Background
John Wheelock was born in Lebanon, Connecticut, the eldest son of Eleazar and Mary (Brinsmead) Wheelock.
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John Wheelock was born in Lebanon, Connecticut, the eldest son of Eleazar and Mary (Brinsmead) Wheelock.
Having attended Yale for three years, he transferred to the newly founded Dartmouth College, was graduated in the first class (1771), and appointed tutor.
During the Revolution he commanded with some distinction various New Hampshire companies, attaining the rank of lieutenant-colonel. In 1779, on the death of his father, he became president of Dartmouth College, having been nominated in his father's will in lieu of his eldest half-brother, Ralph, an epileptic. His most important problems as president were the financing of Dartmouth College and of Moor's Charity School, the construction of new buildings, the instruction of Indians, and the control of the board of trustees. In 1783 he visited France and Holland to raise funds for the college, but was unsuccessful; fortunately he obtained after persistent efforts certain donations (about £1, 300 in all) from a fund raised in Scotland by Nathaniel Whitaker and Samson Occom, and controlled by the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. Other sums were obtained from individuals, from the sale of college lands, from the New Hampshire legislature, and by lottery. Although the income from these various sources was far from adequate, it is to the credit of John Wheelock that he established salaried professorships, built Dartmouth Hall and a chapel, and revived (1800) his father's educational program for the Indians. During his presidency, thanks to the efforts of Nathan Smith, 1762-1829, the Dartmouth Medical School was founded (1798). The first twenty-five years of his presidency were relatively calm, and during them Dartmouth College expanded considerably; the last twelve were embittered by his struggles with the trustees, and the very existence of the college was endangered. The immediate cause of the hostility was the appointment (1804) of Roswell Shurtleff as professor of theology and pastor of the local church, an appointment not approved by the president and symptomatic of a decreasing lack of cooperation between him and the board. Five years later the trustees elected two candidates to fill vacancies on the board, thus aligning the majority of the trustees against the president. It was voted to deprive Wheelock of his professorship, but, because the college was considerably in his debt for his salary as president, the trustees were unable to carry out the vote. In May 1815, wishing to inform the public of the treatment he had received, Wheelock wrote his Sketches of the History of Dartmouth College and Moor's Charity School, With a Particular Account of Some Late Remarkable Proceedings of the Board of Trustees from the Year 1779 to the Year 1815, in which (among other matters and writing anonymously) he praised his own work as president and criticized the opposition of the trustees. During the following August the trustees removed Wheelock as president, trustee, and professor, and elected Francis Brown, 1784-1820, president. The problem was now thrown before the public and was taken up by the newspapers of the state, the Democratic siding in general with Wheelock, the Federalist opposing him. In 1816 a Democratic legislature passed a bill changing the name of Dartmouth College to Dartmouth University, and increasing the number of trustees from twelve to twenty-one, the additional nine members to be appointed by the governor (William Plumer) and the members of his council. After some difficulty in securing a quorum the university trustees elected Wheelock president of Dartmouth University; the college trustees refused to accept the bill as passed by the legislature, with the result that both university and college attempted to function at the same time and in the same town. Wheelock was too ill to fulfill the duties of president, and William Allen, his son-in-law, accordingly became acting president. At this stage of the controversy Wheelock died. The case was tried in the New Hampshire courts and ultimately (March 10, 1818) was brought before the Supreme Court of the United States and won for the college by Daniel Webster.
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He was dictatorial, diffuse in speech and writing, and pedantic.
Wheelock married Maria Suhm in 1786. They had a daughter Maria.
