[2] After studying Latin with local ministers and schoolmasters, including Jared Eliot, in Guilford, Clinton and Middleton, Johnson left Guilford at age 13 to attend the Collegiate School at Saybrook, later renamed Yale College, in 1710, where he studied the Reformation logic of Petrus Ramus and the orthodox Puritan theology of Johannes Wolleb (Wollebius) and William Ames.

He discovered Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning, the works of John Locke and Isaac Newton and other Age of Enlightenment authors not known to the tutors and graduates of Puritan Yale and Harvard.

If he had published the work, it would have predated the first comprehensive English-language encyclopedia,[8] Ephraim Chambers's 1728 Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, by twelve years.

They were opposed by three trustees, two of whom split the college, and opened a schismatic branch in Wethersfield, Connecticut, taking half the students and the junior Yale tutor with them.

At Yale's September 13, 1722 commencement, in a very public and dramatic event labeled the “Great Apostasy”[18] by American religion historian Sidney Ahlstrom, the nine member group declared for the episcopacy.

After strong pressure from the Governor and their family and friends, five of the nine recanted, but Johnson, Cutler, Brown and Wetmore, refused to change their decision, and were expelled from their positions at Yale and their Congregational ministries.

He opened a successful common school in Stratford shortly after his arrival in 1723, and boarded and tutored the sons of prominent New York families to prepare them for college.

In February 1729, Johnson noted in his Autobiography, "came that very extraordinary genius Bishop Berkeley, then Dean of Derry, into America, and resided two years and a half at Rhode Island".

[27] Johnson published the essay "An Introduction to the Study of Philosophy, exhibiting a General view of all the Arts and Sciences” in the May 1731 issue of London-based periodical The Present State of the Republick of Letters (1728–36).

"[34] Going beyond Wollaston and Berkeley, "Johnson extended these men's constructions with his own unique practice-oriented ideas of perception leading to action, and a freewill model of humans with a value system focused on pursuing happiness.

[38] That same year he built the second Christ Church in Stratford, startling his Puritan neighbors with Gothic-style architectural elements, heating, an organ, and a steeple with a clock and a bell, topped by a gold-brass rooster.

According to educator Henry Barnard, “This work had a high reputation at the time of its publication, and met with an extensive sales.”[39] He revised it again with editions released in 1752 in Philadelphia and 1754 in London.

[42] Johnson declined the offer, and instead worked with his wife's relations, his step-sons, former students, and the rector and vestrymen of the Anglican Trinity Church in New York City to found a college there.

Johnson had recently met William Smith, a young Scot immigrant tutor, at the New York City salon of Mrs. De Lancey, wife of Lt.

The funding was bitterly opposed in print by board member William Livingston and other Presbyterian politicians along with their Provincial upstate party allies in an intense two year newspaper war.

Its charter promoted a college without a religious test for admission, was practice and profession oriented, public spirited, inclusive and diverse, and taught the then new disciplines of English literature and moral philosophy.

Colonial historian Richard Gummere noted that, "Had Johnson himself offered a specific course for each of these fields, he would have been presiding, mutatis muntandis, over the equivalent of a twentieth-century university.

It begins with the arrival of "guardian or genius of New England" of a "beautiful countenance" who tells Arisctocles, named after Aristocles of Messene, and who represents Johnson, to "call me Raphael".

[51] Parts of the work praise the British form of Parliamentary government, while others foreshadow the Declaration of Independence, including its core principle that, “The natural obligation to virtue is founded in the necessity that God and nature lays us under to desire and pursue our happiness.”[52] By 1767, Johnson was calling the British ministers in Parliament " a pack of Courtiers, who have no Religion at all.”[53] In 1767, his son William Samuel Johnson, was appointed Colonial Agent to Great Britain for Connecticut, and left Stratford for London, where he would remain for five years.

If decent dignity, and modest mien, The cheerful heart, and countenance serene; If pure religion and unsullied truth, His age's solace, and his search in youth; In charity, through all the race he ran, Still wishing well, and doing good to man; If learning free from pedantry and pride; If faith and virtue walking side by side; If well to mark his being's aim and end, To shine through life the father and the friend; If these ambition in thy soul can raise, Excite thy reverence or demand thy praise, Reader, ere yet thou quit this earthly scene, Revere his name, and be what he has been.

Johnson acquired close contacts with the leading merchant, legal, and political families of the colonial-era Province of New York, many who sent their sons to board with him in Stratford, to be prepared for college.

[59] On February 9, 1763, Johnson lost his second wife Sarah to smallpox, and a few weeks after, amidst an unpleasant controversy with the Board of Governors over funding his pension, "he committed the care of his affairs to Mr. Cooper",[60] and returned to Stratford, Connecticut by sleigh during a snowstorm.

The Schneiders also published for the first time his Autobiography, various letters, a catalog of over 1400 books he read, Synopsis Philosophiae, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Revised Encyclopedia, Logic, Miscellaneous Notes, selections from his textbooks on philosophy, Raphael or the Genius of the English America, Reflections on Old Age and Death, twenty-four selected Sermons, various liturgical writings, and various documents relating to the founding of King's College and its early years.

[72] The American Dr. Johnson corresponded regularly with English archbishops and bishops, colonial governors, college heads in England and America, and the secretaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.

He was well known at Yale, where he tutored, co-administered the Berkeley scholarship program from its inception in the 1730s, and partnered with President Clap to create an Enlightenment curriculum and reform the college in the 1740s.

"[79] Three members of the Committee of Five who edited the Declaration of Independence were connected to Johnson: his educational partner, promoter, and publisher Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania; his student Robert R. Livingston of New York; and his son's legal and political protégée and Yale treasurer Roger Sherman of Connecticut.

A lawyer often called to argue in interstate disputes and a colonial agent to England from 1767 to 1772, he is best known as the chairman of the Committee of Style that wrote the U.S. Constitution: edits to a draft version are in his hand in the Library of Congress.

No one but a remarkable man could have had his career, have rendered his public service, or have had his vision of what world-wide illumination might follow from the flickering little candle which he lighted in the vestry room of Trinity Church during the summer months of 1754.

The Samuel Johnson Medal honors the highest achievement across the entire arc of human endeavor wherever rigor and methodical thinking and actions are applied beyond the traditional fields of science and engineering.

[87][88] Johnson's moral philosophy did not long outlast the Revolution in college classrooms, as "Scottish realism became the academic prop of American higher education" all the way through "the middle of the eighteenth century".