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p. 170 – Recovery and expansion, 1850-1869

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the Grammar School. Professors Beebee and Dodge, though Dem­ocrats, were as ardent for the Union as President Eaton whose oratory was in frequent demand at public mass meetings.

At the commencement of 1864 Dr. Eaton refused to be depressed by “excitements and embarrassments of the hour” and confidently asserted that it was a serious mistake to suppose the University “to be going down on account of the temporary withdrawal of students for soldiers.” The losses, however, had been great and enrollment had fallen to approximately 100. The war had naturally prevented many from entering and large numbers had left the campus to join units from their home localities or had enlisted in those recruited from Hamilton. Though the actual count of students withdrawing from the University to join the army was only 40, it must be remembered that this figure was a large percentage of an enrollment which was never much higher than 200. In addition to 40 students, 70 alumni were also in service, many of them as chaplains. Thus 110 men, ten of whom were casualties, represented Madison University in the Union Army.

Since news of Lee’s surrender arrived during spring vacation, the University was unable to hold an appropriate demonstration. Students and faculty joined with the village, however, in celebrating the Fourth of July, 1865, which was the occasion for a public welcome of the returning local veterans. In anticipation of commencement, the Students Association had already asked Professor Osborn to deliver a memorial discourse on that occasion honoring those who had fallen during the war.

Commencements after 1850 continued to attract large crowds of guests intent on enjoying the week’s festivities, which, in Central New York parlance, have been described as a kind of “intellectual hop­ growers’ picnic.” The bill of fare included meetings of the Education Society, alumni, the Society for Inquiry, and the literary societies, and the College and Seminary graduation exercises. Beginning in 1857, the Grammar School, also, had a commencement. Some of the sessions took place in West Hall chapel where the Latin mottoes on the walls, “God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved” and “No weapon formed against her shall prosper”, reminded audiences of the unhappy Removal struggle. The Baptist Church, however, was usually the scene of the College and Seminary commencements until the auditorium in Alumni Hall was completed in 1861. The ceremony was sometimes

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p. 169 – Recovery and expansion, 1850-1869

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his native Sweden. They adopted as their uniforms gray jackets trimmed with red, gray caps, and black trousers with red tape along the outside seams. The 0fficers had somewhat finer outfits of gray with generously-padded long-tailed coats. Carrying Springfield muskets supplied by the State Militia, the company drilled through the summer afternoons and evenings. By invitation of a friendly farmer they went to his meadows a few miles from the village on a three-or four-day bivouac. Its most outstanding features were a sham battle and the great quantities of good food contributed by neighboring families.

Town and gown were greatly saddened in the spring of 1862 by the news of the first casualties, Lieutenant William McIntyre and Captain Arthur L. Brooks, son of the Baptist pastor, both favorites with their fellows in the Class of 1861. Another solemn reminder of war came at commencement 1862, when one of the Trustees presented a sword to Charles W. Underhill as he left the platform after delivering his graduation oration. Underhill, then a lieutenant, had assisted in raising the 114th New York Infantry with which he was to serve throughout the war.

Students organized a second company for military drill in 1863. It was in charge of Daniel W. Skinner who had rejoined the Class of 1865 after his discharge from the army because of wounds received at Fair Oaks. His experiences must have given the same realistic quality to his instruction which they did in 1864 to his Aeonian Society oration, “The Value of Our National Struggle,” a “sterling production” unmarred by “eagle flights of oratory.”

Other campus activities during the war years included frequent Glee Club appearances at patriotic meetings at which they gave selections from their songbook The War-Whoop. Students followed the course of the battles as they avidly read the daily papers and then readjusted the colored pins of the war maps which were conspicuous in dormitory rooms. Union victories they duly celebrated by firing a cannon placed in front of East and West Halls. Though the faculty prohibited salutes during recitation hours, “somehow the patriotic old gun would go off of its own accord, in the middle of the morning, when a particularly good piece of news came by telegraph.” A poll conducted on the campus in October 1864, showed that students and faculty overwhelmingly favored Lincoln’s re-election by a vote of 77 to 12; of the McClellan supporters, seven were in the College and five in

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Students organize the University Corps. (p. 168)

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George Arrowsmith, Class of 1859, Lt. Col., 175th N.Y.S. Volunteers, Alumni Files, p168 William McIntyre, Class of 1861, Lt., 61st N.Y.S. Volunteers, Alumni Files, p168

 

 

Wendell Phillips, Gerrit Smith, and other molders of public opinion who lectured in Hamilton. Lincoln’s call for troops after the fall of Fort Sumter ·cam~ two days before they left for the four-week spring vacation. In their absence George Arrowsmith, Class of 1859, a young man of great promise for whom they all had a cordial affection who was studying in a Hamilton law office, enlisted and raised a company of local volunteers. His example had a sobering effect on the returning undergraduates, not only because of his engaging personality but also because they knew he was a Democrat and had frequently contributed partisan articles to one of the village newspapers. Arrowsmith’s company elected him captain and after a year’s service he became Lieutenant Colonel in the 157th Regiment of which. his friend, Professor Brown, on leave as Principal of the Grammar School, had been made commanding officer. Arrowsmith fell in the first day’s fighting at Gettysburg.

In May 1861, the students organized a company, known as the University Corps, more than 100 strong, for military drill and elected as captain Knut O. Broady, a senior who had seen military service in

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Madisonensis (Colgate Maroon) and school colors (p. 167)

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they shall resort to no tavern or other place where intoxicating drinks
are kept for sale . . .
[they] shall not play at cards or any other unlawful game . . . nor
shall they use intoxicating liquor.
The faculty minutes abound with cases which called forth admonition,
suspension, or expulsion.

With the introduction of student publications and athletics, some of this adolescent exuberance was diverted. The ephemeral Madison
University Literary Annual and the Madison University Gazette came
out at commencement time in 1857 and 1858. (later Madisonian ) which first appeared in August 1858, was issued annually for ten years. The first two ran stories, poems, and humorous articles, while the third, which had characteristics of a college year book such as listings of organizations, their officers and members, resembled similar publications at Hamilton and Williams Colleges. There was no regular campus newspaper until the Madisonensis began in August 1868; it continues to the present as the Colgate Maroon .

Croquet enjoyed a large following in the late ’60’s. Quoits, once popular, now attracted few devotees and interest in muscle-building gymnastics had declined notably since the ’50’s when students built a makeshift gymnasium. Primarily to distinguish Madison students from their opponents participating in extramural athletic contests, the first University colors, blue and magenta, were adopted in 1868. General recognition of the wholesome contribution athletics can make to college life, however, did not come until nearly two decades later.

The student generations of the ’60’s seem to have gotten considerable enjoyment from informal singing. In 1863 appeared a 24-page pamphlet, Songs of Madison, the first of its kind, which includes college songs of the period as well those of Madison students. Of particular interest is what must be the first Alma Mater which begins:

 

Alma Mater! Alma Mater!
Heaven’s blessings attend thee;
While we live we will cherish,
Protect and defend thee.

 

The most profound influence on the life of the students in the 60’s was, of course, the Civil War. They watched its approach as they read the newspapers in the library reading-room and listened to speeches of

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p. 166 – Recovery and expansion, 1850-1869

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“Ringing the rust” was another college custom Madison students observed each August to mark the close of the freshman year. Pro­longed ringing of the chapel bell from midnight on, and the general disorders which ensued, announced to disturbed sleepers that the first year men had lost their “rust.” There is some indication that sophomores hazed freshmen, but this diversion seems to have been quite innocuous. When the Junior Exhibition was postponed in January 1868, sophomores and juniors arranged an elaborate “burial” service for the third-year men. Wearing white sheets and masks and bearing wooden sticks, each stick representing a junior, they paraded one winter evening, groaning and wailing, to the village park. Here they lighted a pyre and with appropriate eulogies, tossed the “corpses” into the flames.

Common student pranks included driving livestock from adjacent pastures into the chapel or classrooms, burning outbuildings and students’ woodpiles, and mixing up half a dozen student coal heaps outside the dormitories. On one occasion, a few of the boys removed the pipes from the organ and after marching around the campus blowing the tubes, hid them in odd corners; the faculty is said to have identified the culprits from the brass stain on their mouths. Students often attended donation parties, social occasions to which church members brought gifts of vegetables and other staples for their pastor and his family, in surrounding villages, and made the driver of their hired band wagon go through toll gates at full speed to avoid paying the fee. As they returned late at night it was not uncommon for them to take down the rail fences and replace them diagonally across the road so that travelers who followed in the dark would find themselves in the fields. In .1866 the Students Association requested the faculty to suspend classes on a Wednesday in November so that they might observe an expected shower of meteors. On being refused, they voted “that we do all fall asleep in recitation on said Wednesday.”

The faculty, believing that they stood “in loco parentis,” expended great energy in attempting to maintain discipline. Pranks were bad enough; worse were outright violations of the many specific regulations in the University Laws. Among them were these:

 

students, in hours of study, shall abstain from singing, loud talking, playing on a musical instrument, and, at all times, shall withhold themselves from noisy plays in the University buildings…

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Delta Upsilon receives charter (p. 165)

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maneuvered their brothers into office. By request of a majority of the Society, the faculty intervened to order a new election with the result that the previously defeated candidates were victorious. Three years later the Dekes were involved in an Aeonian Society fight over the selection of speakers for the Junior Exhibition and, apparently unsuccessful, withdrew in a body, taking many others with them and leaving the organization in wrath at their tactics.

To counteract these “evil influences” in Adelphian and Aeonian affairs, a few students under the tutelage of Clark B. Oakley, a theologue who had been a D.U. at the University of Rochester, formed an anti-secret society in November, 1865, which early the next year received a charter as a chapter of Delta Upsilon. Meeting at first in each other’s rooms, the group expanded and at length rented quarters in the village. Aside from the obvious advantages of fellowship, they, like the Dekes, stressed cultural pursuits and spent much effort rehearsing one another to ensure performances creditable to the fraternity when they appeared at the Junior Exhibition and on other public occasions. They frequently invited guests to their own literary programs, which seem to have been of a high caliber. They debated Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, and the elective franchise for women, among other questions, and, in a moment of righteous indignation, suspended one member for plagiarism. The Madison D.U.’s were in frequent communication with their brothers at Hamilton College, and on their own campus they seem to have enjoyed tacit faculty approval.

The growing secular influence during the period, 1850-69, appeared also in other practices characteristic of American undergraduate life of the time. One which perennially plagued the faculty was mock schemes, or false programs, which were surreptitiously circulated at the Junior Exhibitions and similar events. Prepared in secret, usually by sophomores and often scurrilous and vulgar, they burlesqued in cartoons and print those whose names appeared on the bona fide programs. In many ways, the mock schemes were forerunners of college humor magazines and some feature columns in college newspapers. The tittering, giggles, and loud guffaws which they excited made the lot of the lampooned speakers extremely trying. Though producing and distributing these sheets was an expulsion offense and the Students Association sometimes cooperated’ with the faculty to suppress them, the custom persisted into the 1880’s.

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p. 164 – Recovery and expansion, 1850-1869

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and to refrain from playing politics in the affairs of the literary societies. Unmoved, the faculty proceeded to inform the Dekes that they must either pledge in writing to disband or face expulsion. Fourteen complied in June and were thereupon ejected from the fraternity. The others eventually capitulated, but not before they had perfected a plan to outwit the faculty. The last one delayed signing until the day of his graduation in August, 1857. On the night before, he and the chief officer of the Hamilton College chapter had initiated eight members of the incoming freshman class, who, as students in the Grammar School, knew the struggle of the past year and were ready to carry it on.

To all appearances the anti-secret society rule had been enforced and only gradually did the truth come out. The new members, knowing the penalty if they were discovered, nonetheless exulted in preserving the organization. They usually assembled every two weeks if conditions favored, sometimes in a member’s room, but more frequently at the Eagle Hotel where a brother would take “lodging” for the evening. As partial satisfaction of the requirement that the fraternity be given up, they formally voted at the close of each meeting to disband and then reorganized when they next convened. They initiated some of the best students in the University and gave particular attention to literary programs of orations, essays and debates, then important features of fraternity life which the Greek letter groups had appropriated from the literary societies. In the need for maintaining secrecy they. once deposited their charter with the Hamilton College chapter and for six months stored their records in the bureau drawer of a local Deke sweetheart. Such precautions gradually became needless, and in 1868 a room in the business section of the village was rented for regular use. The prohibition against fraternities still stood but the faculty no longer attempted to enforce it.

The unity which the Dekes maintained in their struggle with the faculty also made itself felt in the two literary societies, the Adelphian and the Aeonian. During the early ’50’s, the rivalries of these enthusiastic and successful organizations was intense and their public meetings and the Junior Exhibitions-for which they elected third-year men in the College to be their representatives-attracted large and responsive audiences from Hill and village. In 1857 the Adelphians fell into a bitter dispute among themselves over an election in which the Dekes

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Delta Kappa Epsilon secretly formed on campus (p. 163)

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Well aware that expulsion awaited them once the faculty learned what they had accomplished, the new Dekes decided to follow the practice of the current Know Nothing party in denying all knowledge of the new organization. They also asked the Parent Chapter not to make known their existence; a request which was granted. They held their meetings late at night and steadily initiated new members without creating suspicion that there was a fraternity on the campus. The first disclosure is said to have been made at the commencement of 1856 when one or two seniors were reported to have worn Deke pins while delivering their graduation orations. By the fall term, however, the existence of a D.K.E. chapter was no longer a secret.

Faculty sentiment, one may judge, was not entirely hostile since three of the professors were fraternity men: Beebee, who in his college days had been initiated into Psi Upsilon at Hamilton College; Dodge, a member of Alpha Delta Phi at Brown; and President Eaton, an ardent Sigma Phi of the Alpha chapter at Union, whose two sons, both members of the Class of 1856, had joined the Hamilton College chapter of their father’s fraternity. Whatever the faculty’s personal feelings may have been, their responsibilities as officers of the University required them to enforce its regulations as ratified by the Trustees. Since none of the latter were college men, they may naturally have felt that potentially disruptive or dangerous customs on other campuses should have no place at Madison University. It is also quite possible that the Trustees believed the condition of the institution as it recovered from the Removal Controversy was too precarious to risk alienat­ing patrons and churches, many of whom still held anti-Masonic prejudices of an earlier day.

The faculty did not take up the problem in a formal way until December 1856, when they agreed that the rule against secret societies should be reaffirmed and strictly enforced. Protracted investigations and discussions lasted on into the spring with every effort being made to induce the Dekes to disband. They countered with the proposal that the faculty should always be represented in the fraternity by a regular honorary member, and elected Professor Gallup, whom they knew to be unfriendly to the chapter; he declined the membership. They also promised to cooperate with the President to improve the academic standing and general conduct of any brothers in danger of expulsion for irregularities, to prohibit the use of liquor at their festive occasions,

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p. 162 – Recovery and expansion, 1850-1869

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gallery with his classmates he grew so absorbed in Dr. Brooks’s sermons as completely to lose consciousness of his surroundings.

The missionary spirit which had vitalized the activities of the Society for Inquiry and the Eastern and Western Associations waned after 1850. Furthermore, the Removal Controversy had carried off many of the leaders whose ardent interest in the objectives of the organizations, students of succeeding generations did not share. Most noteworthy of the Eastern Association’s members was Jonathan Goble, Class of 1859, a Marine from Perry’s expedition to Japan, who returned to the Empire in 1860 as a missionary and subsequently achieved fame for translating the Gospel of Matthew into Japanese; he is also credited with the construction of the first jinrikisha. By 1860 both the Eastern and Western Associations had ceased to exist. The Society for Inquiry, which absorbed their activities, carried on into the 1890’s.

More closely conforming to contemporary interests was the Theological Lyceum which the Seminary students and faculty organized in 1854 to promote the “intellectual, moral, and religious improvement of its members.” Topics for essays and discussions at its meetings included: Christianity and the Crimean War, spiritualism, freemasonry, and the propriety of a minister’s resorting “to firearms or deadly weapons in defense of political rights.” The Lyceum became practically moribund in the 1860’s, but did not expire until 1871.

For many undergraduates the question of secret societies was much more absorbing than participation in those of a religious character. Despite faculty action suppressing fraternities in the 1840’s and a stipulation in the Laws of 1853 that students “shall form no organizations … except with the consent and under the direction of the faculty and … shall not become members of secret societies,” attempts to establish such groups persisted. Partly circumventing the rules, some under- graduates had themselves initiated into Phi Upsilon at Hamilton College, but this ruse was far from satisfactory to those who sought a fraternity on their own campus. Among them was Caleb H. Gallup, Class of 1856, who after discussing the problem during summer vacation with a cousin, then a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon at Kenyon College, returned to Madison fired with the idea of founding a local chapter. Gallup and a few close associates thereupon petitioned for a charter which the parent chapter at Yale granted to them as Mu Chapter, March 1, 1856.

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p. 161 – Recovery and expansion, 1850-1869

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The Steward also provided furnishings and bedding for the dormito­ry rooms until the late ’50’s; the occupants were left to supply wood or coal for their stoves and tallow· candles and sperm oil lamps for illumination. Flowers and plants, occasionally found in the windows, afforded a homelike touch. Bathing facilities consisted bf a bath house to which spring water was piped down the hill. In winter some Spartan youths took morning showers in the ice-cold water, roaring with pain at the shock, and then wrapped in overcoats, they dashed to their warm rooms to recover.

To relieve the tedium of study in the long winter months, there were innocent amusements such as skating on the Chenango Canal, coasting, or bees to fill the Steward’s ice-house, followed by a savory supper. In summer, students took long walks, often stopping to pick strawberries, or went on brief camping trips to nearby ponds. Then, too, there were opportunities throughout the year for the companionship of the young ladies in the Hamilton Female Seminary, or “Ham Fem Sem” as it was popularly known, which local citizens had established in 1856. Its receptions were social highlights to which the young men eagerly sought invitations and reciprocated by taking the girls to campus events such as the literary societies’ public exhibitions and baseball games. Some village homes, especially Deacon Charles C. Payne’s, welcomed the boys from the Hill. They also found diversion and stimulation at public lectures by such noted men as Emerson, Beecher, Gough, and George William Curtis.

The pronounced religious atmosphere which had pervaded campus life from the 1820’s moderated somewhat after 1850 as a result of the growing number of non-ministerial students and of outside pressures, particularly the issues which led to the Civil War and the effects of that conflict. Most students were church members, however, and participated in prayer meetings and other religious exercises; the Students Association annually elected a theologue to deliver a sermon at one of its assemblies. With the dissolution of the Seminary Church in 1851, all members of the University attended morning services with the village Baptist congregation and shared in their five stirring re­vivals in the ’50’s and ’60’s. Frequently the faculty supplied the pulpit, but Walker R. Brooks, pastor from 1856 to 1873, made the most profound intellectual and spiritual impression. William Newton Clarke, Class of 1861, who was to become one of the most eminent theologians of the Baptists, once said that sometimes as he sat in the

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