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| Affiliation | Nonpartisan |
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| Name | Samuel Stanhope Smith |
| Address |
, New Jersey , United States |
| Email | None |
| Website | None |
| Born |
March 15, 1751 |
| Died |
August 21, 1819
(68 years) |
| Contributor | Thomas Walker |
| Last Modifed | Thomas Walker
Jan 06, 2010 01:18pm |
| Tags |
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| Info | Samuel Stanhope Smith (March 15, 1751 – August 21, 1819) was a Presbyterian minister, founding president of Hampden-Sydney College and the seventh president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) from 1795 to 1812.
Born in Pequea, Pennsylvania, he had graduated as a valedictorian from the College of New Jersey in 1769, and went on to study theology and philosophy under John Witherspoon, whose daughter he married on 28 June 1775. In his mid-twenties, he worked as a missionary in Virginia, and from 1775 to 1779, he served as the founder and rector of Hampden-Sydney College, which he referred to in his advertisement of 1 September 1775 as "an Academy in Prince Edward." The school, not then named, was always intended to be a college-level institution; later in the same advertisement, Smith explicitly likens its curriculum to that of the College of New Jersey. "Academy" was a technical term used for college-level schools not run by the established church. Stanhope Smith held honorary doctorates from Yale and Harvard and was a leading member of the American Philosophical Society.
In his work, Stanhope Smith expressed progressive views on marriage and egalitarian ideas about race and slavery. The second edition of his Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1810) became important as a powerful argument against the increasing racism of nineteenth-century ethnology. He opposed the racial classifications of natural historians such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and Carolus Linnaeus In this text, his attempt to explain the variety of physical appearances among humans involved a strongly environmental outlook. An example he provides involves "the blacks in the southern states." Smith noted that field slaves had darker skin pigmentation and other "African" features than did domestic slaves, and hypothesized that exposure to white, European culture through their "civilized" masters had changed their anatomy as well.
Smith is also known for his attempt to refute Thomas Jefferson's claim in Notes on the State of Virginia, that there were no great black writers or artists. In it, he attacked Jefferson's disregard of poetic abilities of Phillis Wheatley, African slave prodigy.
Noah Webster cited Stanhope Smith in Webster's 1828 Dictionary in the definition of philosophy. The citation was from Stanhope Smith's second edition of his Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1810). The quote as given,"True religion, and true philosophy must ultimately arrive at the same principle."
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