Annals of the archive
At this institution, you can accumulate a couple different kinds of accolades. You could get the Lifetime Achievement Award, join the list of former U.S. Presidents, or your student diary could end up at the Yale University archives. Yale has amassed a great collection of student papers to record its history, including a student diary collection written by white men. Archivists push the diaries at students as rare first-hand accounts of the legacy of our lifestyle.
I visited this particular collection my first semester at Yale, interested in where these sources might take me. At this point in my life, I had armed myself with the languages I needed to approach these men on their own terms — French and German — as well as the languages they themselves borrowed, like Latin. I entered college feeling prepared to engage these men, and whatever modern manifestations of them came my way.
I began by opening Benjamin Trumbull’s diary. Benjamin Trumbull, YC 1759, is not to be confused with Trumbull College’s namesake, Gov. Jonathan Trumbull. Trumbull wrote a diary very much intended for presentation. He went back and forth between Latin and English — his handwriting slightly different in each language. One of his journal entries was titled: “Concerning The Earthquakes… November 18 Annoque Domini 1755.” This particular passage details, in his inflated language, one of the only earthquakes ever felt by Connecticut. He links it to the grace of God, who “gave a longer space to the Repentance of sinful Rebels.” But clever first-year Trumbull extends discussion of the Earthquake into his next entry, Nov. 22: His metaphorical seismic waves run into the church, where a member of the Yale student body stood to expel himself for the sin of fornication. Imagine that today. He called this expulsion the second earthquake. Trumbull, by copying down the biblical passages the preacher referenced, and then by adding his own, qualifies this man’s damnation and shame, not only for his own student body, but for all student bodies to come.
Trumbull is not an original or an outlier. He is one of many Yale students who peddles in First Great Awakening morality, and is therefore deeply secure in his own salvation. He lived in a Protestant church reimagined to be American, a church separated by an ocean from the Puritans that bore it, and now further separated by the words of one single dark fanatic, Jonathan Edwards, YC 1720.
I first learned about Jonathan Edwards in my eighth grade history class, and I was fascinated. Who could scare that many people so profoundly and how did it help incite an entire revolution? I could see this legacy of God and country hanging from the banners and the matriculation ceremony hymns. Jonathan Edwards is a household name at Yale. My own residential college bears his mark and his name passes causally through conversations on campus every single day. So, naturally, when I found out that I could see Edwards’s papers at the Beinecke, I jumped at the opportunity.
Jonathan Edwards reminded me of the original reason I learned Latin. I wanted to approximate “the classical education.” Admission to Yale in Edwards’s time required fluency in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. Edwards came to Yale in 1716 at the age of 13, already fluent in these three languages. Unsurprisingly, he became valedictorian of his class. I focused on Edwards’s 1720 valedictorian speech. I find it light and triumphant, belonging to a young man who, at the turn of the 18th century, had already established himself as a force of change at this emerging institution. I took a photo of the last paragraph to keep for myself. I felt the sense of possibility in this flawless Latin display he wrote around age 17, and I saw it around myself as a first semester first-year at the best school in the world. Everything was possible.
I also read his manuscript for “Original Sin,” a 1758 sermon he wrote in English, at the same time when Trumbull was a grandiose student. I found the same ferocity in his arguments, but none of the joy in the idea of potential he had discussed in his valedictorian speech some 40 years before. He underlined his own phrases, emphasizing, “that mankind were universally debauched into Lust, Sexuality, Rapine, & Injustice.” Seeing Edwards think through his own argument — with lines and boxes and outlines similar to any English 120 paper — made me uneasy. His own weaknesses were present and self-identified with an angry scrawl; his prose had a darkness that lacked acceptance and forgiveness. A man with such a violent rhetoric must have lived a violent life, even if that violence was limited by the four walls of his own conscience.
Trumbull’s 1750s diary echoed Edwards’s influence without naming him, but Trumbull is directly named in another, later journal of a 1840s Yale student. I had continued to go through the Yale student diary archives and sat reading countless, numbing passages about waking up, going to compulsory church service, attending class, and reflections on discussing 19th century politics. But I came across consequential passages in the diary of James Beebee Brinsmade, Jr., YC 1845. The Yale mandatory chapel service Brinsmade attended on Nov. 12, 1843 referred to Trumbull and unpacked his intent. Brinsmade was so disturbed by the service that he recounts it in his Sunday entry: “His dying words were ‘I thank thee O my God who hast covered my head in the day of the battle.’” Brinsmade could not grapple with his feelings about the statement. I could tell by his previous entries and his uneasiness with Trumbull that Brinsmade was lost at Yale.
But Brinsmade was curious, uncertain about his course at a shifting institution where, in 1843, politics are now openly discussed at a place founded on Christianity. With Edwards, Brinsmade, and Trumbull, I began to build a lineage. Maybe I began to build this lineage improperly — without secondary research to complement and enhance my engagement with these primary sources — but I built it anyway. I was trying to build creative memories, imaginary ties between these men and myself.
Last November, Donald Trump became the president-elect, shocking Yale’s core. Throughout the election, I had sealed myself off from Trump’s rhetoric as an act of self-preservation. But on the night of his victory, my body absorbed his language until I felt entombed in it. Rereading Edwards and Trumbull’s notes, I felt betrayed by my naive fascination. Their words were current. They had personally participated in the allocation of sin. I was no longer enticed by the interesting questions their arguments posed, but rather sickened by them and their personal ensnarement of human dignity through rhetoric that this institution had helped them craft.
I had used the archive as a platform to create conversation between these men. But I was a fool, I declared, to think I could ever mediate a conversation I would never be invited to.
But what of Brinsmade? I had him pegged as the transition. I looked to him for some finality.
1844 Monday New Year’s Day — Put far from me all those who look not for pleasure in this world. For how can anyone hope to enjoy the pleasure of the world to come who despises the many blessings that a benevolent Providence has so bountifully showered upon us. Not anyone can, in my opinion, despise mortal pleasure […] But enough of this. This book is intended for a ‘narrative of facts’ which come under my own observation, not for sentimental reflection.
Brinsmade controlled his sentiment in order to maintain his plodding, mundane narrative. But this break in the 200-odd pages of his diary was all I needed. Edwards, through his doctrine, greatly emphasized the concept of sin and delegated the responsibility of defining that sin to the country’s white male elite. Trumbull enabled the continuation of this delegation. Brinsmade, privately, broke with it.
Who can imagine what earthquakes of legacies of lifestyle we will leave after the havoc that we will wreck?
In revisiting this research, I sought out women who take interest in God’s place on campus. Mia Fowler, PC ’20, a religious studies major, concentrates on ancient Christianity. Yale is now a secular institution, she tells me. The academic approach to Christianity reframes this history and literature in an entirely new light. She does not identify as Christian.
Rayo Oyeyemi, BK ’20, who does identity as Christian, is aware that there is a community, but is not as active of an participant in that community. This is not a reflection of community, but rather the way she chooses to perceive God. When I ask her about the campus perception of God, she says, “I don’t think God gets talked about a lot on campus. It’s not hidden, but you don’t express unless you feel comfortable in that space and someone wants to have that conversation.” I told her more about the trajectory of my thought process and in response, she told me how the women in her family relate to Christianity. Each successive generation from her grandmother to her sister moves farther from the institution of the church and closer to the faith itself. I told her that I imagined Brinsmade as really struggling with how to relate to his faith. She wasn’t surprised: “The church has had a heavy hand in the way our family has run because institutions have put their hands in our family.”
The Women’s Table stands outside of the archives in Sterling Memorial Library, which is in itself a cathedral dedicated by James Gamble Rogers to an imagined woman, the “Alma Mater.” The Table is lined with zeros, then single digit numbers, representing the marginalized women at Yale before its official transition to a coeducational institution in the fall of 1969. There is a legacy for me here as well.
I am not under the assumption that Brinsmade was a radical or even mildly progressive. But it was Brinsmade’s choice to celebrate life that allowed for a conversation to begin. I initially wanted to know how Edwards defined Trumbull, how Trumbull defined Brinsmade, and in turn how Brinsmade defines me. But I, too, have agency. As the modern student, I define those that came before me with as much authority as their legacy defines me. I choose to recognize the parts of that legacy that I find informative and pertinent. I know all too well the importance of recognizing the darkness for what it is, but I choose to follow Brinsmade, always shifting, always celebrating.
