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.”
Comments Off on p. 139 – The removal controversy, 1847-1850
Posted in Chapter 7, p. 139, The Removal Controversy, 1847-1850
Tagged Asahel Clark Kendrick, Pharcellus Church, Thomas Jefferson Conant
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.
Comments Off on p. 135 – The removal controversy, 1847-1850
Posted in Chapter 7, p. 135, The Removal Controversy, 1847-1850
Tagged Asahel Clark Kendrick, George Washington Eaton, John Howard Raymond, John Sharp Maginnis, Thomas Jefferson Conant, University Trustees
thought the faculty should take a neutral stand leaving the decision to the Boards. When a majority of his colleagues became active partisans for the change he at first felt that they were injudicious and later, convinced by the arguments against removal, that they were wrong. All the faculty except Dr. Kendrick and Professor Philetus B. Spear joined in a letter urging Eaton not to prejudice Wilder’s efforts in New York. They pointed out that the Rochester brethren were the first to take effective steps to raise an endowment, which was so sorely needed, and that Madison County citizens had acted only when faced with the prospect of losing the University:
Nothing but necessity has prompted their effort & let that necessity be withdrawn & the subscription falls through & we are thrown farther back than ever from the attainment which we consider vital to the Institution’s prosperity. On the other hand let the enterprise go forward, unchecked by untimely interference, & then when the question comes up for final decision, we have at least an alternative, & a strong argument for endorsement to those who would retain it here.*
As a further check on Eaton, Professors A. C. Kendrick and Conant followed him to New York to talk with Deacon Colgate and others. In Eaton they had an impulsive, emotional antagonist who was to make anti-removal the great crusade of his life. Motivated by what he
*Faculty of Madison University to George W. Eaton, New York, N.Y., Dec. 27, 1847.
Comments Off on p. 116 – The removal controversy, 1847-1850
Posted in Chapter 7, p. 116, The Removal Controversy, 1847-1850
Tagged Asahel Clark Kendrick, Nathaniel Kendrick, Philetus Bennett Spear, Thomas Jefferson Conant
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
Comments Off on p. 111 – The removal controversy, 1847-1850
Posted in Chapter 7, p. 111, The Removal Controversy, 1847-1850
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
Comments Off on First Compact (p. 107)
Posted in Chapter 7, p. 107, The Removal Controversy, 1847-1850
Tagged Compact of 1847, First Baptist Church at Hamilton, George Washington Eaton, Jacob Knapp, John Sharp Maginnis, New York, Thomas Jefferson Conant
and ran south, the fine trees and the adjacent hills covered with fields and woods made an unforgettable impression on them. The residents, too, appreciated the natural beauty of their surroundings.
The professors on the Hill joined the village people in many community enterprises in addition to church affairs, where one would naturally expect to find them. They appeared on lecture series and made speeches at donation parties for local poor relief, and at temperance meetings arid Fourth of July celebrations. A. C. Kendrick, for example, debated before the Hamilton Lyceum with James W. Nye, a local attorney, on whether the career of Napoleon was productive of greater evil than good to mankind. Raymond and Eaton, who seem to have been the most sought-after speakers, along with Spear, Maginnis, and A. C. Kendrick, appeared on the program of lectures before a young men’s society “for improvement in literature.” Though there is evidence that some villagers felt that faculty wives “put on airs,” whatever town-versus-gown feeling there was, Hill and village participation in many common causes helped to minimize.
The antislavery movement of the 1830’s and ’40’s drew the faculty into its maelstrom much against their will. Though fundamentally opposed to Negro bondage, they considered the abolitionism of Gerrit Smith, Garrison, and their associates extreme and fanatical. When a group of radicals in the denomination, some of their friends among them, established the American Baptist Free Mission Society in 1840 as a protest against the failure of Northern Baptists to break with their Southern brethren over the slavery question, the faculty refused to be drawn in. Prominent in the affairs of the Baptist Triennial Convention, they appreciated the complexity of the problem and allied themselves with conservative Northern Baptists, such as President Francis Wayland of Brown, in trying to stave off the split. When it eventually did come they helped to found new Northern organizations for carrying on foreign and domestic missionary work.
The faculty was fearful of any disturbance that abolitionist agitation might raise among the students, village people, and the Baptist moderates who supported the Institution. They were no doubt aware of the serious trouble antislavery activity had caused at other colleges such as Hamilton and Amherst. From Colby they had first-hand information from Professor Conant who had seen the havoc wrought there. The resulting clamor had led to his resignation and that of his father-in-
Comments Off on p. 68 – The expanded program, 1833-1846
Posted in Chapter 4, p. 68, The Expanded Period, 1833-1846
