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~ YALE AND HER EARLY BOOKS
Yale College had the makings of its library long before it was founded as a college. The leaders of the settlers of the colony who had come here from England and tl1en Boston had plans to provide for the education of their young and they soon had the books ready at hand. This band of Puritans was led by TheophiIus Eaton, a merchant who had worked in the wool trade in Denmark before returning to London, and John Davenport, a dissenting minister, who had been childhood friends in England despite a difference in age of the half-dozen years by which Eaton was the senior. After the death of his first wife Eaton married next the widowed daughter of the bishop of Cheste1~ Anne Lloyd Yale. Eaton and Davenport in London both supported the New England colonization effort by signing the Massachusetts Bay Company Cambridge Agreement in 1628, but they did not emigrate to Boston with their families and their planters until nearly a decade had passed. They arrived during a time of religious turmoil and sectarian bitterness that they disliked and, besides, most of the good land for settlement had already been claimed and settled. The group moved to land on the north shore of Long Island Sound that they had bargained from the Quinnipiac Indians and there in 1639 they founded what was to be New Haven, tl1e town. In 1643 they founded New Haven, the colony, and it included towns on that shore from Guilford to Stamford and also the town of Southold on the otl1er shore. As the most experienced and 1ichest of the group Eaton became governor of the colony and remained at its head until his death in 1658. Davenport was the minister of its first church and remained in the colony for decades clinging fast to the old orthodox and traditional ways upon which he had been trained in exile in the Netherlands, and he opposed the union of his New Haven colony with the more liberal Connecticut colony in 1662, but he failed at that. A half-dozen years later he left the colony to take the pulpit of the conservative First Church of Boston, but before he left for Boston he made plans for the safekeeping in New Haven for the books worth about twenty pounds sterling that he had been given in 1656 by Eaton for their proposed new college in the town. Davenport had even worked with tl1e town of New Haven as early as 1648 to take some early steps toward the
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founding of that college but the town was not yet ready. His hopes were kept alive more by his own optimism than by the magistrates of the town, but kept alive they were, despite the refusal of the town even to provide a library space for the collection of books upon which that college was to be based. He wrote to John Winthrop the younger in the fall of 1655 that plans for a college "seemed near fruition," but still no college and not even a grammar school. Although the books belonged to the town they remained in the possession of Davenport's son until he died in the winter of 1676-77 and then his widow, Abigail Pierson Davenport, had them to take care of in the house. In 1681 the town asserted its claim to their possession but had no place to put them. The Reverend James Pierpont came to town in the mid 1680s and boarded with that widow of Davenport's son, heard the story of the hopes for a college, and then bought the books
from the town in 1689 for forty bushels of rye and thirty-two of Indian corn, worth as country pay less than thirteen pounds sterling for the same books that Eaton had valued at twenty pounds when he had received them from the estate of his brother in England. George Pierson listed these books in his study of the origins and development of the early Yale library, and his list was based on a catalogue made at the time of Davenport's leaving for Boston. Calling these the Eaton-Davenport books he found that "at least one-half and quite possibly more than one-half of the volumes given by Governor Eaton to John Davenport never reached the Collegiate School (or were later lost). But probably about twenty folios did."
Pierson examined in great detail the legend of the founding of Yale College being based on the forty folio volumes presented by the ten founding trustee ministers and piled on ·the table in the parsonage parlor of the Reverend Samuel Russel in Branford. Pierson found evidence of three presentations of volumes, and none in the exact number of forty. The first was the gift by Pierpont of the Eaton-Davenport volumes that he had husbanded. The second was the gift of three of the founding trustees, Israel Chauncy, Abraham Pierson, and some more from James Pierpont. Whatever books had been collected for the collegiate school may have been put into the care of the minister at Branford, to the further care of whom may have been entrusted whatever other volumes had been donated by the remaining seven founding trustees and other friends of the new college but not all at once: "when the General Court of the Colony of Connecti
cut was asked to authorize the Collegiate School, there was already on hand (delivered or promised) an endowment of not 'about 40' but close to one hundred books," and this endowment made the library nearly a half-century older than Yale College. The charter to erect the college having been granted by the legislanlre of the colony, and the books and faculty and students temporarily settled at Saybrook, the giving of books continued.
The greatest of the early gifts to the library was described in the mid eighteenth-century annals of Yale written by President Thomas Clap as that of
Jeremiah Dummer, Esq; of Boston, then agent [for the colony of Connecticut] at London, who in the year 1714 sent above 800 Volumes of very valuable Books; about 120 of which were at his own Cost and Charge; and the rest by his Procurement from sundry principal Gentlemen in England; particularly Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Richard Blackmore, Sir Richard Steele, Dr. Burnet, Dr. Woodward, Dr. Halley, Dr. Bently, Dr. Kennet, Dr. Calamy, Dr. Edwards, the Rev. Mr. Henry, and Mr. Whiston, severally gave a Collection of their own Works, and Governor Yale put in about 40 Volumes: All of which I suppose to be worth 260 Pounds Sterling.
And in his entry for 1718 Clap mentioned a further seventy-six volumes from Dummel~ twenty of which were folios worth about tllirty pounds sterling. So important was the part played by Dummer in the matter of gathering and sending ofbooks for Yale that in the biographical sketch of him in the new American National Biography it is stated simply tllat Dummer was tile "founder of tile Yale University Library."
It was Dummer who had written in 1711 to the Reverend James Pierpont about his attempts in London to interest Elihu Yale in the new Connecticut college. He also tried to interest Thomas Hollis, the chief early benefactor of Harvard, in the same but Dummer was criticized roundly for the attempt and also for trying to get the Hopkins bequest for this brand-new college, but the Chancery court in London decided in Harvard's favor. But Dummer continued to work toward getting "a pretty parcel of Books" from time to time. When the first lot arrived in September 1714 Samuel Johnson of the Class of 1714 was cheered because before their coming the books available to him in the library were" 100 or 150 years old such as the first settlers of the country brought with them 70 or 80 years before." One of tile founders of the Collegiate School was the Reverend Timothy Woodbridge to whom Dummer wrote in 1715 that "I
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shall be glad to hear how your young Academy grows, and whether you have built a convenient receptacle for your library, that I may send you some Proper Ornaments to furnish it. I hope you had, or at least have by this time, the books and Globes I sent you by the last ships, to which I am still making additions." The books that had arrived had been delivered to Saybrook just before the troubles began. In a letter from the trustees in New Haven written to Dummer in thanks, praise and gratitude were mixed among such bitter comments upon the books being held hostage by the Saybrook people reluctant to have the school move from their town, for the gift was intended for the school and "not to furnish many illiterate families in Say-Brook with a stock of books each." Mter much bitter name-calling by each side the books were forcibly removed from the "illiterate families" of Saybrook in oxcarts and transported for six days, all the while being harassed by the aggrieved Saybrookers, to New Haven where College Hall was being built to house them. Begun in January 1716 it was nearly finished by commencement at which time the trustees announced that the Collegiate School was to be named formally for a generous donor of books and money, Elihu Yale.
Governor Eaton was the stepgrandfather of this Yale whose father had left New Haven for the more liberal neighborhood of Boston where young Elihu was born. When he was about three his mother took him and his brother to England where his father had gone earlier. Elihu became a clerk in the East India Company and soon found himself posted to Madras, India, where he made a personal fortune of about a fifth of a million pounds sterling that had begun with his annual salary of ten pounds, and he worked his way up through the hierarchy of the company to became governor of Madras. His tenure was a rough one and he got in trouble with his employers because of his greed and his disagreeable nature but he returned to England as a rich man, and settled in as a merchant and philanthropist. Jeremiah Dummer had written back to New Haven that this heirless rich man might become a patron of the new college. Yale was one of the 181 donors of those eight hundred books that had been collected by Dummer and sent over to Connecticut. Yale's forty books in the Dummer gift were followed by hundreds more and by many trunks of textiles sent to New England to be sold for the benefit of the Connecticut college. Altogether his gifts came to over eight hundred pounds sterling, tlle largest benefaction in the college's first century.
Cotton Mather was a friend and benefactor of the college who suggested to the trustees that they name the school after Yale after Mather had written to Yale suggesting that, "and your Munificence might easily obtain for you such a commemoration and perpetuation of your valuable name, as would indeed be much better than an Egyptian pyramid."
The great scandal of Yale College in the eighteenth century was blamed upon the books in the library that by 1718 had grown to about thirteen hundred volumes. Timothy Cutler was a graduate of Harvard College who became rector of Yale in the spring of 1719, following in the post his father-in-law who had been acting rector; and his brotller-in-law was Jonathan Law, one of the chief backers of the new college. Jonathan Edwards was then a student who commented on the new head of the college that "when he is spoken of in the school or town, he generally has the title of President." In addition to that esteem Cutler also had under his care a library that was unequalled in New England and was ready for the use of the tutors and the students. Thanks to Jeremiah Dummer and his gifts, Cutler and tutor SamuelJohnson "effected a revolution in the Yale curriculum, lecturing on Newton and Locke, offering instruction in tlle new science and philosophy better than anything Mother Harvard could afford," in the words of Shipton'S sketch of Cutler in Sibley's Haruaul Graduates. A couple of years later Cotton Mather in Boston heard that Anglican or "Arminian books are cryed up in Yale Colledge for Eloquence and Learning, and Calvinists despised for the con
trary." A pamphlet about the controversy in New Haven complained that young men tl1ere had read "only a few Episcopalian things which their library at New-Haven had been unhappily stocked withal, with little or nothing of the antidote."
There was also a rumor tllat land had been purchased in New Haven for the building of an Anglican church where Cutler planned to conduct services out of the Book of Common Prayer. And there was a lot of truth to these stories, for Cutler and a halfdozen other Congregational ministers in the neighborhood had talked with an Anglican missionary and told him that they were ready to switch to the Church of England. By the time of Commencement in 1722 Cutler proved tlle rumors true when he ended the prayer with the Anglican line, "and let all the people say, Amen." The following day he, tlle two tutors, and four nearby ministers, including Jared Eliot and John Hart, appeared in the library and announced to tlle trustees tllat they doubted the divine
worth of presbyteria~ ordination and that they were planning to pursue holy orders 111 the Church of England. This news was shocking enough but what made it worse was learning that Cutler had. never b:~n sincere in his Congregational ministry but was pa~ently walu~g his chance to become the Anglican priest for Chnst Church 111 Boston, a position paying a much better salary than tl1at of rector in ew Haven. The governor of Connecticut, Gurdon Saltonstall, suggested that these new converts and the regular Congregational ministers of tl1e New Haven Association meet in tl1e library in a friendly discussion of differences.
Soon all of the local ministers recanted their decisions and returned but the rector and tutors persisted and the next day tl1ey lost theirjobs.
When Dummer heard that it was the books tl1at he had raised for tl1e library that were being cited as the cause of the apostacy he was so unnerved that he sent immediately a list that showed that among his gifts the works of the dissenters outnumbered those of the Anglican bishops and other worthies. His letter to Woodbridge of June 1723 mentioned that the criticism of his gifts I~ight "discourage me from sending any more books, at least tIll I hear from you about it." He was reassured and he continu:d to arrange for books to be sent including some from Damel Turner for which Turner received in return a medical d,egree fr?m Yale, i~elfbarely a college and about a century away
fl om l~avll1g a ~edlcal school. Dummer said of his gifts tl1at "my Acqua~n~nce Wltl1 men of Learning and Estates is very general" and thIS IS demonstrated by the range of interest of his one hun
dred and eighty-one donors. The affair of the Yale Apostates died down after a while and gifts of books continued to arrive. Another major gift came from George Berkeley, later bishop of Cloyne in Ireland, who sailed from England in 1728 to found a college in Bermuda. He landed in V~rginia and, while waiting for tl1e twenty thousand pounds sterlIng that tl1e government had promised to him for the founding, he moved to Newport, Rhode Island, where he became friends with that Samuel Johnson who had been one of the Yale Apostates. Berkeley wrote to Johnson in 1730 to ask whether
"the~ would admit the writings of Hooker and Chillingworth into tl1e lIbrary of the College in New Haven." When it became obvious th~t ~1e promis.ed. government funds to augment the private subscnpuons for hIS Il1tended Bermuda college were never to appear Berkeley returned to England where he was approached by a number of people who wanted the private funds to be diverted to their OWl1 charities. His response was to say that he had spoken with his subscribers and had recommended that the subscriptions "go to the support of a College in Connecticut, erected about thirty years ago by private subscription, and which breeds the best clergymen and most learned of any college in America." Berkeley wrote to Johnson in July 1732 that "I shall make it my endeavor to procure a benefaction of books for the College library, and I am not ""ithout hopes of success." During the fall and winter he collected these books and'at the end of May of 1733 they were shipped to Boston where the newspaper reported that this "present from tl1e Rev. Dean Berkeley, some to Harvard college in Cambridge, and some to Yale college in New Haven" had arrived. The Harvard Berkeley books were burned in the Harvard Hall fire of 1764.
At the meeting of the Yale trustees on 12 September 1733 in the library there was agreement that Berkeley be thanked by the rector and that the rector also, "at the Cost of this College order Suitable Boxes to be made for the Reception" of tl1e books. The bill of lading is headed "A Catalogue of Books for Yale College at New Haven," and lists almost five hundred books in about a thousand volumes. In his analysis of the list in preparation for a biography of Berkeley published in 1871, A. C. Fraser commented that "the divinity is mostly of the Anglican school," "a few other mathematical books, complete the scanty list in that department. Works in natural history and medicine have a large share," and "tl1ere is a fair collection of poets." When tl1e library was catalogued ten years later by Rector Clap and a tutor named Wortl1ington they "placed all the Books in tl1e Library, in a proper Order (but in Honour to tl1e Rev. Dr. Berkeley, for his extraordinary Donation, his Books stood by themselves, at the South End of the Library)." Once all of the books had been put in order the catalogue done by Clap took three forms: "one as they stood in their proper Order on the Shelves; and another in an Alphabetical Order; and a Third, wherin the most valuable Books were placed under Proper Heads, according to the Sub
ject Matter of them, together with Figures referring to tl1e Place and Number of each Book." Manuscripts of the shelf list and the alphabetical list are in the Beinecke Library along witl1 tl1e books of tl1e 1742 Libraly. The Yale online catalogue Orbis has the cataloguing information of that third catalogue tl1at was plinted in New London in 1743 when the manuscript was probably desu'oyed
in the printing process. That printed catalogue is available here in
this publication, and online at Yale at CO=1742Library.
For Yale's first half-century not a penny was spent upon the buying of books for the library yet the collection was the best in New England thanks to the generosity of the founders and the neighbOling ministers and friends abroad in England. In 1731 the library made money for Yale College when the trustees allowed the rector to sell the duplicate books and use the proceeds for the use of the library, and in 1739 Rector Williams sold some duplicate volumes and raised over fom'teen pounds. In October Elisha Williams resigned as rector and the ten trustees selected as his successor Thomas Clap, another Congregational minister~ thirty-six years old with an interest in astronomy who had been a founder of the library in Lebanon, Connecticut. And it was the library at Yale that was the target of one of his early reforms. He set up rigid standards for the use of the books, being harsh on any student who marked a book with a pen, "for every word that he shall write in it," he would be fined money, and a student could borrow a book only with the permission of his tutor who was responsible for keeping a precise record of the terms of the loan. Before Clap had prepared his rem:. ganization of the collection the lists of the 2500 books on the shelves were posted on the end of the bookshelf and the searching student or tutor had a long and hard time finding a title. In his organizing by subject matter under about two dozen classes some titles appeared up to a half-dozen times under different headings. In the 1755 edition Clap claimed that the number of books in the collection had grown by about five hundred, but the reality was close to one-tenth tllat number. vVhatever the true number~ about forty percent of them were theological, an0tiler fifteen percent each were of philology and of history and geography, and the balance were devoted to mathematics and physics and natural philosophy and poetry and tile like. That edition reproduced here bears tile signature of Stiles from the 1780s on tile title page and at the end in his and others' handWiiting additions to tile collection toward his preparation of the next edition.
Clap kept his interest in astronomy alive also, for he followed the transit of Mercury through a piece of tile "philosophical Apparatus" owned by Yale and kept with the books in the newly reorganized library-a thirty-inch-Iong, four-inch-diameter telescope through which he also studied sunspots-and he added many volumes to the library through gift dming his quartercentury at tile head ofYale college.
Clap was succeeded as rector by Ezra Stiles of the Yale Class of 1746 who took an M.A. at the Harvard commencement in 1754· Shipton was sufficiently impressed with Stiles to devote thirty-five pages to a sketch of his life in the twelfth volume of Sibley's Hm:. vmd Graduates, spending only twice that number of pages on the fifteen members of the Harvard class. He justified this by stating that "it would seem pointless to write at any length of Stiles here without having spent a year in his manuscripts at Yale, and in view of Edmund Morgan's forthcoming biography; but the contrast between his pattern of thought and those of most of his Harvard contemporaries is so revealing that it contributes significantly to the meaning of these biographies." High compliment, indeed. Stiles had been librarian of the Redwood Library in Newport, Rhode Island, where he served as minister of the Second Congregational Church, learned Hebrew well enough to preach in that divine language in the Tuoro Synagogue, and he invited a series of learned rabbis to preach from his pulpit. When he had learned that Clap had removed from tlle library the "Deistic books" that had come as part of the Berkeley gift Stiles complained to him that hiding them would do no good and the "only way is, to come forth into the open field, and dispute the matter on an even footing. The evidences of Revelation are, in my opinion, nearly as demonsu'ative as Newton's Principia, and these are
tlle weapons to be used." The logic of this argument was ignored and some of the rationalist, latitudinarian tracts were taken from the shelves. A critic of Clap, Thomas Darling, published in New Haven in 1757 a criticism of Clap's book on the New England churches, in which he wrote that Clap "locks up a umber of Books from the Scholars to prevent the reading of them." In his biography of Clap, Tucker wrote that "if there was any single key to victory in orthodoxy's battle against rationalism, that key was Yale. For this reason, Clap was determined that it must remain a bastion of old truth." But what came to end Clap's rectorship was the students, for whose souls he cared so much but whose other needs he never comprehended. They called for him to be deposed and he was. Tucker ended his biography of Clap by citing a response to tile rector written in the margin of a library book, "Tomme Clap you fool do not tllink that I mind your Finis."
During the war tlle books were moved out of the range of the guns of tlle Royal Navy and in their place the town meeting voted in 1776 that the governor of tlle brand new state of Connecticut "be desired to permit 100 stands of arms to be lodged in the
library for the use of the Company in Yale College." But along with the books and the "philosophical apparatus" that were removed the faculty and students went also, and after the peace the books and the apparatus were returned from various safe inland towns, "the asylum to which they had been taken five or six years before," but not all of them made the trip back then, some returning late and others never. Pierson calculated that of the books "that had been squirreled away outside of town some never got back," roughly the same percentage that disappeared in the move from Saybrook. Stiles agreed with the percentage, about six hundred books. In the view of most undergraduates then and earlier in the century it mattered little, for they seldom used these books. Juniors and Seniors alone had borrowing rights although the President could "give Leave for the Sophimores to take out some particular books upon the Rudiments of
Language and Logic, rarely used by the upper Classes." Observing in his diary in 1787 the Reverend Manasseh Cutler of the Class of 1765 wrote that "tl1e Library is small; the collection consists principally of rather antiquated authors. The Philosophical apparatus is still less valuable."
A comparison of tl1e Harvard and Yale catalogues of the eighteenth century makes clear tlnt as the century moved on tl1e Harvard library caught up from the setback of a slower start and the disastrous fire and then went well beyond that of Yale. Harvard's first catalogue of 1723 had about a hundred pages listing tl1e books and this was supplemented a couple of years later with another dozen pages of additions; tl1e second was a brief listing, "selectus," with some titles for particular courses and this was published in 1773; the third was published in 1790 and had almost three hundred and sixty pages of listings. Harvard's first and third catalogues gave an alphabetical listing within each category of the works with author's last name, first name, title of the book, and the place and date of publication and the location on the library shelves. The second student guide had only rarely a
place and date of publication. The first Yale catalogue was published in 1743 and had about forty-five pages of listings; the second was published in 1755 set fresh in a smaller size of type and had about forty pages of listings; the third was published in 1791 and had fifty pages of listings. The first and second editions were the same with the exception tl1at about forty new titles were added but in both editions the listing was much more "familial~" last name only of authors, subject of the work not tl1e wording of the title, and no place or date of publication and entries not arranged in alphabetical order. Typographical errors in the first were carried over to the second and some were spectacularly confusing as with Bennet for Kennel. The third had the same attributes but tl1e entlies were arranged alphabetically.
SELECTED SOURCES
American National Biograph)\ 24 volumes (New York: Oxford University Press for American Council of Learned Societies, 1999), for biographical sketches of many of those mentioned here but, interestingly, not of Thomas Clap.
W. H. Bond and Hugh Amory, The Printed Catalogues of the HanJard College Libral)', I723-I790 (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1996), reproduces the texts and includes an index with a concordance of the entries.
John Davenport, Letters ofJohn Davenport, Puritan Divine, edited by Isabel MacBeath Calder (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press for First Church, 1937), has much on the earliest books and the attempts to found a college.
Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Sltetches of the Gradu.ates of Yale College, six volumes (New York: Hem)' Holt, and later New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1885-1912), for Classes of 1702 through 1815, but with very little information about the undergraduate years of his subjects.
Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Documentary Ristol)' of Yale University ( ew Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1916), full of information for this period.
Brooks Matller Kelley, Yale: A Ristol)' ( ew Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), a respectful and useful long view.
PallersinRonorofAndrewKeogh, Librarian ofYaleUniversitybytheStaffofthe Libmry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Library, 1938)
Anne Stokely Pratt, 'The Books Sent fi'om England byJeremiah Dummer to Yale College," pp. 6--44, presents the letters and other sources for the gift.
Anna Marie Monrad, "Historical Notes on tlle Catalogues and Classifications of the Yale University Library," pp. 251-84, this long view has a few pages on the early library.
Dorothy Wildes Bridgwater, "President Stiles's Letter to Ebeling," pp. 307-16, includes a brief description of the library.
l'vlargaret L.Johnson, "American Imprints and Their Donors in tlle Yale College Libral)' of 1742," pp. 355-71, gives full authOl' and title and place and date of publication of tlle items.
Louise May Bryant and Mal)' Patterson, "The List of Books Sent byJere
