John Phillips: A Sketch
Having read parts of several volumes on our Academy’s history, I falsely believed myself something of an expert on the school. However, I had foolishly skipped the first few chapters—the ones about the Phillips family and the founding of the Academy—thinking I was already well-acquainted with the story. My own ignorance shocked me into writing the following column, so that others, possibly as unknowingly ignorant as I was, may better understand the father of our school.
John Phillips was born in 1719, and for the first decade of his life, he took religious and academic lessons at his father’s parish in Andover, Massachusetts. Evidently, Phillips Sr. should have chosen the schoolhouse over the pulpit; at the age of eleven, young Phillips enrolled in Harvard University, the youngest of his class by two years. He was not handicapped by his youth. While there, Phillips won several awards and was selected to deliver the Salutatory Oration at his commencement in 1735. After graduating, he returned to his hometown and taught school for one or two years. While he was in Andover, he stood behind the pulpit, but despite his steadfast piety, he decided that a life in the ministry would not suit him. His brief inquiry into medicine yielded no special affinity either. Three years after leaving Harvard, he returned and earned his master’s degree in 1738 at only nineteen years. Soon thereafter, he left his hometown for Exeter.
At 21 and in a new town, Phillips did not have a clear idea of his profession. Having briefly taught in Andover, Phillips continued to teach for about three years after his relocation to Exeter. Shortly after his 1743 marriage to Sarah Gilman, the widow of the wealthy Nathaniel Gilman, he had a two-story house built on Water Street. He quit teaching and stocked the first floor with goods. As Myron Williams wrote in his 1957 book The Story of Phillips Exeter, he “had begun his long and prosperous career—first as country storekeeper, then as an importer and exporter of food, manufactured goods and lumber and finally as a speculator in lands and, as a banker, lending money at the pleasant rate of twelve and fifteen per cent.” By 1765, John Phillips was the wealthiest man in the town.
Despite the images some might have of a wealthy colonist, the Founder was not miserly. New Hampshire Governor William Plumer wrote that Phillips was “a man of many talents … mild in his temper, easy and courteous in his manners and in conversation modest and unassuming. He had a strong aversion to every thing that had the appearance of splendor, pomp and parade, but was particularly prudent and frugal––always preferring the useful to the showy.” He was not a greedy loyalist but instead a generous benefactor to noble causes. For that, we have his religious upbringing to thank.
In that age, religion and the accompanying moral education dominated social life. Thus, our Founder felt the obligation to contribute to causes that might aid the education of religious principles. In his diary, he wrote that “being sensible that a part of my income is required of me to be spent in the more immediate service of God, I, therefore, devote a tenth of my salary to keeping school and to pious and charitable purposes.”
It was in this mind that John Phillips gave significant tracts of land and sums of money to Eleazar Wheelock for his school for Native Americans in Connecticut and to his newer college: Dartmouth. His numerous contributions to the latter include some four thousand acres that the college later sequestered to create a professorship in the Founder’s name. For his gifts and service as a trustee, the college honored him with a doctorate-level degree in law. His contributions to Dartmouth College were so great that they were noted on his grave, alongside his positions as “Founder of the Phillips Exeter Academy” and “Associate Founder of the Phillips Academy at Andover.” Yes, John Phillips was an Associate Founder of Phillips Academy, Andover.
It was with the goal of providing educational and moral guidance that the founder of our sister school at Andover, Judge Samuel Phillips (Dr. Phillips’s nephew), began to consider establishing an academy. Laurence Crosbie, Class of 1900, speculates that in the “low ebb” of education during the revolutionary years, “Judge Phillips recognized the need [to establish educational institutions] and set his mind to fill it.” The message resonated with our Founder, to whom “the logical conclusion of Religion [was] Education.”
In 1776, Dr. Phillips wrote to his nephew on the topic of “our proposed establishment” and preemptively donated what adjusts to about $330,000 towards to foundation of Phillips Academy Andover. Two years later, Judge Phillips founded Andover, with our own Dr. Phillips as “Associate Founder.” In Dr. Phillips’s will, he gave approximately two-thirds of his estate to his academy and one-third to his nephew’s. The remaining amount of the estate was so meager that, despite having signed away her dowry, Elizabeth Phillips, his second wife, protested to the Trustees of both Phillips Academy and Phillips Exeter Academy.
Dr. Phillips’s allocations of his wealth aptly summarize the dedication he had to the cause of education. At the 1903 General Reunion of Exeter alumni, President William Jewett Tucker of Dartmouth observed that “it is one thing to go down into the market and make a million in a day and turn over half of it to an institution; it is another thing to set one’s self day by day and year by year to earning and saving, till one at the last can reckon up his earnings and his savings by the thousands, and then turn them over to the just and sure future.” John Phillips did the latter. From the inscription on his grave comes this concise description of his energy and character: “Actuated by his ardent attachment to the cause of Christianity, he devoted his wealth to the advancement of letters and religion. His appropriate monuments are the institutions which bear his name.”