Samuel Johnson (Columbia) - Life

Life

Born in Guilford, Connecticut, he graduated from the Collegiate School (now Yale University) in 1714. Johnson first became Congregationalist minister of a church in West Haven, but influenced by the writings of John Locke and Isaac Newton, he and a group of other Collegiate School graduates began to express doubt in the legitimacy of their Congregational ordination. As a result, Johnson left the colony in order to seek ordination in the Church of England. Upon his return to Connecticut, he opened the first Anglican church in the colony at Stratford in 1724 and strenuously polemicized, under the auspices of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, against both the Congregationalists of New England and the new evangelical outburst occasioned by popular preacher George Whitefield and the Great Awakening he unleashed.

He remained in Stratford until 1754, when the vestrymen of the Anglican Trinity Church in New York City considered him the logical choice to serve as after the first president of King's College. Though reluctant to leave his family in Connecticut and fearing the smallpox epidemics he considered endemic of urban life, Johnson ultimately took up the post, assisting in behind-the-scenes maneuverings to ensure the college would be explicitly Anglican, rather than nonsectarian. In the early years of the institution, Johnson was the sole instructor, primarily teaching classics and philosophy. His first class consisted of eight boys he considered "woefully unprepared". Owing to his fear of smallpox, of which his son William had died while in England, Johnson was frequently absent from the city, and increasingly shared his teaching responsibilities. When his wife died of smallpox, Johnson began to seek a means to leave his post, although the Governors of King's College and the Archbishop of Canterbury had already maneuvered to replace him with the Oxford-trained minister Myles Cooper. Johnson left the post in 1763 and returned to his ministry at Stratford, where he died. Cooper penned the inscription which adorns his monument in the town:

If decent dignity, and modest mien,
The cheerful heart, and countenance serene;
If pure religion and unsullied truth,
His age's solace, and his search in youth;
In charity, through all the race he ran,
Still wishing well, and doing good to man;
If learning free from pedantry and pride;
If faith and virtue walking side by side;
If well to mark his being's aim and end,
To shine through life the father and the friend;
If these ambition in thy soul can raise,
Excite thy reverence or demand thy praise,
Reader, ere yet thou quit this earthly scene,
Revere his name, and be what he has been.

Johnson was the father of William Samuel Johnson, a Founding Father of the United States who attended the United States Constitutional Convention. He followed his father's footsteps, attending Yale and becoming president of Columbia College.