deterred from
examining it as it deserves by the first chapter, which is very obscure,
and by the confusion of the narrative which follows. Yet this monograph,
which has so unfortunately suffered from a defective arrangement of
material, is of very great value, not only to our legal and constitutional
history, but to the political history of the time and to a knowledge of the
distinguished actors in a series of events which resulted in the
establishment of one of the most far-reaching of constitutional doctrines,
one that has been a living question ever since the year 1819, and is at
this moment of vast practical importance. Mr. Shirley has drawn forth from
the oblivion of manuscript a collection of documents which, taken in
conjunction with those already in print, throws a flood of light upon a
dark place of the past and gives to a dry constitutional question the vital
and human interest of political and personal history.

In his early days, Eleazer Wheelock, the founder of Dartmouth College, had
had much religious controversy with Dr. Bellamy of Connecticut, who was
like himself a graduate of Yale. Wheelock was a Presbyterian and a liberal,
Bellamy a Congregationalist and strictly orthodox. The charter of Dartmouth
was free from any kind of religious discrimination. By his will the elder
Wheelock provided in such a way that his son succeeded him in the
presidency of the college. In 1793 Judge Niles, a pupil of Bellamy, became
a trustee of the college, and he and John Wheelock represented the opposite
views which they respectively inherited from tutor and father. They were
formed for mutual hostility, and the contest began some twelve years before
it reached the public. The trustees and the president were then all
Federalists, and there would seem to have been no differences of either a
political or a religious nature. The trouble arose from the resistance of a
minority of the trustees to what they termed the "family dynasty."
Wheelock, however, maintained his ascendency until 1809, when his enemies
obtained a majority in the board of trustees, and thereafter admitted no
friend of the president to the government, and used every effort to subdue
the dominant dynasty.

In New Hampshire, at that period, the Federalists were the ruling party,
and the Congregationalists formed the state church. The people were, in
practice, taxed to support Congregational churches, and the clergy of that
denomination were exempted from taxa