Eleazar Wheelock

Eleazar Wheelock founded Dartmouth College on money raised to educate Native Americans and then educated mostly colonists with it. He was a Congregational minister in Connecticut and a preacher of the Great Awakening, and in 1754 he started a school at Lebanon for Indian boys, having taught one - Samson Occom, a Mohegan who became a minister - with striking success. Occom was then sent to Britain in 1766 on a fundraising tour, preached some three hundred sermons over two years, and collected about twelve thousand pounds, a very large sum, from donors including the Earl of Dartmouth, on the explicit understanding that it was for the education of Indians. Wheelock used it to move the operation to New Hampshire, where the governor offered a large land grant, and chartered Dartmouth College in 1769 with a charter naming the education of Indian youth first and English youth second. In practice the college enrolled overwhelmingly white students almost immediately, and Occom broke with him permanently, writing that he had been used and that the school had become alba mater, a mother for whites. Wheelock had also kept enslaved people, including at the college. Dartmouth graduated fewer than twenty Native American students in its first two centuries and has since made the commitment central to its Native American programme, founded in 1970. The college is also the subject of Dartmouth College v Woodward in 1819, in which Daniel Webster persuaded the Supreme Court that a charter is a contract the state cannot alter, which shaped American corporate law. Occom died in 1792 among the Brothertown community he had helped found in New York. Wheelock s son John succeeded him as president and the dispute that produced the Supreme Court case was partly about his removal.

• Lived: 1711 CE – 1779 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: religious_leader