page_title: Harry Croswell
section_title: Parish minister
hierarchical_section_title: Harry Croswell / Life / Parish minister
caption_attribution_description: English: The Rev. Dr. Harry Croswell, of Trinity Episcopal Church on the Green
context_page_description: Harry Croswell was a crusading political journalist, a publisher, author, and an Episcopal Church clergyman. Though largely self-educated, he received an honorary degree of A. M. from Yale College in 1817, an honorary Doctorate of Divinity from Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut in 1831 – an institution he co-founded – established the first public lectures in New Haven, and founded an evening school for the education of adult African-Americans in the city. He was a key figure in first amendment battles over freedom of the press and religious freedom. After abandoning politics for religion, he became the much respected Rector of Trinity Church on the Green in New Haven, Connecticut, for forty-three years, growing his church and establishing seven new churches within the original limits of his parish. Though he published fourteen books, and wrote newspaper articles as an editor and journalist weekly for eleven years, he is best known as an author for being the first person to define the word cocktail in print.
context_section_description: Obeying his own precept, Croswell never publicly commented on politics nor voted in an election in the 43 years he was Rector of Trinity parish. He rarely even mentioned the political issues of the day in the diary he kept for most of the years he held his office. Croswell's 5,300 page diary, begun in 1821 when he was 41, is a largely untapped treasure found in manuscript form at the Yale library. The historian Franklin Bowditch Dexter in "The Rev. Harry Croswell, D.D., and his Diary", called it "a remarkable record of individual activity, and of the shrewd comments of a critical observer on persons and events within his daily experience."
  According to the African-American history scholar Randall K. Burkett, Rector Harry Croswell was known to minister to blacks at a time when other white clergy did not. Among the American diocesan clergy, Burkett notes that "none had more extensive or intimate acquaintance either with his own black parishioners or with a larger number of the twenty-two antebellum African-American Episcopal clergy than did the Reverend Harry Croswell," and that Croswell "all but singlehandedly ministered among the black population of New Haven."
  His charitable works in the city ranged from co-founding Washington College in New Haven (now Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut), New Haven's first Orphanage, several night schools, Sunday schools, the Colonization Society, and he was a trustee and secretary of the General Theological Society.
  His diary recounts an extraordinary life of pastoral visits and care. Yale historian Dexter, who knew Croswell, observed that
  ... in personal intercourse with his fellowmen he was uniformly genial and overflowing with practical beneficence. With regard to this last trait, it is evident that, like the rest of his generation, he observed none of the methods of our modern Organized Charities. Beggars thronged his door, and found him the easiest of prey, while fully aware of his own weakness.
  When he died, a local newspaper summed up his career:
  For over forty-three years, Dr. CROSWELL devoted himself assiduously to the arduous labors of a large and steadily increasing Parish. How effectual those labors have been, a brief statement will show. The Parish, which included not only the Town, but a wide, if sparsely settled, adjoining country, numbered, at the beginning of his ministry, about 130 families; in 1828, it had increased to about 500 families ... there are now eight Episcopal Churches within the original limits of Trinity Parish, the Parish retains a stable congregation of about 500 families. In a period of forty-one years, he administered 2,553 baptisms, married 837 couples, and officiated, alone, at 1,842 burials.
caption: The Rev. Dr. Harry Croswell, of Trinity Episcopal Church on the Green in his sixties
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