In his commemorative oration delivered on the semicentennial anniversary of the founding of the University in June, 1887, President James Burrill Angell said: "We might in a very just sense celebrate this year the centennial of the life of the University." Just one hundred years before, the Ordinance of 1787 had proclaimed that throughout the Northwest Territory then in process of organization "schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." This advanced educational policy rested upon sound precedents in the administration of education in the Colonies, where most of the colleges, particularly in the beginning, had received active support from the public treasuries, although by the time of the Revolution, the administration of most of these institutions had come under what was practically church control (see Part I: The University of Michigan and State Education) .
The Ordinance of 1787 was inspired by the liberal and even free thinking spirit of that period and in its provisions for education proclaimed, despite the generally accepted view, that the maintenance of schools was a function of the state. This conception of a public responsibility for education formed one of the really constructive policies inaugurated by the weak and ineffective national government in the era before the adoption of the Constitution, though it was to be many years before its implications were to be realized in Michigan or in any other of the states to be established.
Aside from outlying trading posts the only settlement in Michigan at that time was Detroit, a little village of French and Indian fur traders. It was situated strategically, however, on the highway of the GreatLakes, and, like many frontier communities, it attracted men with a talent for leadership as soon as it became a part of the United States in 1796. Among those who rose to prominence in Detroit were three significant figures. The first was Father Gabriel Richard, a French Sulpician missionary priest who came to the Territory in 1798 and almost immediately set about developing means of education for a community in which the inhabitants, we may assume, were almost wholly illiterate. He founded elementary and trade schools, imported the first printing press in the Territory, and even looked forward to an institution for instruction in the higher branches.
With the coming of Augustus A. B. Woodward as the chief justice of the Territory, after its organization in 1805, Father Richard's efforts received strong support. Woodward was a classical scholar, something of a pedant, with a tendency toward extravagant theories, and he saw in the movement toward the provision of educational facilities for the Territory an opportunity to put into effect some of his own pet ideas. He had long been engaged upon the philosophical task of dividing and subdividing human knowledge into appropriate categories and published a book on the subject in 1816. The classification of knowledge was also one of Jefferson's hobbies and it may well have been a friendship between the two men based on these ideas that led to Woodward's appointment (Isbell, p. 182).
A third figure who comes actively into the picture was the Reverend John Monteith, a young Presbyterian clergyman who had been ordained at Princeton in