Dickinson College: First Charter of the New Republic

On the ninth of September, seventeen eighty-three, a Philadelphia physician named Benjamin Rush helped win a charter from the Pennsylvania legislature for a new college in the frontier town of Carlisle. The charter came less than one week after the Treaty of Paris had officially ended the American Revolution and confirmed that the United States of America actually existed. The institution he founded, Dickinson College, was among the first colleges chartered in the new nation.

Rush was already one of the most remarkable men in early America. He had signed the Declaration of Independence seven years earlier. He was a pioneer in medicine and public health, a vocal opponent of slavery, and one of the most insistent voices for a new kind of education suited to a republic rather than a monarchy. He believed deeply that a democracy could only survive if its citizens were genuinely educated, and he wanted Dickinson to be on what was then the western frontier of settlement, training practical men for the practical challenges of building a country.

He named the college after his friend John Dickinson, the Pennsylvania statesman and eventual governor who had helped guide the Constitutional Convention and who gave the college its motto: "Tuta libertas," meaning a bulwark of liberty.

Dickinson had grown out of a grammar school founded in seventeen seventy-three, but the seventeen eighty-three charter gave it formal standing as a college of the young republic. It was, Rush wrote, "nursery of useful knowledge" rather than ornamental learning.

The college that stands in Carlisle today maintains that tradition. It has become known especially for its emphasis on global education and civic engagement, the kind of practical patriotism that Benjamin Rush thought a democracy required. The charter granted here, days after the revolution formally ended, still hangs in the college's memory as its founding act.