of the tasks of the 1780 team. Adjusting the clock was a three-man job even in 1980: one person to measure with the sextant the altitude of the Sun above the horizon, one to read off the clock time, and one to record both readings. In 1980, the latitude was calculated from the height of the Sun, while the longitude could be reckoned from the difference between the time on the adjusted clock and a radio time signal from Greenwich. In 1780, the longitude was measured by the difference between the observed timing of the eclipse and the theoretical time calculated from tables. When I went to watch the 1980 observers on the first clear night the group was practicing holding the sextant steady enough to measure the altitude of the pole star. From this they calculated approximately the true latitude of 44° 19'.

One of the persons particularly interested in the 1980 trip was Professor Owen Gingerich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory of Astrophysics and subsequently Chair of the Department of History of Science, who was interested at that time in eighteenth-century eclipses as a means of measuring changes in the solar system over long periods of time. Both the students and their mentors were aware that Williams had reported being on the very edge of the path of totality, just missing the complete obliteration of the Sun; one of the objectives of their trip was to try to understand why he had just barely failed to see complete totality. Had he miscalculated the eclipse path?

Gingerich arranged with Dr. Alan D. Fiala of the U.S. Naval Observatory for the Observatory to calculate the path and timing of the 1780 eclipse; to his surprise Fiala found that the calculated path of the eclipse passed too far north for Williams’s observation of a near miss to have been possible. In planning his expedition Williams had used the best astronomical tables available at that time, those created in 1755 by the German astronomer, Johann Tobias Mayer. Professor Gingerich introduced me to Charles Kluepfel of New York who went through the laborious task of calculating the path of the eclipse from these tables as Williams had done. Kluepfel’s conclusion justified Williams in his expectation that he would see totality at the expedition’s location, and his great disappointment at his near miss.

Meeting Owen Gingerich in 1980 was for me the beginning of a most stimulating friendship. With his encouragement I began to work in earnest on Williams’s life and to study his other scientific work. Gingerich has continued to be my guide and inspiration over the years and has devoted endless time to reviewing the technical accuracy of my work and suggesting amplifications.

I began to form a better picture of how remarkable a man Williams was. He began his career at age twenty-one as the minister of the Congregational church of Bradford, Massachusetts. After fifteen years, he left Bradford to serve as Hollis Professor of Natural Philosophy at Harvard from 1780 to 1788. Under a cloud of suspicion that he had forged a receipt for repayment of debt for a trivial amount, he left Harvard abruptly and went to Vermont where he forged a succession of successful careers over his remaining twenty-eight years. He preached there to support himself for two years, meanwhile founding a newspaper, The Rutland Herald, which he published and edited for a decade. (It is now one of the oldest newspapers in the United States.) In 1793 he wrote one of our first state histories, The Natural and Civil History of Vermont and the History of the American Revolution Intended as a Reading-book for Schools. He was the co-founder of the University of Vermont, New England’s third oldest university.

An article I wrote in 1981 mentioning Williams came to the attention of Professor Merle Curti, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning History of American Thought and President of the American Historical Society.1 Curti told me that he had been working on a biography of Samuel Williams some years before but had been forced to abandon it for lack of material. He had started on the project in the 1930s and 40s. In the 1950s he succeeded in locating a trove of Williams material at the Vermont Historical Society. This included, along with a great number of Williams sermons, the manuscript of an unpublished book, Philosophical Lectures on the Constitution, Duty, and Religion of Man. In 1960 Curti sent the manuscript for publication to the American Philosophical Society prefaced with a detailed biographical sketch of Williams, a dozen pages based on his newly discovered material. Professor Curti, though his own interest was primarily in Williams’s religious philosophy, was kind enough to help me by sharing the materials he found. He also led me to find Williams’s great-great-grandson, the late Frank Williams Oliver. Oliver was a criminal lawyer who repeated to me an old family legend that one of the grandchildren of Governor Charles Williams (said to be addicted to drugs or alcohol) had destroyed any documents that reflected unfavorably on his grandfather’s character, particularly those having to do with his departure from Harvard. Oliver as the sole surviving heir had the remaining family papers and was most generous in sharing with me what material he had and in giving me access to family records that shed light on Williams’s life.

I decided to persevere with my biography despite frustrations with gaps in the historical record. The legacy of Williams’s accomplishments was rich both in the metropolis and on the frontier. Besides the unique contribution to American intellectual history represented by his books, journalism, and essays, his record as a scientist, educator, and local patriot is outstanding among those in his Revolutionary generation.

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I have mentioned above some of the people who helped me over the past two decades to assemble and write this biography. There are many others and their help was prodigious. Some of them are named in the endnotes. In particular I want to thank Dr. Alan Fiala of the Naval Observatory for ascertaining the path of the 1780 eclipse. I had generous assistance from Kevin Graffagnino and Paul Carnahan of the Vermont Historical Society, Jeffrey Marshall of the Bailey/Howe Library at the University of Vermont, the librarians at the Harvard Archives, and Stephen Nonack of the Boston Athenaeum in finding documentary material. Other people, too, have been helpful: Roy Goodman of the American Philosophical Society, Rutland historian Dawn Hance and Jim Davidson of the Rutland Historical Society, Jeremy Dibble of the Massachusetts Historical Society, W. D. Barry of the Maine Historical Society, Beth Carroll-Horrocks of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and John Hannigan of the Archives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments was created out of the gift of the personal instrument collection of the late David Wheatland. Along with Ebenezer Gay who curated the Collection for Harvard, Wheatland supported the 1980 trip to Islesboro that introduced me to Samuel Williams. Gay was later succeeded as curator by Will Andrewes who helped me explore the legacy of Williams held by Frank Oliver in Miami. I also am indebted to Sara Schechner, the present Director of the Collection for help in identifying Williams instruments.

For some years I had extensive help from an editor, Paul DeAngelis who added a great deal to my understanding of the history of the times and suggested addition of sections of necessary explanatory material to my text. More recently, at the suggestion of Professor Barbara Rosenkrantz of Harvard, I obtained the editing help of Kennie Lyman who has now devoted a year to correcting or adding countless bibliographic references. Without the unstinting encouragement and enthusiasm of my late wife Maurine I might never have started this project nor sustained the necessary diligence for most of these years. But for the support and powerful critical help of my partner and companion, Margaret Bowers Touborg, in the past two years I might never have brought it to completion.

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1743, the year Samuel Williams was born, was the mid-point of the Age of Franklin when the Enlightenment came to America. Benjamin Franklin himself recognized it as a turning point in the intellectual life of America, declaring in 1743 that The first drudgery of settling new colonies which confines the attentions of the people to mere necessaries [being] now pretty well over . . . there are many . . . in circumstances that afford them the leisure to cultivate the finer arts and improve the common stock of knowledge.2

Among those leisured many, only a handful would have been able to understand the book that initiated the Enlightenment, Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (published in 1543) or the book that was the keystone that completed that revolution in human thought, Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. In time the full impact of these works, reaching first the educated minority, dramatically altered the understanding of every aspect of the physical and biological world. Samuel Williams was first and foremost an astronomer, so it is the effect of this revolution on cosmology in America that will engage most of our attention in this book.

For a dozen centuries the cosmology of Aristotle and Ptolemy had defined the universe. The structure of this universe was an adaptation of naked-eye observation to conform to metaphysical or spiritual beliefs. A central, spherical Earth, was surrounded by the Sun, the Moon, the planets, and the fixed stars, arrayed in perfectly spherical, crystalline shells. Only spherical shapes, circular orbits, and uniform motion were thought to be consistent with the concept of the Creation. However, the apparent motions of the planets did not support those beliefs. To make these apparent motions conform to the revolution of the Sun around the Earth, Ptolemy had to resort to ingenious techniques that have been called one of the greatest achievements of the human mind.3 His approximations, however, contained inaccuracies which became more apparent as observations improved.

Copernicus’s iconoclastic new scheme (1543) in which the Earth and planets in their crystalline spheres rotated around a fixed Sun seemed (at least at first) simpler and more precise. It came into increasingly wide use by astronomers notwithstanding vigorous Church opposition to any theory that did not have Earth fixed at the center of the universe. The beliefs that had been universally accepted for more than a millennium—that Earth was created by God for man and for man’s domination and that man’s salvation was the paramount purpose of heaven and earth— had a unity, a harmony, and a stability that the Copernican scheme seemed to lack.

The Copernican system had other problems as well. Even heliocentrism, with Earth only one among several planets that revolve around the Sun in uniformly circular orbits still did not accurately fit actual observations. In 1609 Johannes Kepler, using Tycho Brahe’s observations of Mars, found he could solve the enigma of this planet’s apparent motion by making the radical assumption that its orbit was not circular but elliptical and that therefore its motion was non-uniform. This discovery demolished the metaphysical assumptions of circularity and uniformity that had been the starting point of Ptolemaic and Copernican theory. At the same time it opened the way for Kepler to develop a set of laws from which all the planetary orbits could be calculated. The telescopic discoveries of Galileo Galilei beginning in 1610 having made heliocentricity incontrovertible, Kepler’s laws now enabled astronomers to predict planetary positions with unprecedented accuracy. Another three-fourths of a century had to pass, however, until Newton’s Principia provided an explanation of these laws and of the gravitational principles governing the universe and the motions of celestial bodies.

The revolutionary change in seventeenth-century thought—a change from the finite universe of Aristotle and Ptolemy with nothing outside of it, to a mathematicized universe of limitless dimensions—was a change so drastic that all studies of nature, all perceptions of life and society were irreversibly altered. Glass and lens technology led to the invention of the microscope, which was to the study of nature what the telescope was to the study of the heavens, making visible what previously had to be hypothesized. Microscopic observation of pollen and sperm, for instance, revealed much about the mechanism of plant and animal reproduction. Cellular structures became visible, leading to understanding of organisms and organic processes not known before. Barometer, thermometer, air-pump, all provided new understandings of nature. In 1759, Jean Lerond d’Alembert, the French mathematician, perceived the revolutionary character of his own century saying, The discovery and application of a new method of philosophizing, the kind of enthusiasm which accompanies discoveries, a certain exaltation of ideas . . . brought about a lively fermentation of minds, spreading throughout nature in all directions like a river which has burst its dams. 4

The Principia itself did not quickly become part of popular culture in the colonies; only a select few could understand such revolutionary material as the fundamental underlying concepts of gravitation, mass, energy, acceleration, and centrifugal force, as well as heliocentrism and the Keplerian planetary system. Educated leaders and intellectuals, however, were deeply influenced by Newton, and they reflected Newton’s influence in their political as well as their philosophical writings.

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Samuel Williams’’s birth occurred a little over a century after his ancestors arrived in America. For most of that hundred-odd years there was little inclination or opportunity for the study of science, and colonists had only scripture to explain their relationship to the wilderness to which they had come. It was a hostile environment fraught with dangers that dominated their lives: drought, earthquakes, disease, and especially Indian attack. They tended to attribute unpredictable events to a God who was using his control of nature to punish them or to warn them of even more severe punishments to come, or was even capable of acting from ill-controlled tempers like a child-abusing parent. Even an educated man like Cotton Mather called the colossal snowstorm of March 17, 1717, a Rebuke from Heaven upon us.5 Diseases, especially smallpox, which had been brought to Plymouth and Cape Cod by the first Europeans and had wiped out the Indian inhabitants leaving cleared fields that provided an arable beachhead for colonists, acquired the status of one of God’s preferred tools, uniquely in this case to aid the colonists. But having acquired this reputation, smallpox thereafter could be credibly cited in sermons as a weapon of punishment (as at the time of the great smallpox epidemic of 1721 when, in a bitter debate over whether to inoculate, Mather sided with Dr. Zabdiel Boylston in favor of inoculating against Dr. William Douglass who opposed it—largely on theological grounds).6 Every natural disaster was seen as either punishment or warning. Increase Mather, Cotton Mather’s illustrious father, said he was persuaded that the floods of great water are coming. I am persuaded that God is about to open the windows of heaven, and to pour down the Cataracts of his Wrath ere this Generation (wherein Atheism and Profaneness are come to such prodigious height) I say ere this Generation is passed away.7 Mather called the appearance of a comet in 1682, a warning piece for a merciful God to use before murdering pieces go off.8

Like Adam in Eden, eighteenth-century colonists were challenged by the profusion of unfamiliar and unnamed plant and animal species. For most of that century, science in the colonies had three major parts: collection of specimens, identification and classification of species, and nomenclature. Pure science and mathematics were luxuries that lacked sufficient economic incentive in a survival society. Experimental science, still in its infancy even in Europe, usually required equipment that colonial scientists did not possess. Understandably, colonists at first saw their role as that of explorers of a new land who reported home on everything they found that could be of value. The reports most likely to arouse interest abroad were those giving accounts of observations peculiar to America including the vast number of new botanical species such as tobacco and maize. Botanists, geologists, meteorologists, and later on, astronomers made their reports to the Royal Society and hoped to see them published in the society’s Philosophical Transactions. If their reports were accepted, the greatest honor that they could aspire to would be to become one of the select few elected foreign Fellows of the Royal Society. Recognition in Europe for an American was held to be the preeminent mark of successful achievement. Colonial colleges—Harvard, Yale, New Jersey, Brown, Dartmouth, and William and Mary—were established primarily to prepare men for the ministry. Scientists were generally ministers or at least had been trained for the ministry. For them, science was a means of understanding, appreciating, and explaining the works of God. Harvard, which received its first telescope in 1672 as a gift from Governor John Winthrop, was able to take the lead in teaching future ministers to observe the celestial sphere as a manifestation of God’s beneficence.

But the urgent need of the new world for improved navigation, exploration, and surveying gave important new meaning to the study of Newton’s laws and the Keplerian planetary system. Navigation became the great beneficiary of the new cosmology that burst upon the seventeenth century as a result of Galileo’s new access to knowledge of planetary motion. His discovery of the moons of Jupiter in 1610 and the subsequent ability to forecast their eclipses gave astronomers a set of precise celestial events, simultaneously observable anywhere in the world. With these celestial time signals, longitude on land could be ascertained with useful accuracy wherever there was access to an accurate pendulum clock. Accurate latitude and longitude information, essential to surveying new land and for local, coastal shipping were desperately needed for British ship pilots crossing the ocean to the colonies.

Some astronomical observations necessarily had to be made from stations as remote from each other as possible. While planetary observations were being used for terrestrial measurements of latitude and longitude, it seems natural that they stimulated growing interest in the dimensions of space—the sizes and distances of the heavenly bodies being observed. From the Copernican-Keplerian model of the planetary system, astronomers could now determine the ratios of the solar distances of all the planets relative to one another. Knowing the ratios of their distances, however, left their absolute values still a mystery. All such distances were measured and stated (and often still are) in astronomical units—the multiple of the Earth’s distance from the Sun. The length of the astronomical unit in miles, the actual distance from Earth to the Sun, could not be determined until a suitable celestial event could be measured from points on Earth as far apart as possible, requiring a worldwide dispersion of observing stations. In this endeavor too, the colonies had a significant role to play that depended not only on their location but upon their production of a body of educated astronomers.

To educate colonial astronomers required navigational instruments, which to the very limited extent they were able, colleges purchased from British instrument makers. Under the influence of tutor Thomas Robie, Harvard had acquired a considerable inventory of philosophical apparatus during the fifty years since its first telescope, and the college established a chamber in which to use and house them.9 And not long before Samuel Williams’s birth, Harvard was pushed into a commanding lead in the colonies for the study of natural philosophy by the gifts of Thomas Hollis, most importantly, his endowment of a professorship in this field.

The Hollis Professors

Thomas Hollis (1659-1730/1), a wealthy English merchant, was visited in 1690 by Harvard President Increase Mather, who gave him the idea of making a substantial bequest to Harvard. Thirty years later Reverend Benjamin Colman (1673-1747) also visited Hollis and persuaded him not to wait for the end of his life but to give an endowment right away to supply books and money: £700 for scholarship money for divinity students, £300 for other needy students, and, most important for Harvard, 1,200 books for the Harvard library. In addition he provided an annual endowment of £40 for a chair in Divinity. Edward Wigglesworth was appointed Hollis Professor of Divinity in 1722 and served with distinction for 43 turbulent years.

A year or so after the Divinity chair was established, Isaac Greenwood, who had only just graduated from Harvard College and had gone to England to study Newtonian mathematics and astronomy with John Theophilus Desaguliers, influenced Hollis to add a chair in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. Hollis endowed this chair in 1727, and along with the chair in Divinity, it became one of the two oldest endowed professorships in the United States. (The donor was not beyond ordering the cosmologies that were to be taught to be that of the two great astronomers of geocentrism, Ptolemy and Tycho Brahe, as though not recognizing the existence of heliocentrism nor of its great proponents, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Isaac Newton!)10

Though no doubt Greenwood hoped to have Hollis award the chair to him, he jeopardized his chance by leaving England abruptly (after an escapade, perhaps drunken) and sail for home from Gravesend, leaving debts behind. In consequence Hollis at first favored an alternative candidate, who, like himself, was a Baptist. Finding this would be unacceptable to Harvard, he forgave Greenwood, who was thereupon unanimously elected by the Overseers. (In his 1840 History of Harvard, President Josiah Quincy said this showed that for the Overseers want of character or want of morals had little weight in the scale against what it called heresy or schism.)11

In Greenwood, Harvard got a brilliant and innovative professor, one who established a curriculum that paved the way for a succession of great science educators. This curriculum was made possible by Hollis’s ongoing generosity. Over the decade following his endowment of the chair, Hollis, and, later, his nephew, donated a very large assortment of instruments, in addition to the books and scholarship money that had accompanied his initial gift. Included were not only astronomical instruments, but also instruments for instruction in optics, pneumatics, and especially Newtonian mechanics.12 With this new philosophical apparatus Greenwood was able to make significant contributions to the teaching of science in America. The terms of the endowment stipulated that in addition to the courses for his own students, the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy was to offer a series of public lectures open to all students (and the general public) once or twice a week.13 Greenwood immediately organized public lectures on the use and application of the instruments in Harvard’s collection. He introduced lecturing with demonstrations of physical principles using laboratory apparatus (he had what may have been America’s first barometer and first planetarium). He observed comets, meteors, eclipses, the aurora borealis, and weather phenomena, and on some of these topics he wrote letters to the Royal Society, some of which were published in the Philosophical Transactions. His innovative lectures were a successful departure from anything ever known here before and seemed to confirm Harvard’s choice of Greenwood as the first Hollis Professor. With this professorship and the new apparatus, far more advanced than anything possessed by other colonial colleges, Harvard took a commanding lead in the study of natural philosophy.

Sadly, Greenwood’s tenure lasted only until 1738, when the Overseers had to remove him for intemperance. As colonial scientists began to contribute analysis and understanding of their observational data, Hollis’s endowment and Greenwood’s innovations provided the educational underpinnings for these contributions. Greenwood’s public lectures brought awareness of natural law to an entire student body who otherwise would have had only the scriptural learning of their forefathers. Greenwood himself contributed relatively little of original thought or analysis of his own observations, but during his tenure science at Harvard advanced far beyond what it had been under his own teacher, Thomas Robie.

Greenwood’s student, John Winthrop (1714-1779), was elected to succeed him in 1739. Winthrop, though only newly graduated from Harvard in that year, was already 25. His incumbency for the next forty years was to be one of the most productive in the development of science at Harvard and inspired two generations of students of science. One of his students was Samuel Williams who became his successor.

Studying divinity with Edward Wigglesworth, however, was hardly less important to young Williams than studying with Winthrop It profoundly influenced Williams’s career and indeed his life. The period of Wigglesworth’s tenure, from 1722 until his death in 1765, was a period of religious turmoil in the colonies. Harvard, in these times was beset from two sides by zealots with powerful alliances. On one side were the New Light Calvinists and the religious movement known as the Great Awakening, kindled by British revivalist preacher, George Whitefield (1714-70) who invaded the churches of New England preaching the moral degeneracy of man and the personal revelation that is called today a born-again experience. On the other was Episcopalianism, supported by England, the respectable refuge of New Englanders who were tired of the excesses of evangelism and Great Awakening hysteria. Wigglesworth resisted both these extremes, pursuing a course of doubt and inquiry that extended even to some of the cherished doctrines of high Calvinism which had attained an authority not inferior to the Scriptures themselves.

Samuel Williams and Harvard had the great good fortune to have, as an exemplar, a religious leader so moderate, so rational and temperate, and yet so influential as Wigglesworth. Under his tutelage Williams’s own religious rationalism developed. Because Williams did not keep a diary, we know very little about the sources of his ideas, but it is probably largely from Wigglesworth that he acquired the conviction that the minister should be independent of church dogma and tolerant of divergent views. Although this religious liberalism makes Williams appealing to modern readers of his sermons, it was to impair his popularity in his own ministry in Vermont in later years.

Like Greenwood, Winthrop was one of the few scientists in New England who was less a minister than a teacher. In fact, for some reason, when he was examined at the tender age of 25 for the Hollis chair, he was not examined on his religious principles. The Hollis rules are specific about requiring of each candidate that . . . he shall declare himself to be of the Protestant Reformed Religion as it is now Professed and practiced by the Churches in New England commonly distinguished by the Name of Congregational, Presbyterian, or Baptist and that he will comply with the same.14 Although nothing in Winthrop’s later execution of his responsibilities suggests any tendency towards impiety, as a product of the Enlightenment he showed no inclination to accept supernatural explanations for what he could explain by physical laws. Progress in America in public acceptance of scientific explanation of nature during his intellectual leadership was more rapid than at any time before (and perhaps any since).

Science and Religion

While conflict between science and religious beliefs occurs in all times and all cultures, in the eighteenth century, as I. Bernard Cohen, the dean of historians of science at Harvard, pointed out, at Harvard as throughout New England, and indeed the rest of America, there was a general freedom from clerical opposition to science.15 Thomas Hollis’s almost simultaneous gifts to Harvard, of the chairs of Divinity and Natural Philosophy symbolized his acceptance of the two disciplines as equally necessary and non-confrontational. This joining of natural philosophy with revealed Scripture was expressive of the concept that all nature reflected the wisdom and beneficence of God and that its study was the study of this wisdom and beneficence. In Pope’s famous couplet:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night.

God said, Let Newton be, and all was light!

Worship of Sir Isaac Newton as a man without equal in the history of human genius dominated the teaching of natural philosophy in America as in Europe. Theodore Hornberger said of Newton and his influence on Winthrop’s curriculum:

Doubtless not all his worshipers understood his universe (how many today venerate Einstein without understanding him?), but of the passion to understand there can be no doubt. Greenwood’s lectures . . . were only the beginning of a flood of instruction in the so-called experimental philosophy, and of such a vogue for astronomical observations as had never been seen before and has scarcely been seen since. John Winthrop, as might be expected, took over such tasks at Harvard . . . [and] beginning with a definition of motion, lectured upon the following topics: [comprehensive survey of mechanics] . . . the three laws of motion, gravity . . . magnetism . . . optics and astronomy. As this list reveals, natural philosophy was beginning to assume the shape of modern physics.16

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Twenty-five did not prove to be too young an age for John Winthrop to be entrusted with the weighty responsibility for science at Harvard. Indeed, by adding experimental science for his students, he made the scope of the job of Hollis Professor far greater than it had been under his predecessor. He also extended scientific education to the community. He wrote articles on scientific subjects for the popular press and, more significantly, gave public experimental demonstrations of scientific principles. While these were mainly for the Harvard student body and the faculty, the general public was also invited. Winthrop added to the curriculum (though only as an optional study) the new subject of fluxions—elementary differential and integral calculus—without which Newtonian mechanics could hardly be understood.

Winthrop held the Hollis professorship for forty-two years. By the time of his death in 1779 he had vastly enhanced the understanding and appreciation of science in New England and the prestige of Harvard in America and in the Western world. The turning point that Franklin discerned in 1743, the year of Williams’s birth, coincided very nearly with the commencement of John Winthrop’s long tenure as the second Hollis Professor of Natural Philosophy. It was emphasized by Franklin’s founding, the next year, of America’s first scientific society, an academy which twenty-five years later matured into the American Philosophical Society. This provided an American scientific society for publication of data about observations of nature and of natural phenomena and about peculiarly American fauna and flora and the classification of them as an alternative to submission to the Royal Society of Great Britain.

Yet another decade later, in 1780, John Adams, Samuel Williams, and James Bowdoin founded a second and rival society in Boston, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Samuel Adams and John Hancock were also among its first participants. As Cohen has pointed out, historians have surprisingly neglected the role of science in the thinking of the founding fathers and their role in these institutions.17 The American Philosophical Society provided a center for scientific publication and public education for natural philosophers south of New Haven and New York. Contributions to its Transactions tended to lean chiefly toward the life sciences. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences provided a competing center of scientific thought and publication around Harvard, with emphasis on cosmology. These two learned societies included in their councils and in their membership rolls the intellectual leaders of the colonies and of the new nation, who were at the same time those chiefly responsible for supporting the Enlightenment in America. As Cohen shows, these men drew on their scientific knowledge . . . in their political discussion and writings [and] displayed a knowledge of scientific concepts and principles which establishes their credentials as citizens of the Age of Reason.18

Throughout Williams’s adult life, he too displayed himself as a citizen of the Age of Reason. As a minister, a professor, and an author, he was foremost and primarily an educator, disseminating the liberalizing influence of the Enlightenment learned from the outstanding teachers of his college years, Wiggleworth and Winthrop. From 1764 to 1779, as minister in Bradford, Massachusetts, he taught that reason was the principal faculty of the soul. From 1780 to 1788, when he succeeded Winthrop as the Hollis Professor at Harvard, he led the intellectual community of New England and defended observation and logical thinking over superstition. In 1788 he resigned under a cloud, moving to Rutland, Vermont. There, until his death in 1817, he continued to teach, first as a minister, then as the founder and editor of the Rutland Herald, then as the author of histories of the state of Vermont and the American Revolution, and even as a founder of and lecturer at the University of Vermont. It was Williams who penned the lines in the university’s charter which founded the school on a principle of religious freedom: . . . not barely toleration but equality . . . without any legal distinction or preeminence whatever. In the final years of his life, he penned what he considered to be a summary of his beliefs, The Philosophical Lectures on the Constitution, Religion, and the Duty of Man.

In this work, Williams disputes the basic pessimism inherent in the belief in the natural depravity of man by the followers of Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening, asserting that a perfect God could not have created a man who was anything other than perfect—that is, in the sense that he has within himself the rational, moral, and religious capacity for perfection. He supports this argument by reasoning from the idea that the human species was a fixed permanent one in the great chain of being and of a higher spiritual order than any animal species, thus uniquely having the capacity for perfectibility. Williams, of course, believed in God’s creation of man and the other beings at a single point in time, but his acceptance of the supernatural ended there. In his History of Vermont and his Philosophical Lectures as well as in his teaching and his sermons his voice was the voice of a student of nature and a man of science.

Speaking of Williams’s Natural and Civil History of Vermont, the eminent American historian Merle Curti has said, [This work] is a wonderful exemplification, in relating human behavior and history to nature, of Williams’s eighteenth-century conviction of the unity, comprehensibility, rational order, and purposiveness of creation. Williams believed, says Curti that in America, God had created a state of society in which human institutions harmonized with nature and with man’s social needs . . . glorif[ying] the simple and unaffected everyday life of ordinary people . . . their dedication to freedom and equality, whether in the sphere of religion, economy, or politics.19.

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The Town, which is built upon one of the branches of Charles River, very fruitful, and of large extent: watered with many pleasant springs, and small Rivulets: The Inhabitants live flatteringly. Within half a mile is a great Pond . . . we rambled thro’ severall Tall Woods between the Mountains, over many rich and pregnant Vallies, beset on each side with variety of goodly Trees.

—John Dunton, describing Waltham, Mass. in 1686.20

On 23 April 1743 a bird flying west along the path of the Charles River from the port of Boston to the pastures and settlements in Cambridge and Watertown would soon come to the more wooded territory of Waltham, Massachusetts. In the north a large pond dominated, while several streams threaded the town’s various valleys on their course towards the river. Along Main Street just above the brook and not far from the town line was a cluster of houses. The one with the old-fashioned lofty hay scales and the capacious barn set a few rods back from the main road was the Bird Tavern, an important watering place for those driving their wagons west towards the frontier.21 A half mile or so up Pleasant Street from this tavern was the parsonage, home of the Reverend Warham Williams.22

Inside the parsonage the Reverend’s wife, forty-year-old Abigail, was in labor. The parents may well have been wondering whether the child about to be born—their ninth—would live to maturity. Only weeks earlier the eldest and youngest of his brothers, Samuel and Eleazar, were carried away by a diphtheria epidemic. When the healthy baby was born he was named Samuel after his late brother.

In 1743 the town of Waltham of which Reverend Warham Williams was the Congregational minister had borne this name—meaning forest home—a scant five years. For several decades previously it shared an uneasy political co-existence within Watertown as the West Precinct, or simply Watertown West. Now, however, Waltham was prospering. Farm products passed on their way to Boston along Main Street—the Great Country Road that ran east–west past the two taverns, two stores, and the tailor’s, blacksmith’s, wheelwright’s and cabinetmaker’s shops. The return trip from Boston harbor brought sugar, molasses, and other West Indies goods to this and other towns to the west. The sandy road crossing Waltham Plain was the cause of much profanity among the teamsters and gave them an excuse for stopping in one of the several taverns.23 The prosperity of Waltham was the result of a prolonged peace with the Indians established on the western borders of Massachusetts after 1714—a peace that was about to end just as Samuel Williams was born.

Samuel’s family was no stranger to Indian–colonist conflict. The severed head of the Algonquian Indian Metacom, alias King Philip, had been displayed on a post outside the house in which his mother grew up, and part of the skull may have remained during her childhood.24 When Samuel’s father was four years old, he and his entire family were captured by a party of some 250 French, Abenaki, Huron, and Caughnawagan Mohawks in the famous Deerfield raid of 1704. Warham’s mother and two of his siblings were killed. His father, the Reverend John Williams was quickly turned over to the French. He, himself, traveled to Montreal with the Indians, where he was purchased by a French businesswoman. He lived there for three years before he was ransomed and returned to Massachusetts to join his father and three of his remaining siblings. His sister Eunice embraced Indian life and remained a Mohawk and a Catholic for the rest of her life.25

After his return to Massachusetts, the Reverend John Williams set about re-establishing the remnants of his family and ministry in a rebuilt Deerfield. His account of his captivity experience, The Redeemed Captive, proved so popular that it continued to be reprinted and widely read for a number of years. While Warham’s oldest brother, Samuel, became a leader of colonist raiders counterattacking the Indians and was killed in 1713, Warham and his brother Stephen took the path of academic achievement. Despite his belated start, Warham whisked through Boston Latin School and at age sixteen was admitted to Harvard, where his uncle Increase Mather saw to it that he got some scholarship aid.26

After graduating from Harvard in 1719, Warham spent a year studying theology under his step-grandfather Solomon Stoddard at Northampton, dickered unsuccessfully for a post in Deerfield, then came back to Cambridge, where he lived for an additional year at the college while completing his Master’s degree in 1722. During this year he also preached in the Watertown West Precinct meeting house. He was well liked, and the parishioners there negotiated to keep him. He remained in the pulpit in Watertown West—later Waltham—for the rest of his life.27

The Enlightened Pastor

As minister of Waltham, the Reverend Warham Williams exhibited a benign and affectionate manner and showed no signs of suffering from the trauma he had endured at Deerfield as a child. In 1728 he married Abigail Leonard of Norton, the sister of a Harvard classmate.28

Waltham was largely rural, and Warham did his own farming, perhaps raising most of the family food. In addition to the twenty-one acres he owned near the parsonage, he bought two parcels of land totaling twenty-nine additional acres near Prospect Hill in what would become the better side of town.29 Warham and Abigail’s first-born son John died within days of his birth in 1729. Thereafter, the couple obliged the era’s preference for large families by producing a healthy child nearly every two years.

Warham and his wife were modest and retiring by nature, and Warham’s letters and diary entries that have survived lack self-revelation. He kept his journal on the blank pages of Nathaniel Ames’s Almanac, a publication to which he subscribed out of his interest in astronomy. Ames’s Almanac was one of the most widely used and comprehensive in circulation at that time, and one of those that introduced modern cosmology to the general public. Only about two years of Warham’s Ames Almanac notes survive, from the years 1739 to 1741. The entries consist entirely of one-line notations such as: On this day ----- died.; On this day began mowing; Weather today was -----; On this day ------’s house burned. and so on. 30

Warham cared for poetry and history. He spoke gently from the pulpit, offending no one and attracting the approval of his West Watertown flock. This was no small achievement, given the shifting population and uncertain boundaries that had turned Watertown into one of the most contentious communities in Massachusetts during this period.31 Over the next fifteen years Warham, as the West Precinct’s new young minister, served as a natural cheerleader in the struggle for a schoolhouse, better roads, and ultimately, in 1738, separation from Watertown.

The Frontier Revival

Frontier communities such as Deerfield that had been torn apart by the disruption of the Indian wars were particularly open to religious innovations. In Northampton Jonathan Edwards, Warham’s and Stephen’s cousin, was a principal promoter of the conversion experience that is now called born again salvation, an innovation more or less invented by their step-grandfather, and Warham’s theological mentor, Solomon Stoddard. During such an experience, which was available to anyone, persons sensed they were on the receiving end of a divine and saving grace from God.32 When the excitement of this revivalism reached Long Meadow, where Warham’s brother Stephen was minister, Stephen embraced the evangelistic message.33 Warham felt called upon to let his brother know how his Boston colleagues (and presumably he himself) felt about Edwards and his movement:. They look upon you as Rigid Presbyterians and too warm and zealous, as wanting Charity & Moderation. As to you it is said you are warm & Hot, very Forward, take too much upon You . . . make Mountains of Mole Hills.34

These differing views on the Edwardsian revival, however, didn’t appear to undermine the brothers’ fraternal relationship. Their father, the Reverend John Williams died in 1729, and the responsibility for maintaining contact with their sister Eunice, the unredeemed captive in Montreal, fell to Stephen and Warham. They often exchanged letters about family business, church controversies, the division of their late father’s estate, and their sister in captivity. Throughout the 1730s Stephen and Warham Williams kept open channels of communication with their estranged sister through messages sent via ambassadors from Boston and Albany. In August 1740, this persistence paid off when Stephen was alerted that Eunice Williams, accompanied by her Mohawk husband Arosen, would be visiting Albany, and that she was at last willing to consider a face- to-face meeting with her long-lost brothers. Within days, arrangements had been made, and Stephen and one or more of his brothers were on their way.35

The encounter in Albany went so well that Eunice was persuaded to come immediately to Long Meadow and stay for several days, though she could not be convinced to take up residence again in her ancestral home, despite the efforts of all family members. However she did promise to visit on a yearly basis and for several years kept this promise.

The Great Awakening

During the visit of 1741 the Indianized Eunice was momentarily caught up in the broadening of the frontier revival into the great religious convulsion that became known as the Great Awakening. Unlike the earlier revival, which was largely confined to the fringes of civilization, this movement was spread by itinerant preachers and their publications, traveling, not from the provinces in, but from the urban centers out. It was set loose by the visit to Boston and New England of the Grand Itinerants George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent. Contemporary Thomas Prince said of the resulting quickening of spiritual concern, we have never seen any thing like it before, except at the time of the general earthquake.36

Though no longer associated primarily with the Connecticut River Valley, Awakening fervor did not spare the branch of the Williams family that dominated there. The pressure on ministers in the area to climb aboard the revivalist bandwagon was strong. Most Williams-family clergymen along the Connecticut River were supporters and/or imitators of Jonathan Edwards’s revivals.37 Stephen Williams experienced a harrowing outpouring of the Spirit of God during a Jonathan Edwards’s sermon in Enfield which led not only to a born-again sense of bliss, but to repeated bouts of anguish, anxiety, and manic energy.

When Eunice Williams and Arosen arrived in the valley for their second visit, they soon became the target for an attempted conversion through mass prayer. Alas, the only effect this show of mass zeal had on Eunice was to make her hug her Indian blankets more tightly around her. Warham, who was temperamentally unsuited for revivalism missed the event, but he came to a general family reunion in Coventry,