Samuel Eells - Origins of Alpha Delta Phi

Origins of Alpha Delta Phi

Samuel Eells studied at Hamilton College from 1828 to 1832, a time when both the college and American society were in turmoil. The college was nearly bankrupt due to mismanagement, and the student body was torn apart by rivalries between underground debating and literary societies, primarily the Phoenix and the Philopeuthian. College life at the time was intensely supervised and instruction was rigidly traditionalist. Eells saw the virtue of the debating societies as a haven for free thought, association and intellectual cultivation, yet he deplored their vicious competition for members and social dominance.

In 1832, Eells gathered five students to form a new society, Alpha Delta Phi, which would cultivate intellectual debate and development in the manner of the existing literary societies, but put aside their social competitiveness. It would seek to develop the "entire man," "moral, social and intellectual," and create a community of caring and brotherhood. In writing the constitution and "ideals" for Alpha Delta Phi, Eells and his cohorts drew on the previously existing debate and literary societies, the few previously existing Greek-letter fraternities such as Sigma Phi and Kappa Alpha, liberal Protestant philosophy, the Enlightenment philosophy and traditions of the Freemasons, and the very early stirrings of Transcendentalist philosophy, which would become very influential later in the 1830s.

Alpha Delta Phi was the second Greek-letter fraternity at Hamilton College, behind Sigma Phi, and as it founded more chapters, it also became the first fraternity at Harvard, Brown University, and several other institutions. When it founded a chapter at Miami University in Ohio, it became the first Greek-letter fraternity west of the Alleghenies, and the first anywhere outside of New York and New England.