| Chapter 1: | Educating Stockton |
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home and was on hand to witness two of his father's failed attempts to be elected governor of New Jersey. Thus, in addition to reading and writing, Robert witnessed firsthand the losses that could be sustained in politics. Prior to his admission to Princeton in 1811, Robert and his brothers also took classes at the Princeton Academy, which advertised that “no vacations are permitted, nor usual holidays given but on the written request of the respective parents.”26 Yet its discipline seemed less strict than Finley’s, for it also advertised itself as having a “steady, strict, yet mild discipline.”27
Like so many members of his family, Robert entered Princeton, the school his great-great-grandfather had helped to create, and from which his grandfather, father, uncle, and elder brother had all graduated. Robert entered in his thirteenth year, destined, as was the family tradition, to study law. However, the exciting tales from the newly published memoirs of Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson intervened, and Robert discovered a heroic life beyond the legal profession.
Lord Admiral Nelson’s Lessons
No sooner had Nelson died in battle at Trafalgar in 1805 than presses in Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia rushed his memoirs into print.28 They continued printing the British naval hero's memoirs even during the War of 1812—only then combining them with stories of glorious American naval exploits.29 It was Nelson, not the American naval hero John Paul Jones, who captured the American imagination in the early nineteenth century, for Nelson died a martyr in the midst of battle, while Jones ended his career in service to a Russian empress. It was Nelson's words, not Jones’, that anointed Decatur's exploit in Tripoli Harbor (February 16, 1804) as “the most bold and daring act of the age.” It was Nelson, not Jones, whom the American artist Benjamin West chose as the subject for two epic paintings (later made into figures to accompany an 1809 Nelson biography—see figures 1 and 2).
It was Nelson, not Jones, whom Revolutionary War commodore Thomas Truxtun commented upon in his A Few Extracts, from the Best