American Heroes by Edmund S. Morgan Page A

Baptists could write learned books. But Clap had grown suspicious of heretical books, however learned. He had recently removed from the library some of those he considered most subversive, including one by Samuel Clarke, the author who had started Stiles on the road to skepticism. Having got these out of the way, Clap did not propose now to start filling the library with new evils. Rather than expose the students to Foster’s works, Clap refused the Collins gift. He had evidently become convinced that a library is a dangerous place.
    Ezra Stiles had not. Pained by Clap’s suppression of free inquiry, he wrote a letter suggesting that liberty offered a clearer road to truth than the kind of control that Clap was now exercising. “It is true,” Stiles admitted, “with this liberty error may be introduced; but turn the tables, the propagation of truth may be extinguished. Deism has got such head in this age of licentious liberty, that it would be in vain to try to stop it by hiding the Deistical Writings: and the only Way left to conquer and demolish it, is to come forth in the open Field and dispute the matter on an even Footing.”
    This letter has a significance that extends beyond the circumstances of its composition, because in a little less than twenty years after he wrote it, Ezra Stiles became president of Yale College. Had he by this time overcome his youthful confidence in reason, he might have been a fit man to keep the students free from heresy. But he still had not altered from the sentiments expressed in his letter to Clap. He not only let the students read what they wanted but encouraged them to discuss controversial questions in every field of thought.
    His liberal policy escaped serious criticism during the Revolution and the early post-Revolutionary years, when the intellectual climate throughout America was effervescent. In Connecticut, however, conservative reaction gradually set in. People witnessed the growth of infidelity undermining their religion, and the new ideas of democracy assaulting their social and political habits of thought. They watched the French Revolution, from hopeful beginnings, boil over into the excesses of mob violence and regicide. They saw the formation of democratic clubs in America as a sure sign that the germs of the French Revolution had crossed the ocean and were about to breed a revolution of social classes in the land of the free. And so when their sons came home from Yale College with nicknames such as Rousseau and Voltaire, and with an admiration for such subversive Frenchmen, small wonder if eyebrows and tempers rose. President Stiles obviously let the students read and discuss these French infidels.
    Indeed, in spite of his firm belief in Calvinist Christianity, his sympathy for the French was notorious. Fifty years later, David Daggett, a New Haven lawyer, could recall Stiles accosting him on the street:
    â€œHave you heard the glorious news?” cried Stiles.
    â€œWhat news, Mr. President?”
    â€œThe French have entered Holland—they have planted the Tree of Liberty before the Stadtholder’s palace. They will plant it before the palaces of all the princes of Europe. The people will live under its shade—I rejoice at it—I am a democrat—yea, I am a Jacobin—I glory in the name.”
    At a time when most men in Connecticut shuddered at the word Jacobin, Ezra Stiles gloried in the name, because he continued to believe that it spelled liberty. His faith endured that the way to truth “is to come forth in the open Field and dispute the matter on an even Footing.” If free inquiry led to the death of kings, that did not alarm or surprise him, for only tyrants, he believed, need fear the truth. His last book, published just before his death, in 1795, was a history of the men who condemned Charles I. It contained an impassioned defense not merely of that action but also of the execution of Louis XVI, and from