|
|
"Too much
sectarianism, and too little true piety"—a sharp rebuke,
coming at a time when public awareness of educational needs had
been sharply revived. The early 1830's were a season of school
and college founding. Now the leading provision in the will of
Stephen Girard had just become known: a fabulously endowed
institution which promised to become a model for all others. The
public school systems would soon be an accomplished fact, with
their promise of better stabilized college preparation than
ever before. Jacksonian democracy was transforming American
society along bluntly practical lines, and with it an era of
imaginative and ardent reform movements was coming in—forces to
which the colleges would respond gingerly, while endeavoring to
stand as rocks of intellectual probity among the flowing tides.
For Dickinson College the answer would now
be an avowed sectarianism, and piety in due proportion. At
special session on March 12, 1833, the trustees discussed an
enquiry from the Rev. Edwin Dorsey of the Baltimore Annual
Conference of the Methodist Church as to their willingness to
retire in favor of Methodist control and a program of expansion
and endowment They pronounced it "worthy of consideration.
"
Methodism had mushroomed in America since
its first small meetings in New York in 1766. Methodists had
rooted themselves in the cities and swept out through the
countryside everywhere, setting the frontier aflame for
holiness. Nisbet had
watched their progress
in Carlisle with a sharply contemptuous eye. They had a kinship
with New Side Presbyterianism, but this was all-the-way and
inordinately successful. They combined a doctrine of unusual
ease and warmth with a remarkably tight and effective
organization. From bishop to class leader to member, each with
his tender or burning recollection of "conversion,"
they were a united brotherhood, and "Brother" or
"Sister" their common form of address. Their
itinerant ministry reached out through the thinly settled lands.
Their clergy's regular changes of location kept the spirit of
inspiration fresh, as did their modest educational standard.
They lived to shake down the heavenly fire, and left theological
hair-splitting to their rivals.
Yet by 1830 they had education itself as a
major issue of their own—warm inspiration against cold book—learning, a "God-made" against a
"man-made" ministry. They were growing in numbers and
social status, and the desirability of educational institutions
of their own could not be denied, though any proposal of a
theological school would still have met overwhelming opposition.
That would not come until the founding of Drew University in
1867. This prevailing hostility put the intellectuals of the
Church upon their mettle. They were determined to succeed and
eager to win the respect of educators everywhere. The Baltimore
Conference, central and strong, controlling a vast area from
central Pennsylvania down into Virginia, had before it the
example of the New England Methodists, who had taken over the
buildings of Captain Alden Partridge's military school to found
Wesleyan University in 1831. By June, 1833, the time of
Wesleyan's first commencement, Baltimore had been joined by the
powerful Philadelphia Conference in the Dickinson venture. With
the growth of the Church, conference divisions would divide
responsibility for the College—New Jersey separated from
Philadelphia in 1836, Newark from New Jersey in 1857, and from
Baltimore came East Baltimore, 1857, and Central Pennsylvania,
1868—but with the two original conferences still holding their
endowment funds in trust. That same year, 1833, Pittsburgh
Conference was taking over Allegheny College, also formerly
Presbyterian. It all had the inevitablity of a rising tide.
The old Board was as
ready to yield to events as it had formerly been to turn the
burden over to the state. The seats of the half dozen who
refused to resign were declared vacant as the Methodist majority
moved in.1 The old regime held its
last meeting on June 6, 1833,
and the new one its first on June 7. On that day, John Price
Durbin was elected to head the new administration. An amendment
to the charter was initiated to give the presidency of the Board
to the Principal of the College. Durbin would be the
institution's first actual chief executive, formulating policy
for Board approval and carrying it out.2 He was also one of
those churchmen in Dickinson's history who saw the office as a
step to higher ranges of ecclesiastical service.
Durbin was then thirty-two years of age, a
Kentuckian of poor background, yet one whose conversion and call
to the itineracy had been acts of deliberation rather than of
the endemic emotional ecstasy. He was self-educated in
classics, literature and science, but had taken a degree at
Cincinnati College in 1825. For the next six years he was
Professor of Languages at Augusta College in Kentucky. In 1831,
he had a choice between the professorship of Natural Science at
Wesleyan and the chaplaincy of the United States Senate. He
chose the Senate.3 The General Conference of 1832 elected him
editor of the Christian Advocate and Journal and other
publications. From this vantage point he supported the
educational movement as giving Methodists a larger access to
the professions, supporting both Dickinson and Wesleyan and
even, in a final editorial of July 18, 1834, the idea of a
theological seminary.4
Among the first acts of the new Board were
building repairs, grading and planting the campus with trees
and shrubs, property insurance and inventory.5 More importantly,
it provided for the immediate continuance of the Grammar
School, and accepted the offer of Judge John Reed of Carlisle to
establish a "law department." Reed had been a student
in the Class of 1806, and a trustee from 1821 to 1828. "I
would not contemplate," he wrote in his proposal June 8,
1833, "more than a nominal connection with the
College." But since there was no other law school in the
state, and his own new home would adjoin the campus, he could
foresee a relationship of mutual advantage.6 So indeed it would
become. His first student was
enrolled April 1, 1834,
and the College would confer its first degrees of Bachelor of
Laws two years later.7
By Durbin's arrival, April, 1834, the
Grammar School had grown to nearly forty pupils, laboring over
Caesar, Cicero, the Greek reader and New Testament and an
assistant must be found for Mr. Dobb.8 Thus primary and
professional training preceded the College itself, which the
conferences had resolved not to open until $45,000 had been
raised. In May, word of an accounting of $48,000 in
subscriptions came through, and the second Wednesday of
September was set for formal opening.9
Avowed sectarian control would now remove
the old charge of Dickinson's being covertly so controlled;
while at the same time, as at Wesleyan and almost all other
denominational schools, students of other faiths would be
welcomed—as would, in careful proportion, faculty and trustees.
The trustees of the new Board were primarily clergy and laymen
of the two conferences, men who would speak for education and
whose voices would carry weight in General and Annual
Conference, in the crowded city churches, in the country
circuits, down to that last unit of about a dozen souls, class
and class leader. Persuasion would not be easy, yet an
organization such as any modern development officer might envy
was there. The first list of trustees included in their
minutes, June 7, 1833, is headed by two names obviously so
placed for their importance. The first is John Emory, a graduate
of Washington College, a man of unusual ability who had turned
from the law to the ministry and had been elected a bishop the
year before. The second is John McLean, a rugged, self-educated
newspaperman, lawyer and politician, who had refused a cabinet
post under Jackson rather than agree to political dismissals.
Jackson had responded by making him a Supreme Court Justice in
1829. Even so early, he was spoken of as a presidential
possibility. Under Dickinson's Chief Justice Taney, Dickinson's
McLean wrote the dissenting opinion in the Dred Scott case.
The Baltimore group included Dr. Samuel
Baker of the College of Medicine, a fashionable practitioner,10
and Thomas Emerson Bond, physician and editor, a man of great
influence in the growth of the Church. Others were Bond's close
friend the Rev. Alfred Griffith, whose sermons were described as
"heavy
artillery," ponderously declaimed from under shaggy brows,
lightened with flashes of humor; preachers Stephen George Roszel,
aging now, but a powerful influence in General Conference, and
John Davis, tall and commanding "a prince in Israel."11
Roszel at that first meeting nominated Daniel Webster for
membership, no doubt mindful of the Dartmouth case and Webster's
championship of the independence of college trustees under their
charter, but the name lost by nine votes.
Philadelphia had strength of the same
sort—old-line Methodists like Samuel Harvey, merchant and
banker, and younger men of education and refinement. Harvey had
watched and recorded the earliest growth of the American church
and came to Carlisle ready to give this new enterprise the Midas
touch of his personal success. The Rev. Pennell Coombe had also
an interest in finance, as did another clergyman, Charles
Pitman with his large head and sunken eyes, a dark, earnest,
melancholy man. The Rev. Joseph Lybrand, with a florid face
under dark hair and a "well-regulated cheerfulness,"
came (as the description would imply) from a well-to-do
Philadelphia family.12 John Miller Keagy, the brilliant
physician and educator, author and disciple of Pestalozzi was
there. He would be appointed to the College faculty two years
later, just before his death. James Barton Longacre, the painter
and engraver was another new trustee, as was the scholarly
Englishman, Joseph Holdich, who would resign after two years to
accept a professorship at Wesleyan. Holdich, nearsighted, would
long be remembered by the Wesleyan boys for having tipped his
tall hat to the President's cow as he crossed the campus, with a
"Good morning, Madam."13
Carlisle was best represented by men of
the old families and of other churches, elected, one may
suspect, with an eye to a continuance of the state subsidies.
William MacFunn Biddle would be an active member of the Board
from 1833 until his death in 1855. When Charles Bingham Penrose
presented his resignation, June 7, 1833, he was immediately
elected Secretary of the Board. Penrose, who had married
Biddle's daughter, Valeria, was a successful politician, a
genial, attractive man of thirty-five, his bald crown surrounded
by a bushy halo of yellow curls.14 He was a trustee of the new
Second Presbyterian
Church. Charles McClure
of the Class of 1824 (and Turkey Club), an Episcopalian, would
soon be elected to the state legislature, and would serve in
Congress after that.15 Frederick Watts, who collaborated with
Penrose in the publication of law reports and stands as founder
of the Pennsylvania State University, would be reelected a
Dickinson trustee in 1841.
This new Board met only once a year, at
commencement. Later, there would be a midwinter meeting also. Its
executive committee, varying in title, powers and activity,
would be present in the intervals. At Dickinson as at Wesleyan,
the trustees were independent and self-perpetuating under their
charter. Churchmen of seventy-five and a hundred years later
would bemoan the failure of those of 1833 to initiate a charter
change giving the Methodist conferences direct control of Board
membership. Why they did not is obvious. They were a minority
in a predominantly anti-intellectual denomination. The majority
looked askance at higher education. Strong pressures to
introduce elements of the trade school were exerted. These
trustees had to deny any intention of setting up an educational
standard for the ministry, though some cherished a hope that
their program would lead in that direction. The two
"patronizing conferences" took their own guarded view
of the situation. Each would hold the endowment funds it raised
for the College under conference-elected trustees, and they took
up the old practice of sending "visitors" as official
liaisons with the campus, where they continued to appear at
commencement until 1925.16
From the first, the conferences would be
watching the College with a sensitivity to the doubts and
misgivings which have always confronted educators in one form or
another. The two conferences subdivided, and conference
representation on the Board became a matter of jealous concern.
So also did loyalty to the Church. This could include acceptance
of any favorite doctrine or practice, and we glimpse frequently
the old-line clergy's distrust of soft-living intellectuals—of
colleges and academies as "the high places of the
devil."17 In 1846 the New Jersey Conference, an offshoot
from Philadelphia, demanded that students kneel rather than
stand at prayer, and that faculty set the example. Faculty
"respectfully" refused.18 Baltimore took Durbin
roundly to task for countenancing the reading of
novels.19 In all of
this Durbin was well supported by his facultv. but the age of
the College gave him an additional element of stability—"a
network of custom and tradition more intractable, as more
exacting and imperious, than written codes."20
The new sectarianism, Durbin had found,
interested Carlisle more than any other feature of the
reopening, and he brought the matter out in his inaugural
address. "What religious requisitions will be made upon the
students?" Only College chapel, he declared, and Sunday
attendance at any church of their own choosing. "They will
be received as Christian youth . . . and it will be the duty of
this ancient and venerable institution to see that they lose
not this character."21
His audience was listening to a rather
small, angular, shrill-voiced man, with sandy hair over a
receding forehead and sleepy hazel eyes which could become
lustrous and commanding when aroused.22 Durbin's renown as a
preacher was based on what, in the religious jargon of the day,
was called "the sudden change." Prosaic, thoughtful,
informative, he would skillfully lay a foundation and then
suddenly surge forward with it in a torrent of warmth and
fervor.23 Some students thought him a poseur, but Sidney George
Fisher's estimate at their meeting in 1838, "a damned
pompous fanatical Methodist & prig" is jaundiced to say
the least. Even Fisher glimpsed in Durbin and his surroundings
a refinement he would not have expected to find in a Methodist
minister's home.24
Durbin, keeping the initiative, held both
trustees and faculty to his will.25 He would influence the
town through his work at the College and with the new public
school system.26 He appears in 1840 on the executive committee
of the National Convention for the Promotion of Education in the
United States presided over by Alexander Dallas Bache, the new
head of Girard.27 That he was not elected a delegate to General
Conference that year was attributed to his forwardness as an
educator.28 The organization would never realize that the
religious life of a college must be exploratory, creative,
combative, exciting a loyalty only to its ideals, if it would
escape the contempt a tacit subservience deserves. Durbin's
faculty breathed life and advance into orthodoxy—a function not
rediscovered at
Dickinson until the
1960's—and the spirit of inquiry touched the classroom as well.
The method of instruction in the College
is by regular and careful recitation, accompanied with free and
unrestrained enquiry and conversation on any or all points
directly or collaterally involved in the subject. The students
know that they are at liberty to make free enquiries or to
propose and discuss any questions. They are encouraged to it.
This process while it enables the instructor to satisfy himself
of the knowledge of the students in reference to the particular
subject calls into action his intellectual powers and accustoms
him to think and investigate, while the communication with the
Professor directs his thoughts and stimulates his investigation.
Thus the true object of a collegiate education is obtained, viz.
to develop and discipline the powers of the man. The books used
in instruction are subject to change, but generally are the
same as those used in the best colleges.
So Durbin informed his trustees, July 20,
1836. His own classroom was, as one student described it,
"a place of pleasure," so ready was he to move from
lecture to discussion, encouraging challenge and debate, even
letting the young men believe they had lured him away from the
routine of presentation and recital.29 He was teaching as
"Professor of Moral Science." The usual presidential
course, "Moral Philosophy," was intended as a
summation of all previous learning and its application to
contemporary life. Content and approach were left very much to
personal choice, and the altered title suggests Durbin's bias.
At the outset, Durbin had only two
colleagues besides Judge Reed and the three men who were then
handling the larger body of Grammar School pupils. That
ever-central place in Latin and Greek had been taken by John
Emory's son, Robert. Robert, just turned twenty-one, had
graduated at the head of his class at Columbia in 1831. In that
year his father had been elected President of Randolph-Macon and
he its Professor of Languages.30 The father became a bishop
instead, while Robert, before coming to Dickinson, had been
studying law under Reverdy Johnson in Baltimore. His students
now saw a dark-haired young man peering at them through
spectacles, an exacting teacher, always precise, a
perfectionist, yet with a sweet
voice, a dignified charm
and that remote intensity which so often characterized the young
consumptive.31 In Emory's
classes a student called upon to
recite must sit in a chair apart from the others, not led on by
questions but merely directed to speak upon the subject—a
situation in which success and failure were equally conspicuous.
The practice encouraged sound preparation. President Herman
Merrills Johnson followed it, and we see it in the 1890's,
vestigial and ineffective, in the classroom of Emory's student,
Dr. Henry Martyn Harman.32 Emory left
after five years for a
tour of duty in the ministry, then returned to assume the acting
presidency and presidency of the College.
At the outset, too, this faculty had only
one experienced professional teacher, Merritt Caldwell. He was a
native of Maine, and had been Principal of the Maine Wesleyan
Seminary from 1828 to 1834. The appointment may be traced to
trustee Thomas Sewall, another New Englander, a graduate of the
Seminary, a man of refinement and scholarly tastes.33 Durbin
turned to Caldwell for advice, and received sound, dispassionate
counsel. Caldwell's publications include a Conjugation of the
English Verb, A Practical Manual of Elocution, a volume of
Christian biography and a study of the psychological principles
of Christian perfection. His commencement address of 1835
refutes the prevalent doctrine of separate "powers of the
mind," calls for more widespread "female
education" and attacks the insistent utilitarianism of the
times.34 He had come to Carlisle at the age of twenty-eight, he
and his wife Rosamond living in West College, where their son,
later a Dickinson alumnus, was born. Here was a confident,
unruffled figure in the milieu which Joseph Spencer had found so
difficult—a face framed in dark brown hair and side whiskers,
with calmly observant eyes behind the steel-rimmed spectacles.
He was a successful but not a popular teacher, patient,
impersonal, always strict and fair within the rules. When the
students who had been directed to step forward for recitation,
first bowing to the professor, chose instead to rush up and
prostrate themselves, kissing the floor at his feet, we see
Caldwell, unmoved, noting down the minus marks in his book as he
nods to them to proceed.35 He did laugh at the dramatization of
Thomas Campbell's poetic dialogue between the Wizard and Lochiel,
Chief of the Came-
roes, when Lochiel, at
the climactic, "Down, soothless insulter!" stamped
his foot so hard that the stage all but collapsed. "Well,
Spottswood, you ought to be emphatic just where you were, but
don't you think that your emphasis was a little too
pronounced?"36
Caldwell, like Emory, was tubercular. In
1841 he was too ill for a full schedule, but he recovered and
lived another seven years. Moncure Conway learned from him
"the importance of weighed words, exact statement, and
tones sympathetic with the sense. His criticism of our
compositions, or of our accentuation in reading, was uttered
with such sweetness that the effect was always encouragement."37 And Conway always
remembered his announcement in
class that there would be "no more Monday morning
recitations, as he was going away." They learned of his
death soon after.38
Within three years, college enrollment had
risen from thirteen Freshmen and five Sophomores to over a
hundred, and the first Seniors of the new regime graduated in
1837. That level was maintained till the Civil War years, while
the crowded grammar school population was allowed to drop to a
lower figure. These developments brought new faculty to the
College, and began the practice of using recent graduates of
high standing, such as Thomas Bowman or John Zug, as instructors
for a year or two m the preparatory work.
With Keagy dying of consumption before he
could take over his duties as "Professor of Chemistry and
Experimental Philosophy," a new man of indubitable health
and vigor was found in the state of Maine. William Henry Allen,
a twenty-six-year-old Bowdoin alumnus who had attended
Caldwell's academy at Readfield, and had been teaching Latin
and Greek. He wrote frankly that he could teach the sciences
acceptably (though not "to equal my predecessor until after
long experience"). He would do so for ten years, following
with three in English literature.39 "Bully" Allen,
sturdy, round-faced, bald, was immensely popular and effective.
Dr. Richard A. F. Penrose of the Class of 1846, looking back
from his chair in Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania,
thought his lectures "the clearest and most philosophical
I have ever listened to. They possessed also a quality not
common in lectures on such subjects,
which I might designate
by the word 'adhesiveness,' that is, the student somehow could
not forget them; and hence it was that the graduates of
Dickinson knew more about these sciences than any of the other
young men of their day."40 In Caldwell's illness, Allen
took over rhetoric and logic, which were being taught from
Archibishop Whately's texts, and carried his students
enthusiastically beyond Whately.41 "Corpus," as they
also called him because it suited that ruddy rotundity, took
his Methodist background lightly and was more ready than anyone
else to assure them that good novels were "always worth
reading."42 When in 1849 the telegram came informing him
of his election as President of Girard College, he and Mrs.
Allen invited them all in to "have an oyster," an
evening of warm congratulations, refreshments and cigars.43
"Bully" had turned over his work
in the sciences to young Spencer Fullerton Baird, an alumnus of
1840. Baird would leave a year after Allen to join Joseph Henry
in setting up the new Smithsonian Institution. He was the
youngest of this young faculty, and was, as young Conway saw
him, "the beloved professor and the ideal student .... All
that was finest in the forms he explained to us seemed to be
represented in the man."44 He had prepared himself with
the study of medicine and languages and with exhaustive reading;
he stood high with other naturalists, among them Audubon, whom
he assisted in the identification of the birds he was painting.45 Baird was still the
passionate boy collector and had come to
the College with a wealth of materials, demonstrating his value
by working for a year without pay. Suddenly, the Museum became
as large as and more used than the Library. He made field trips
a part of the regular course—a startling innovation in the
higher education of that day.
Baird was the faculty's only
non-Methodist—actually a member of no church. He and Allen,
close and congenial, cared little how the College's religious
sponsorship might fare. Their colleagues John McClintock and
George R. Crooks were on the other hand profoundly concerned and
would profoundly influence the Church's new intellectualism.
McClintock, a Philadelphian, arrived in 1836, a year after his
graduation from the University of Pennsylvania at the age of
twenty-two. A decade
before, Joseph Holdich,
his pastor, had recognized the boy's unusual promise. At
Dickinson he would teach mathematics for four years, then Greek
and Latin until 1848. In appearance he was the teacher and
scholar only, though he was soon to have notoriety as a man of
action. He was short and slender, with a small body and a large
head, its features delicate, youthful and engaging. As Professor
Allen put it, "McClintock had a head as large as Daniel
Webster's poised on a body half his size." His carriage and
manner were always graceful, frank and easy. His swiftness of
thought and warmly sympathetic responses made him, to some,
"the most magnetic and inspiring" of the faculty.46
"If there is such a thing as a universal genius,"
Durbin said, "Mack is one."47 There was a genuine
idealism here, with a radiance long remembered. Crooks, younger,
and a classmate of Baird, saw McClintock as an Apollo,
"amazing us by the energy with which he quickens our
minds." Crooks, after a stint as assistant in the Grammar
School, taught classics in the College for two years and left
in the same year as McClintock, whose biographer he eventually
became. The two collaborated on a wide range of works and ended
their careers at Drew, McClintock as President, Crooks as
Professor of Church History.
The revived Dickinson had assembled a
faculty which Moncure Conway saw in retrospect as unsurpassed
in any American college. The national importance of seven of
this small group is attested by their inclusion in the
Dictionary of American Biography: Durbin, Keagy, Allen, Baird,
McClintock and Crooks. One only was palpably a failure, Thomas
Emory Sudler, teacher of mathematics from 1840 until he was
eased out in 1851. "Colonel Sudler" to colleagues,
"Jimmy Sudler" to students, could flash through to
mathematical solutions with as much skill—and as little
comprehension on the part of his audience—as a prestidigitator.
He would swing into class in his blue military cloak, and watch
like a hawk to be sure that the lad at the blackboard got no
surreptitious help—"Every gentleman must stand on his own
bottom."48
This faculty was a tight unit, meeting
formally once a week (largely on disciplinary matters), and as
regularly if less formally for intellectual discussion. We see
Durbin, Emory and Allen fascinated by Caldwell's solid defense
and McClintock's light-
ning thrusts at
"that great crux philosophica, the human will," as
expounded in the new treatise by Professor Upham of Bowdoin.49
Caldwell, senior educator, held forth among them and in public
on educational progress, and lured them as well into the new
borderlands of psychology, phrenology and mesmerism.50
He was
a stern advocate of temperance, recognized by all as a vital
social reform, though the medicinal value of alcohol was not
denied, and was sometimes invoked by a student in trouble.
Faculty, like the students, were not wholly free of the vices of
smoking and chewing. The professors, young men all, joined in
walks, horseback rides, fishing and shooting, would meet again
in "soirees" and suppers often with a cheerful crowd
of college boys, and girls from the young ladies' academy.
The influence of the state of Maine upon
this scene appears once more in the Carlisle Female Seminary, an
attendant feature of the new Dickinson, whose preceptresses,
the Misses Phoebe and Sarah Paine and Mrs. B. H. H. Stevens, had
come from the Maine Wesleyan Seminary. Its curriculum included
all the "common English studies," along with botany,
chemistry, astronomy, mental, moral and natural philosophy, the
French, Spanish and Italian languages, music and drawing.51
This liberal program gave the College faculty an additional
source of income, and sometimes brought the girls into college
classes, with Allen's, again, the most popular—"What
student of that day will ever forget our electrical circles
there? How tenderly we took in ours the soft, white hands of the
blushing maidens! How tightly we held them, trembling when the
shocks from the battery waxed heavy, and the fair ones wriggled
and twisted and struggled in vain to get free, squealing as
only girls can squeal!"52 The Female Seminary was
incorporated in 1838 under seven trustees, of whom Durbin was
the only Methodist, though it had strong Methodist endorsement.53 It would be for many years a crowning feature of the schools
clustering about the College—by 1843 fifteen of them, with about
eight hundred pupils.54
Among these the old Grammar School
shone for a while as "Dickinson Institute," intended
no doubt to give it equal status with the New Jersey
Conference's Pennington Seminary of 1837 and the other academies
from which boys were coming. Thin, sharp-chinned Levi Scott,
later a bishop,
catalogued the growing
library of the Oratorical Society, the Institute's equivalent of
Belles Lettres and Union Philosophical;55 Here one must credit
also the enthusiasm of John McClintock, Librarian of the
College from 1840 to 1848.
McClintock, from his first arrival in
1836, found college life wholly congenial and predicted that its
regularity would be "very serviceable to my health."
The order is as
follows:—First bell, half
past five A.M.; prayers, six A.M.—breakfast immediately after
prayers; recitations, nine, ten, eleven, or nine, ten A.M. and
four P.M., or ten, eleven A.M., and four P.M., never exceeding
three recitations a day. The students generally are moral,
studious, and well-behaved, and many of them are pious. Evening
prayers at five P.M.—tea immediately after prayer. Last bell,
nine P.M. Thus the bells are—First, half past five A.M., second,
six A.M.; third, eight A.M.; fourth, nine A.M.; fifth, ten A.M.;
sixth, eleven A.M.; seventh, twelve M. (dinner); eighth, two
P.M.; ninth, three P.M.; tenth, four P.M.; and five, seven,
eight and nine P.M.
On Sabbath, after breakfast, two classes
meet at eight o'clock; preaching, eleven; dinner, half past
twelve; Bible class, . . . three; preaching, half past six, as
usual. On Tuesday evening we have a social meeting for literary
conversation, etc. On Wednesday, Faculty meeting; Thursday,
preaching; Friday, prayer-meeting; Saturday, debate; so that the
days and evenings are pretty well filled up.56
The old German Reformed Church building,
facing West College from across High Street, had been purchased
from schoolmaster Henry Duffield in 1835, refurbished as
"Dickinson Institute," and made a part of this little
world under the rule of the College bell. Burned in December of
the next year, it was promptly rebuilt in better style. This was
South College, complementing the rambling, shambling North
College of 1822, on the other side of West. Meanwhile, the long,
tall walls of East College were rising, four sections four
storeys high with fire walls between, the fourth section at the
east end designed to be the home of the President. Otherwise, it
was a typical college dormitory of the time, strikingly similar
to Princeton's East College, completed two years earlier.
But Yale was now Dickinson's model of
academic respectability, as it was for Princeton and others
throughout the land.57 The Dickinson
Statutes of 1834 are
merely a revision of those of 1830, but the edition of 1836 is
patterned directly on The
Laws of Yale
College.
The marked difference is only in Yale's section on "Crimes
and Misdemeanors" with its hilarious reflection of student
life in New Haven, as against Dickinson's "On the
Deportment of Students" which reflects Methodism's larger
flow of redemption and grace, and a new faculty's hopefulness.
Deportment at Dickinson would soon be approaching Yale's.
"Old East" was finished and filled with students in
January, 1837—fresh paint, brightly carpeted floors, three rooms
for each two students, two for sleeping and a third where
"chum and I" could study.58 Yet only a few weeks
later the first desecration had occurred.
Faculty minutes for the time are lacking,
and scattered notes on the disciplinary cases of March, 1837,
present a confused picture—Purnell driving a stick into the
door of Mr. Roszel, Grammar School master, a strange business
of Wright's having found money hidden under Professor
Caldwell's carpet, but more palpably guilty of noise and
disrespect—Waters and Owens also up for noise. Dreadful to
relate, there had been "whooping" in East College
attic, and logs of wood rolled recklessly down the stairs with
damage and din, greeted from below by young voices raised in the
song,
I've oftentimes been told
That ye. British sailors bold ....
Only so much of the lyric was noted down
in the tight, shocked script. No more was needed. Professor
Caldwell moved that Wright, Waters and Purnell be dismissed
forthwith, Owens suspended for the rest of the year. After
discussion, the severity of this proposal was somewhat modified.
Three of the culprits disappear from the Dickinson scene. John
Armstrong Wright, who was to become a dedicated trustee,
regained status by making a full apology.59
Soon after, some vengeful student pen
labored out a touching tribute to Caldwell, forged the signature
of John Price Durbin at its close and dispatched it to the
Christian Advocate and Journal which, mirabile dictu, printed
the whole, filling a half column of the huge sheet. Professor
Caldwell was dead, his last moments before his "soul
departed to the land of spirits" feelingly described. And
finally, "It became my painful duty to
address the weeping and
afflicted assembly at the grave, when I discoursed on the words,
'Well done, good and faithful servant.'"60
A year later, looking forward to
graduation, John Wright had chosen the career, engineering, in
which he would attain eminence. "It is the wish of my
friends, of Prof. McClintock, Durbin & Allen & I think
it will suit my turn of mind."61 He saw the College as
flourishing, Belles Lettres "in the height of her
glory"—better than "the Unions."62 Belles
Lettres minutes show the society at this time using its
"Court of Inquiry" as an instrument of student
self-government, yet with a leniency unlikely to attract
faculty approval. Wright, on January 25, 1837, had been fined
only 25¢ for intoxication and "unnecessary noise." On
January 4, for "frequent intoxication," Freshman Henry
W. Nabb had been fined $1 and ordered to sign the pledge. On
appeal, a week later, the pledge was remitted and the fine
increased by 50c. Faculty frequently resorted to the signing of
pledges, and in the case of John Quarles of the Class of 1850,
bright and popular Secretary of Belles Lettres, accepted the
pledge of a group of his friends to stand with him on the
straight and narrow. It was given, alas, in vain.
"Squabbles," repeatedly guilty of "criminal
conversation" with "girls of dissolute
character," and in East College, no less, did not graduate.63
To enter the Freshman Class at Dickinson
(or Yale) a boy must be at least fourteen years of age.64 As
Judge Reed put forward from the first, they should be entering,
not graduating, at eighteen.65 Up to fourteen or fifteen the
influences of piety tended to prevail. McClintock found his
small brother, aged ten, in the Grammar School, "getting a
little too religious: for half the time when I go to my room in
College I find some half a dozen youngsters holding a prayer
meeting, and it incommodes me not a little."66 But later,
the forbidden delights and excitements would appear—disruptive
classroom tricks (as early as January, 1840 it had been
discovered that pepper sprinkled on the stove top in winter made
the atmosphere almost unendurable, especially for a teacher
with weak lungs or throat), card-playing, alcohol and the girls
sure to be found at night on the dark streets of a garrison
town. The faculty, to protect the
virtuous, were kept busy
with surprise visits to dormitory rooms and the back rooms of
taverns, and with sifting the evidence on which suspensions or
dismissals would depend. As in the Presbyterian regime,
room-visiting was a duty which the faculty abhorred and
inclined to leave to the President, with his larger salary and
greater responsibility.
Riots and rebellions continued to enliven
the scene. In the spring of 1843, a hundred students armed with
pistols, knives and clubs held the campus wall against the
"Carlisle Infantry," until other soldiers arrived from
the post and raised the siege.67 Rebellion against faculty
authority had appeared early, and would continue. "The
young gentlemen," President Durbin reported to his
trustees in 1839, "took a resolution which left the Faculty
no alternative but to yield to their peremptory demand in a
question of administration of discipline, or to send them home
if they did not yield."68 They had been sent home.
Only the societies could raise student
objections and maintain dialogue in terms of academic courtesy.
At the start of the Methodist regime they had opposed any
invasion of ancient practices, and would continue to meet issues
in this fashion.69 Yet faculty was far more apprehensive of
organized opposition than appreciative of the value of
independence. The Statutes made clear that society property
belonged, in fact, to the Board, and that meetings were held
under faculty authority and only at authorized (never nocturnal)
hours. The students, aware of the value of their libraries,
their public "exibitions" and their invited speakers,
all at a considerable cost borne by themselves, still yearned
for true autonomy in buildings, or a building, of their own. By
1840, class loyalty was vying with loyalty to the society.70
The fraternities would follow. Yet these teachers did maintain a
friendly rapport with their students, benign and more lenient
than their predecessors. How else could the young naturalist
Baird, Class of 1840, capable of trudging sixty miles in a day
with pack on back, have been excused from early morning chapel
because of "palpitation of the heart? "71
Similarly, what is gained in class depends
far more on the character of the teachers than on a published
curriculum. Comparing the Statutes of 1828 and 1834, one does
see an advance in standard and goals. The quality of the new is
supported also
by the Grammar School
schedules, where a thorough foundation for the college years
was being laid. The new Board in its first scheme, approved
September 25, 1833 and published at once in the Carlisle and
other papers, promised professorships of (1) "Intellectual
and Moral Philosophy," embracing both "Political
Economy" and "Evidences of Natural and Revealed
Religion" (Butler's Analogy); (2) "Exact
Sciences," that is, mathematics; (3) "Natural
Sciences," including chemistry, mineralogy, geology,
botany, physiology; (4) Greek and Latin, the languages,
literature and "antiquities"; (5) "Belles
Lettres," English literature, with rhetoric and elocution;
and (6) French, Spanish, Italian and German.72
The modern languages were taught at first
on a fee basis as formerly, but with no regular professor until
1846. They were being offered, the Statutes of 1834 inform us
significantly, "to meet the demands of the age, and enable
the institution to offer every facility to a complete
education." Durbin's vein of caution and respect for
respectability were hostile to "the spirit of age."
Emory, succeeding him as President, would find the faculty more
ready to accept experimental changes.
In Methodist thinking, the fine arts rated
only a milder condemnation than works of fiction, but music was
another matter. Here there was a tradition stemming from the
Wesleys themselves, a source of inspiration and unity, though to
have an organ or piano in church was still unusual. Durbin
proposed a regular course in Music in 1837, and a teacher was
engaged for those who "voluntarily associate for this
purpose. "73 Four years later, Edward L. Walker appears in
the catalogues as Professor of Music, holding that post until
1847.74
Anatomy and physiology were taught on a
fee basis, 1842 to 1844, by Dr. James McClintock, John's older
brother, and efforts were made to continue what was, in effect,
a pre-medical course.75 John McClintock, at the same time, was
making an effort to launch a pre-ministerial course on Sunday
afternoons in the Chapel, he lecturing on the Pauline writings
and Durbin on the Old Testament.76 The course has a note in the
catalogues from 1841 to 1843. Judge Reed's law school, the
while, may well have had a sounder, if less insistent, appeal
than the ministry to young men seeking careers. Certainly then,
as in
later years, the Law
School was a strengthening and maturing influence.
As Durbin was aware and Emory would soon
learn, special courses and electives evoke the perennial problem
of where to find the money. This had been a first concern of the
Methodist trustees, knowing as they did the low income level of
their constituency, as well as the hostility of most of it to
higher education. Carlisle, grown to a lovely country town of
four thousand inhabitants, was grateful, as it had been before,
for the revival of the College, and a trustee resolution of June
8, 1833, had welcomed the "spirit of mutual
friendship." From this good beginning the two parties
settled into the mutual exacerbations of town and gown.
Methodists had long been partial to the" manual labor
system" in education, by which students worked to support
the school, not a little like prisoners at labor. It had
prevailed at Cokesbury College, derided by Nisbet. Both
Wesleyan and Dickinson perforce made gestures and broke promises
in its behalf.77 Its false economy had been demonstrated at the
Maine Wesleyan Seminary.78 It was thought degrading by
professional educators, which may have been one reason why the
constituency approved it. It was an even more unwelcome idea to
the tradespeople of Carlisle, who preferred college students as
customers rather than competitors. Years later, after giving a
few poor students rooms in which to work at their trades, the
College would respond to town complaint and forbid the
practice.79 Durbin experienced all the sensitivity of a college
president to local feeling. When he turned for advice to
Caldwell vacationing in Maine, it was given in terms he scarce
dared follow:
You know I have always been more
indifferent to the feelings which the good people of Carlisle might
please to indulge toward the college than you have. We ought to
do right & then ' go ahead;" if they love us, well; if
not, well. I don't think our college would go down if all the
borough east of West Street should be swept away by some flood,
or if all the people east of that street should die of the
cholera . . . .80
In the last year of Durbin's
administration the College, by order of the borough, built
pavements along the West and High Street
sides of the campus, an
insistence upon conformity with the requirements imposed on all
residents to be repeated in later generations, and with chronic
ill feeling on both sides.81
That initial $45,000 was to have come from
collections in the churches and among the laity and from the
sale of scholarships. On payment of $500 to the conference
fund, the donor received a certificate entitling him and his
heirs forever to send one student to Dickinson College.82 A
minister who raised $100 could send one minister's son.83 In
addition to the itineracy and other preachers, agents were
employed to solicit. College sessions began at last in a spirit
of jubilation, yet the drive, over the top on paper, had
actually far from achieved its goal. Agents signed up
subscribers readily, but were slow in collecting cash.84
Scholarships were sold without proper record. They were given
for both cash and kind.85 Durbin hoped to launch his Music
Department with a $350 piano which had been given in part
payment for a $500 perpetual scholarship, but the trustees
voted to try, at least, to get the money.86 Many purchasers
elected to pay only what would be the interest on $500 until
they could afford the principal, and sums were coming in
undesignated as to whether they were interest or principal.87
By Durbin's first commencement, 1837, they had in cold truth
received less than $20,000 of the stipulated endowment.88
A month later, auguring future prosperity,
the Cumberland Valley Railroad's first train smoked and rattled
into the village at the market house and square. Yet already the
panic of 1837 had brought the smouldering presence of hard
times, to last for a decade more. Durbin's report of 1843 shows
the combined funds at only $41,793, and income from every source
barely meeting the annual expenses of over $9,000. Writing,
pleading, collecting in churches and camp meetings, he and his
professors still might not have weathered it but for state aid.
The new Board, not without effort and delay, was able to get the
final $3,000 installment of the grant of 1826, and—pleading that
the College now "bears more directly on the great middling
class from whence our common schools must derive their
teachers"
became one of the schools to which $1,000
a year was granted 1839 to 1843.89
This new willingness of the state to
support the College
despite its sectarian
bias emphasized the insecurity of church support, and we see
faculty looking elsewhere. Emory resigned in July, 1840, to
enter ministerial work. McClintock, replacing him in languages,
was replaced in mathematics by Sudler. Durbin, at the same
time, asked and was granted a six-month leave to visit Europe.
Then, in May, 1841, he stood for election as secretary of the
Missionary Society, an important church office which he would
hold later, from 1850 to 1872. He was defeated by one vote only,
friends of the College opposing his leaving it.90 He had done
well as a money-raiser, and there was still a debt of $15,000
borrowed from the conferences to build East College and rebuild
South.
The trip to Europe was made in 1842 and
1843, with Emory brought back as Acting President. Durbin was
allotted $1,000 to purchase books and apparatus abroad. He was,
quite obviously, following the example of President Wilbur Fisk
of Wesleyan, who had crossed the ocean in 1835, returning with
scientific apparatus and specimens and then bringing out a
popular book on the tour.91 Durbin would write two similar
books of travel, published by his son-in-law's firm, Harper and
Brothers.92 He would be welcomed back to Carlisle with a
procession, speeches, an illumination of the College buildings.93 Yet faculty morale had been low since before his departure.94 He lingered two more years and then resigned to reenter
church work.95
Caldwell, to whom the acting presidency
would have come by seniority, was grateful for Emory's return.
Both were slowly dying of consumption. Now, for two years, there
would be an Emory administration characterized by that stern
inner vitality. Faculty by-laws were adopted at once to remedy
past laxity: faculty would meet every Friday evening and attend
all prayers. No class would be dismissed until the ringing of
the bell, and none omitted without prior notice to the
President. That ever-unpopular chore of visiting student rooms
would be a scheduled duty of each, once a week, "the
President to visit them all."96 The rampant drinking and
card-playing declined under this watchfulness. In 1847, Emory
could report not a single dismissal for discipline—not even
Charles Wesley Carrigan, who had had liquor in tavern and in his
room, but whose fellow students
had intereceded for him
in thirty-six lines of melodious appeal, "Forgive that
Erring Youth":
Deep is the
anguish of his heart!
O add not to its wo,
Lest black despair should o'er his mind
Its fatal influence throw.97
Examinations in the new regime continued
to be oral and open to the public by invitation. Finals in 1837
ran for five afternoons, one for each professor, from two
o'clock to five. Durbin had set the example of writing questions
on slips, to be passed out, giving each student time for
consideration before he would be called upon to speak. Samples,
on Butler's Analogy:
Why can we not conclude death will be the
destruction of the living powers—"from the reason of the
thing"—nor from the analogy of nature? Explain.
State & illustrate the argument in
favor of the moral govt of God, founded upon the "necessary
tendencies of virtue."
Apply these principles to the temptations
of the Christian and of Christ—& show how the latter was
"without sin." (Not in the author but in our
conversations.)98
With the written questions, alas, we have
our first records of cheating. McClintock's slips were obtained
from "his beautiful sister, Annie," and Sudler's
filched at dinner time from inside his tall hat.99
After Durbin's return from abroad, Allen
introduced a new grading system which continued for many years.
Class performance and general deportment were figured together
in a plus and minus record.100 Following a student request of
1845, the sums were announced at the end of the year. The top
student of 1846 had a score of 5,657, and the lowest, 1,004.101
Ultimate standing was dramatized in the commencement program:
the Valedictorian in first place, then the opening Salutatory,
the "Philosophical Oration" coming third and the other
addresses arranged in order of standing—each mercifully short
and blessedly interspersed with music by the military or some
other band.
College catalogues and trustee
pronouncements do not al-
ways tell us precisely
what was being learned in class. In his first report as Acting
President,— Emory gave in more dependable detail a description
of the work of the year just passed. In a summary, it appears
that
Freshmen,
with Emory, studied William Smellie's
Philosophy of
Natural History (Boston, 1838).
Caldwell led them through a course in
English grammar
and composition, probably from his own text,
and a
basic course in geometry.
With McClintock, they read Sallust's
Conspiracy of
Catiline, Horace's odes, Xenophon's Cyropaedia,
studied Charles Anthon's Latin Prosody, "Grecian
antiquities" and Greek exercises from Sophocles.
Sudler confronted them with "decimal
fractions and
algebra to its highest branches."
Sophomores.
Emory introduced the class to Thomas
Hartwell Home's
Introduction to the Study of the Bible, and
lectured on
ecclesiastical history.
Caldwell carried his English grammar
course into
elocution, completed the study of geometry and went
on to Charles Davies' text on plane trigonometry.
Allen took the class through Lord
Woodhouselee's
(Tytler's) popular two-volume Universal History
from
the Creation of the World to the Beginning of the
Eighteenth Century (Boston, 1838, but also to be had
in a
Harper set of six volumes, 1839).
McClintock's young classicists had taken
up Cicero's De
Oratorio, more Horace, with Theophrastus,
Xenophon
and Euripides.
Sudler was laboring along in trigonometry,
and one
wonders whether Caldwell's math class may not have
been
intended to make up for his colleague's poor
presentation.
Juniors. Emory, in the presidential course
usually
reserved for Seniors, used the work of a great
American
educator and contemporary, Francis
Wayland's Moral Science.
This was reinforced by
Archbishop Richard Whately's Elements of Logic, with
declamation every Saturday, and by
Caldwell's work with Wayland's Political
Economy and
Whately's Elements of Rhetoric, and a written
composition every three weeks.
Allen taught French grammar and reading
(he had
confessed him-
self inadequate with the
spoken language),
beginning with new texts by Alexander G.
Collot and
Arsene Napoleon Girault. The Juniors attended his
science class for Seniors. McClintock had reached the
Medea of
Euripides, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus,
lectured on the Greek
drama, and filled in with Cicero,
Juvenal and Perseus.
Sudler's classroom, in turn, was threading
the mazes of
analytical geometry, spherical trigonometry,
surveying
and differential calculus.
Seniors. Emory, in addition to Bishop
Butler's Analogy of
Religion, Natural and Revealed, so long to
be a staple
and a terror to Dickinson Seniors, took them through
Caleb Sprague Henry's Epitome of the History of
Philosophy, a
translation (with additions) from the
French of Bautain
recently published in two volumes of
"Harper's Family
Library." This fare was punctuated,
as was his work with
the Juniors, by Saturday speeches
and debates.
Caldwell introduced them to Upham's
Mental Philosophy,
for a modern view, and then to William Paley's
Evidences of Christianity, a complement to the work
with
Butler. He delivered also a short lecture course
on the history
of the English language.
Allen's texts were William Augustus
Norton's Elementary
Treatise on Astronomy (Philadelphia, 1839),
John
Johnston's Manual of Chemistry (Philadelphia, 1839, a
popular text by a Methodist author), Sir David
Brewster's
Treatise on Optics (Philadelphia, 1835) and
John Lee Comstock's Elements of Mineralogy
(Boston, 1827), with lectures twice a
week on heat,
electricity, mechanics, pneumatics, hydrostatics,
chemistry and other aspects of "natural science."
Like
Durbin, he had class discussions of a "colloquial
form, in
which points which had been too hastily
passed over while the
experiments were in progress,
were more fully and familiarly
explained. l regard
these conversations as the most profitable
as well as
the most pleasant exercises which the Seniors have
had in my department."102 Going afield as the others
so
often did, he worked into all this a course based on
James
Bayard's Brief Exposition of the Constitution
of the United
States (Philadelphia, 1834).
McClintock was now leading the way through
the
Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, Tacitus' Germania
and
Agricola and Terence's Andria.
Sudler, at his peak, led the class through
analytical
mechanics and "Civil Engineering embracing the
theory of Mathematics applied
to practical
problems," the use of mathematical
instruments, with
lectures on the principles and history
of mathematics.
As President, Emory obtained trustee
approval of an improved modern language program, with a first
appearance of electives. Juniors could choose between Greek or
German; Seniors, mathematics or French.104 Charles E.
Blumenthal joined the faculty as "Professor of Modern
Languages and Hebrew," teaching at first on a fee basis,
and without a graduation requirement in his subjects.105
Yet
the change was popular with the more serious students, who had
their eyes already on study in Germany and travel in Europe.106
Wesleyan University had had from the beginning a "Literary
and Scientific Course" leading to the Bachelor of Science
degree.107 This concession to "the spirit of the age"
appears briefly under the same heading in the Dickinson
catalogue of 1846-47. In line with earlier Dickinson practice,
however, it had only three years' duration and led only to
"a certificate of proficiency under the seal of the
College."108 It seems to have been a compromise between
Durbin's condemnation of partial courses,109 Emory's more
progressive view, and a respect for the older conservative
traditions of the College.
One of Emory's proposals of 1846 is a
credit to his leadership only in that he was able to impose it
on a reluctant faculty. He integrated Grammar School and
College, bringing all classes together in the main building and
spreading the teaching loads to include both. Crooks, Principal
of the School, was a brilliant young fellow, well able to
sustain the post of Adjunct Professor of Languages, and he
foresaw that the College faculty, Baird particularly, would do
well with the younger boys. Their salaries would be duly
increased. The real saving would be in space.110 The College
Library, rearranged and catalogued by Emory and McClintock back
in 1837, was moved into South, along with the natural science
lecture room and laboratory and Baird's large and rapidly
expanding Museum.111
Thus Emory met space needs which the
trustees had refused to grant Durbin at their 1845 meeting. The
Board had put Durbin off by raising the vision of an entirely
new building housing laboratory, Museum, the society halls and
all the libraries. Emory hoped to
achieve this too. The
societies were clamoring for larger halls, and were ready to
appeal to their graduate members (the only alumni organization
of the time). At the 1847 meeting he proposed that the
societies raise $6,OOO for their share, and the conferences at
least $4,000 more.112 He was eager to launch a broad drive for
funds.113 Yet in 1847 he was only reimbursed the $300 he had
spent to refurbish old North College with those workshops for
poor students which were to alarm the town and then be used for
dormitory and other purposes.114 And even as he advanced his
plans and hopes he must needs ask for a possible leave of
absence because of failing health.
It had been an exhausting year for the
President, topped off by a sudden catastrophe of fury, bloodshed
and death only five weeks before commencement and the trustees'
meeting. "The McClintock Riot" brought the College for
the first time face to face with the issue of slavery in its
most hideous aspect. It brought human values, with which College
and Church should be so deeply concerned, into the balance with
property values, also of such urgent concern to both. We now see
Dickinson's most brilliant professor standing out for the moral
issue, and the President doing his best to bring money and
morality into an accommodation.
Money and
morality—the murder of Lovejoy,
the gag rule in Congress, had been followed closely by the Panic
of 1837. With the years of hard times, as so often occurs,
intellectual and religious idealism simmered and surged. In 1844
the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, had separated itself from
the main body upon the issue of slavery. Durbin, heading the
Philadelphia delegation in that famous General Conference, had
brought forward a "Plan for the Removal of Slavery" by
indemnification of owners and colonization in Africa, but
withheld it from publication until it appeared in the Christian
Advocate of February 10, 1847. The end of the Mexican War and
the rise of the Free Soil Party had then brought the battle into
national politics. "A Southern Methodist" approved
the "Plan," while "A Virginian" raised
reasonable doubts as to the feasibility of transporting to
Africa five million Negroes, Americans for generations and, as
experience had taught, unwilling emigrants.115
President Olin of Wesleyan and others of
the northern confer-
ences, though
predominantly antislavery, were even less ready than Durbin to
act.116
Not so McClintock. He was reading law and
watching Congress, alert for the attack. Close after Durbin's
came his own articles in the Advocate, "Slavery, No.
I" of February 24, followed by II, III and IV—bold, clear
condemnation, scornful and provocative.117 Judas had sold his
Master for the price of a slave. Slave-money was the price of
blood. Slavery, root of the ruin of republican Rome, had been
brought to republican America and "thrown upon the
spotless shoulders of Christianity"118
The
Advocate, under a storm of protest,
balked at the fifth article, observing primly that "we
ourselves differ with him, toto c[o]elo, in respect to the good
which he supposes has been done by the abolition
societies."119 McClintock's first book, a Latin text in
collaboration with Crooks had just been published. He had
offers from the University of Pennsylvania, from a church, from
Harper's for an editorship. He knew he would be considered for
the presidency of Dickinson should Emory fail to go on, and was
prepared to decline it as he would later decline the
presidencies of Wesleyan, Alleghany and Troy. In a mood of great
issues and a widening career, he was looking beyond the
schoolroom, beyond Carlisle, when, on a calm day in early
summer, June 2, 1847, the little town began to buzz with the
affair of James Kennedy and Howard Hollingsworth. They had come
up from Maryland in pursuit of runaway slaves and were now at
the courthouse with their prisoners, Lloyd Brown had his
ten-year-old daughter Ann, and Hester, wife of a Carlisle man,
George Norman. As McClintock would soon become acutely aware,
the "aristocracy" and the "rabble" of
Carlisle were hotly proslavery, a feeling not shared by
"the substantial middle class."120 Black citizens
had the aid of such men as Jacob Rheem, later a trustee of the
College, and lawyer Samuel Dunlap Adair in forcing Kennedy to
answer for the manner of the capture he had made and the
legality of holding his prisoners in the county jail. This had
filled Judge Samuel Hepburn's courtroom with excited spectators,
black and white.
Meanwhile McClintock, stepping into the
post office, met the ebullient Charles Wesley Carrigan and
learned what was hap-
peeing. George
Sanderson, Postmaster and printer, confirmed it. The student no
doubt expected a strong reaction from this professor. It came.
McClintock denounced the seizure as illegal under a new state
act against slave hunting in Pennsylvania, passed March 3, 1847.
He brushed aside Carrigan's suggestion that federal law would
nullify that of the state. Together they hurried to the
courthouse, where Judge Hepburn was himself making haste to
settle the matter in Kennedy's favor. Kennedy had a carriage
waiting for his prisoners at the door. As the two came in, Mr.
Thorn, the hot-tempered and occasionally hard-swearing Episcopal
minister, told them of doubts that Hester and the little girl
were slaves at all. McClintock, hearing the Judge order the
three to be delivered to their master, came forward indignantly
to present the fact of the new law. His Honor denied knowledge
of it. McClintock promised at once to bring his own copy, and
then, as Carrigan remembered, "pressing hurriedly to the
dock, in an excited manner," told the prisoners that under
the law they were free to go where they chose.121
McClintock was not present when the three,
aided by their friends, made a break for liberty at the door.
Shouts were raised; stones flew. Kennedy, dashing in pursuit,
was knocked down and trampled, suffering injuries from which he
died soon after. When McClintock returned with his document, his
only part in the melee was to warn off a white man threatening a
black woman with a club. Back at the College, however, he found
an excitement almost as great as that in town. The students
were shocked by the thought of an abolitionist in their midst.
Those from the South were packing to leave. Next day they held a
meeting on the stone steps and in the Chapel, with Edwin
Webster, later a lawyer and Congressman, presiding. "We
were all stormy until the door opened and the face of McClintock was seen, serene as if about to take his seat in the
recitation room. " Young Moncure Conway never forgot the
transformation wrought by "the calm moral force of that
address in the Chapel, the perfect repose of the man resting on
simple truth."122 A resolution of approval was passed,
echoed by one from the faculty praising their resistance to
popular clamor and loyalty to the College.123
With the press aroused,
with shocked and angry letters pouring in, a typical
college-president circumspection overcame any finer feeling in
President Emory. He could, of course, honestly clear McClintock
of any violent action or illegal intent: " . . . the
reports are grossly false, & may be traced to some of our
most corrupt citizens. The Professor's presence on the occasion
was purely accidental & he is incapable (whatever his views
about slavery) of any illegal interference with a master's
rights."124 But when he faced his trustees on July 7 it
was with a careful oral statement "on the subject of
slavery and abolition," to which McClintock, serving as
secretary, must have listened with mixed feelings. The Board,
however, heard it with satisfaction and resolved that he
"commit the same to writing for publication."
That summer, during vacation, McClintock
would be brought to trial before Judge Hepburn for
"inciting to riot." He would be acquitted over an
abundance of perjured testimony, faring somewhat better than his
Negro co-defendants. "The truth of the case," he
confided to his diary, "was that my human and Christian
sympathies were openly exhibited on the side of the poor blacks—and this gave mortal offense to the slaveholders and
their confreres downtown.''125 His Advocate articles, no less,
along with his willingness to advise the Judge, had helped to
make him an unwelcome presence.
The year that followed, with Allen as
Acting President, was difficult. Emory was in London to attend
the Evangelical Alliance, returning by way of Havana to
Baltimore where he died, May 18, 1848. Caldwell, teaching but
little through the year, died in Maine on June 6. Early in the
year; evoking the authority of the Board's executive committee,
Allen had called a halt to faculty absences and irregularly
scheduled classes. Professors must provide substitutes at their
own expense.126 Conversely, at year's end he urged the trustees
to authorize the treasurer to borrow, so that faculty might be
freed from doing so on personal security. He recommended also
returning the Grammar School to South College under its own
teachers (Library and Museum remaining there also) and
strengthening Baird's department to meet his "reputation
as a Naturalist and skill as a teacher." Blumenthal's also
must be reinforced: "In the present
state of education the
department of Modern Languages is very important, and a
knowledge of French and German almost indispensable."127
As to the presidency, there was no thought
of electing Allen, an educator, to an office tacitly open only
to a clergyman. By late June there were a dozen candidates in
view, led by Stephen Montfort Vail, Principal of the New Jersey
Conference Seminary, and Herman Merrills Johnson, professor and
Acting President at Ohio Wesleyan.128 A week before the
election it had narrowed down to two, Joseph Holdich and Jesse
Truesdell Peck. Holdich wrote to Allen that he would accept if
it were "a cordial election."129 It was not. Peck won
by two votes.
McClintock, resigning from the faculty,
was elected to the Board of Trustees. Thus Dickinson retained a
figure of recognized eminence, within the pale of a safely
conservative majority. McClintock was accepting the editorship
of the Methodist Quarterly Review, a position which would
become, in his hands, a far greater influence in the
intellectual advance of the Church than a college presidency
could have been. His wife had written in January, "Some of
the trustees say John must be President next year, but we are
not very much inclined to anything of that kind." Students,
she reported then, were crowding the College, even from the
South—"riots and all."130 John, on his part, was not
only disinclined but felt that his convictions on slavery
unfitted him: "I might become an incendiary . . . I am too
impulsive, too unsteady, to be made a model for young men."131 Emory's success in recapturing the southern
constituency
had tarnished McClintock's standing elsewhere and brought out
the problems he would have had in Emory's place.132
But the students of that long-remembered
year of the riot had seen the force of an open commitment to
truth. Young Conway would go out upon that "earthward
pilgrimage" of a long and memorable life. John Fletcher
Hurst, scholar and churchman, as a flaxen-haired, boyish-looking
student in the Class of 1854, would lead the U. P. debate on the
resolution "That the interests of the United States would
be conserved by the abolition of slavery," and win it.133
In the College, lethargy, equivocation, that mental paralysis
imposed upon so many
by this overwhelming
issue, could not again be a safe, unchallenged, respectable
surrogate for truth.
|
|
|