Heman Humphrey (March 26,1779 –April 3,1861) was a 19th-century American author and clergyman who served as a trustee of Williams College and afterward as the second president of Amherst College,a post he held for 22 years. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Humphrey was born in West Simsbury,Hartford County,Connecticut (which became Canton,Connecticut) to farmer Solomon Humphrey,of a family that came from England before 1643,and Hannah,daughter of Captain John Brown. [5]
Humphrey graduated from Yale University with an A.M. in 1805 and was ordained a Congregational minister on March 16,1807. He became a minister in Fairfield,Connecticut,in 1807,moving to Pittsfield,Massachusetts,in 1817. His 1813 report to the Fairfield Association is one of the earliest temperance tracts published in America. [6] Humphrey is also said to have published six articles in The Panoplist and Missionary Magazine on the cause,origin,effects and remedy of intemperance. [7]
Following his tenure at Williams College,in 1825 he was appointed president of Amherst. [8] He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1842. [9] Humphrey was influential in the nineteenth-century temperance movement and typical of the early proponents of prohibition. [10] He was the father of U.S. Representative James Humphrey.