Raymonds seem not to have been able to accept, but Professor Conant and Pharcellus Church were on the campus and participated in the exercises. Professor A. C. Kendrick and other former Removalists who were present at the Jubilee Celebration in 1869 could join Professor Eaton in rejoicing that amity and good will between Madison and Rochester prevailed and that the friends of each exchanged “hearty congratulations on the success of their favorite enterprises.”
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Tagged Asahel Clark Kendrick, Pharcellus Church, Thomas Jefferson Conant
regarded as moral duty and possessed of a tireless energy in speaking and writing, he easily assumed leadership of the opposition. He was, moreover, armed with the opinion of his friend, President Eliphalet Nott of Union College, who believed that relocation would violate the implied contract between the University and its donors who had assumed that Hamilton would be the permanent site and in support of the view cited the Dartmouth College case. Also, Dr. Nott favored a rural setting because of the moral, religious and economic advantages. Even if it should be that a large number of New York State Baptists supported removal, he questioned whether it would be expedient “to rupture the ties that bind so many hearts to the original Institution, and in disregard of the rights and feelings of its founders & patrons to attempt to force on them the acceptance of an interest in a new and distant location….”
These points Eaton was to enunciate repeatedly in the next two years.
Eaton’s Candid Appeal proved the chief topic of discussion at a meeting of Western New York Baptists at Wyoming on January 11, 1848. Their reply, An Address to the Baptist Churches of the State of New York…, written by Pharcellus Church, was lengthy, sharp and sarcastic. It assailed “certain false reasonings and injurious imputations” emanating from Hamilton and castigated the non-Baptists of the village, whose interests were branded as essentially foreign and hostile to those of the University. Stung to the quick, one of the Hamiltonians responded with a letter to the Democratic Reflector, reminding Dr. Church,
You have partaken of the charities of the Institution at Hamilton; you have received its highest honors; now you have raised your snaky head, and thrust out your envenomed tongue, to destroy that which warmed you into life and influence.
The columns of the Reflector, the Baptist Register, and New York Recorder carried many letters and articles on the controversy, but few were as abusive as this censure of Dr. Church. The writers, their identity often concealed by pseudonyms, did not hesitate to stoop to personalities, so heated had their feelings become. Daniel Hascall, replying in a letter to the Register to statements made by Church, wrote that this “alumnus was not taught such random shots at Hamilton. If he has any more disclosures to make, I beseech him to confine himself to veritable facts.”
Members of the faculty, particularly Eaton
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Elisha Payne the next year. In their places a new generation stood ready for change, such men as Wilder, James Edmunds, Edward Bright, and others who knew of the early trials and sacrifices only from the records or hearsay. It was the beckoning future which held their interest.
Immediately after the special meetings of the Boards to consider the Maginnis case in September 1847, Trustee Elisha Tucker went to Rochester, where he had been pastor of the Second Baptist Church, and reported their actions to Pharcellus Church, minister of the First Baptist Church. He told him that, in his opinion and that of other Trustees and faculty members, removing the University to Rochester would eliminate the various difficulties. Dr. Church, meanwhile, had received a letter from Hamilton hinting at this solution. At about the same time as Tucker’s visit, Wilder, having spent the summer in Hamilton, and Professors Maginnis and Conant arrived in Rochester. All three seem to have agreed with Tucker that removal would be highly desirable.
These visitors found a sympathetic and understanding listener in Dr. Church, himself a University Trustee, a member of the Class of 1824, and the recipient of a D.D. at the commencement of 1847. He was a man of great enthusiasm, rather fond of controversy, a forceful speaker and master of a direct and pungent literary style. A native of Western New York, he had entertained the idea of establishing a college in that area as early as 1830. Though he does not seem to have participated actively in the founding of a short-lived Baptist college at Brockport, Monroe County, which had enlisted the support of Rochester Baptists in the mid-1830’s, he joined with Presbyterians and others in attempting to establish a «University of Rochester” a decade later. Since this project had failed to materialize, he saw in Tucker’s suggestion a means of supplying Western New York with an institution of higher education and at the same time of relieving the University of its problems, financial and otherwise.
Rochester, which was flourishing following the Panic of 1837, seemed an ideal site. With the abandonment of the movement to organize a university under Presbyterian sponsorship the field was now open to the Baptist, who were numerous and influential in the area. The First Church was in a prosperous condition as a result of Jacob Knapp’s revivals there in the late ’30’s. The skillful and devoted
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circles who became one of the first trustees of Madison University, used his influence to get favorable action.
The objection raised in 1845 that there was no proper agent to receive the charter had been met by setting up an independent corporation, Madison University, which had the power to provide for its own succession. Of the twenty-seven men composing the first Board of Trustees, seventeen were at the same time trustees of the Baptist Education Society, thus making an interlocking directorate. All of them were Baptists and New York residents; six came from Albany, six from Hamilton, seven from New York City and Brooklyn, three from Utica, and one each from Rochester, Homer, Elbridge, Fayetteville, and Waterville. Twenty were laymen; among them, in addition to Ira Harris were William Colgate, Seneca B. Burchard, Friend Humphrey, Alvah Pierce, Henry Tower, John N. Wilder, and ex-governor William L. Marcy. The clergymen included Nathaniel Kendrick; Bartholomew T. Welch, well-known Albany pastor; Edward Bright, Jr., preacher and editor; William R. Williams, outstanding New York City minister, and Pharcellus Church, a member of the Class of 1824 and pastor of the First Baptist Church of Rochester.
The charter defined the purpose of Madison University as “promoting literature and science” but made no mention of training ministers. The character of the new Trustees was no doubt sufficient guarantee that this new function would not be neglected. Perhaps the omission of this point was used as a means of facilitating the passage of the act of incorporation. The charter authorized the Education Society to make whatever arrangements seemed proper for the transfer of all or part of its property to the University whose location was fixed at Hamilton. The right to grant degrees was stipulated, and the Trustees were empowered to appoint the faculty subject to removal by a majority vote of the total membership of the Board.
The Education Society Trustees believed incorporation would benefit the Institution in many ways without detracting from its efficiency as an agency for ministerial education. They saw the charter as a means of advancing its reputation, enlisting state aid, and increasing the number of tuition-paying students in the collegiate department. They rejoiced also that there now existed in the State a Baptist university which would provide “the education of our sons at college by teachers who hold the truth as we hold it.”
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Tagged Alvah Pierce, Edward Bright Jr., Nathaniel Kendrick, Pharcellus Church, Seneca B. Burchard, William Colgate, William R. Williams
books in them, edited Adoniram Judson’s noted Burmese dictionary, and compiled a Karen dictionary which he hoped would equal Judson’s in scope and value. Eugenio Kincaid, Wade’s classmate and fellow worker, achieved a reputation nearly comparable to Wade’s. He became so well known for his tact and ability that the Burmese king made him his diplomatic agent at Washington in 1856. He was also a successful fund-raiser for the institution at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, which was to become Bucknell University. A third member of the Class of 1822, John Glazier Steams, deserves notice as a leader among New York Baptists and a writer on anti-Masonry and church polity.
Alumni of later classes who should be mentioned in passing include: John Newton Brown, 1823, prominent New Hampshire pastor and educational secretary of the American Baptist Publication Society; Pharcellus Church, 1824, Rochester minister, author, and editor of important denominational journals; Jacob Knapp, 1824, well-known evangelist and indirectly father of Washingtonian temperance movement; and Jabez Swan, 1827 who was almost as renowned as Knapp for his work as a revivalist. William Dean, Grover S. Comstock, Hosea Howard and Justis H. Vinton, all of the Class of 1833, and Samuel S. Day, Class of 1836, were celebrated missionaries in the Far East.
Professor Hascall, John G. Stearns, and a few others, at a meeting in Utica in 1825, organized the Institution’s graduates into the Society of
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Tagged Bucknell University, Daniel Hascall, Eugenio Kincaid, Grover S. Comstock, Jacob Knapp, John Newton Brown, Pharcellus Church, Samuel S. Day, William Dean
