previous next

Wheelock, John 1754-

Educator; born in Lebanon, Conn., Jan. 28, 1754; graduated at Dartmouth College in 1771; appointed lieutenant-colonel in the American army in 1778, in which year he served against the Indians, and then became a member of the staff of Gen. Horatio Gates. He was president of Dartmouth College in 1779-1815; and in the latter year, owing to religious beliefs and a conflict with the trustees, he was deposed, an action which caused a storm of protest from the people. In the following year the legislature, claiming the right to do so, reorganized the college under a new board of trustees, who replaced Dr. Wheelock in 1817. He served, however, only a few months, when he died in Hanover, N. H., on April 4. In the mean time the old trustees went to the State Supreme Court to recover the college property, and lost their case, but on an appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States they were successful, It [335] was in this trial, called the Dartmouth College case, that Daniel Webster (q. v.) began his famous career as a constitutional lawyer.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)
hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
John Wheelock (2)
Horatio Gates (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
1817 AD (1)
1815 AD (1)
1779 AD (1)
1778 AD (1)
1771 AD (1)
January 28th, 1754 AD (1)
1754 AD (1)
April 4th (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: