James Blair (1656-1743)
James Blair (1656-1743) was a graduate of Edinburgh University who founded the College of William and Mary, the second-oldest university in the USA.
The son of Peter Blair (d. 1673), minister of St Cuthbert's, Edinburgh, he matriculated at Edinburgh University in 1669 and graduated MA on 21 July 1673. After completing his theological studies, he was ordained in 1679 and appointed to the parish of Cranston in the Presbytery of Dalkeith. In December 1681 he was deprived of the post when, like many Scottish clergymen, he refused to swear the test oath which would mean acknowledging the Catholic James, Duke of York and Albany (the future King James VII and II) as head of the Church of Scotland on his succession to the throne. With assistance from Laurence Charteris (c1625-1700), his former Professor of Divinity, Blair sought refuge in London, where he became an under-clerk of the master of the rolls.
In 1685, Henry Compton, Bishop of London, appointed Blair to Henrico parish in Virginia. Four years after emigrating, Blair was appointed the Bishop's commissary in the colony. In 1694 he was transferred to James City parish, then in 1710 to Bruton parish, a post he held for the rest of his life. His marriage to Sarah Harrison (1670-1713), daughter of a prominent planter, brought Blair powerful political connections. He increased his personal fortune by acquiring land and partnering his brother Archibald who opened a trading store in Williamsburg.
At a convention of the clergy of Virginia in 1690, Blair proposed establishing a college to educate candidates for the ministry, noting that since the establishment of the colony in 1607, there had been a serious shortage of ministers. The plan was approved, and Blair successfully sought financial support from key political contacts, including Francis Nicholson, Governor of Virginia. In view of Blair's influential London contacts, he was then sent to England in 1691 to obtain a royal charter and endowment for the institution. A charter for the College of William and Mary was granted on 8 February 1693, with Henry Compton designated chancellor and Blair president. On his return to Virginia, Blair was rewarded for his success by being appointed to the colonial council, a position he would hold for nearly half-a-century.
The college based at Middle Plantation (later renamed Williamsburg under Blair's initiative) opened in 1695. Initially, however, its financial situation was weak, and it had difficulty attracting tutors. The college was practically destroyed by fire in 1705 and only rebuilt in 1716. In 1726, Blair returned to England for a year to raise funds for the college with the assistance of Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London. By 1729, the college was finally on a secure enough footing to permit Blair to enter formally into his duties as President.
as chancellor, and Blair as president. He was rewarded with appointment to the colonial council in 1694, a position he held for nearly fifty years.
On Blair's return to Virginia the college, based at Middle Plantation, Virginia, began instruction about 1695 with a handful of students but was exposed to weak financial circumstances and difficulty attracting tutors. In 1699 a joint initiative by Blair and the governor of Virginia, Francis Nicholson, led to Middle Plantation
being renamed Williamsburg, replacing Jamestown as Virginia's capital. In 1705 a fire practically reduced the college buildings to ruins and it was not until 1716 that they were rebuilt and classes resumed. Fortunes for the college improved by the late 1720s and Blair spent much of 1726–7 in England raising funds with the assistance of Edmund Gibson, bishop of London. In 1729, nearly three and a half decades after the college opened, Blair entered formally on the duties of his office as president.
During Blair's first three decades in Virginia and as a member of the colonial council he was regularly engaged in controversies with royal governors. Each dispute was shaped by the strong willed temperaments of the combatants, men archly seeking to protect and advance the prerogatives of their offices. Blair's conflicts with the royal officials led to their recall by the Board of Trade. He stridently complained in a 1697 memorial to Bishop Compton, a member of the Board of Trade, that the governor, Sir Edmund Andros, neglected to serve the needs of the church and the college. He argued that twenty-seven of the fifty congregations in the province were without ministers; that parson's salaries were deficient; and that the recently founded college was in need of urgent provincial financial assistance. The commissary also claimed that Andros had withheld granting the use of glebes to several ministers because the vestries had not presented the men to the livings, a situation that led Andros not to intercede and induct the clergymen. A menu of charges suggested that Andros was not fulfilling his royal instruction on ecclesiastical affairs. Both men were summoned by the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Tension, to Lambeth Palace in 1697 to discuss the matter. It remains unclear how the objections of both disputants were resolved. None the less Andros resigned his governorship in 1697.
Blair attacked Francis Nicholson, Andros's successor, in 1703, when he complained to Bishop Compton that Nicholson was marked with a personal streak of ‘hypocrisy and profaneness’. The controversy between the two men was expanded and included a division of opinion between several members of the colonial council and the rank and file members of the provincial clergy. Joined by five members of the Virginia council Blair presented to Queen Anne in 1703 a memorial disparaging the arbitrariness and maladministration of Nicholson's regime. The governor counter-attacked by summoning the Virginia clergy to a convention at Williamsburg on 25 August 1703 for a discussion of the dispute. After hearing a presentation of the two antagonists, twenty ministers in attendance supported Nicholson's position and noted their satisfaction with his administration. The men concluded that Blair's action had stirred up public contempt for the clergy. They recommended to Bishop Compton that Blair should be required to confine his duties to furthering his ecclesiastical duties with the aid of the colony's well-to-do planters rather than to indulge in such divisive political affairs. Blair's unrelenting criticism forced the Board of Trade to recall Nicholson in 1705.
Blair's political and educational interests overshadowed his career as a deputy of the bishops of London in Williamsburg. Despite his tough-mindedness, persistence, and political acumen, he was not venerated by his fellow clerics, and was warily surveyed by politicians and laymen. In churchmanship he was a latitudinarian, and in 1703 he welcomed the first missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to the colonies, the recently converted former Quaker George Keith, to the pulpit of the Jamestown church. Keith was on an assignment to assess the state of the church in the colonies on behalf of the society. Throughout his career Blair had limited contact with the society, as the Church of England was established by statute in Virginia. There was no need for him or the local vestries to rely on the society for a regular supply of ministers to fill vacant pulpits or to pay their salaries. Successive bishops of London aided in the recruitment of clergymen. Blair's view of doctrine was expounded in Our Saviour's divine sermon on the mount, contained in the fifth, sixth and seventh chapters of St Matthew's gospel, explained, and the practice of it recommended in divers sermons and discourses, published in four volumes in London in 1722. A second edition appeared in 1732, with a preface by Daniel Waterland.
Blair's third major political opponent was Alexander Spotswood, lieutenant-governor of Virginia from 1710. Their dispute festered for several years and came to a head in 1719 and 1720. Blair outspokenly objected to Spotswood's efforts to impose additional imperial authority over such local institutions as the judiciary, the colonial council, and the right of vestrymen to induct into parishes ministers of their choosing. Following Nicholson's example Spotswood called the clergy to a convention in 1719 with the specific purpose of bluntly challenging Blair's charges. Again the clergy were divided in their support of the commissary and the governor. Yet Spotswood emerged from the controversy a blighted official and in 1722 was recalled by the Board of Trade. The Spotswood dispute was Blair's last feud with a royal governor and for the remainder of his life he called the clergy to convention only once, in 1727. He retained his latitudinarian position to the extent that in December 1739 Blair welcomed George Whitefield to his home and church, when his Anglican counterparts in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston had rejected Whitefield, whose preaching excoriated most of the Church of England clergy. Whitefield preached from the pulpit of Bruton parish church to a congregation that included lieutenant-governor William Gooch and members of the provincial council.
At bottom Blair was a complex personality, at once bold, narrowly tough-minded, self-confident, hot tempered, and politically accomplished. By his offices and longevity Blair was a prominent Virginia public figure. During the absence of the lieutenant-governor, Gooch, from the colony he served for more than a year in the early 1740s as acting governor.
Childless, Blair died in Williamsburg, Virginia, on 1 August 1743, aged eighty-seven, a wealthy man, and was buried at Jamestown church cemetery alongside his wife, who had died on 5 May 1713. His will, dated 5 April 1743, bequeathed to the college his library and £500 for a scholarship for ‘breeding a young divine’. The remainder of his £10,000 estate he left to his nephew, John Blair (1687–1771), including 1250 acres of farmland in New Kent and 100 acres of the Richneck Tract; a half interest in the Blair-Prentis store with a value of £6000; as well as unfree servants and other property. He also bequeathed £100 for the education of poor children.