The 24-year administration of President Atherton vindicated the trustees for the time and care they used in selecting him to be the seventh President of the University. He was born in Massachusetts, and when he was 12 his father died. Through work in a cotton mill and on a farm he earned enough to help support his widowed mother and to pay his way at Philips Exeter. He entered Yale, but withdrew for Union service in the Civil War, and had risen to the rank of captain when his health failed. Returning to Yale, he was graduated in 1863 and taught for several years at Albany Boys' Academy in New York and at St. John's College in Maryland. He was a member of the first faculty of the University of Illinois, which he left to become professor of political science at Rutgers. In New Jersey, he also took a law degree and ran unsuccessfully for Congress. He was at Rutgers when he accepted the Penn State presidency at the age of 45.