and intellect."
Horace Webster (1794–1871), a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, was the first president of the Free Academy. At the Free Academy's formal opening on January 21, 1849, Webster said:
The experiment is to be tried, whether the children of the people, the children of the whole people, can be educated; and whether an institution of the highest grade, can be successfully controlled by the popular will, not by the privileged few.
In 1847, a curriculum was adopted that had nine main fields: mathematics, history, language, literature, drawing, natural philosophy, experimental philosophy, law, and political economy. The academy's first graduation took place in 1853 in Niblo's Garden Theatre.
Even in its early years, the Free Academy had a framework of tolerance that extended beyond the admission of students from every social stratum. In 1854, Columbia University denied distinguished chemist and scientist Oliver Wolcott Gibbs a faculty position because of his Unitarian religious …
