Ezra Stiles


Ezra Stiles was an American academic and educator, Congregationalist minister, theologian and author. He was seventh president of Yale College, and one of the founders of Brown University.

Early life

Born the son of the Rev. Isaac Stiles in North Haven, Connecticut, and Kezia Taylor, the daughter of poet Edward Taylor. Ezra Stiles graduated from Yale in 1746. He studied theology and was ordained in 1749, tutoring at Yale from that year until 1755. At one point he nearly became an Anglican: the Rev. Dr. Samuel Johnson in a letter to Archbishop Seeker of Canterbury on April 10, 1762, confided that Stiles "was once on the point of conforming to the Church, but was dissuaded by his friends, and is become much of a Latitudinarian." Styles resigned from the ministry in 1753 to study law and practice at New Haven, but returned to the cloth as a Congregationalist minister two years later. Historians Helen A. Lane and Marion B. Walkden report that he was the first minister of the Dighton Community Church in Massachusetts. They state:
In 1768, he was elected to the revived American Philosophical Society. In 1784, Stiles was elected an honorary member of the Society of the Cincinnati of Connecticut, one of the first so honored, for his ardent support of the Patriot cause.

Newport life

, the Anglican Church in Newport, Rhode Island, asked him to become its minister, but he turned the offer down. Instead, in 1755, he became pastor of the Second Congregational Church, also in Newport, where he also served as Librarian of the Redwood Library and Athenaeum. He kept an informative diary of his life and distinguished acquaintances in Newport, including his association with Aaron Lopez. Newport's Ezra Stiles House is on the National Historic Register.
in Newport, Rhode Island
From time to time, Stiles invested with the merchants and sea captains of his congregation; in 1756, he sent a hogshead of rum along on a voyage to Africa and was repaid with a 10-year-old male slave, whom he renamed "Newport". Around the same time, he wrote a joint letter with fellow Newport minister Samuel Hopkins condemning "the great inhumanity and cruelty" of slavery in the United States.

Foundation of Brown University

In 1764, Stiles helped establish the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations by contributing to the drafting of its charter and by serving with 35 others—including Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery, Samuel Ward, the Reverend John Gano, the Reverend Isaac Backus, the Reverend Samuel Stillman, and the Reverend James Manning—as a founding fellow or trustee. In drafting the charter, Stiles combined broad-minded public statements defining Rhode Island College as a "liberal and catholic institution" in which "shall never be admitted a religious test" with private partisanship: his draft charter packed the board of trustees and the fellows of the college with his fellow Congregationalists, but the Rhode Island Assembly caught on to his plan, and changed his numbers to increase the number of Baptists, Episcopalians, and Quakers, reflecting the more ecumenical character of the state.

Biblical scholarship

Stiles struck up a close friendship with Rabbi Haim Isaac Carigal during the latter's six-month residence in Newport in 1773. Stiles' records note 28 meetings to discuss a wide variety of topics from Kabbalah to the politics of the Holy Land. Stiles improved his rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew, to the point where he and Carigal corresponded by mail in the language.
Stiles' knowledge of Hebrew also enabled him to translate large portions of the Hebrew Old Testament into English. Stiles believed, as did many Christian scholars of the time, that facility with the text in its original language was advantageous for proper interpretation.

American Revolution

Before Regular troops of the colonial army arrived in Newport in late 1776, Stiles left. He became Pastor of the Congregational Church at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1777.
As a pastor Stiles, defended the monarchy as the best form of government in his sermon, entitled The United States elevated to Glory and Honor, to the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut in 1783. He stated that "a monarchy conducted with infinite wisdom and infinite benevolence is the most perfect of all possible governments."

Yale presidency

In 1778, he was appointed president of Yale, a post he held until his death. Stiles freed Newport on June 9, 1778, as he prepared to move to New Haven; he would in 1782 hire his former slave for $20 a year and the indenturing of Newport's two-year-old son until age 24. As president of Yale, Stiles became its first professor of Semitics, and required all students to study Hebrew ; his first commencement address in September 1781 was delivered in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. By 1790, however, he was forced to face failure in instilling an interest in the language in the student body, writing
From my first accession to the Presidency... I have obliged all the Freshmen to study Hebrew. This has proved very disagreeable to a Number of the Students. This year I have determined to instruct only those who offer themselves voluntarily.

The valedictorians of 1785 and 1792, however, did deliver their speeches in Hebrew.
Stiles was an amateur scientist who corresponded with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin about scientific discoveries. Using equipment donated to the college by Franklin, Stiles conducted the electrical experiments in New England, continuing a practice first begun by his predecessor, President Thomas Clap. He charged a glass tube with static electricity and used it to "excite the wonder and admiration of an audience". He shocked 52 people at once, fired spirits of wine and rum, and caused counterfeit spiders to move about as if they were alive. These were all experiments that had been performed before, and "Stiles seems to have had little genius for pushing back the frontiers of knowledge" and his observations "disclosed nothing new". He was more a learner and teacher than an experimenter.
Nevertheless, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1781.
His book The United States elevated to Glory and Honor was printed in 1783.

Legacy at Yale

Yale's legacy from this interest of Stiles' includes a portrait of Carigal by artist Samuel King. The idea that the Hebrew words "Urim" and "Thummim" on the Yale seal are there because of Ezra Stiles is a false myth. Indeed, the Hebrew on the Yale seal appears on Stiles' own master's degree diploma from Yale in 1749, decades before he became president of Yale College.
In 1961, Yale named a new residential college in his honor: Ezra Stiles College, noted for its Eero Saarinen design, particularly the building's lack of right angles between walls.
His upholstered armchair is currently in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. The chair was made in Newport, Rhode Island.

Personal life

Stiles married twice and had eight children. Stiles' son Ezra Stiles, Esq., was educated first at Yale College, then at Harvard College, where he studied law, graduating in 1778. Ezra Stiles, Jr., subsequently settled in Vermont, and served to establish the boundaries between Vermont and New Hampshire. He died prematurely at Chowan County, North Carolina, on August 22, 1784, and his two daughters by his wife Sylvia Stiles of Vermont had their uncle Jonathan Leavitt appointed their guardian.
His daughter Emilia married Judge and State Senator Jonathan Leavitt of Greenfield, Massachusetts. His daughter Mary married, in 1790, Abiel Holmes, a Congregational clergyman and historian and a 1783 graduate of Yale College. By the second marriage to Sarah Wendell, Abiel was the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.