Delivered at Yale University, Davenport College, September 2004

John Davenport and Universal Education in an Infant Plantation

Francis J. Bremer

I am both pleased and honored to be here at Davenport College to talk to you about John Davenport. The occasion bears some similarity to the experience I had dining and giving a talk about John Winthrop at Winthrop College in that university to the north on the River Charles. When I was there I discovered that most of the fellows and undergraduates knew virtually nothing about John Winthrop. At the risk of prejudging you, I decided to assume that at least some of those who would gather here would welcome a little bit of background about the man whom this college was named to honor.

Let me begin by affirming that John Davenport is a man worth honoring and remembering – and perhaps especially in our current troubled times. I was born in New York City and educated entirely there through getting my PhD from Columbia. I consider myself a born and bred member of the northeastern liberal establishment but I have become increasingly disenchanted with the failure of fellow liberals, particularly in the academy, to come to terms with the importance of religion in American history. Yale’s own Professor Jon Butler has raised some important points concerning what he called “The Religion Problem in Modern American History” in an essay last year in the American Historical Review. His focus was largely on the monographs that historians write largely for other historians, and his assessment of the situation differs from mine, though I think we would both agree that the role of religion in our past has not been adequately understood.

My own concern was driven home with particular force when after the last presidential election the academic and pundit Garry Wills wrote a column proclaiming that the re-election of George Bush marked the end of the Enlightenment in America. The context for that conclusion, as elaborated in the column, was that America had its origins in the Enlightenment. Wills isn’t alone in arguing that our history begins with the Revolution rather than with the seventeenth century colonists, and focusing on the more secular founders, such as Jefferson, as the fathers of both the revolution and the nation that emerged from it. And within the past year there was a major article in the New York Times discussing how political forces have led to a polarization between those who seek for polemical purposes to overstate the role of religion among the signers of the Declaration and writers of the Constitution, and those who wish to understate the religious sensitivity and concerns of those men. In essence, the blue-red divide that we hear so much about is reflected in the ways in which some wish to write our history.

Denying the importance of the pre-Revolutionary period is reflects either the strategy or myopia of those who wish to ignore the significance of religion in the shaping of our society. Writing off pre-Enlightenment America is not only historically flawed, but does the nation disservice, for failure to understand the puritans and other men and women of faith in our past makes it more difficult to come to terms with the role of religion today – and there is no denying that whether it takes the form of the hostility of many followers of Islam to American policy and values, or the debates over the place of prayer in schools and the Ten Commandments in public places, much of what we as citizens are faced with abroad and at home involves religion. Yet it has become much too fashionable to dismiss people of faith and their beliefs rather than engage with them, to fail to even try to distinguish between faith and fanaticism, and to disparage any religious beliefs as primitive superstition. In doing so we accelerate the process of division in our society and undermine our chances of transcending the challenges of our time.

Biography is a branch of history which encourages us to get into the skins and minds of people very different from us. It enhances our ability to understand with men and women of very different values and, sometimes, to even empathize with them. To work to understand someone who lived in a different time and in different circumstances is a humanizing experience in the best of senses, including making us aware of the uniqueness of each individual. While I’ve had an interest in John Davenport since I began studying the puritans over forty years ago, I’m just now beginning to focus on him with the intensity involved in writing a biography. I came to like and admire John Winthrop, though being aware of his warts. I don’t know if I’m going to end up liking John Davenport or not. But I do know that he had an important impact on New England’s society and culture and that if we see the value in understanding the history of the region and its contributions to our American world, then knowing about John Davenport is an important part of that process. Right now I am at a very early stage of this project and so what I have to say is preliminary and not necessarily new to everyone in this room. Have me back in a few years and I’ll share the fruits of a more intense investigation.

So who was John Davenport? He was what we call a puritan, but puritans came in many different varieties. In fact, one of the values of studying him is to remind ourselves that not all puritans were the same and that all New England was not Massachusetts.

Davenport was born in 1597, not in the East Anglian heartland that we most closely identify with English puritanism, but in the city of Coventry. He was baptized in the parish church of the Holy Trinity by the rector, Richard Eaton, the father of John’s future friend and fellow New Havenite Theophilus Eaton. He was raised in Coventry, the son of privilege. His father was an alderman and his uncle served for a time as mayor. John studied at the chartered grammar school under the classicist Philemon Holland, and then matriculated at Merton College, Oxford in 1613. When his father died there were questions about his being able to continue his education, but his uncle Christopher supported his studies. He transferred to Magdalen Hall, perhaps attracted by the reputation the college had earned as a nursery of godly (i. e., puritan) clergy in the late sixteenth century. That’s quite possible since Coventry had a reputation as a center of religious reform and there is evidence that Davenport himself had a conversion experience shortly before or early in his college career. Religion was at the center or life for men and women in the early modern European world. In an age when science was not able to explain lightening, disease, and other natural phenomenon, supernatural explanations offered a way of coming to terms with the everyday world. Supernatural interventions could also determine the course of history. God’s wind dispersed the Armada. God’s light revealed the Gunpowder Plot.

This is the area of belief that is easy to look down upon, but more important than this for men like Davenport was their sense of being connected to – and ultimately judged by – by a God who had created the universe and was the source of all values. They were willing to judge themselves by those values and to recognize their sins. In the case of Protestants they went further, committing themselves to strive to live meritorious lives, but accepting that their addiction to sin would make them deserving of damnation. God alone could save them, and a born again experience such as John Davenport had meant that he felt touched by God’s love in a personal way that signified that he had been chosen among those who would be saved despite his sinfulness. Buoyed by God’s caress and strengthened by grace, he would strive with more determination and more effectiveness to carry out the will of God.

For Davenport this meant following his calling to the ministry, where he could advance God’s will by helping others to confront their sinfulness and turn to God for mercy. The most difficult part of getting into the skin and mind of a puritan is to accept that even if we have no experience of it, that there may be a supernatural dimension of reality and that there can be a sort of interaction between supernatural being and natural man. Because historians are trained to test evidence empirically and reject the unverifiable, this presents a real challenge. But even if we can’t accept that Davenport’s understanding of what he experienced was “accurate” we need to accept that that is how he understood it.

We can’t get too deep into this aspect of the subject given the time available, however, so let’s get back to Davenport’s life. After a brief interlude as a private chaplain at Hilton Castle, he moved to London, serving first (perhaps) as an assistant to the puritan minister Thomas Taylor in St Mary’s Aldermanbury, then in 1619 as a preacher in the parish of St. Lawrence, Jewry in London. There he earned a reputation as a powerful preacher and in 1624 he was chosen to be pastor of the parish of St Stephen on Coleman Street. This was a time when longstanding divisions among English Protestants were becoming more pronounced. Puritanism, as its enemies labeled the beliefs, was characterized by the belief that the Church of England had been insufficiently purified of elements of the Roman Catholic faith. By the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign the reformers were content with the Calvinist theological foundation of the national church and were pleased with England’s aggressively anti-Catholic foreign policy, but still troubled by the lack of sufficient learned clergy and by the continuing use of ceremonies that they felt smacked of “popery.”

Over the following decades puritans became alarmed as it appeared that not only was further reform unlikely but that the accomplishments of the earlier reformers were being undermined. A party in the church hierarchy that came to be most closely identified with Bishop, later Archbishop, William Laud, sought to reinstitute ceremonial procedures that had been shed during the early decades of the Reformation, and seemed unconcerned if not actually supportive about the rise of anti-Calvinist theological positions. Furthermore, by the 1620s, the leaders of church and state were insisting on a precise conformity to some of the controversial ceremonial practices that puritans had been allowed to evade in the past. Numerous clergy were deprived of their livings. Some ended up directly joining the migration to create a New England in America that began at the end of the decade. Others, John Davenport included, first sought refuge in the Netherlands.

When, after a brief interlude in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, Davenport emigrated to New England, he found himself first in Boston at the height of the so-called Antinomian Controversy that swirled around Anne Hutchinson and her followers. Despite the reputation that Davenport suffers for being more intransigent than many of his clerical contemporaries, what has struck me most in these early days of focused research is his moderation and concern for uniting Christians. In England he had initially conformed to distasteful practices because, as he explained, it was more important to unite Protestants of different persuasions against the threat of Catholicism than to quarrel among themselves over what they disagreed on. He was a noted supporter of the ecumenical efforts of the reformer John Dury (about whom more later), who sought to unify the various Protestant churches of Europe. And his role in Boston in 1637 appears to have been damage control – to persuade his friend John Cotton to separate himself from the more extreme advocates of free grace (such as Hutchinson herself) and to work with John Winthrop to limit the efforts of the more zealous heretic hunters to banish not only Cotton but many others whose views were on the fringe of orthodoxy.

Shortly after his involvement in that affair Davenport and his flock sailed south to establish the town and colony of New Haven, and there he spent most of the remainder of is life. He played a key role in the shaping of the region’s institutions of church and state, as well as the shaping of the colony’s laws. He declined an invitation to return to England at the start of the Civil Wars (and another invitation in the 1650s to relocate in Ireland to aid in the further reform of that country), but advocated reforms at a distance through his correspondence and writings. His colony was one of the first and strongest in its support the Puritan Revolution and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. He supported the unification of the region’s colonies into the New England Confederation, and supported the efforts of New Haven to prosper by expansion of its influence across Long Island Sound and also into the Delaware Bay. When the hopes for a permanent English reformation collapsed following the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, he harbored the regicides Whalley and Goffe who fled to the colonies to escape the wrath of Charles II, the son of the executed king Charles I.

New Haven’s existence had never been recognized by the royal government of Charles I and its strong support of the Revolution and sheltering of the regicides certainly earned it no credit with Charles II. As a result, its independent existence came to an end officially in 1662, when John Winthrop Jr. obtained a charter for Connecticut which absorbed the New Haven territories, and effectively three years later. From the key figure in an independent colony, Davenport had been reduced to a respected clergyman in a town that was now part of a larger and more dynamic colony. His marginalization increased when he assumed the leadership of those in New England who sought to preserve the traditional restrictions on Baptismal admissions by opposing the proposed reform known as the Half-Way Covenant. Here too he proved to be on the losing side. And so it is perhaps not surprising that when the majority of the First Church of Boston – the oldest and most prestigious congregation in all of New England – invited him to be its new pastor in 1667 he was eager to accept. Congregational polity required him to be dismissed by the New Haven church, which was reluctant to lose the only pastor its members had known. Tempted by the chance to once again command New England’s center stage, Davenport fudged his letter of dismissal and accepted the new call. But his remaining yeas were filled with controversy. He fought, unsuccessfully, the effort of a minority of the Boston Church that had not approved of his call to secede and form the Third, or Old South, Church. He delivered an inflammatory election day sermon to the Massachusetts General Court in 1669, in which he attacked the decline of the puritan spirit in the region he had helped found. Shortly thereafter he died, in 1670, at the age of seventy three.

Though there are many aspects of John Davenport’s life and work that might engage us, but I have chosen to discuss his contribution to the shaping of education in New England. It has been said Davenport’s “plan [for the colony of New Haven] included schools for all, where the rudiments of knowledge might be gained; schools where the learned languages should be taught; a public library; and, to crown all, a college ‘in which youth might be fitted for public service in church and state’.” Indeed, an historian of Yale has written that “A college was one of the institutions which the Rev. John Davenport, the leader of the colony which was planted in New Haven, A. D. 1638, deemed essential to that idea of a Christian State, which he had formed before he left his native land….”

Though a product of English grammar school and collegiate education himself, it is likely that Davenport’s views on education were shaped by his involvement with an advanced group of European thinkers that were linked together through the efforts of Samuel Hartlib. Hartlib was born in Ebling, then part of Poland, and had studied briefly in at the University of Cambridge as a young man. He moved in England in 1628 to escape the ravages of the Thirty Years War. Settling soon thereafter in London, he took upon himself the mission of promoting educational and religious reform and all forms of knowledge by organizing a communications network that encompassed the most advanced thinkers on the continent as well as the British Isles. His work to foster intellectual exchanges is credited with having an important role in the later formation of the Royal Society.

Given his interests, Hartlib was an early supporter of the religious reform efforts of John Dury. Dury was a Scot who had been raised and educated in Leiden, where his father served as minister to the Scotch Presbyterian church in that Dutch city. Growing up in a region that was a center of religious controversy and conflict, Dury committed himself to the task of healing the divisions that rent Christendom. His primary effort was to unite the Reformed (including the English) and Lutheran churches behind a common set of religious fundamentals and to encourage concentration on practical divinity as opposed to more narrow doctrinal issues. He befriended Hartlib when he was in Elbing in 1627

It seems that from the time his feet touched English soil in 1628, Hartlib was advancing Dury’s projects, and from the start Davenport was involved. The pastor of St. Stephen’s was one of a number of men who pledged to contribute an annual amount to finance the composition, translation, printing, and distribution of works of practical divinity. Davenport was soon in direct contact with Dury and was so impressed with the reformer that in 1628 he invited him on behalf of the Massachusetts Bay Company (of which Davenport was a member) to take up a ministerial position in New England. In 1630, in a letter to Dury in which he expressed the view that “moral wisdom is far to be preferred before any thing which this world can afford,” Hartlib rejoiced “greatly that you found Mr. Davenport so forward, earnest, and judicious in the work.” This is only one of a number of letters in the Hartlib Papers that document Davenport’s support of Dury’s efforts.

By the early 1630s the reform group around Hartlib, which would include Davenport, were also promoting the ideas of the educational reform Jan Amos Comenius. Comenius, born in Moravia and a bishop in the Moravian Church, had met and befriended Dury in Elbing in the late 1620s. He believed that learning and spiritual growth were linked and sought to reform education as a means of promoting religious truth. His goal, as he expressed it, was “nothing in fact less than the improvement of all human affairs, in all persons and everywhere.” One of the radical elements of this program was the belief that education was for all men and women, not, as he put it, “that all men should become learned but that all men may be made wise unto salvation.” With the invention of printing, “books are grown so common in all languages and nations, that even country people, and women themselves are familiarly acquainted with them.” This did not mean the leveling of the social order -- “We do not mean,” he wrote, “that it is our desire that mechanics, rustics, and women should devote themselves heart and soul to books. Those who have high position shall know their position and learn how to rule, and those who have a subordinate position may know theirs and learn to obey.” But with basic education ordinary men and women would be able to read the scriptures, sift truth from error, and strive for moral and religious perfection, “embracing of that Golden Age of light and knowledge, which hath been so long foretold.”

Comenius and his supporters were critical of “the learning which is now taught in schools, [which] is a thing too tedious, and long in regard of the shortness of life, too laborious for common capacities, too narrow in respect of the amplitude of things, and in regard of the subtlety and solidity of their truth many ways defective.” It was necessary to accommodate learning to the uses of life. Hartlib identified Davenport as one of the supporters of this “general project of education and reformation in all sorts of learning,” and it was these ideals that influenced the shaping of education in New Haven. One of the striking things about early New England as compared to other American colonies, was the concern to insure the education of youth. We are all familiar with the legal steps taken in early Massachusetts to require the employment of town schoolmasters, and the establishment of Harvard in 1636. But New Haven was just as dedicated to the task. It is likely that Davenport had recruited Ezekiel Cheever to be colony’s first schoolmaster before leaving England. Cheever was born in London and attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He was a member of St. Antholin’s parish in London, when he joined the Davenport group in migrating to New England in 1637. Continuing on to New Haven with Davenport and Eaton, he ran a school almost from the beginning of the colony. Though not a wealthy man, he was active in public affairs, participated in the gathering of the church, served as a deputy to the general court in 1646, and occasionally preached. His “Latin Accidence” was probably used by the advanced students at New Haven and would hold its place in New England for more than a century as the accepted text in Latin Grammar.

Universal education was not legislated in early New Haven, but was clearly expected. Within a year of its formation the General Court ordered a clause inserted in the indenture of an apprentice, Charles Higginson, mandating that he was to be kept at school for a year. A few years later the indentures of another apprentice, Samuel Hitchcock, were cancelled “because he had not been taught to read and write.”

Like the Boston Latin School, Cheever’s first school was not created by formal government action. But early in 1642 the colony’s legislature dictated that a free school be established in the town and instructed Davenport and the town magistrates to consider “what yearly allowance is meet to be given of it out of the common stock of the town.” Cheever was the schoolmaster until 1649, when he left to assume a similar position in Ipswich, Massachsetts, his departure likely prompted by a censure from the New Haven church resulting from a disagreemtn over church discipline.

As noted before, Davenport’s vision for the New Haven colony included the formation of a college. In 1643 New Haven joined with the other colonies of the New England Confederation in supporting Harvard through collections of corn. But Davenport had grander plans, and in 1647 a tract in the town was set aside as “college land” and a house donated for the support of college, “so soon as their ability will reach thereunto.” Massachusetts complained that there were not enough people in New England to support two colleges, but the real obstacle was the depressed economy of the region. The project was raised in the General Court again in 1652, at which time the representatives from the town of Guilford complained that the cost was too much and suggested cooperation with the Connecticut colony. When Harvard president Henry Dunster was revealed as an Anabaptist in 1653 and forced to resign his position in the following year, some saw this as their best chance to establish a New Haven college. Variosu towns appropriated funds, William Leveridge of Oyster Bay was nominated as president, Theophilus Eaton donated books for a library, and Fitz John Wintrhop, the son of Connecticut’s John Winthrop Jr., who had been denied admission to Harvard, planned to attend the new college. But the effort again fizzled out. Leveridge, a clergyman who had committed himself to the Indian missions, may have declined, or support might just not have reached the necessary threshold. In 1657 Davenport’s friend and seven time governor of Connecticut, Edward Hopkins, died and left funds to further learning in the two southern New England colonies. With this bequest to draw on, Davenport pushed hard for the local college in 1660. The Restoration and the resultant uncertainties of the colony’s future undoubtedly hindered these efforts in the early 1660s. In the end, the Hopkins bequest was used to endow the local grammar school and the hopes for a college were deferred – but not forgotten – till the dawn of a new century.

Despite his failure to fully implement his educational vision, Davenport’s contributions were significant. Reflecting Davenport’s vision, in establishing the town school, the New England General Court had defined its purpose as “the better training up of youth in this town, that through God’s blessing they may be fitted for public service hereafter, either in church of commonwealth.” He was not alone among the puritan colonists in believing that each individual needed to make his or her own decisions in their quest to live in accordance to the laws of God and man, nor was he alone in believing that to empower them to do so it was essential to teach all to read and write. Education was a means to facilitate the search for advancing knowledge and building a better society. If for Davenport and his peers this goal was rooted in religion its implications transcended any one faith. And if he was not alone, few were as committed to this task and it is fitting that for his efforts this college be named after him.