These volumes, the fourth and fifth, complete the series of biographical sketches of students at Princeton University (the College of New Jersey in colonial times). They cover pivotal years for both the nation and the College. In 1784, the war with England had just ended. Nassau Hall was still in a shambles following its bombardment, and the College was in financial distress. It gradually regained financial and academic strength, and the Class of 1794 graduated in the year of the death of President John Witherspoon, one of the most important early American educators. The introductory essay by John Murrin, editor of the series since 1981, explores the postwar context of the College. The two volumes contain biographies of 354 men who attended with the classes of 1784 through 1794 and two other students whose presence at the College in earlier years has only now been demonstrated. During these years Princeton accounted for about an eighth of all A.B. degrees granted in the United States. It was the young republic's most "national" college, although it had nearly lost its New England constituency and was instead beginning to draw nearly 40 percent of its students from the South. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

These volumes, the fourth and fifth, complete the series of biographical sketches of students at Princeton University (the College of New Jersey in colonial times). They cover pivotal years for both the nation and the College. In 1784, the war with England had just ended. Nassau Hall was still in a shambles following its bombardment, and the College was in financial distress. It gradually regained financial and academic strength, and the Class of 1794 graduated in the year of the death of President John Witherspoon, one of the most important early American educators. The introductory essay by John Murrin, editor of the series since 1981, explores the postwar context of the College. The two volumes contain biographies of 354 men who attended with the classes of 1784 through 1794 and two other students whose presence at the College in earlier years has only now been demonstrated. During these years Princeton accounted for about an eighth of all A.B. degrees granted in the United States. It was the young republic's most "national" college, although it had nearly lost its New England constituency and was instead beginning to draw nearly 40 percent of its students from the South. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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Part biography and part microhistory, Jacob Green’s Revolution focuses on two key figures in New Jersey’s revolutionary drama—Jacob Green, a radical Presbyterian minister who advocated revolution, and Thomas Bradbury Chandler, a conservative Anglican minister from Elizabeth Town who was a leading loyalist spokesman in America. Both men were towering intellects who were shaped by Puritan culture and the Enlightenment, and both became acclaimed writers and leading figures in New Jersey—Green for the rebelling colonists, Chandler for the king. Through their stories, this book examines the ways in which religion influenced reform during a pivotal time in American history.

Perceptions of the United States as a nation of immigrants are so commonplace that its history as a nation of emigrants is forgotten. However, once the United States came into existence, its citizens immediately asserted rights to emigrate for political allegiances elsewhere. Quitting the Nation recovers this unfamiliar story by braiding the histories of citizenship and the North American borderlands to explain the evolution of emigrant rights between 1750 and 1870. Eric R. Schlereth traces the legal and political origins of emigrant rights in contests to decide who possessed them and who did not. At the same time, it follows the thousands of people that exercised emigration right citizenship by leaving the United States for settlements elsewhere in North America. Ultimately, Schlereth shows that national allegiance was often no more powerful than the freedom to cast it aside. The advent of emigrant rights had lasting implications, for it suggested that people are free to move throughout the world and to decide for themselves the nation they belong to. This claim remains urgent in the twenty-first century as limitations on personal mobility persist inside the United States and at its borders.

“A friend in history,” Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “looks like some premature soul.” And in the history of friendship in early America, Caleb Crain sees the soul of the nation’s literature. In a sensitive analysis that weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative, Crain describes the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America’s greatest writing--the Gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the novels of Herman Melville. He traces the genealogy of these friendships through a series of stories. A dapper English spy inspires a Quaker boy to run away from home. Three Philadelphia gentlemen conduct a romance through diaries and letters in the 1780s. Flighty teenager Charles Brockden Brown metamorphoses into a horror novelist by treating his friends as his literary guinea pigs. Emerson exchanges glances with a Harvard classmate but sacrifices his crush on the altar of literature--a decision Margaret Fuller invites him to reconsider two decades later. Throughout this engaging book, Crain demonstrates the many ways in which the struggle to commit feelings to paper informed the shape and texture of American literature.

The forty-second volume of the collected writings and correspondences of the American statesman, ambassador, and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin In the spring of 1784, Franklin, John Jay, and British negotiator David Hartley exchanged ratifications of the definitive British-American peace treaty. Hoping for permission from Congress to return home, Franklin settled his accounts, negotiated a French consular convention, headed a royal commission to investigate animal magnetism, wrote several scientific theories, and published his well-known satire about rising with the sun. As the volume ends, Thomas Jefferson brings news of a diplomatic assignment that would keep Franklin in France for another year.

In the early 1790s Richard Randolph was accused of fathering a child by his sister-in-law, Nancy, and murdering the baby shortly after its birth. Rumors about the incident, which occurred during a visit to the plantation of close family friends, spread like wildfire. Randolph found himself on trial for the crime largely because of the public outrage fueled by these rumors. The rest of the household suffered too, and only Nancy, who later married the esteemed New York statesman Gouverneur Morris, would find any degree of happiness. A tale of family passion, betrayal, and deception, Scandal at Bizarre is a fascinating historical portrait of the social and political realities of a world long vanished.

Forty years in the making, this book constitutes an unveiling of hitherto unrecognized archival records pertaining to the founding of Washington and Lee University. These startling records created by men of the highest reputations and character disclose long-held secrets both shocking and at the same time assuaging. In the process, the true character of the universitys founding first president is illuminated as is his astounding significance to the history of the Great Valley of Virginia and to all the nations lovers of liberty. Within a vast array of pearls of wisdom are disclosed serving to quash long-held but mistaken notions and several myths exposed as utterly false narratives concerning when the institution was founded and by whom. The institutions current mistake on this subject is only wrong by twenty-five years. Some of those who are today heralded as founders turn out had nothing whatever to do with establishing Washington and Lee. Within these pages lies the unmistakable evidence of who was responsible and when the historical miscalculations were committed. Empty assertions too numerous to mention here are discredited as are many of their perpetrators. Some of those named were merely credulous and or too disinterested to scrutinize unauthenticated assertions of the past. Others, more agenda driven, failed to rise above their predispositions and selective perceptions, all failing to exercise due diligence in preserving the heritage and legacies of their forebears. The vast majority of the conclusions presented here for the first time since 1850 are virtually incontrovertible, at least by critics employing empirical standards nearly universally accepted since the dawn of the enlightenment. Footnotes are liberally employed to emphasize facts and uncover truths, as well as giving citations of authority. A bibliography is also attached, as are several important appendices. In a few select cases, those with the intent to deceive or cover up are specifically exposed. In the case of one particular false narrative, its exponent is held up to just ridicule for knowingly publishing a malicious and unjust traducement of a noble paragon of virtue, Rev. William Graham. In all, Washington and Lee University and its founding first president, William Graham, are shown in an entirely new light. The university is compellingly demonstrated to deserve to be considered the most progressive American institution of higher learning of the eighteenth century. As the new nation gave to the world an unprecedented democratic vision of freedom, this book reveals Washington and Lee University in its infancy (Liberty Hall Academy), introducing a vision of higher education for men and women of all races. This chartered degree-granting institution was then the only such institution with its doors open to all. Then the only campus in America where one might observe a black or female regular undergraduate student was at Lexington, Virginiaa sight never yet seen at Harvard, Yale, or even Princeton in the eighteenth century. This noble idea unfortunately died when the universitys founder, William Graham, died. His vision in this regard is but a part of his heretofore mostly unknown legacy. Although unheralded, he was, nevertheless, unquestionably the only educator in America who dared to prove that a black man, if given the opportunity, can succeed in securing a college education. A powerful lesson that once learned remained a powerful and enduring truth.