Timothy Dwight IV

Engraving of Dwight and his signature, circa 1820 to 1840

Dwight was the leader of the evangelical New Divinity faction of Congregationalism, a group closely identified with Connecticut's emerging commercial elite. Although fiercely opposed by religious moderates, most notably Yale President Ezra Stiles, he was elected to the presidency of Yale on Stiles's death in 1795. Shortly afterwards, Dwight was elected an honorary member of the Connecticut Society of the Cincinnati. His ability as a teacher and his talents as a religious and political leader soon made the college the largest institution of higher education in North America. Dwight had a genius for recognizing able protégé such as James Murdock,[7] Lyman Beecher, Nathaniel W. Taylor, and Leonard Bacon, all of whom would become major religious leaders and theological innovators in the antebellum decades.

During troubled times at Yale College, President Timothy Dwight saw his students drawn to the radical republicanism and "infidel philosophy" of the French Revolution, including the philosophies of Hume, Hobbes, Tindal, and Lords Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke. Between 1797 and 1800, Dwight frequently warned audiences against the threats of this "infidel philosophy" in America. An address to the candidates for the baccalaureate in Yale College called "The Nature and Danger of Infidel Philosophy, Exhibited in Two Discourses, Addressed to the Candidates for the Baccalaureate, In Yale College" was delivered on September 9, 1797. It was published by George Bunce in 1798. This book is credited as one of the embers of the Second Great Awakening.

Dr. Dwight has made a contribution to science though he was not trained in any particular field.[8] Yale's faculty, still small and theological at the end of its first century, significantly transformed when Dwight hired three new professors between 1801 and 1803: Jeremiah Day, professor of mathematics; James Luce Kingsley, professor of classical languages; and Benjamin Silliman, professor of chemistry and geology.[9] Silliman, Yale's first chemist, who introduced science education at Yale, became the patriarch of American science.[10] Day, a minister as well as a mathematician, succeeded Dwight as Yale College president upon his death.

Dwight was as notable for his political leadership as for his religious and educational eminence. Known by his enemies as "Pope" Dwight, he wielded both the temporal sword (as head of Connecticut's Federalist Party), and spiritual sword (as nominal head of the state's Congregational Church). He led the effort to prevent the disestablishment of the church in Connecticut—and, when its disestablishment appeared inevitable, encouraged efforts by protégés like Beecher and Bacon to organize voluntary associations to maintain the influence of religion in public life. Fearing that the failure of states to establish schools and the rise of infidelity would bring about the destruction of republican institutions, Dwight helped to create a national evangelical movement—the second "Great Awakening"—intended to "re-church" America.

In 1809, Dwight was introduced to the Hawaiian-born Henry ʻŌpūkahaʻia by his relative Edwin W. Dwight, a student at Yale. ʻŌpūkahaʻia, a 17-year-old boy orphaned at the age of 10, had arrived in New Haven after being given passage from Hawaii by New Haven resident Captain Caleb Britnell. Dwight agreed to tutor ʻŌpūkahaʻia, who later became instrumental in establishing Christian missions to Hawaii.[11] In 1810, Dwight became a founder of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which launched its first mission to Hawaii in 1819 under Hiram Bingham.

Dwight was a founder of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences and Andover Theological Seminary. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1797,[12] and was also an early member of the American Antiquarian Society, elected in 1813.[13] He received honorary degrees from the College of New Jersey in 1787 and Harvard College in 1810.

Dwight was well known as an author, preacher, and theologian. He and his brother, Theodore, were members of a group of writers centered around Yale known as the "Hartford Wits" In verse, Dwight wrote an ambitious epic in eleven books, The Conquest of Canaan, finished in 1774 but not published until 1785, a somewhat ponderous and solemn satire, The Triumph of Infidelity (1788), directed against David Hume, Voltaire and others; Greenfield Hill (1794), the suggestion for which seems to have been derived from John Denham's Coopers Hill; and a number of minor poems and hymns, the best known of which is that beginning "I love thy kingdom, Lord". Many of Dwight's sermons were published posthumously under the titles Theology Explained and Defended (5 vols., 1818–1819), to which a memoir of the author by two of his sons, W. T. and Sereno E. Dwight, is prefixed, and Sermons by Timothy Dwight (2 vols., 1828), which had a large circulation both in the United States and in England. Probably his most important work, published posthumously, is his Travels in New England and New York (4 vols., 1821–1822).[14][15] The work contains much material of value concerning social and economic New England and New York during the period 1796–1817.[3] The term "Cape Cod House" makes its first appearance in this work. The work also contains the correspondence between Dwight and the theologian Gideon Hawley, following Dwight's visit to the elder preacher who was a very close friend of Dwight's parents.

Dwight married Mary Woolsey. They had eight sons: Timothy Dwight (1778–1844), a New Haven merchant and philanthropist; Benjamin Woolsey Dwight (1780–1850), a New York physician; educator and theologian; twins James Dwight (1784–1863) and John Dwight (1784–1803); Sereno Edwards Dwight (1786–1850), who served as the third president of Hamilton College; clergyman William Theodore Dwight (1795–1865); Henry Edwin Dwight (1797–1832),[16] an educator and author; and one who died young. Dwight's grandson and namesake, "Timothy Dwight the Younger" (1828–1916), served as Yale's president, 1886–1899. His nephew, Theodore Dwight Woolsey (1801–1889), served as Yale's president between 1846 and 1871. Another nephew was Theodore Dwight (1796–1866), an author and journalist.

Dwight died of prostate cancer in 1817, and was buried in New Haven's Grove Street Cemetery. Mary Woolsey Dwight, died October 5, 1845.[2]