tenacity of the Hamiltonians. To give up the charter, the latter maintained, would kill the institution; it would lose its faculty and students, its patronage from friends and the state, and its name and reputation as a college. The Albany convention optimistically appointed Henry Tower, an active member of both Boards for many years, to a committee to try to persuade Daniel Hascall and Medad Rogers and the Hamiltonians to abandon their suit and surrender the charter. His efforts proved unsuccessful, and he was assured that if Hascall and Rogers withdrew others would take their places.
Early in December 1849, the Education Society Board held a special meeting to take official action on the “Albany Compromise.”
Among those present was Deacon Colgate who had hitherto yielded to removal as the will of the denomination. Devoted to the institution at Hamilton, he had changed his mind and now thought that to accept the proposals would mean its death and at this crisis he even assented to an endowment for the University. The solemn and prayerful deliberations of the Board consumed two days. By unanimous vote it rejected the measures adopted at Albany and directed that counsel, employed to defend the Society in the Havens and Hascall suits, be dismissed. If an institution were to rise in Rochester, they felt, “it would be better for it to be wholly new, and not have interwoven with it a charter that should bring with it more or less of prejudices and embarrassments contracted by removal.”
Despite the Board’s action, the Removalists, determined to wage their struggle to a finish, sought in January 1850, to have Judge Gridley vacate or modify Judge Allen’s temporary injunction of August 28, 1849. That they should have chosen to bring the action before Judge Gridley occasioned surprise since he was known to be partial to the Hamilton group. The attorneys argued the case in March and the judge gave his decision the following month. He held that the University Trustees in voting to remove to Rochester had not complied with the Act of the State Legislature of April 3, 1848, which authorized the transfer, because the resolution of the Trustees read “to Rochester or its vicinity“
whereas the statute specifically permitted removal to Utica, Syracuse, or Rochester. He also held that the filing of the resolution with the Secretary of State was unauthorized because the Trustees’ committee on legal obstacles, on whose favorable report the filing