Stephen Girard

From Philosopedia

Girard, Stephen (1750—1831)

Girard, a French-born philanthropist, settled in Philadelphia as a shipowner and helped finance the U.S. in the War of 1812 - in fact, he lent the government five million dollars. He called his vessels after the names of the philosophers Helvetius, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau.

A freethinker, he bequeathed $6,000,000 to found Girard College for fatherless boys. By a provision of his will, no ecclesiastic or minister of any sect whatever was to hold any connection with the college, or even be admitted to the premises as a visitor; however, the institution officers were required to instruct the pupils in secular morality and allow them to adopt their own religious opinions.

His will, according to Wheeler, “has been most shamefully perverted.” In a lawsuit which went all the way to the Supreme Court (Vidal v. Girard’s Executors), the Court ruled the will did not actually aid infidelity or attack Christianity. Had it done either, the Court stated the will would have been invalid. Commenting, Joseph McCabe has stated that a favorite argument of the clergy is that freethinkers never found charitable institutions, so the clergy finds ways to change the original intent of the philanthropist. McCabe estimates that the estate of Girard - whom he cites as being a deist - was worth an estimated $40,000,000 in the mid-1940s.

His bequest terms in endwing a college for orphans included the following:

• I enjoin and require that no ecclesiastic, missionary, or minister of any sect whatever shall ever hold or exercise any station or duty whatever in the said college; nor shall any such person ever be admitted for any purpose, or as a visitor, within the premises appropriated to the purpose of the said college. . . . My desire is that all the instructors and teachers in the college shall take pains to instill into the minds of the scholars the purest principles of morality, so that, on their entrance into active life, they may, from inclination and habit, evince benevolence toward their fellow creatures, and a love of truth, sobriety, and industry, adopting at the same time such religious tenets as their matured reason may enable them to prefer.

{BDF; CE; FFRF; FUS; JM; PUT; RAT; RE}