Scurrility: The Politics of “Quilsylvania”
Even as Smith, Alison, and their colleagues built their innovative school, the project brought controversy. Franklin accused the other Trustees of acting as “cabal” to favor a classical-based school of higher learning that compromised, to a great extent, the original vision of an English language-based education.[1]
Meanwhile, Smith, newly ordained, gained influence among the city’s Anglican population. He became the spokesman for the “Proprietary party,” a group of elites and backcountry Presbyterians allied with the Penn family and opposed to the pacifist Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania Assembly. He attacked the Assembly for its refusal to provide funds for the colony’s defense in his explosive 1755 pamphlet, A Brief State of the Province of Pennsylvania. The two sides were so at odds that the Assembly even imprisoned Smith briefly for libel in 1758. The Trustees did not object to Smith’s participation in this very public battle or to his teaching classes from his jail cell.
The political situation grew still more heated in the 1760s, in the school and in the colony. Smith and his ally, Trustee Rev. Richard Peters, continued to push for more Anglican influence, over objections of Presbyterian Vice Provost Alison. Anglican Trustees codified an Anglican majority on the Board of Trustees under the guise of ensuring non-Anglican representation.
This did little to allay suspicions, and Smith was even suspected of leading an effort to become an Anglican Bishop for America, giving rise to fears of an Established Church in Pennsylvania.[2]
Political debates split the faculty, students, and Trustees, with each side accusing the other of “scurrility” in often vicious pamphlet satires. These “Quilsylvanians” included the idiosyncratic and strident English teacher David James Dove, the mathematics teacher and future revolutionary Hugh Williamson, and a particularly abrasive student named Isaac Hunt. More than mere institutional debates, these arguments were part of larger dissension over the colony’s direction and its leadership, in the context of the settler and frontier violence swirling during the Seven Years’ War. A contentious print culture, and emerging class conflict, all in a diverse ethnic and religious population, made Pennsylvania fertile ground for revolutionary challenges to authority.[3]
“He has scribbled himself into universal Dislike here”[4]
Behind an innocuous title, this anonymous 1755 pamphlet provoked a political firestorm. “This Province,” Smith writes, “is reduced to the most miserable condition.” He attacks the pacifist Quaker-dominated assembly as a relic of Pennsylvania’s past who refused to defend Pennsylvania’s borders against “the French Enemy and their Savage Allies.” Smith also disdained the German-speaking populations, whom he calls “an uncultivated race,” who allied with the Quakers out of ignorance. The Germans, he wrote, were led and deceived by Christopher Saur, the Germantown printer whom he called a “Popish Emissary.”
Smith called for an oath of allegiance to the British Crown (an affront to Quakers) and the suspension of all voting by Germans “till they have a sufficient knowledge of our Language, and Constitution.” He also proposed an Anglo-led bilingual education system and a law that would require all German-language printing be accompanied by English translations.
Franklin believed that the Brief State created a deeply divisive atmosphere both in the colony and at the school and would undermine the institution’s goals. He noted in his letters that the enrollment of the academy was declining as a result of faculty partisanship:[5] “Smith, now known to be the Writer of the Brief State . . . is become universally odious, and almost infamous,” he wrote; “the Schools decline on his Account . . .”[6] The breach between the two men was never healed.
Four College students did speak out in defense of Smith, declaring in a letter to the Trustees that he had scrupulously avoided politics in his lectures on Ethics and Moral Philosophy: “. . . he never did in any of his Lectures take Occasion to introduce any Thing relating to the Parties now subsisting in this Province.”[7]
“Waging Wordy-War”[8]
Born in Barbados, Isaac Hunt moved to Philadelphia and received his degree from the College in 1763. When working as a tutor (assistant teacher) at the school, he became one of the strident voices of “Quilsylvania,” the political pamphlet battles of the 1760s. Calling himself “Jack Retort, Student in Scurrility,” Hunt pokes fun at his professors—Smith, Alison, John Ewing, and James Davidson, whose names are thinly disguised on the title page. The pamphlet—here, as issued, uncut and stab-stitched—defends Franklin from an attack by David James Dove, and mocks William Allen, who was the richest man in the colony, Chief Justice, head of the Trustees, and a Proprietary supporter. Hunt was refused an M.A. degree because of his abrasive writings, and he departed for Barbados, then London, from where he continued to attack Smith. He was the father of Romantic critic Leigh Hunt.[9]
“To him were attributed some political effusions . . . which . . . made a good deal of noise.”[10]
One of Philadelphia’s most flamboyant and politicized educators, David James Dove arrived in Philadelphia from England in 1750 and became English master at the new Academy. Apparently successful at recruiting students, Dove was a restless reformer. While continuing at the Academy, he also opened his own school for girls. When the Trustees objected to his dual roles, he resigned in 1753, then ran his own school nearby before teaching at the new Germantown Academy. Dove even bought property next door to the New Building and sold it to the College later at a profit.
His fame came from his constant entanglements in civic politics and print culture. In 1758, Dove, anonymously, published a ballad attacking the practice of lotteries used by the Trustees to raise revenue, entitled “A Begging We Will Go.” Dove also authored a serious of anonymous broadsides attacking both the Quakers and the Proprietary allies of William Smith in the 1760s.[11]
Lloyd; Cheyney. Trustees Minutes I, 67–68: the new “scheme of Liberal Education,” 1756. ↑
Turner, College, Academy, and Charitable School, 348–353; Gordon 98–99. Hoeveler 167–73. Schlenther, Charles Thomson, 73. ↑
Nash, “Transformation,” 630; Pencak, “The Promise of Revolution,”115. ↑
Franklin to Peter Collinson, November 5, 1756, Franklin Papers 7: 9: “He has scribbled himself into universal Dislike here: The Proprietary Faction alone countenance him a little; but the Academy dwindles, and will come to nothing if he is continued.” Lemay, Life of Franklin, 3:208. ↑
Franklin Papers 7:12: “He has scribbled himself into universal Dislike here: The Proprietary Faction alone countenance him a little; but the Academy dwindles, and will come to nothing if he is continued.” 7:50. ↑
Franklin to Peter Collinson, June 15, 1756, Franklin Papers 6:457 (original in Franklin Papers, UPenn): “Smith, now known to be the Writer of the Brief State, &c. still endeavours to keep up a Flame; but is become universally odious, and almost infamous, as you will see in the Papers. He will do no longer here.” Franklin to Peter Collinson, December 19, 1756, Franklin Papers 7:49–50: “Smith continues still in the Academy; but I imagine will not much longer, unless he mends his Manners greatly; for the Schools decline on his Account: The Number of Scholars at present, that pay, not exceeding 118, tho’ they formerly were 200.” ↑
Minutes of the Trustees, vol. 1, 70–71, quote on 71. The students who signed this letter were Jacob Duché, James Latta, Francis Hopkinson, and Hugh Williamson. ↑
A Humble Attempt at Scurrility, 16. ↑
Cheyney, 113–4; “The Good Education of Youth,” 222–3. On Hunt and the Paxton crisis: Kenney, ↑
Alexander Graydon 1811, p. 14. ↑
Cheyney, 76–77; Joseph Jackson, Encyclopedia of Philadelphia, 2: 593–4; “The Good Education of Youth,” 222–3; Snyder, City of Independence, 74–80; Joseph Jackson, “A Philadelphia Schoolmaster of the Eighteenth-Century.” ↑