country, especially for “young men from the interior, bro’t up to hard labour; without the advantages of a common school education” and unaccustomed to city ways and often desperately poor. The opportunities at Hamilton for them to supply “destitute churches” on Sundays he stressed as valuable in providing preaching experience and a small financial return. He tactfully called attention to arrangements for cooperation already worked out with the Vermont education society and stated, “If you deem this method calculated to promote the general interest of our common cause … you will accept the assurances of a firm disposition on our part, to enter cordially into such a connection [with you] and be fellow helpers in the same good work.”*
Negotiations dragged on till March 24, 1823, when the Trustees of the New York Baptist Theological Seminary, giving up the idea of maintaining their own school, voted that it was “expedient to send to the Seminary at Hamilton such an annual sum as may be conveniently Spared and such students as may to this board appear Expedient.” Within a month they turned over to agent Joel W. Clark $350 and soon after shipped $100 worth of books to Hamilton. Their first student, William G. Miller, “a member in good standing of the Abyssinian Church,” joined the Class of 1826. Henceforth, the New York Baptist Theological Seminary was a paper organization only, its sole purpose being to assist the Hamilton institution. The Board justified abandoning their own school on the ground of inadequate funds, but the unfailing help which they and other Baptists in New York City, now released from supporting a strictly local enterprise, were to give to the up-state seminary was many times to save it from ruin.** When the Education Society had been chartered in 1819 the New Yorkers had regarded it as a rival The Rev. John Stanford had said, “‘I wonder if the people away off in the woods, a hundred miles west of Albany, are so silly as to suppose that young men licensed [to preach] in the city of New York would think of going away there to obtain an education.” ***But four years later he had changed his opinion.
William Colgate, a wealthy soapmaker and philanthropist, had been
* Baptist Education Society, Executive Committee, to New York Baptist Theo-
logical Seminary, Board, July 29, 1820.
** New York Baptist Theological Seminary, Record Book, 1813-48, passim.
*** New York Baptist Register, July 27, 1848.