Samuel Eells

Samuel Eells (1810–1842) was a 19th-Century American philosopher, essayist and orator who founded the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity in 1832 at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.

Eells was born in Westmoreland, New York, in the rural western part of the state, in 1810. He could trace his family back to early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his father was a Congregationalist missionary who worked amongst the Native Americans in Western New York. He was educated at home, probably primarily by his mother, before attending the nearby Clinton Academy and finally Hamilton College.

Eells' constitution was feeble, and through all of his short life he struggled with tuberculosis and possibly other illnesses. Nevertheless, he was known amongst his friends and colleagues for his intense intellectual curiosity, drive, and "personal magnetism." Besides his praiseworthy writing and oration, he often undertook seemingly impossible projects; for example, before going to Hamilton, in order to improve his health, he traveled on foot from Maryland to Massachusetts, then sailed to Newfoundland and back, paying for his passage by fishing.

Samuel Eells studied at Hamilton College from 1828 to 1832, a time when both the college and American society were in turmoil. The college was nearly bankrupt due to mismanagement, and the student body was torn apart by rivalries between underground debating and literary societies, primarily the Phoenix and the Philopeuthian. College life at the time was intensely supervised and instruction was rigidly traditionalist. Eells saw the virtue of the debating societies as a haven for free thought, association and intellectual cultivation, yet he deplored their vicious competition for members and social dominance.

In 1832, Eells gathered five students to form a new society, Alpha Delta Phi, which would cultivate intellectual debate and development in the manner of the existing literary societies, but put aside their social competitiveness. It would seek to develop the "entire man," "moral, social and intellectual," and create a community of caring and brotherhood. In writing the constitution and "ideals" for Alpha Delta Phi, Eells and his cohorts drew on the previously existing debate and literary societies, the few previously existing Greek-letter fraternities such as Sigma Phi and Kappa Alpha, liberal Protestant philosophy, the Enlightenment philosophy and traditions of the Freemasons, and the very early stirrings of Transcendentalist philosophy, which would become very influential later in the 1830s.

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