William Bentley was an American Unitarian minister, scholar, columnist, and diarist.
21 Facts About William Bentley
2.
William Bentley was a polymath who possessed the second best library in the United States, and was an indefatigable reader and collector of information at the local national and international level.
3.
William Bentley provided a highly sophisticated capsule of current political and cultural news, set in a broad historical context.
4.
William Bentley graduated from Harvard University in 1777, and worked as a schoolteacher and then a tutor of Latin and Greek at Harvard.
5.
In 1805, Thomas Jefferson asked him to become the first president of the University of Virginia, but William Bentley opted to continue with the church.
6.
William Bentley declined Jefferson's offer of the role of chaplain for Congress.
7.
In 1811, William Bentley was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.
Related searches
Thomas Jefferson 8.
William Bentley was well liked by his parishioners because of his philosophy of emphasizing good works over rigid doctrine.
9.
William Bentley himself lived modestly, and was a boarder at the Crowninshield-Bentley House from 1791 until his death in 1819.
10.
William Bentley gave almost half his salary to help the poorer members of his congregation.
11.
William Bentley often shared the East Church pulpit with pastors of other sects.
12.
William Bentley was a strong supporter of public education and frequent tutor and substitute teacher; among the students he taught was Nathaniel Bowditch.
13.
William Bentley spoke 21 languages, 7 fluently, and was an inexhaustible reader and book collector.
14.
William Bentley eventually amassed a library of over 4,000 volumes, one of the largest private libraries in America at the time.
15.
William Bentley had originally drafted his will to leave his collection to Harvard, but withdrew the bequest because of Harvard's failure to award him an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree until just before his death.
16.
William Bentley was one of the American Antiquarian Society's earliest elected members; elected in 1813, he left his books on history and natural science to the Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts in his revised will.
17.
William Bentley left the rest of his library to the just-established Allegheny College, founded by fellow Harvard graduate Timothy Alden.
18.
From 1797 to 1817, William Bentley wrote columns twice weekly for the Salem Gazette and Salem Register, discussing American and foreign news and politics on current topics such as the China trade, slavery, and the French Revolution, and often reflecting William Bentley's Jeffersonian outlook.
19.
William Bentley twice declined Thomas Jefferson's offers of prominent positions, first as chaplain of the United States Congress, and then as first president of the University of Virginia.
20.
William Bentley kept a detailed diary recording not only current events in Salem and the world, but his own thoughts on a broad range of topics.
21.
William Bentley died on December 29,1819, of a heart attack.