The New International Encyclopædia/Blair, James

BLAIR, James (1656-1713). A Colonial clergyman and educator, the founder and first president of William and Mary College in Virginia. He was born in Scotland, graduated at the University of Edinburgh in 1673, removed to England in 1682, and in 1685 was sent to Virginia as a missionary of the Church of England. He was minister successively at Henrico City, Jamestown, and Williamsburg, and after 1689 was Commissary of Virginia, "a very weighty and creditable post." the highest ecclesiastical position, at that time, in the colony. In this capacity he did much to raise the character of the provincial clergy and to rectify many clerical abuses. In 1690, at a time when there was only "one privately endowed school and a few old field schools" in the colony, he took up the work of founding a college in Virginia. and in the same year began soliciting subscriptions for an institution which was to provide for "the Education of our Youth, a constant supply of our Ministry, and perhaps a foundation for ye Conversion of our neighboring Heathen to the Christian Faith." In 1691 he went to England, and there, in 1693. secured a charter for the College of William and Mary. On his return he worked indefatigably to secure the immediate erection of buildings, and until his death was president of the college. After 1693 Blair was also a member of the Council of Virginia, of which he was for some time president. In this capacity he had rancorous disputes with Goveniors Edmund Andros, Francis Nicholson, and Alexander Spotswood, and by his representations to the home Government was instrumental in securing the removal of each in turn. It has been said of Blair that he did more than any other one man for the intellectual advancement of Virginia during the Colonial period. He collaborated with Henry Hartwell and Edward Chilton in the preparation of a valuable work, entitled The Present State of Virginia and the College (London, 1727), probably the best extant account of Virginia in the latter part of the Seventeenth Century, and published an elaborate series of sermons on Our Saviour's Divine Sermons on the Mount (1740), which have been much commended by theologians. Consult D. E. Motley. "Life of Commissary James Blair, Founder of William and Mary College," in Series 19, No. 10, of Johns Hopkins University Studies (Baltimore, 1901).