require that the Faculty allow to the Boards of the University and the Education Society the charge which the churches have committed to them, of managing the institution; and that this Board regard and interference of the Faculty, or any members of it, revising and thwarting the action of the Board as entirely unwarrantable.*
The Board also proceeded to appoint committees to arrange for moving the University to Rochester.
The Education Society Board, likewise in special session at Utica, concurred in the actions of the University Trustees and voted to hold the Society’s next annual meeting in Albany on June 12, instead of in Hamilton in August, as had long been the custom. Their purpose was to get unquestioned approval for removal without having the proceedings embarrassed “by mere local excitements.”
Because of the irregularities attendant upon the election of the Society’s Trustees in August 1848, the legality of the Board’s activities was in doubt, as even the Removalists tacitly admitted when they sponsored the forthcoming Albany meeting. Taking advantage of this situation, the friends of Hamilton, represented by Benjamin W. Babcock, Henry G. Beardsley, and Theodore Burchard, applied to the courts on May 25, 1849, to set aside the 1848 election and vacate all acts of the Board relating to removal. On June 7, five days before the annual meeting was to be held, the Supreme Court, acting on their application, postponed that gathering until further order. Nevertheless, some members of the Society, most of them from Albany, it was alleged, assembled and organized themselves into an “Educational Convention”
but not without a “pretty deep sense of injury”
at the Anti-Removalist move.
As a compromise gesture the Hamiltonians presented to the “convention”
a , Fraternal Address written by Professor Spear, in which they urged that the whole institution, and not merely the collegiate department, be transferred in the event that they lost the pending Havens and Wiley suit. The “convention,”
however, maintained that the University only be moved and that “a literary and theological school, at least one of a shorter course”
be preserved at Hamilton. As was to be expected, the Anti-Removalists rejected the course suggested at Albany and resolved to await the outcome of the litigation.
Judge W. F. Allen of the State Supreme Court, who heard the Babcock case at Oswego late in July 1849, handed down a decision on
*Colgate University, Board of Trustees, Minutes, Apr. 12, 1849.