Schools for Statesmen: The Divergent Educations of the Constitution’s Framers by Andrew H. Browning

Abstract

Detailed and compendious, Schools for Statesmen performs a valuable service. It breaks down every conceivable factor in categorizing the backgrounds of the fifty-five framers of the U.S. Constitution, who represented twelve states (Rhode Island boycotted the convention). Rather than simply analyzing eighteenth-century college life, Browning focuses at length on delegates who were largely self-taught in addition to those who had tutors or attended college, examining which group was the better prepared. That kind of boldness marks the strength of this book.What about the college experience? Classes were small and students—who entered at various ages, between thirteen and eighteen––were keenly aware of each other’s class status at the outset. Browning draws clear distinctions among America’s oldest colleges (Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary), showing next how the later emergence of Princeton and King’s College (Columbia) liberalized learning. He engages with the relative significance of church affiliation for curriculum, the outsize influence of college presidents, the uniform reliance on ancient authors (read in Latin), and the growing significance of Scottish moral philosophy on the younger delegates.Beyond its synthetic purpose, the book examines a range of affinities and individual quirks, venturing into what shaped the framers’ discordant personalities. Some of the framers exhibited provincial outlooks; others were more worldly. William Livingston (New Jersey), educated by his grandmother, later lived among the Mohawk Indians with his Yale-educated tutor. Those who breathed in the atmosphere of Oxford or went to Edinburgh or Glasgow to imbibe the spirit of moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson (regarding, most dramatically, popular consent and right of resistance) were forever changed by the experience.America’s early college presidents were all men of the cloth, but Scottish Presbyterians and Scottish thought contributed most to the republic’s founding. The straightforward statistics that Browning compiles tell a story: Four of the framers studied in Scotland; many more profited from their experience. After Princeton’s Edinburgh-educated John Witherspoon (nine of the framers, including James Madison, fell under his sway), came an unheralded schoolmaster named Francis Alison, a grammarian and an ethicist, whom Yale’s long-serving patriot-president Ezra Stiles called “the greatest Classical Scholar in America.” Alison, also a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, divided his time between Delaware and Philadelphia, teaching boys as young as seven—three of whom were to sign the Declaration of Independence, two to help frame the Constitution, and another to serve with distinction as secretary of the Continental Congress. At William and Mary, despite its Anglican affiliation, Virginians of Thomas Jefferson’s peer group benefited from the teaching of the Scot William Small, who lectured on ethics and belles-lettres. Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson, two of the most outspoken delegates, were especially responsive to Scottish political philosophy. A teenaged Alexander Hamilton, too, learned from a Scot.The threads that Browning connects are tantalizing. The touchy Oliver Ellsworth (Connecticut), an unsung but influential convention delegate, hated Yale and transferred to Princeton. Ellsworth’s Yale classmate Waightstill Avery made the same switch, later moving to North Carolina, where he helped to establish the school that readied William Richardson Davie, a Revolutionary officer and future delegate (North Carolina), for Princeton.The connections that emerge in this book extend even to the next generation’s experiences. Future president Andrew Jackson received his legal training from Davie’s law tutor; not long afterward, he issued his first dueling challenge to attorney Avery. Early America was a small, peculiar world. Browning reports that five of the framers who had colleges named after them never attended a single class at any college.Schools for Statesmen is so well-constructed that it might at first appear to be a blueprint for political theorists and historians of education. But it has a more creative tenor than that: In supplying evidence of the role that school ties played at the Constitutional Convention, it offers a colorful palette, mixing personalities and painting a compelling picture of copyists who grew to be inventors of what these days counts as tradition.