Samuel Johnson (October 14, 1696 – January 6, 1772) was a clergyman, educator, linguist, encyclopedist, historian, and philosopher in colonial America. He was a major proponent of both Anglicanism and the philosophies of William Wollaston and George Berkeley in the colonies, founded and served as the first president of the Anglican King's College, which was renamed Columbia University following the American Revolutionary War, and was a key figure of the American Enlightenment.
Johnson was born in Guilford, Connecticut Colony, the son of a fulling miller, Samuel Johnson Sr., and great-grandson of Robert Johnson, a founder of New Haven Colony, Connecticut. Johnson was substantially influenced by his grandfather, William Johnson, a state assemblyman, village clerk, grammar school teacher, mapmaker, militia leader, judge, and church deacon. His grandfather taught him English at age four, and Hebrew at five; he took young Samuel Johnson around the town on visits to his friends, and proudly had the young boy recite great passages of memorized scripture.
After studying Latin with local ministers and schoolmasters, including Jared Eliot, in Guilford, Clinton and Middleton, Johnson left Guilford at age 13 to attend the Collegiate School at Saybrook, later renamed Yale College, in 1710, where he studied the Reformation logic of Petrus Ramus and the orthodox Puritan theology of Johannes Wolleb (Wollebius) and William Ames. He graduated in 1714 as class valedictorian with a bachelor's degree; three years later, in 1717, he was awarded a master's degree.
Johnson began teaching grammar school in Guilford in 1713, and continued to teach while a student a Yale and for the rest of his life, spending nearly 60 years as a teacher.
In 1714, he began to write a short work titled Synopsis Philosophiae Naturalis, summing up what Puritans knew of natural philosophy. He left this work unfinished and began working instead for his master's thesis by writing in Latin a more ambitious "encyclopedia of all knowledge", titled Technologia Sive Technometria or Ars Encyclopaidia, Manualis Ceu Philosophia; Systema Liber Artis. It was a systematic exploration of all knowledge available to Johnson based on the methods of the Reformation logician Petrus Ramus.
His work on this logical exploration of the Puritan New England Mind eventually resulted in 1271 hierarchically arranged theses. It has been called by Norman Fiering "the best surviving American example of student application of Ramist method to the whole body of human knowledge".
His work on the Encyclopaidia was interrupted when a donation of 800 books collected by Colonial Agent Jeremiah Dummer was sent to Yale late in 1714. He discovered Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning, the works of John Locke and Isaac Newton and other Age of Enlightenment authors not known to the tutors and graduates of Puritan Yale and Harvard.
Johnson wrote in his Autobiography, “All this was like a flood of day to his low state of mind”, and that “he found himself like one at once emerging out of the glimmer of twilight into the full sunshine of open day". Though he finished his Latin Ramist thesis, he now considered what he had learned at Yale “nothing but the scholastic cobwebs of a few little English and Dutch systems that would hardly now be taken up in the street.”
He used what he learned in the next two years to write in English a Revised Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1716). It was prefixed by a hierarchical Table or map of the intellectual world outlining the sum of all knowledge. It would be the first of a series of tables categorizing "the sum of knowledge" into ever more complex tables used for both categorizing knowledge for libraries and to define curriculum in schools. If he had published the work, it would have predated the first comprehensive English-language encyclopedia, Ephraim Chambers's 1728 Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, by twelve years.
In 1716, Johnson was appointed the senior tutor at Yale College. Founded in 1701, Yale was located on a small neck of land in Saybrook, Connecticut. By 1716, Saybrook Point was considered too small to handle the needs of the growing school. Connecticut Governor Gurdon Saltonstall and seven Yale trustees proposed moving the college to New Haven, Connecticut. They were opposed by three trustees, two of whom split the college, and opened a schismatic branch in Wethersfield, Connecticut, taking half the students and the junior Yale tutor with them.
For over two years, Johnson was the sole member of the Yale faculty and the only administrator on-site at the college in New Haven. Unsupervised, he took the opportunity to introduce the Enlightenment into Yale. When Johnson's close friend Daniel Brown left his position as Rector of Hopkin's Grammar School and was formally hired as a second tutor in 1718, Johnson found time to create the first catalog of books of Yale's expanded library, and, between 1717 and 1719, to write up Historical Remarks Concerning the Collegiate School, the first history of Yale.
Johnson's first publication was a broadside printed for the 1718 Yale Commencement, which contained Latin commencement thesis. It shows that Johnson taught Locke, Newton, Copernican astronomy, modern medicine and biology, and, for the first time in an American college, algebra.
The next year was one of tumult. In November 1718, Governor Saltonstall forced the schismatic Wethersfield students, including a young Jonathan Edwards, to come to New Haven. The Wethersfield students were surly and rebellious. Johnson attempted to teach them his Enlightenment curriculum, and the schismatic students complained that he was a poor teacher. They returned to Wethersfield in January, 1719. After the spring 1719 elections confirmed Saltonstall as Governor, the schismatic trustees and students gave up and returned to New Haven.
According to historian Joseph Ellis, "Johnson's presence precluded its reunification," so he was "sacrificed for college unity" and lost his job as tutor. Out of a job, he designed a new curriculum for a Yale now run by his friend Rector Timothy Cutler and Tutor Daniel Brown, studied religion and philosophy, and wrote up a book on Logic (1720), which may have been used as class notes at Yale, but was not published in his lifetime.
In 1720, Johnson became Congregationalist minister of a church in West Haven, Connecticut. Even though "he had much better offers", he took up the position for the sake "of being near the college and library". There he, Yale Rector Timothy Cutler, Yale Tutor Daniel Brown, and six other Connecticut ministers, including the Rev. Jared Eliot of Clinton, and Johnson's friend the Rev. James Wetmore of North Haven, formed a group to study the Anglican divines and the "doctrines and facts of the primitive church". Their reading and discussions led them to question the validity of their ordinations, and the book group members converted from embracing a Presbyterian polity on ordination to an Episcopal one sometime in 1722.
At Yale's September 13, 1722 commencement, in a very public and dramatic event labeled the “Great Apostasy” by American religion historian Sidney Ahlstrom, the nine member group declared for the episcopacy. After strong pressure from the Governor and their family and friends, five of the nine recanted, but Johnson, Cutler, Brown and Wetmore, refused to change their decision, and were expelled from their positions at Yale and their Congregational ministries.
Johnson along with the others left the colony in order to seek ordination in the Church of England. As one of the now famous Great Apostates, he was greeted warmly by the Church and University establishment. On Sunday, March 31, 1723, at the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, "at the continued appointment and desire of William, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, and John, Lord Bishop of London, we were ordained Priests most gravely by the Right Reverend Thomas, Lord Bishop of Norwich". He was granted honorary master's degrees at both the University of Oxford, where he was the first American awarded an honorary master's degree by the university, and the University of Cambridge.