James Blair | Biography

For fifty-four years James Blair--parish rector, Anglican commissary, president of the College of William and Mary, and councillor--dominated church life and was a major force in political life in Virginia. One of the three ablest Anglican commissaries in the colonial South. Blair was politically powerful enough to effect the dismissal of three strong royal governors and has been called, for his period, "the most articulate spokesman in Virginia" against the exercise of royal authority. With friends in England such as John Locke, three successive Archbishops of Canterbury, and two Bishops of London, Blair ruthlessly destroyed those who opposed him. Tough-minded, impervious to criticism, iron-willed, ruthlessly ambitious, avaricious, solitary, imperious, articulate, idealistic, and pragmatic, Blair was a complex man of tireless abilities and a violent temper who also was a conscientious and effective pastor, a powerful speaker, and an able writer. As he left office in 1721, partially due to Blair's machinations, Governor Alexander Spotswood indignantly dubbed Blair "that old Combustion."

Blair was born sometime between May 1655 and May 1656, the son of Robert Blair, minister of Avah in Banffshire, Scotland in 1667, at the age of twelve, young James entered the preparatory grammar school at Marischal College, Aberdeen, and matriculated at the University of Edinburgh in 1669. He took his M.A. in 1673 and was ordained into the Church of Scotland in 1679, serving as rector of Cranston in the diocese of Edinburgh until his refusal in 1682 to sign the test oath that was one of the Stuart efforts to disarm Scottish opposition to the accession of James II. Blair was far from alone among Protestant clergymen in Scotland who balked at the Roman Catholic James II's requirement that all Scottish administrators, soldiers, scholars, and churchmen sign an oath that would have placed James at the head of the Scottish church. After a period of working as a law clerk in the Rolls Office in London, during which time he cultivated several powerful friendships, Blair accepted an appointment to a rectorship in Virginia.

Arriving in Virginia in the autumn of 1685, Blair assumed his duties in Henrico parish on Virginia's westernmost frontier, where on 2 June 1687 he married Sarah Harrison, daughter of Colonel Benjamin Harrison, thus aligning himself with a politically and socially prominent family. Appointed Virginia's first Anglican commissary in late 1689, Blair began his campaign for the establishment of a college in Virginia. Through his tireless efforts and fierce resolve, including a trip to England to lobby for his cause (1691-1693), the College of William and Mary was chartered in 1693 with Blair as president.

In 1694 Blair's friends in England secured his appointment to the Royal Council of Virginia; he was the first clergyman on that body. Now part of the inner circle of Virginia's leaders, Blair was named in 1695 rector of James City parish, the oldest and most desirable in the colony, where he served until he went to Bruton parish in Williamsburg in 1710. The first of Blair's thirty years of squabbles with Virginia governors also began in 1695. In 1697 Blair carried this fight with Sir Edmund Andros to the Board of Trade in England, where Blair's great debating abilities and ruthlessness won the governor's dismissal.

Blair developed a friendship with one of the members of the board, John Locke, and coauthored with him "Some of the Chief Greivances of the present Constitution of Virginia with an Essay towards the Remedies thereof," an essay which was the basis for a longer report written by Blair, Henry Hartwell, and Edward Chilton. On 20 October 1697, the three men submitted their report to the Board of Trade, entitling it "An Account of the Present State and Government of Virginia." It languished in government files, however, until it was published in 1727 as The Present State of Virginia, and the College. Although largely overlooked in Southern colonial historical surveys, this sociopolitical appraisal--combined with promotional literature for the College of William and Mary--is a significant view of developing political attitudes in Virginia. Blair's hand is seen throughout the work in its call for restricting the broad powers of the governor and council and for the correction of abuses of power.

Blair's battles with Andros's successor, Francis Nicholson, and Nicholson's successor, Alexander Spotswood, were fierce and ended the same way, with their removal. In these disputes Blair found himself aligned with Virginia's political establishment against the majority of the clergy. The clergy and the governor were pressing for the right of the governor to induct ministers into their parishes; Blair sided with the local vestries in their right to appoint and dismiss ministers. The Blair-Nicholson feud inspired a little body of literature, including a number of satiric poems largely by clergymen. Back in England, the novelist Arthur Blackamore, who had been dismissed from William and Mary for alcoholism, perhaps modeled the villain Whiskero of The Perfidious Brethern ... (1720) on his old enemy James Blair.

Throughout his stormy public life, Blair remained a conscientious parish minister. His effectiveness as a pulpit orator can be seen in his Our Saviour's Divine Sermon on the Mount ... (1722), a massive five-volume edition of 117 sermons preached at Jamestown and Williamsburg between 1707 and 1721. Although he was a brilliant and learned theologian, Blair's sermons are for the most part practical discourses aimed at an ordinary audience and deal with Christian behavior, morality, and ethics. This collection spread Blair's name throughout the English-speaking world; it remained in libraries in England and America for over a century. Regarded highly by church historians, the series exemplifies one Southern homiletic tradition which Richard Beale Davis describes as "the quiet unraveling of texts which touched upon some aspect of everyday life, in as plain a style as was any ever found in New England."

From the late 1720s until his death on 18 April 1743 Blair's life was relatively quiet and largely solitary. He never adopted the robust life-style and camaraderie of Virginia society and never formed many close friendships; moreover, his policy positions and truculent nature alienated most of his clergy. In the final analysis, James Blair has been judged a powerful force both for good and bad in Virginia's history. He founded, against almost insurmountable odds, the South's only colonial college, and he doggedly opposed abuses of royal power. Moses Coit Tyler called him the actual founder of "intellectual culture" in Virginia, and Parke Rouse, Blair's biographer, credits him with being unequaled in contributing to Virginia's intellectual maturation.