Teacher and author '' in 1768 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.
Yale College 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.
Congregationalist minister 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. He returned to Connecticut in 1723, under the auspices of the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, as a missionary priest. He opened the first
Anglican church built in the colony, Christ Church in
Stratford, Connecticut in 1724. Charged with spreading the Anglican church in the colony, he formed parishes and opened
house churches throughout the colony, which he then staffed with his disciples, then built physical churches in the town. He founded 25 churches in the Colony by 1752, for which he has been called "The Father of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut". Beginning in the 1730s, he participated in a long running pamphlet war with
New England Puritans. "Johnson willingly and enthusiastically defended his beliefs in a series of three pamphlets" titled
Letters to His Dissenting Parishioners (1733–37), and in the next decade, was attacked, and then counter-attacked his greatest Puritan antagonist, the President of Princeton
Jonathan Dickinson, in a series of
pamphlets titled
Aristocles to Authades (1745–57). The debate was not only theological, but political and legal. As a minority Anglican in a Congregationalist
established church state, he led the Anglican side against both the
Old Light and New Light Puritans who dominated the elected Connecticut Assembly, struggling to emancipate his people from Puritan church taxes and laws restricting Anglican worship. He defended his American Anglican practices vigorously, and advocated for an Anglican Bishop in America. This request for a Bishop was vigorously opposed not only by New England Puritans and their supporters in England, but by Southern Anglicans who wished to preserve their independence. Johnson failed in this effort: no Church of England Bishop was ever sent to America, and there was no Episcopal Bishop until
Samuel Seabury (bishop) was ordained by the
Scottish Episcopal Church. In addition to dealing with the powerful Old Lights from 1723 on, after 1740 he now had to deal with the
evangelical outburst occasioned by the New Light popular preacher and fellow Anglican minister
George Whitefield and the
Great Awakening he unleashed. He opened a successful
common school in Stratford shortly after his arrival in 1723, and boarded and tutored the sons of prominent New York families to prepare them for college. He also trained Yale students for the Anglican ministry at his
parsonage in Stratford, converting many of them from
Puritan denominations, as well as training Anglicans in a kind of small seminary. Between 1724 and his death in 1772, Johnson mentored 63 Yale graduates who intended to take Anglican orders. His disciples resided in all 13 states and Canada by the time of the Revolution.
Creating "A New System of Morality" , a member of the
George Berkeley Group in Rhode Island that Johnson met with between 1729 and 1731 president from 1754 to 1763, now housed in the Columbia Trustees Room in 1743 Johnson was a seminal figure of
American philosophy. Though busy with ministry and educational duties, and raising his family, he never stopped learning or writing, and kept to his self-appointed mission to write up the sum of all knowledge. In February 1729, Johnson noted in his
Autobiography, "came that very extraordinary genius
Bishop Berkeley, then Dean of
Derry, into America, and resided two years and a half at Rhode Island". Johnson hurried to visit him, and his group in
Rhode Island, including the painter
John Smybert. He became for a time a disciple of Berkeley's, and exchanged many letters with the philosopher over the years, discussing Berkeley's
idealist philosophy. Before Berkeley left America in September 1731, Johnson convinced Berkeley to donate to Yale a large number of books, 500 pounds sterling, and a 100-acre farm with 100 pound sterling yearly income which would fund three scholars at the college. Johnson published the essay "An Introduction to the Study of Philosophy, exhibiting a General view of all the Arts and Sciences” in the May 1731 issue of London-based periodical
The Present State of the Republick of Letters (1728–36). Written just as he was about to send his two Nicoll stepsons to Yale, it was a manual for teaching young men
ethics and
moral philosophy, things not taught at a Yale that had reverted to the Puritan curriculum after the Great Apostasy; it was the first work published by an American in a British journal. In 1740s, while Johnson's son William Samuel Johnson was attending Yale, Johnson collaborated with Rector
Thomas Clap to create a new curriculum, for which he revised his moral philosophy and his tables on the sum of all knowledge. He published it as a textbook titled
An Introduction to the Study of Philosophy (1743). It was three times longer than his previous essay. In large bold letters on the front page facing the title page, he proclaimed it "A New System of Morality". The work "was intended from the beginning to accompany President Clap of Yale's 1743
Library Catalogue of the Library of the Yale–College in New Haven." The work contains a moral philosophy textbook along with a revision of his table of the sum of all knowledge, which was used by Clap to index his
library catalog, and by Johnson to order a recommended reading list of books to be read by Yale students included as an appendix to the textbook. Though Johnson had begun replacing the Puritans' ideas of Predestination and Sin with his American Enlightenment idea of pursuing happiness as far back as his sermons in 1715, the new system makes the pursuit of happiness its starting point. In its opening paragraph, reflecting the influence of
William Wollaston and Berkeley, he
defines philosophy as "The Pursuit of true Happiness in the Knowledge of things as being what they really are, and in acting or practicing according to that Knowledge." Going beyond Wollaston and Berkeley, "Johnson extended these men's constructions with his own unique practice-oriented ideas of perception leading to action, and a freewill model of humans with a value system focused on pursuing happiness." Its library catalog schema taken from Johnson's scheme was adopted by other colleges, and "was superior to anything until
Melvil Dewey published his
Dewey Decimal Classification Scheme in 1876." Johnson, who had first cataloged the Yale library back in 1719 when its books were moved from Saybrook to New Haven, and who had secured the large Berkeley donation of books, selecting which volumes would go to Yale from the wealthy philosopher's large collection, has been called “The Father of American Library Classification”. Also in 1743, for his successful missionary work and his defense of the Anglican church in America he received an honorary
doctorate of divinity from Oxford. He was only the third American to receive this honor. That same year he built the second Christ Church in Stratford, startling his Puritan neighbors with Gothic-style architectural elements, heating, an organ, and a steeple with a clock and a bell, topped by a gold-brass rooster. Johnson revised his moral philosophy textbook again, titling it
Ethices Elementa: or the First Principles of Moral Philosophy. According to educator
Henry Barnard, “This work had a high reputation at the time of its publication, and met with an extensive sales.” He revised it again with editions released in 1752 in Philadelphia and 1754 in London. Professor Mark Garett Longaker noted that it contained "a system of morals built upon his philosophical idealism, and the conclusion of this entire system (moral, philosophical, and rhetorical) is that all human endeavor aims towards happiness, a condition realized when one fully understands and obeys God's will."
King's College in New York City Johnson had been considering a college in
New York since 1749. In 1750, Johnson began to exchange a series of letters with
Benjamin Franklin over the founding of a "new-model" or "English" college. Franklin admired Johnson's moral philosophy, and asked him to head up a proposed
College of Philadelphia. Johnson declined the offer, and instead worked with his wife's relations, his step-sons, former students, and the rector and vestrymen of the Anglican
Trinity Church in
New York City to found a college there. In 1751, a board of trustees had been appointed by the New York colonial assembly to manage money raised in a lottery for a college in
New York City. In 1752, Johnson was proposed as the logical choice for its president. They decided to name it King's College to help them secure an official
royal charter from
King George II. Johnson had recently met
William Smith, a young Scot immigrant tutor, at the New York City salon of Mrs. De Lancey, wife of Lt. Governor
James De Lancey. Johnson had suggested and mentored Smith's writing of a Utopian book of college education, titled
A General Idea of the College of Mirania (1753).
Johnson recommenced the young William Smith to Franklin. During the
colonial era, "The chair of moral philosophy stood above all other faculty positions in importance and prestige." Selecting a moral philosophy was thus a fundamentally important consideration when founding a college. In 1752, at Franklin's urging, Johnson revised his philosophy textbook again to create a philosophy suitable for the proposed new-model colleges. Franklin took the unusual step (for him) of self-funding the domestic printing of
Elementa Philosophica (1752).
New American college model Along with
Benjamin Franklin and
William Smith, Johnson created what
President James Madison of the
College of William and Mary called a new-model plan or style of American college. They decided it would be profession-oriented, with classes taught in
English instead of
Latin, have subject matter experts as professors instead of one tutor leading a class for four years, and there would be no religious test for admission. They also replaced the study of theology with non-denominational moral philosophy, using Johnson's "new system of morality" and his philosophy textbook as the core of the curriculum. Johnson, Franklin, and Smith met in Stratford in June 1753. They planned two new-model colleges: Johnson would open King's College in
New York City, and Franklin and Smith would open the College of Philadelphia, now the
University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia. Immediately after the meeting, Smith left for London to raise funds and receive Anglican orders. Franklin and the board of trustees appointed him Provost of the College of Philadelphia when he returned. Johnson with the help of his stepson Benjamin Nicoll, his former students. who were now powerful merchants, the De Launcey-Nicoll Popular downstate majority party in the
New York Assembly, and the clergy and vestry of
Trinity Church, New York City, created a board of Governors for the new college, ensuring that it had an
Anglican majority though it included
Dutch Reformed Church and
Presbyterian Church members. The assembly voted that a lottery be established to raise funds for the new college. The funding was bitterly opposed in print by board member
William Livingston and other Presbyterian politicians along with their Provincial upstate party allies in an intense two year newspaper war. Without funding and without an official charter, Johnson defiantly opened
King's College (now
Columbia University) in July 1754. On October 31, it finally received the
Royal charter. Its charter promoted a college without a religious test for admission, was practice and profession oriented, public spirited, inclusive and diverse, and taught the then new disciplines of English literature and moral philosophy. It was
polytechnic in scope, teaching math, science, history, commerce, government, and nature. Colonial historian Richard Gummere noted that, "Had Johnson himself offered a specific course for each of these fields, he would have been presiding,
mutatis muntandis, over the equivalent of a twentieth-century university." Johnson also presented a values-focused curriculum, proposing in the
Advertisement "in May 1754, to teach student to be “Ornaments to their Country and useful to the public Weal in their Generations” and "to lead them from the study of nature to knowledge of themselves, and of the God of nature and their duty to him, themselves, and one another, and everything that can contribute to their true happiness, both here and hereafter." Once again, the pursuit of happiness was the focus of Johnson's curriculum, his table of philosophy, and his textbook. In addition to the burden of dealing with the political Presbyterians attacking his college as a devious Anglican plot, and hence leading Presbyterian parents to refuse to send their sons to it, and the usual ramp-up problems of starting a new college, the nine-year-long
French and Indian War coincided almost exactly with Johnson's tenure at King's College, drying up funds and draining the pool of potential students while raising fears of invasion. He also had to deal with periodic outbreaks of smallpox, during which he had to leave the college to be run by his tutors for months at a time. Yet he persevered. In the 22-year period from 1758 to 1776, when the college closed due to the
Revolutionary War, 226 men attended, and 113 graduated. Among the 83 college students who attended King's College during Johnson's -year tenure were some prominent future
Loyalists, including
Adolph Philipse, Daniel Robart,
Abraham De Peyster, and
John Vardill. But he taught many more men who became prominent Patriots, including
John Jay,
Samuel Prevoost,
Robert R. Livingston, Richard Harrison,
Henry Cruger,
Egbert Benson,
Edward Antill,
Dr. Samuel Bard,
John Stevens, Anthony Lispenard, and
Henry Rutgers. Among the students taught by his successor
Dr. Myles Cooper, were
Alexander Hamilton and
Gouverneur Morris. In 1764, he returned to his ministry, replacing as Rector his successor at Christ Church, the Rev. Edward Winslow, who moved to
Braintree, Massachusetts. Johnson also began working on another revision of his philosophy. This time Johnson wrote not a textbook but a
dialogue titled
Raphael, or The Genius of the English America (c. 1764–5), which Johnson called "a Rhapsody". It begins with the arrival of "guardian or genius of New England" of a "beautiful countenance" who tells
Arisctocles, named after
Aristocles of Messene, and who represents Johnson, to "call me
Raphael". His son William Samuel Johnson in 1765 would represent Connecticut at the
Stamp Act Congress, and the work hints at the controversies of the period; historian
Joseph Ellis suggests that a disillusioned Johnson believed that "the underlying cause of the growing discontent between England and America was the breakdown of a sense of community". Parts of the work praise the British form of
Parliamentary government, while others foreshadow the
Declaration of Independence, including its core principle that, “The natural obligation to virtue is founded in the necessity that God and nature lays us under to desire and pursue our happiness.” By 1767, Johnson was calling the British ministers in Parliament " a pack of Courtiers, who have no Religion at all.” In 1767, his son William Samuel Johnson, was appointed
Colonial Agent to Great Britain for Connecticut, and left Stratford for London, where he would remain for five years. Johnson was left in Stratford with his daughter-in-law and grandchildren. He continued to minister, teach and write. He also taught prospective Anglican priests in a kind of “little Academy, or resource for young students of Divinity, to prepare them for Holy Orders”. He taught his two grandsons English and Hebrew, as his own grandfather had taught him 70 years before. He wrote for them the first English Grammar (1765) and the first Hebrew grammar (1767) published in America authored by an American. In a 1771 revised edition of Hebrew grammar, he printed his last revision of his table, presenting the sum of all knowledge. In October 1771, just before he finished his
Autobiography, his son William Samuel returned home from London to Johnson's "great and unspeakable comfort and satisfaction". Johnson died a few months later, on January 6, 1772. His protegee and friend President Myles Cooper penned the inscription which adorns his monument in Christ Church, Stratford, where Johnson was minister for most of the 47 years between 1723 and his death, minus the eight and a half years he spent at King's College in New York City.
If decent dignity, and modest mien, The cheerful heart, and countenance serene; If pure religion and unsullied truth, ''His age's solace, and his search in youth;''
In charity, through all the race he ran, Still wishing well, and doing good to man; If learning free from pedantry and pride; If faith and virtue walking side by side; ''If well to mark his being's aim and end,''
To shine through life the father and the friend; If these ambition in thy soul can raise, Excite thy reverence or demand thy praise, Reader, ere yet thou quit this earthly scene, Revere his name, and be what he has been. ==Personal life==