Francis Wayland, the American Baptist clergyman, educator, and moral philosopher, was one of the central figures in the modification of American collegiate education. As president of Brown University (1827–1855), he introduced proposals to ease the rigidity of the classical curriculum by an approximation of the later elective system. With his mentor, Eliphalet Nott of Union College, Schenectady, New York, Wayland approved of the substitution of modern language study for at least some of the required Greek and Latin, encouraged training in science and its practical application, and advocated a more professional faculty employed for longer terms. To some degree his interest in these reforms was the result of his Jeffersonian philosophy of democracy. He was completely in accord with Thomas Jefferson's insistence that a republican government can flourish only if the voters are well educated. He argued, too, that native talent was widely diffused and should be given the opportunity to develop through education.
Philosophically, Wayland was a naive realist of the Scottish school of philosophy. His theory of knowledge was basically Lockean sensationalism supported by a faculty psychology. Knowledge is gained by a combination of experience and intuition, leading to inductive generalizations whose certainty he did not question. Ultimately Wayland's epistemology rests upon a theistic assumption, that there is a correspondence between what man finds in the universe and what God put there for man to find. However, Wayland's most important contribution to American philosophic development was moral rather than epistemological. His textbook, The Elements of Moral Science, first published in 1835, was very widely used and served as a model for many imitators. In this book Wayland departed from the William Paley form of utilitarian ethics that had been taught in the colleges and introduced an ethical position more dependent upon the deontological position characteristic of Bishop Butler. The Enlightenment emphasis on the rights of man was subordinated to a philosophicoreligious stress upon ethics as a system of duties. The moral quality of an action is declared to reside in its intention rather than in its consequences.
Wayland's moral theory led him to an increasing rejection of the institution of slavery. At first he found intolerable only the thought of being himself a slave owner; later he came to feel that all property in human beings was intolerable. From a mildly antislavery position in 1835, he moved to vigorous abolitionism and support of the Union cause in the Civil War. To at least some of the Southern defenders of slavery, Wayland became the archenemy, particularly because of his insistence that the Scriptures cannot be used to support the institution of slavery. Wayland's exchange of letters with Richard Fuller, a Southern clergyman, published as Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution (New York and Boston, 1845), presents the arguments on both sides most effectively.
Wayland's The Elements of Moral Science has appeared in the John Harvard Library (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963) with an extended introduction by the editor, J. L. Blau. Wayland's other major works are The Elements of Political Economy (New York: Leavitt Lord, 1837), Thoughts on the Present Collegiate System in the United States (Boston: Gould, Kendall and Lincoln, 1842), and The Elements of Intellectual Philosophy (Boston and New York, 1854). For discussions of Wayland see J. L. Blau, Men and Movements in American Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1952) and Wilson Smith, Professors and Public Ethics (Ithaca, NY: American Historical Association and Cornell University Press, 1956).
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