耶鲁大学庆祝美国独立250周年

As the United States celebrates its 250th birthday, Yale News presents here some of the ways Yale, in its 325th year, has been honoring, examining, and exploring the nation whose story overlaps so closely with its own.

When war came to campus: 

Yale during the American Revolution

On April 19, 1775, British redcoats clashed with colonial militias and minutemen in the Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord, the first military conflict of the American Revolution. Two days later, news of the hostilities reached New Haven.

As in towns and villages throughout the colonies, the news jolted New Haven. Yale College sophomore Ebenezer Fitch recorded the moment in his journal. 

“Today tidings of the battle of Lexington, which is the first engagement with the British troops, arrived at New Haven,” he wrote. “This filled the country with alarm and rendered it impossible for us to pursue our studies to any profit.”

As the Revolution approached, Yale was one of just nine formally chartered colleges in the American colonies.

The sentiment was widespread across the Yale campus. A day later, classes were cancelled and students sent home two weeks before their regular spring vacation. Fitch returned to his hometown, Canterbury, in eastern Connecticut, before continuing to Boston, where the British soldiers had retreated following the April 19 skirmishes, and where patriots from across the region were now gathering on the city’s outskirts.

By the time classes resumed at Yale, on May 30, the siege of Boston was underway. 

Indeed, Yale College continued to operate, for the most part, throughout the war, which would last until September 1783. But the revolutionary era that accelerated that spring was marked by danger, disarray, and disruption on campus. And for many Yalies, it was a time to join the patriots’ cause, and to help forge a new, independent nation. 

In a period when fewer than 150 students were enrolled at Yale, dozens took up arms for the new Continental Army or local militias. (These students included a future lexicographer named Noah Webster, who would later be known as “the schoolmaster of America.”) Naphtali Daggett, a staunch patriot and Yale graduate who was the college’s president at the start of the war, would himself enter the fray, with grave personal consequences.

Number of Yale graduates who signed the Declaration of Independence

In 1776, as Yale marked its 75th anniversary, four of its graduates — Philip Livingston and Lewis Morris of New York, Oliver Wolcott of Connecticut, and Lyman Hall of Georgia — were among the 56 delegates to sign the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming the colonies’ separation from Great Britain, in Philadelphia. Roger Sherman, a prominent New Haven lawyer and politician, also signed the document. Sherman, who served as Yale’s treasurer from 1765 to 1776, would become the only individual to sign all four of the nation’s primary founding documents: the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the U.S. Constitution.

Days later, the Connecticut Journal, a New Haven newspaper, published the document in full. Writing in his diary on July 13, the renowned theologian and Yale graduate Ezra Stiles reacted to the seismic event.

“The thirteen united Colonies now rise into an Independant Republic among the Kingdoms, States & Empires on Earth,” wrote Stiles, who would become Yale’s seventh president in 1777 and lead the college through the remainder of the war. “May the Supreme & Omnipotent Lord of the Monarchical Republic of the immense Universe, shower down his Blessings upon it, & ever keep it under his holy Protection! And have I lived to see such an important & astonishing Revolution?” 

Yale was a vastly different institution in 1776 than the large, global research university of today. The campus consisted of three buildings just north of the New Haven Green, now long known as Old Campus. Only Connecticut Hall remains today. (A statue of Nathan Hale, a 1773 Yale graduate who gave his life to the Revolution, stands outside.)

Enrollment records from the period are imprecise, but about 150 students, exclusively male and white, attended the college at the time. 

As president pro tempore, Naphtali Daggett’s role as Yale’s leader was considered a “temporary” one. (His permanent title was the Livingstonian Professor of Divinity.) By 1776, however, he’d already held the position for a decade. Nehemiah Strong was professor of mathematics and natural philosophy. A small group of tutors, including Timothy Dwight, a theologian who would become Yale’s eighth president, serving from 1795 to 1817, shouldered most of the responsibility for day-to-day instruction.