(November 29, 1727–May 12, 1795), was a founder of Rhode Island College (later Brown University) in 1763, the president of Yale College, and was the president of the first society for the abolition of slavery formed in Connecticut, in 1790.
On May 8, 1783, as the president of Yale College, Ezra Stiles gave a major Election Address, entitled “The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor,” before the Governor and the General Assembly of Connecticut, declaring:
All forms of civil polity have been tried by mankind, except one, and that seems to have been reserved in Providence to be realized in America.672
Our system of dominion and civil polity would be imperfect without the true religion; or that from the diffusion of virtue among the people of any community would arise their greatest secular happiness: which will terminate in this conclusion, that holiness ought to be the end of all civil government. “That thou mayest be a holy people unto the Lord thy God.”673
In our lowest and most dangerous state, in 1776 and 1777, we sustained ourselves against the British Army of sixty thousand troops, commanded by … the ablest generals Britain could procure throughout Europe, with a naval force of twenty-two thousand seamen in above eighty men-of-war.
Who but a Washington, inspired by Heaven, could have conceived the surprise move upon the enemy at Princeton—that Christmas eve when Washington and his army crossed the Delaware?
Who but the Ruler of the winds could have delayed the British reinforcements by three months of contrary ocean winds at a critical point of the war?
Or what but “a providential miracle” at the last minute detected the treacherous scheme of traitor Benedict Arnold, which would have delivered the American army, including George Washington himself, into the hands of the enemy?
On the French role in the Revolution, it is God who so ordered the balancing interests of nations as to produce an irresistible motive in the European maritime powers to take our part. …
The United States are under peculiar obligations to become a holy people unto the Lord our God.674