Samuel Stanhope Smith

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Samuel Stanhope Smith (1751-1819) was a Presbyterian minister and the seventh president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) from 1795 to 1812. 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. In his mid-twenties, he worked as a missionary in Virginia, and from 1775 to 1779, he served as the first president of Hampden-Sydney College. 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 powerful argument against the increasing racism of nineteenth-century ethnology^[1]. Stanhope Smith was a staunch monogenist. He opposed the racial classifications of natural historians such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and Carolus Linnaeus^[2], and refuted Thomas Jefferson's claim in Notes on the State of Virginia that there were no great black writers or artists^[3].

Contents 1 Works 2 External links 3 Notes 4 References

[edit] Works

• Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species. (1787, 2nd ed. 1810)
• Lectures on the Evidences of the Christian Religion. (1809)
• Lectures on Moral and Political Philosophy. (1812)

[edit] External links

• Short Biography of Samuel Stanhope Smith at the Princeton University web site.
• Longer Biography of Samuel Stanhope Smith from the Princeton Companion
• Photographic tour of Samuel S. Smith's grave at Princeton Cemetery.
• Biography of Samuel Stanhope Smith at the Hampden-Sydney College web site.

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Dain 2002:40-41.
2. ^ Dain 2002:66.
3. ^ Dain 2002:67.

[edit] References

• Dain, Bruce R. A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-674-00946-0 (Stanhope Smith and 18th century race theory 40-49, 55-58, 64-70).