The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Johnson, Samuel (college president)

JOHNSON, Samuel, American college president, first president of King's College (now Columbia University): b. Guilford, Conn, 14 Oct. 1696;  d. Stratford, Conn., 6 June 1772. He was graduated at Yale College in 1714, and two years later appointed tutor there. In 1718 he resigned to receive ordination as a Congregational minister, and settled at West Haven. He relinquished his charge in 1722 and soon after sailed for England; where he received Episcopal ordination in 1723. Shortly after he returned to America, bearing a commission as missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and settled in Stratford, Conn., as rector of an Episcopal church there. In 1743 he received the degree of D.D. from the University of Oxford. In 1746 he published ‘A System of Morality,’ and in 1752 a compend of logic and metaphysics, and another of ethics; the two latter were printed in Philadelphia by Franklin as textbooks for the University of Pennsylvania. In 1755 he was offered the presidency of that university, but declined it. In 1753 he was invited to accept the presidency of the newly founded King's College in New York, in all the plans for which he had been consulted. He did so, but in 1763 resigned and returned to Stratford, where he resumed his parochial duties, revised his previous works and published an ‘English and a Hebrew Grammar’ (1767). Johnson carried on long controversies upholding apostolic succession and divine sovereignty. Consult Beardsley, ‘Life of Samuel Johnson, D.D.’ (New York 1876), and Chandler, ‘Life of Samuel Johnson’ (London 1824).