Nathaniel Sheldon Wheaton

Nathaniel Sheldon Wheaton was the second president of Trinity College, from December 1831 to February 1837.

Nathaniel Sheldon Wheaton, ca. 1831. Photo credit: Trinity College Archives

Born in 1792 in Washington, Connecticut, Nathaniel Sheldon Wheaton graduated from Yale College and was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1818. Elected assistant rector of Christ Church in Hartford and secretary of the Trustees of the newly chartered Washington College (now Trinity College), Wheaton was sent in 1823 by the trustees to England to obtain financial support and book donations for the College. Between October 1823 and November 1824, he remained in England long enough to raise about $2,000, some of which he spent to purchase scientific equipment and about a thousand books for what became Washington College's library. He published an extensive account of his travels in the Episcopal Watchman in 1827-1829.

As a Trustee of Washington College, Wheaton sat on a committee to plan a course of study and discipline for the students. He also published what historian Glenn Weaver deemed “the first catalogue of the College.” In April 1826, during what was a period of difficult finances for the institution, Wheaton was appointed to a committee of the Trustees charged with increasing the funds for the College. Two years later, amidst these duties to the College, Wheaton became the first rector of Hartford's African Mission School, an Episcopal institution devoted to training African-American clergy to become missionaries or teachers in Africa.

In October 1831, Wheaton was unanimously elected as President of Washington College at a salary of $1,200. He occupied the post until his resignation six years later. During these years, Wheaton continued many of the College structures and policies which President Thomas Church Brownell, the College's co-founder and first president, had helped nurture. The number of library books increased on campus, mainly through the temporary deposit of 5,000 recently-published books of history and literature by the Reverend Samuel F. Jarvis, who was given a professorship in exchange, even though Jarvis lived in absentia and did not teach until his return to Hartford in 1835. Wheaton may have disapproved of Jarvis's unusual relationship to the College. In February 1837, Wheaton resigned from Washington College in order to take the rectorship of Christ Church in New Orleans.

Wheaton's move to New Orleans may have increased his connections to slavery and its defense. According to the 1840 U.S. Census, Wheaton owned a male slave between the ages of 36 and 50. Two years later, he was appointed Chairman of the Louisiana State Colonization Society. In his overtly pro-slavery discourse on St. Paul's epistle, delivered in December 1850 at Christ Church in Hartford, the Reverend Wheaton asked, “Is not obedience in the slave, according to the apostolic standard, made a duty as sacred as any other duty, social or moral?” ¹⁾

On March 18, 1862, Wheaton died at Marbledale, Connecticut, leaving $20,000 for Trinity College in his will. One half of that amount was allotted for the construction of a new chapel on campus.