page_title: Samuel Johnson (American educator)
section_title: Missionary years
hierarchical_section_title: Samuel Johnson (American educator) / Career / Missionary years
caption_attribution_description: A cartoon from the periodical Political Register of 1768 depicting an Anglican Bishop climbing up the ropes on a ship labeled "Hillsborough" to escape a mob of angry American colonials who use long poles to push the ship away from the quay while holding aloft political and religious books.
context_page_description: Samuel Johnson was a clergyman, educator, linguist, encyclopedist, historian, and philosopher in colonial America. He was a major proponent of both Anglicanism and the philosophies of William Wollaston and George Berkeley in the colonies, founded and served as the first president of the Anglican King's College, and was a key figure of the American Enlightenment.
context_section_description: 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, Stratford, Connecticut in 1724.  In 1725, Johnson, the son of a fulling miller, married the widow Charity Floyd Nicoll, the mother of three young children, one of whom, William Nicoll, was heir to the vast estate of Islip Grange, in Sayville, New York, then part of a 100 square mile estate on Long Island owned by the Matthias Nicoll family. Johnson thus acquired close contacts with the leading merchant, legal, and political families of New York colony, many of whom would send their sons to board with him in Stratford, to be prepared for college. His first son by Charity, William Samuel Johnson, was born on October 14, 1727; his second son, William "Billy" Johnson, was born on March 9, 1731.
  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, who then built 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 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 the need 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 also opened a successful common school in Stratford shortly after his arrival in 1723, and also 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.
caption: An attempt to land a bishop in America, Political Register, 1768
exif: {}