Eleazar Wheelock was a New Light Congregationalist minister who founded Dartmouth College. He was born into a very typical Congregationalist family, and began studying at Yale in 1729, where he fell in with the emerging New Light clique. The evangelical network that he built in college propelled him to fame as an itinerant minister during the First Great Awakening and gave him many of the contacts that he later drew on to support his charity school for Native Americans. Wheelock’s time as an itinerant minister indirectly brought about his charity school. When the Colony of Connecticut retroactively punished itinerant preaching in 1743, Wheelock was among those who lost his salary. Thus, in 1743, he began operating a grammar school to support himself. He was joined that December by Samson Occom, a Mohegan Indian, who sought out an education in hopes of becoming a teacher among his people. Occom’s academic success inspired Wheelock to train Native Americans as missionaries. To that end, he opened Moor’s Indian Charity School in 1754 (where he continued to train Anglo-American students who paid their own way as well as students who functionally indentured themselves to Wheelock as missionaries in exchange for an education). Between 1754 and 1769, when he relocated to New Hampshire, Wheelock trained approximately 60 male and female Native American students from nearby Algonquian tribes and from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of central New York. At the same time, he navigated the complicated politics of missionary societies by setting up his own board of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, although he continued to feud with the Boston Board of the SSPCK and the London Commissioners in Boston (more colloquially called the New England Company). By the late 1760s, Wheelock had become disillusioned with the idea of Native American education. He was increasingly convinced that educating Native Americans was futile (several of his students had failed to conform to his confusing and contradictory standards), and, in late 1768, he lost his connection to the Haudenosaunee. With his inclination and ability to sponsor Native American missionaries largely depleted, Wheelock sought instead to fulfill his ultimate ambition of obtaining a charter and opening a college, which he did in 1769. To fund this new enterprise, Wheelock drew on the £12,000 that Samson Occom had raised for Moor’s Indian Charity School during a two-and-a-half year tour of Great Britain (1765 to 1768). Much of this money went towards clearing land and erecting buildings in New Hampshire for the Charity School’s relocation — infrastructure that also happened to benefit Dartmouth. Many of Wheelock’s contemporaries were outraged by what they saw as misuse of the money, as it was clear that Dartmouth College was not intended for Indians and that Moor’s had become a side project. Although Wheelock tried to maintain at least some commitment to Native American education by recruiting students from Canadian communities, the move did a great deal of damage to his public image. The last decade of Wheelock’s life was not easy. In addition to the problems of trying to set up a college far away from any Anglo-American urban center, Wheelock experienced the loss of relationships with two of his most famous and successful students, Samson Occom and Samuel Kirkland (an Anglo-American protégé). He also went into debt for Dartmouth College, especially after the fund raised in Britain was exhausted.

The Reverend Samuel Johnson was a prominent Episcopalian (the American branch of the Anglican church) clergyman and scholar who spent much of his career as the pastor in Stratford, Connecticut. After a Congregationalist upbringing and a stint as Yale’s first tutor, he was ordained in 1720 and served as pastor to the Congregationalist church at West Haven, a few miles from New Haven. He continued pursuing scholarship and, in the course of his studies, concluded that Anglicanism was the most preferable Christian sect. Together with several other Yale-affiliated Congregationalists, Johnson declared himself an Anglican and traveled to England for Anglican ordination, which he received in 1723. Upon his return to America, Johnson took the Episcopalian pulpit at Stratford, Connecticut. In the course of his lifetime, he partook in a significant expansion of the Episcopalian Church in Connecticut. Johnson had close ties to the Society for Propagating the Gospel (SPG, the primary Anglican missionary society in the colonies) and was precisely the sort of Episcopalian that most frustrated Reformed Protestants like Wheelock: in addition to working to convert Native Americans, several of whom attended his Stratford church, Johnson also strove to convert Anglo-American Congregationalists to Episcopalian worship. In 1753, Johnson was named as the first president of King’s College (renamed Columbia after the Revolution). He retired in 1763, and returned to his congregation at Stratford. In 1766, he participated in the collection authorized by the Connecticut Assembly for Moor’s Indian Charity School. Although he firmly believed that Anglicanism was the best approach to Christianity, he did support Wheelock’s efforts to convert Native Americans. Johnson was an eminent scholar. He published extensively in the field of moral philosophy and also wrote a catechism and English and Hebrew grammars. He should not be confused with Samuel Johnson, an Anglo-American Yale student employed by Wheelock, or William Samuel Johnson, this Samuel Johnson's son, who was Great Britain’s agent in the Mason Land Case between the Mohegan tribe and the Colony of Connecticut.