Tag Archives: Triennial Convention

p. 39 – Teaching and learning, 1820-1833

Posted on May 1, 2012 by | Comments Off on p. 39 – Teaching and learning, 1820-1833

Chapter III – TEACHING AND LEARNING 1820-1833

Adequate training for ministers, English and American Baptist lead­ers had insisted, must include a “liberal as well as a theological education.” The Rev. John Ryland, President of the Baptist college at Bristol, England, recommended as background the study of science, history, modern and ancient languages, the “heathen” (classical) writers, and English. John Stanford of New York and William Staughton of Philadelphia agreed with him and carried out his ideas in their instruction of prospective young preachers who had come to live in their parsonages. The Board of the Triennial Convention, too, gave its assent to liberal education as preparation for a theological course.

Because Baptists throughout New York State generally were several steps behind the leaders with regard to educational ideas and because the Seminary at Hamilton depended solely on them for its support, The Institution had to walk cautiously. Until 1829 only a three-year regular course was provided. As the Trustees stated in 1835:

in its infancy, with little experience and less means, it was unable to go far in opening the fountains of science and theology, and in giving to an unexpected number of young men, all that mental culture … desirable. Nor, indeed, were many . . . prepared for anything more than a limited course.*

The first-year class concentrated on Latin and Greek though they gave some attention to English grammar and arithmetic. The second- year class continued Greek, but branched out into geography, natural philosophy, astronomy, logic, rhetoric, and, by 1827, mathematics. The third-year class devoted their whole time to moral philosophy and theology, professional subjects which fittingly climaxed the course.

* Baptist Education Society, Annual Report, 1835, 6.

 

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p. 20 – Administration, Setting, and Staff, 1820-1833

Posted on March 28, 2012 by | Leave a comment

philanthropist, Gerrit Smith, gave 10,000 feet of seasoned pine boards, 20 bushels of wheat, and $25.00 worth of “furnace ware.” Kendrick, Olmstead and Galusha on a trip to Albany obtained $20.00 from Governor DeWitt Clinton, $10.00 from Lieutenant-Governor John Tayler, and $2.50 from Chancellor James Kent. On commencement day, 1823, the Reverend Calvin Philleo of Westmoreland; a Trustee, gave 150 acres of military bounty land in Illinois. The best the Baptist Triennial Convention could do for the Institution, however, was to wish for its work “the blessings of heaven” because the interests of the national organization were centered in Columbian College, in Washington. Nonetheless, favorable sentiments of any kind must have been appreciated by Kendrick and other officers, who were always quick to note the state of public opinion towards the Seminary.

In areas where Baptists took kindly to their cause; the agents formed auxiliary or: branch societies to act as local, fund-collecting agencies for the parent society in Hamilton. This practice, then in common use for raising money for home and foreign missions, proved a convenient method for combining many small contributions into substantial sums. The women’s’ auxiliary’ societies were especially valuable’ because many of the members who were unable to give money contributed through these organizations the products of their spinning wheels, looms, knitting needles, and kitchens.

From 1820 to 1830 Vermont was an important reservoir of funds and students. The Corresponding Letter oil ministerial education sent out by the Boston Association in 1816, which had stirred Baptists of New York State to action, met with a similar response in Vermont. Here also an education society was founded, its constitution in many respects resembling those of the Massachusetts and New York societies. However, provision had been made in it for cooperation with other organizations with the same objectives.

When the Executive Committee of the New York society learned of the existence of the Vermont group they foresaw competition with it in the eastern counties of the Empire State. A correspondence between the two potential rivals led to Kendrick’s being sent to discuss matters with the president of the Vermont society, his cousin, the Reverend Clark Kendrick, and with other members of the board. These he found cordially disposed to cooperate with the New York State organization rather than found a school to compete with it. When their views

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Nathaniel Kendrick named President of the Institution (p. 16)

Posted on March 28, 2012 by | Leave a comment

over the Seminary and to present its needs to the rank and file of Baptists, whose outlook on life they understood and usually shared. The laymen brought to the deliberations contacts in business, politics and agriculture which proved helpful in deciding many more or less secular questions relating to the Institution. Nearly all the Trustees lived within a fifty-mile radius of Hamilton, an essential arrangement if they were to travel to meetings over deeply rutted or snowbound roads.

Joel W. Clark, minister at Waterville, and Dr. Charles Babcock, New Hartford physician, were the first Secretaries of the Board. Their successor, Nathaniel Kendrick, who served from 1819 to 1848, developed the office into the most influential and responsible in the Society. His vigorous personality, his knowledge of the Seminary’s immediate problems, his extensive correspondence with Baptists throughout the country and his high standing in the denomination where he was an officer of the Triennial Convention and the Home Mission Society, made him the dominant man in the organization. “He  ruled in every position, not with an arbitrary power, but by natural authority,” one associate remembered.*

Like many other American colleges of the day, this school had found in Kendrick a leader able to unite the forces which had given rise to the Institution and fashion them steadily in such a way as to achieve a lasting result. He was the architect who shaped most of the foundations and also one of the builders who gave the edifice permanent form. His preeminent quality, “practical wisdom,” kept him from rash experiments. Reluctant to accept innovations, he yielded gracefully when outvoted by the other Trustees. Though a man of strong emotions, he had so disciplined himself that a slight compression of the lips or a glance of his eye were often the only traces. His dignity, which a thoughtful kindness mellowed, assured him an involuntary deference wherever he went.

Formal recognition of Kendrick’s leadership came in 1836 when at the request of the faculty “that their respected and reverend brother Nathaniel Kendrick, be recognized by the Board of Trustees as the President of the Institution,” the Trustees unanimously elected him to that office. He hesitatingly accepted the honor and seems to have held

* Philetus B. Spear, Class of 1836, Spear MS., 1.

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Posted in Administration Setting and Staff 1820-1833, Chapter 2, p. 16, timeline

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Ebenezer Wakeley introduces a bill for incorporation (p. 12)

Posted on March 15, 2012 by | Leave a comment

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

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p. 2 – Origin

Posted on March 15, 2012 by | Comments Off on p. 2 – Origin

“Colgate Academy” from 1873 until it was discontinued in 1912. The “theological department” was designated the “Theological Seminary” in 1853, the name it retained until its removal to Rochester in 1928 to become part of the Colgate Rochester Divinity School. Madison University was renamed Colgate in 1890.

Sometimes “College” and “University” were used interchangeably, the latter being the more formal term and prior to 1928 it included both “Seminary” and “College.”

In founding the Education Society, Robert Powell and his twelve associates were joining the great movement for the spread of Christian faith and ideals which American and British Protestants advanced with great vigor in the nineteenth century. Organized activity was necessary to achieve their ends and they proceeded to set up various missionary societies on a voluntary basis. The Americans at first turned their attention to the Indians and settlers on the frontier and the English to the Far East. New England Congregationalists, however, sent five young men to India in 1812. When two of them, Adoniram Judson and Luther Rice, on becoming Baptists could no longer claim the support of their original sponsors, Judson went to Burma to inaugurate what became the first American Baptist foreign mission and Rice returned home to enlist support for his colleague. Since the Baptists had no organizations beyond local associations of churches new measures were called for and in 1814 they formed at Philadelphia the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States for Foreign Missions, or as it was generally called, the Triennial Convention. To fulfill the obligations for carrying the Gospel to the Far East and the rapidly expanding American frontier, which the Baptists were now assuming, they recognized that trained men were necessary. The “Colgate Immortals,” aware of the needs, were, in founding their society, making their contribution toward meeting them.

Many Baptists opposed ministerial education because of its lack of  “Scriptural sanction” and the fact that uneducated preachers had been very successful in making converts. The gift for preaching, they held, came from God and could not be acquired through human efforts. Furthermore, educated ministers were often thought to “put on airs” The improving economic and social status of Baptists and the rising educational level of the country made many churches dissatisfied with the preaching of unlettered men. The example of English Baptists

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