The Ten Tribes of David Stiles
The first investigator into the history of the Stiles family of Connecticut was the Rev. Ezra Stiles, then pastor of the Second Church, in Newport, Rhode Island, and afterwards the distinguished President of Yale College, New Haven, Conn. From his earliest youth (as is evidenced by the pages of his memorandum books, still preserved by his descendants), he had the habit of carefully noting dates and facts concerning his own immediate relatives. His first efforts, however, in the direction of compiling the general statistics of the family, seem to have been made in, or about, the year 1762; and its results were embodied in his own handwriting in a small quarto-sized blank volume, sewn into a stiff brown paper cover; very many of its entries being evidently first made in pencil, and afterwards, (as they were confirmed, or as leisure permitted), traced over in ink….The President, in his correspondence and his travels, evidently pursued these genealogical investigations with great zeal and pleasure; and the results were soon formulated with greater precision and care in another similar blank-book, which seems to have been virtually completed about the year 1764…
It is a matter of congratulations to the members of the Connecticut family of Stiles, that so early in the American history of the family, its beginnings were so thoroughly investigated by one well calculated, as was President Stiles, by education, intelligent curiosity and deep reverence for ancestral ties, to undertake such a work. We have him to thank for the securing of many facts and points in the early history of the family which, had they been left unstated and unfound until the present day, would now be unattainable.”
Ezra Stiles was born in 1727 in North Haven, Connecticut, the son of the Rev. Isaac Stiles. He graduated from Yale College in 1746. He studied theology and was ordained in 1749. He tutored at Yale from that year until 1755. He resigned from the ministry in 1753 to study law and practiced in New Haven, but returned to the cloth two years later.He was asked to be Pastor to Trinity Church, the Anglican Church, in Newport, Rhode Island. Instead, in 1755, he became pastor of the Second Congregational Church in Newport, Rhode Island. While in Newport, he also served as Librarian of the Redwood Library and Athenaeum and kept an informative diary of his life and distinguished acquaintances in Newport. In 1764, Stiles helped establish the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, now Brown University by contributing to the drafting of its charter and by serving with 35 others as a founding fellow or trustee.
In 1773 Stiles struck up a close friendship with Rabbi Haim Isaac Carigal during that Rabbi’s six-month stay in Newport at the Touro synagogue. Stiles’ records note 28 meetings to discuss a wide variety of topics from Kabbalah to the politics of the Holy Land. Stiles improved his rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew, to the point where he and Carigal corresponded by mail in Hebrew. Stiles’ knowledge of Hebrew also enabled him to translate large portions of the Hebrew Old Testament into English. Stiles believed, as did many Christian scholars of the time, that facility with the text in its original language was advantageous for proper interpretation.
In 1778, he was invited to become President of Yale. He initially had reservations about taking up this post because anticlericalism, perhaps fueled by republicanism, had driven a wedge between the citizens of Connecticut and Yale College, whose Board of Directors were all Congregational clergymen. He found this rift unsettling. Also he was a widower with 8 children and loved living in Newport. Eventually Yale’s need overcame his reluctance and he moved to New Haven. It appears he made the right choice because by 1784 he had made Yale the most popular and flourishing college in the United States with some 270 students, the largest enrollment ever then seen in an American College. “Stiles had made Yale a crashing success and everybody knew it” (Edmund Morgan, Stiles’ biographer).
From time to time, Stiles had invested with the merchants and sea captains of his congregation in Newport; in 1756, he sent a hogshead of rum along on a voyage to Africa and was repaid with a 10-year-old male slave, whom he renamed “Newport.” Around the same time, he wrote a joint letter with fellow Newport minister Samuel Hopkins condemning “the great inhumanity and cruelty” of slavery.
Stiles freed his slave, Newport, on June 9 as he prepared to move to New Haven; he would in 1782 hire his former slave for $20 a year and the indenturing of Newport’s two-year-old son until age 24. As President of Yale, Stiles became its first professor of Semitics, and required all students to study Hebrew (as Harvard students already did); his first commencement address in September 1781 (no ceremonies having been held during the American Revolutionary War) was delivered in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic….”
The future theologian was born the son of a minister in North Haven, Connecticut. Stiles mother died in childbirth but his father, Isaac, soon remarried, and Stiles spent his childhood under the watchful eye of his stepmother, Esther Hooker, great granddaughter of Connecticut founder, Thomas Hooker.
Stiles graduated from Yale in 1746, but he remained at the school studying theology until receiving his master’s degree in 1749. After tutoring for a number of years, Stiles resigned from the ministry and briefly practiced law in New Haven before moving to Newport, Rhode Island, in 1755 and returning to the pulpit.
While in Newport he became pastor of the Second Congregational Church and went on to write a charter establishing an institution that eventually became Brown University. He also published numerous works on religion, including 1760’s A Discourse on the Christian Union, which helped earn him an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 1765. He remained in Newport for over 20 years before moving to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1777 and then returning to Connecticut to become president of Yale in 1778.
While president, Stiles also served as a professor, teaching ecclesiastical history, philosophy, and astronomy. In addition, he used some equipment donated by his Yale classmate, Benjamin Franklin, to conduct the first electrical experiments ever recorded in New England.
By this time, Stiles was also busy keeping daily records of 18th-century life. For 32 years he recorded daily temperature highs and lows, gathered population figures, and records of births, deaths, and marriages. In addition, he conducted interviews with Native Americans and members of the Jewish community—recording their experiences for posterity.
Ezra Stiles continued to serve as president of Yale right up until his death from fever in May of 1795. He left behind a legacy of educational advancement among the finest of its time. Today, his preserved records fill 42 boxes and make up 22 reels of microfilm housed at the Yale University Library. Ongoing digitization efforts have also made materials from the collection accessible online.
Sources
Genealogies of the Connecticut Family. Descendants of John Stiles of Windsor, Conn., and Stratford, Conn., 1635-1894; Also the Connecticut New Jersey Families, 1720-1894; and the Southern (or Bermuda-Georgia) Family, 1635-1894, with Contributors to the Genealogies of some New York and Pennsylvania Families;
Henry Reed Stiles, A.M., M.D., 1894.
https://caas.yale.edu/our-founders/ezra-stiles
https://connecticuthistory.org/ezra-stiles-captured-18th-century-life-on-paper/
The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795,
Edmund Morgan, University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
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