The Baptist Education Society’s first year proved more prosperous than its founders had expected. Its agents had raised over $2,400 in donations and $55.00 in subscriptions. Already one student, Jonathan Wade, of Hartford, New York, had been received as a beneficiary and was studying Latin with Daniel Hascall. The sum of $27.12 for his board for fifteen and a half weeks at $1.75 per week was the chief expenditure. So sanguine were the members that they directed the Trustees to apply to the state legislature for a charter for the organization. A committee was also appointed to select a site for the new institution.
News of the founding of the Education Society had spread to New England, New York, and Philadelphia. William Staughton, Luther Rice, and the Board of the Triennial Convention, believing that the interests of the denomination could best be served by a concentration of effort, hoped that the Society would become an auxiliary organization of the Convention and send men and funds to its institution in Philadelphia; But no step was taken in this direction. Hascall, Kendrick and the others had clearly indicated in the Constitution that the Society was to have its own institution and one of the arguments urged for supporting it was that the school would be located in up-state New York.
As directed by the Society, the Trustees petitioned the legislature for a charter. Ebenezer Wakeley, a member who, was in the Assembly, in January 1819 introduced a bill for incorporation and headed the select committee to which it was referred. He later learned that General Erastus Root, a fellow assemblyman of great influence with the majority party, opposed the bill on the ground that it would charter a religious society. An extremely able man, scholarly, sarcastic, dissipated, and sometimes uncouth and rough, Root could be a dreaded antagonist. When Wakeley called on him one evening in an attempt to explain the purpose of the Society and win him over he exclaimed, “What the devil do you want with an act of incorporation?” and swore that the bill should be defeated. The next morning as the Assembly went into the committee of the whole the Speaker called on Root to preside. Wakeley feared that the General would ask to be excused so that he could participate in the discussion, but after a moment’s hesitation he took the chair and thus eliminated himself as an opponent on the floor. As Wakeley presented the reasons for the bill, Root would frequently scowl at him. On its third reading it passed with 62
