Elisha Williams

Elisha Williams
Portrait of Rev. Elisha Williams, fourth Rector of Yale College
4th Rector of Yale University
In office 1726–1739
Preceded by	Timothy Cutler
Succeeded by	Thomas Clap
Personal details
Born	(1694-08-26)August 26, 1694 Hatfield, Massachusetts
Died	July 24, 1755(1755-07-24) (aged 60) Wethersfield, Connecticut

Elisha Williams (August 26, 1694 – July 24, 1755) was a Congregational minister, legislator, militia soldier, jurist, and rector of Yale College from 1726 to 1739.

The son of Rev. William Williams and his wife Elizabeth, née Cotton (daughter of Rev. Seaborn Cotton), he was born at Hatfield, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard, graduating, at the age of seventeen, in 1711.

His first wife, and mother of his seven children (only two of whom survived him), was Eunice Chester. They were married in 1714; she died in 1750.

After his marriage he studied law, and was a member of the Connecticut legislature from Wethersfield for five sessions, the first in 1717. He was also a tutor in Weathersfield, Connecticut for those Yale college students who for three years from 1716 to 1719 refused to move from Saybrook Point to New Haven, Connecticut; he was one of the leaders in the attempt to make the schismatic college part of Harvard, an offer which Harvard turned down. After Yale college was reunited in New Haven, he remained in Weathersfield, studied divinity with his father, and was ordained a clergyman in 1722. He served the church at Wethersfield until 1726, when he became fourth Rector of Yale College, serving in that capacity for thirteen years. He entered the position during a troubled period of Yale's history. Under the leadership of senior Tutor Samuel Johnson between 1716 and 1719, Tutor Daniel Brown from 1718 to 1722, and Rector Timothy Cutler from 1719 to 1722, Yale had begun to teach an Enlightenment curriculum. The "Great Apostasy" of 1722 had seen these three men and four other local clergymen abandon the Puritan Congragationalist church and declare for the Church of England at the close of Yale's commencment. Yale's trustees fired Cutler and Brown, and searched for an orthodox Rector. After being turned down by six other candidates, the board offered Williams the position in 1726. His mission there for the 13 years he was there was to restore the Puritan curriculum, much of which went back to the early sixteenth century. According to colonial college scholar J. David Hoeveler, “Yale set its sights on an orthodox recovery”, and Rector Williams became “a polemicist for orthodoxy.”