"Thus a new college was inaugurated: church-initiated, but managed by an independent board made up largely of secular members of the local gentry class; church-sponsored, but relying for financial suppirt on pledges made locally just before the outbreak of revolution; nondenominational by pronouncement, but later colored in the minds of the members of the new legislature of Virginia as an arm of a church and therefore not eligible for state support; and intended- as Smith said in his first prospectus- "to form good men, and good Citizens" at a time when being a good citizen meant, to many prospective students, going off to fight for the Patriotic cause. It was a beginning, in other words, rife with potential trouble. Yet the college got off to a good start. Quickly it linked itself to the Revolutionary cause. Historian of Hampden-Sydney John Brinkley contends that President John Witherspoon of Princeton probably gave the college its patriotic name. Though a recent immigrant from Scotland, Witherspoon was, in 1775, a member of the Second Continental Congress, which had just chartered a ship named for two activist Englishmen of the seventeenth century; these men were remembered in the name of patriotic organizations in several of the colonies. They were John Hampden, a Member of Parliament who challenged the king's right to levy certain new taxes and whose attemped arrest by Charles I precipitated the English Civil War; and Algernon Sidney (or Sydney, the spelling eventually adopted by the college as late as the 1920s), who fought on the side of Parliament in the Civil War, was convicted of treason under Charles II and was executed, and whose influential Discourses Concerning Government was required reading at Princeton. Smith returned from his Northern tour with three Princeton men, aged 15 through 26, engaged as faculty; a "Princeton woman," Ann Witherspoon, daughter of the president, as his wife; and "Hampden-Sidyney" as the name for the new college."