Tag Archives: John Sharp Maginnis

p. 135 – The removal controversy, 1847-1850

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capital. Brown and Judd had tapped a reservoir of emotion.

The transition of control in the University Board from the Rochester supporters to the Anti-Removalists was another dramatic episode of the 1850 commencement week. Thanks to the fact that Removal men had been appointed to vacancies, friends of Hamilton failed to constitute a quorum. In case the Removalists should refuse to meet, the University would be forced to suspend operations. That a quorum of any kind could be gathered after August, 1850, seemed improbable.

When the Trustees met on the 19th they were three short, and it was not until their third session, the afternoon of the 20th, that a quorum of nine was present. Knowing that a committee of Anti­-Removalists was prepared to negotiate with the Board, five Removalists present agreed to resign and resolved:

 

 

that we pledge ourselves to elect substitutes on the nomination of Dea. Wm. Cobb, of Hamilton, provided a written pledge be first given by responsible individuals, that the professors who shall resign shall be paid in full on or before the 10th of September next, and that the bill of the Legal Committee at Albany … be paid by 1st of November next.*

 

 

The condition meant that friends of Hamilton, already staggering under a heavy deficit and hard-pressed to raise the endowment, would immediately have to secure $2,700 for faculty salaries and $265 for lawyers’ fees incurred by the Removalists. Though willing to pay the salaries, they regarded the legal expense as unjust and declined the condition. As the Board was about to dissolve without having surrendered control to the Hamiltonians, Professor Spear volunteered to assume responsibility for providing the money and Deacon Cobb, Alvah Pierce and three others joined in signing the bond. The Board accepted the document and six members withdrew one by one as Anti-Removalists took their seats. The crisis was passed and it was now possible to proceed with arrangements for carrying on the work of the University.

The newly constituted Board turned at once to the most urgent matter, that of reorganizing the faculty. Professors Maginnis, Conant, Raymond, A. C. Kendrick, and Richardson had resigned two days previously to accept appointments at Rochester, leaving only Eaton

*Colgate University, Board of Trustees, Minutes, Aug. 20, 1850.

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p. 128 – The removal controversy, 1847-1850

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passage. The Removal Act of April 3, 1848, still stood.

Morale on the campus had rapidly deteriorated among faculty and students early in 1849 when repeal seemed a possibility and removal prevented. Both groups were anxious that the question be settled as soon as possible so that they could make plans for next year. Professor Eaton’s exertions in Albany and elsewhere, his Removalist colleagues regarded as most reprehensible. They censured him not only in faculty meeting but also publicly, in connection with Dr. Kendrick’s funeral sermon.

During the last years of his life Dr. Kendrick had become especially fond of Eaton, no doubt because both worked strenuously to prevent removal. Before his death in September, 1848, Kendrick asked that Eaton preach his funeral sermon, but it happened that Eaton was absent from the village when he died and Kendrick’s friend, the venerable Alfred Bennett of Homer, gave the discourse. Kendrick’s request, however, was known by several students, many of them having taken turns watching at night by his bedside, and, out of respect for the departed “Father in Israel,” the Students Association invited Professor Eaton to deliver a memorial sermon.

The Remavalist members of the faculty, apparently jealous of Eaton’s popularity with the students, feared he would make the sermon a vehicle for Anti-removalist propaganda, especially since it would be published and widely circulated. When the students 1earned that Professor Maginnis would give the sermon, “the deep waters were stirred,” as one wrote, and “The Great Rebellion” soon developed. Despite protest meetings and petitions Maginnis preached the sermon. The professors, viewing the students’ behavior as a revolt against authority, designated Dr. Conant to inform them of the reasons for faculty policy. At the end of his two-hour “exhaustive exposition” the thunder of feet and prolonged hisses drowned his voice. Disciplinary measures and even expulsions failed to restore an atmosphere of study, and soon some students transferred to other colleges and universities.

When the University Trustees met in special session in Utica in April 1849, to accelerate measures for removal they gave particular attention to the disturbances and, to check Professor Eaton’s activities, though not mentioning him by name, they resolved:

 

 

that whilst this Board would not deny to the Faculty individually the free exercise and expression of their private judgment, yet the relations of the Faculty to the Board and the interests of the University

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First Compact (p. 107)

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innovation contrary to the purpose of the Education Society. After the University charter had been granted in 1846, some of the Society’s trustees, fearful that secularization would go farther, even suggested the document be returned to the Legislature. Since both Boards at first were unable to adjust their relations to each other in such a way as to establish what were considered proper safeguards for ministerial education, they had tabled that troublesome question for a year.

In June and August, 1847, both Boards, the faculty, and the Education Society eventually worked out an arrangement, known as the First Compact, which became effective on the first of September. It provided that the Society should grant the University the use of its property and that the University should maintain a suitable course for “candidates for the Christian ministry” and allow beneficiaries to have rooms rent-free. The faculty was to be considered a single unit responsible to the University Trustees. As a means of retaining control of ministerial education the Society required the University Board to appoint and dismiss such theological professors as it should designate.

It was the question of faculty appointments which first produced serious friction. The professors in the collegiate department had been formally appointed under the new charter as a matter of course in June 1846. The University Board took no action on the theological professors, however, until a year later when they were then made members of the University faculty, but on a temporary basis until their duties and titles should be determined.

Meanwhile, some of the Baptists in Hamilton, among them Jacob Knapp, the evangelist, came to see in the formal appointment of the theological faculty an opportunity to remove Professor Maginnis from the chair of Biblical Theology. This aristocratic, tall, bent, and ailing man had aroused their enmity by his intellectual approach to religion and his uncompromising Calvinism. Knapp, of course, had not forgotten that Maginnis had been his chief opponent in the village church quarrel a few years before. When information on the Education Society Board’s meeting on August 19, 1847, leaked out, the strategy of Maginnis’s enemies was apparent. The Board had convened, with only 13 out of 31 members present, probably most of them resident Trustees, to nominate theological professors for final appointment by the University Board in accordance with the First Compact. Conant and Eaton were chosen unanimously but only four votes were cast for

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p. 95 – Administrative problems and incorporation, 1833-1846

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Seneca B. Burchard, Alumni Files, p95

 

over the finances with care and took a leading part in the work of the Executive Committee.

Throughout the 1830’s and late into the next decade Dr. Kendrick continued as Corresponding Secretary. After 1840, administrative duties occupied so much of his time that he had turned over to Professor Maginnis. most of his work as professor of systematic and pastoral theology. The Reports of the Board, circulars, and other articles from his pen in the hospitable pages of the Baptist Register and other denominational journals were perhaps the Society’s most effective advertising. Of all the members of the Board, he had the most thorough understanding of its activities and problems.

Financial questions proved by far the most serious and trying with which the Board had to deal. From 1833 to 1846 annual expenditures

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p. 88 – Student life, 1833-1846

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The low state of the students’ health attracted the attention of one observer in 1840. He noted that many, especially those who had worked on farms or in shops and stores, came to the Institution in good physical condition but that after a short time broke down because of too little exercise. In 1836 and 1841 there were epidemics of mumps and measles; in 1845 smallpox threatened. The Executive Committee permitted two local physicians to deliver at their own expense a course of physiological and anatomical lectures in 1833. The professors them­selves discussed with the students from time to time matters of hygiene and physical education. They also sanctioned a Hygeian Society which in 1845 listened to a long lecture by Dr. J. S. Douglas, a local physician, on homeopathy as the best means of curing disease.

Student interest in the reform movements of the period was most aroused with respect to antislavery. As we have already seen, the faculty feared the adverse public opinion campus antislavery societies might create and therefore suppressed them. The world peace movement, however, did not disturb the local equilibrium. Students’ attention had been directed to it in 1837 by a prize offered by Howard Malcom, prominent Boston Baptist clergyman, for the best essay on the Christian attitude toward war. Three years later, by faculty invitation, Captain William Ladd, President of the American Peace Society, addressed the Institution. Students at the Institution joined those of Auburn, Princeton, and Andover Seminaries in 1833 in sending letters of commendation to John R. McDowall who formed the Christian Benevolent Society “to reform depraved and abandoned females.”

Like Unitarianism in 1830, the doctrine of perfectionism in 1840 briefly menaced Baptist orthodoxy on the campus. Developed at Oberlin College, this philosophy taught that through the help of Christ one might attain a state of “Christian perfection” before death. It was charged that Elder Jacob Knapp, the revivalist, had encouraged students to accept the doctrine. When Professor Maginnis faced this heresy in his theology class he sought first to combat it with spiritual argument. This means failing, he lectured on the results of such theories as shown in ecclesiastical history, whereupon his hearers gave up their erroneous views.

Since most students had already had preaching experience and were young men whose average age was twenty-five, their teachers felt they could be trusted with extensive responsibility and authority. The

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p. 71 – The expanded program, 1833-1846

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country for his violent and dramatic sermons which swayed thousands. His lurid admonition to the unregenerate that sinners would have to plow the hottest regions of hell with a shingle and two bobtailed rats is still remembered in Hamilton. Following his graduation from the Institution in 1824, he had introduced his revival methods among Baptist churches with great success. In 1835 he returned to the village to locate his family while he went out to preach wherever his services were requested. The large amount of property he was acquiring in the work of “saving souls” as well as his spectacular technique excited considerable comment and criticism among Baptists and non-Baptists alike. When he asked the local church in 1843 to grant him a letter of commendation that his standing might be assured in the denomination, the storm broke. Fiery Professor Maginnis, motivated by disapproval of Knapp’s preaching methods and for personal reasons, led those who objected to granting the letter. Out of this issue developed involved investigations and bitter discussions of Knapp’s character and behavior which were protracted over six months. When finally the church by a vote of 32 to 16 gave Knapp their approbation, all the faculty save Professor Taylor were found in the minority.

While the uproar was subsiding, Dr. Kendrick wrote ambiguously to a friend that the faculty had objected neither to Knapp’s success as a revivalist nor to the methods he employed so long as his meetings were “properly conducted.” The professors had tried to do their duty when the case was before the church and now that it was over they would “leave the whole affair with things that are behind.”*Some of the Trustees of the Education Society had “considered the propriety & practibility of forming a church in the Seminary” and a few months after the Knapp case the Board recommended that the faculty take such a step. Accordingly, in September 1845, they and their families withdrew in a body from the village church to establish their own on the Hill. Professor Taylor whose stand in the Knapp case had not differed from that of his colleagues had avoided the embarrassment by resigning in the spring.

The professors and their families, Deacon Seneca B. Burchard, President of the Education Society Trustees, and his wife, both of whom had also left the village church, and one student, gathered on a snowy Sabbath in Professor Raymond’s classroom, and formally orga-

*Nathaniel Kendrick to James Edmunds, New York, N.Y., Mar. 7, 1845.

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Jacob Knapp urges church to declare slavery a sin (p. 70)

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though at the same time lashing out at them on the platform and in the newspapers. He asserted that wherever they exerted “their influence, there languishes the cause of slaves, and there abound apologists for the oppression.” Eaton, who had a favorable impression of the more enlightened slaveholders as a result of teaching in Virginia in his youth, seems to have been chosen to represent his colleagues in disputes with Smith.

When the Peterboro reformer became incensed in 1841 at a visit to the campus of the Southern Elder Jonathan Davis, as well as at the suppression of the third antislavery society and the failure of the Seminary to support his new Liberty party, Eaton defended the faculty in a long letter to the Hamilton Palladium. He made it clear that, since they had not identified themselves with the abolitionists, it did not follow that they were pro-slavery. Elder Davis, he pointed out, had not come to reconcile the students to slavery, nor had he mentioned the subject on the Hill. Professor Maginnis, whose guest he had been, heartily opposed Negro servitude, but was convinced that the evil could be righted peaceably only with the help of Southerners whom Northerners should treat courteously and invite to discuss the subject without rancor or bitterness. Such an approach to the problem failed to make any impression on Smith whose avowed and constant purpose was “to abolitionize the public mind.”

The Hamilton Baptist Church, like the Seminary, refused to become involved in the slavery question. Jacob Knapp, the firebrand evangelist, had bitterly denounced a representative of the American Colonization Society from its pulpit in 1841 and a year later urged the church to declare slavery under all circumstances a sin. After extensive discussion, in which it was evident that the members agreed with his sentiments, they nevertheless decided against “the passing of any specific resolutions on the subject of slavery &to such a mode of church action; in general” and concurred “in the opinion, that by their public profession of Religion, &by their church covenant, they have clearly declared themselves against slavery as a sin, together with all other moral evil.”

Though the church avoided dissension on the slavery question, Knapp, with his genius for controversy, was able to plunge it into bitter turmoil on his own account. A plain, uncouth, loud, and uncompromising revival preacher, he was widely known throughout the

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p. 65 – The expanded program, 1833-1846

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Crozer Theological Seminary. Richardson, Spear, and Raymond, alone of the tutors, became regular faculty members.

By employing tutors and student assistants, the Trustees were able to keep down the cost of instruction. Though more full-time professors were needed, the faculty members concurred with the Board in its policy of making no such appointments and were willing to carry heavy teaching loads to keep expenses at a minimum. By 1836 their salaries had risen to $800 but they were still underpaid. Worse than being underpaid, however, was the frequent inability of the Treasurer to remit each quarter’s salary on time. Often the professors were forced to go deeply in debt to care for their families. Dr. Kendrick, keenly aware of their privations, reminded the Education Society that, since the faculty had been chosen to train young men for the ministry,

It is of utmost importance . . . that adequate provision be made for their support, in order that they may give themselves wholly to their appropriate labors, without being ‘distracted with private cares….*

Typical of the faculty’s spirit of sacrifice is Raymond’s statement to the Board that he had turned down-offers of more lucrative positions because of his “settled conviction of the permanent importance of this Institution” and his “attachment to’ the particular departments of instruction” over which he presided. When Professor Maginnis disclosed that because of inadequate recompense he was about to resign, the entire faculty went so far as to “express to the Ex[ecutive] Com[mittee] their full conviction that the continuance of Prof. Maginnis in the chair of Biblical Theology is of vital importance to the interests of the Institution” and to “assure the Com. that they will found no claim in their own behalf upon any arrangement which the Com. may deem it expedient to make in order to meet the pecuniary wants of Prof. Mag”[innis.]**

Even though often harassed by financial worries, the professors and their wives, formed “a circle, rarely surpassed … in its elements of congeniality, and in the rich sources of enjoyment which it opened to its members,” Professor A. C. Kendrick recalled forty years afterward. Three faculty families, the Spears, Eatons, and Conants, lived in

*Baptist Education Society, Annual Report , 1840, 18.

**John H. Raymond to Board of Trustees, Baptist Education Soceity, Jan. 12, 1843; Faculty Minutes, 1840-51, Mar. 25, 1841

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p. 59 – The expanded program 1833-1846

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been separated from the Institution a little more than nine years,” he
lamented in 1845,

but I have not forgotten it nor is my attachment lessened by time and distance. I seem to myself like one buried alive. I hear some distinct reports concerning those I love but hold no direct communication with them…When connected with the institution its joys & sorrows, hopes & fears were mine. And they remain so still with the additional circumstance that I can do nothing for its benefit.*

Within three years, however, he was once more to share actively in “its joys & sorrows” as he heroically and successfully fought the attempt to remove it to Rochester.

John Fram Richardson, a native of Vernon, New York, and a member of the senior class, seems to have taken over some of Hascall’s work a few months before graduating in 1835. He acted as a “tutor” until 1838 when he was made Professor of the Latin Language and Literature. He was the first graduate to become a member of the faculty. He was also Secretary of the Faculty and the clear, neatly-written minutes attest his competence in that sphere. His friends remembered him as a refined, gentle and unobtrusive man and a fine teacher and scholar.

When Barnas Sears vacated the important chair of Biblical Theology in 1835, the Board, after several fruitless attempts to get a Baptist of equal eminence and ability, appointed John Sharp Maginnis in 1838. Born in Pennsylvania, of staunch Scotch-Irish immigrants, he spent his childhood in Ohio. When in his ‘teens he joined the Baptist denomination and for a short time assisted the indefatigable preacher and friend of the Institution, Joshua Bradley, in his church in Pittsburgh. To train for the ministry he studied at Waterville, Brown, and Newton. Prior to his appointment to the faculty he held pastorates at Providence, Rhode Island, and Portland, Maine. Maginnis’s ardent piety and logical thinking had commended him to the Board as likely to be the kind of professor they sought and his career on the Hill justified their selection. Spare, dignified, high-strung, and dyspeptic, he tempered the austerity of his harsh Calvinism with a gentle simplicity and friendliness and a keen wit which endeared him to students and colleagues. He delighted to detect errors in reasoning and his skillful use of the Socratic method, combined with his lucid theological lectures,

*Daniel Hascall, West Rutland, Vt., to George W. Eaton, July 8, 1845.

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