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Agency, Denominations and the Western Colleges, 1830–1860: Some Connections between Evangelicalism and American Higher Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

James Findlay
James Findlay
Affiliation:
Mr. Findlay is professor of history inthe University of Rhode Island, Kingston, Rhode Island.
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Extract

This essay focuses attention on certain aspects of the religious forces which powerfully shaped the small colleges which dominated American higher education prior to the Civil War. Religion, and more specifically evangelical Protestantism, has long been recognized as an important factor influencing the early history of these colleges. But the precise connections between evangelicalism and higher education during those years have not been studied very systematically recently, especially in the light of a new historiography concerning the ante-bellum college which has been developing during the past decade. This article begins with a brief sketch of the new historiography and tries to suggest some of the interpretive strengths and weaknesses of the recent writings. Then follows a description of the “agency” systems developed by certain Midwestern schools to aid in fund raising—a specific point of linkage between the general religious community and the colleges this community helped to found. This latter section seeks to redress in a limited way the interpretive imperfections of the recent historiography and to suggest something of the nature of the special relationships which existed between the small colleges of the Midwest and the evangelical Protestant churches during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , March 1981 , pp. 64 - 80
Copyright
Coprright © American Society of Church History 1981

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References

1. The writings of Richard Hofstadter on higher education probably best express this point of view. See Hofstadter, and Metzger, Walter, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York, 1955),Google Scholar especially chaps. 5 and 6; Hofstadter, and DeWitt Hardy, C., The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States (New York, 1952),Google Scholar part one; and Hofstadter, and Smith, Wilson, American Higher Education: A Documentary History, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1961), 1: Parts 4, 5.Google Scholar

2. The most recent—and best—historiographical overview is McLachlan', James “The American College in the Nineteenth Century: Toward a Reappraisal,” Teachers College Record 80 (December 1978): 287–306.Google Scholar Some of the historical works which serve as the basis of the revisionist interpretations include Potts, David, “American Colleges in the Nineteenth Century: From Localism to Denominationalism,” History of Education Quarterly 11 (Winter 1971): 363–379,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “College Enthusiasm as Public Response, 1800-1860," Harvard Educational Review 47 (February 1977): 21–37; Allmendinger, David, Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life in Nineteenth Century New England (New York, 1975);Google Scholar and Burke, Colin B., “The Quiet Influence: American Colleges and Their Students, 1800–1860” (Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 1973).Google Scholar

3. Potts, “From Localism to Denominationalism,” pp. 368–369, 377. Two other revisionists, Douglas Sloan and James Axtell, rightfully emphasize the key role religious beliefs and actions played in every aspect of the pre-Civil War colleges, but their comments on the matter are very brief and Sloan in particular lacks adequate understanding of evangelical Protestantism as the cultural matrix out of which most of the colleges developed. See Axtell, “Death of the Liberal Arts College,” History of Education Quarterly 2 (Winter 1971): 345; Sloan, “Harmony, Chaos, and Consensus: The American College Curriculum,” Teachers College Record 23 (December 1971): 227–232. There are also brief but inconclusive comments about the crucial religious dimensions of the ante-bellum colleges in McLachlan, “The American College in the Nineteenth Century,” pp. 300, 301–303.

4. The essay entitled “Uncommon Schools: Christian Colleges and Social Idealism in Midwestern America, 1820–1950,” is the first of two parts of a larger publication of the Indiana Historical Society, Lectures, 1976–77: The History of Education in the Middle West (Indianapolis, Ind., 1978).

5. Sweet is the exception. He wrote a centennial history of DePauw University, where he taught before going to the University of Chicago. Sweet, William Warren, Indiana Asbury-DePauw University: A History (New York, 1937).Google Scholar

6. Sweet's own work is perhaps best summed up in his four-volume documentary collection entitled Religion on the American Frontier, 1783—1850. Subtitles include The Baptists, 1783–1850 (New York, 1931); The Presbyterians, 1783–1840 (New York, 1936); The Congregationalists, 1783–1850 (Chicago, 1939); and finally The Methodists (Chicago, 1946). The best work of Sweet's students is in Goodykoontz, Colin B., Home Missions on the American Frontier with Particular Reference to the Home Missionary Society (Caldwell, Idaho, 1939)Google Scholar and in the essays of Kuhns, Frederick L., in Spinka, Matthew, ed., A History of Illinois Congregational and Christian Churches (Chicago, 1944).Google Scholar

7. Smith, “Uncommon Schools,” pp. 5–15, 17–18, 20. See also Hedrick, Travis, “Julian Monsen Sturtevant and the Moral Machinery of Society: The New England Struggle Against Pluralism in the Old Northwest, 1829–1877” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1974).Google Scholar

8. The best of the individual institutional histories, upon which Smith relies heavily for factual information, can be quite helpful; but these monographs often contain crucial omissions of important data and usually neglect the kind of broad socio-cultural setting which is essential to sound historical analysis. Representative examples of the best of these sources (all of them utilized by Smith) include Cady, John F., Centennial History of Franklin College (Franklin, Ind., 1934);Google ScholarOsborne, James I. and Gronert, Theodore, Wabash College: The First Hundred Years, 1832–1932 (Crawfordsville, Ind., 1932);Google Scholar and Rammelkamp, Charles H., >Illinois College: A Centennial History, 1829–1929 (New Haven, Conn., 1928.)Google Scholar

9. Potts, “College Enthusiasm as Public Response,” p. 42. See also the same author's “Baptist Colleges in the Development of American Society, 1812–1861,” (Ph.D diss., Harvard University, 1967), pp. 201–206Google Scholar.

10. In 1851, fourteen years after Indiana Asbury University was established, the annual Report on Education to the Indiana Conference began with the assertion that “the great center of our educational system is the Asbury University"; of the “Minutes of the Indiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, 1851,” p. 14. Over the years the Methodist conferences in the Hoosier state came to support other institutions—secondary school academies, female institutes, colleges—yet Indiana Asbury always occupied the central place in the detailed reports on those enterprises submitted annually to the conferences, a clear reflection of the key position Asbury occupied among Indiana Methodists. ibid., pp. 14–20; 1849, pp. 11–14; 1850, pp. 11–18; 1853, pp. 11–14; 1854, pp. 14–16; 1858, pp. 18–21.

11. “Minutes of the Board of Trustees, DePauw University,” 1 March, 18 October 1837; “Journal of the Indiana Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church,” 19 October 1838.

12. “Journal of the Indiana Conference,” 28 October 1840. The first year's campaign hoped to raise $20,000 to purchase “Library, Chemical, and philosophical apparatus.” The Bishop of the Indiana Conference, planning to visit Europe in 1842, was to buy much of the needed equipment and books with this money. ibid.. There is no record available now of how much money was actually collected in 1841, nor is there a clear indication that a grass-roots financial campaign of this magnitude was mounted annually, as the conference minutes suggest.

13. The colleges included in this study stated in their charters or constitutions that they were open to students of all religious groups without discrimination. “Minutes of the Board of Trustees, McKendree College,” 4 February 1839; “Minutes of the Indiana Baptist Education Society,” 15 January 1835, Franklin College Archives. Statements emphasizing the broad purposes and appeal of the colleges abound in the literature published by the schools and their supporting religious bodies. See, for example, “Journal of the Illinois Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church,” 11 September 1844; Western Christian Advocate, 10 November 1843, p. 119; 12 February 1841, p. 171; Byrum Lawrence to Jesse Holman, 19 May 1832, Holman Papers, Franklin College Archives.

14. “Journal of the Indiana Conference,” 12 October 1841; “Minutes of the Board of Trustees, Indiana Asbury University,” 11 October 1838, 6 May 1842, 29 June 1864. In 1839 a request for agents to solicit money outside the state was rejected by the Indiana Conference. At other times agents went out of state, although they always secured approval from the Conference. ibid., 2 February 1839; 28 October 1847.

15. “Minutes of the Board of Trustees, McKendree College,” 18 November 1828; 30 October 1830.

16. “Journal of the Illinois Conference,” 21 September 1829; 6 October 1830; 7 October 1835. Leading supporters of McKendree, including Peter Cartwright, the famous backwoods preacher, and Peter Akers, president of McKendree, were involved in the establishment of a second college in central Illinois.

17. ibid., 1 October 1833; 12 February 1834; “Minutes of the Board of Trustees, McKendree College,” 8 April 1834; 16 October 1832; 11 June 1832.

18. “Journal of the Illinois Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church,” 29 September 1832; 20September 1841, “Minutes of the Board of Trustees, McKendree College,” 26 June 1838; 16 August 1843; 1 April 1846.

19. Lebanon (111.) Journal, 6 January 1848, p. 1.

20. For descriptions of the disputes that affected the Plan of Union schools in Illinois, see Rammelkamp, Charles H., Illinois College: A Centennial History, 1829–1929 (New Haven, Conn., 1928), chaps. 6, 8;Google Scholar and Muelder, Hermann, Church History in a Puritan Colony of the Middle West (Galesburg, Ill., 1937).Google Scholar

21. “Minutes of the Board of Trustees, Wabash College,” 16 April 1833, 24 September 1834.

22. Knox occupied a less important position largely because its founders embraced a radical-perfectionist stream of ideology and theology, emerging originally in western and central New York, which the mainstream “Presbygationalists” looked upon with considerable suspicion. George Gale, a principal founder of Knox, viewed the college and the town- colony which was to develop with it, as a center of abolitionist agitation and activity in central Illinois and a proving ground for perfectionist religious sentiments. Gale and the Oneida Institute he founded in western New York served as common intellectual ground for the early history of both Knox and Oberlin Colleges. See Muelder, Hermann, Fighters for Freedom: The History of Anti-Slavery Activities of Men and Woman Associated with Knox College (New York, 1959);Google ScholarFletcher, Robert, A History of Oberlin College, 2 vols. (Oberlin, Ohio, 1943), 1: chaps. 1-5.Google Scholar

23. “Minutes of the Board of Trustees, Wabash College,” 27 December 1833, 18 July 1835, “Ormes” folder, Wabash College Archives. The first president of Illinois College, Edward Beecher, was the son of Lyman Beecher, the famous spokesman for evangelicalism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Elihu Baldwin, the first president of Wabash, came from a successful ministry in the Seventh Presbyterian Church in New York City and was well known in the denomination before he moved west. Merideth, Robert, The Politics of the Universe: Edward Beecher, Abolition and Orthodoxy (Nashville, Tenn., 1968),Google Scholar chap. 5; Edmund O. Hovey to Israel Dewey, 28 February 1835 (and attached flyers); Samuel G. Lowrie to Hovey, 5 January 1835, Hovey Letters, Wabash College Archives.

24. The first director of the SPCTEW was Theron Baldwin, a member of the small group of Yale graduates which founded Illinois College, an early faculty member at the college, and a trustee until his death in 1870. Even after moving to New York City, Baldwin remained the closest confidant of Julian Sturtevant, the second president of Illinois College. See Baldwin-Sturtevant Correspondence, Illinois College Archives, and the many letters between the two men in SPCTEW Collection, Congregational Library, Boston. Wabash people participated in the meetings which led to the organization of the Society in 1843. After that date Baldwin maintained regular contact with Wabash officials, and fund raising in the East was supervised by the Society. Theron Baldwin to Charles White, 12 June 1848; to John M. Ellis, 18 November 1848; to E. O. Hovey, 9 November 1858, in SPCTEW Letterbooks, Congregational Library, Boston. The financial support given to both Illinois College and Wabash by the Society can be traced in the Annual Reports, beginning in 1844 and continuing into the 1860s.

25. Theron Baldwin especially disliked the president of Knox, Jonathan Blanchard, in part because of his unorthodox social and theological views and in part because he was pushy and abrasive in personal relations and in the demands he made on the Society. See, for example, Jonathan Blanchard to Theron Baldwin, 14 October 1845, Box 1, SPCTEW Correspondence; Baldwin to H. Smith, 10 November 1845, Baldwin to Blanchard, 27 December 1848, Baldwin to C. Y. Hammond, 9 September 1865, all in SPCTEW Letterbooks.

26. A collection of addresses and sermons entitled Permanent Documents, SPCTEW (many editions), presented first as talks at the annual meetings of the SPCTEW and then published for promotional use by the society over the years, are full of such ideas concerning the missionary role of education in the West.

27. Smith, “Uncommon Schools,” pp. 20, 21.

28. L. B. Lawson to Washington Leverett, 3 November 1858, Illinois Baptist Educational Society Correspondence, Box 1, Shurtleff College Collection, Illinois State Historical Library; “Minutes of the Board of Trustees, Franklin College,” 18 July 1835; “Minutes of the Baptist Association of Illinois,” 1839, pp. 7–9; 1840, pp. 12–13, 15; 1844, pp. 12–13; 1845, p. 10; “Minutes of the annual meeting, Indianapolis Baptist Association,” 1850, pp. 3, 4; 1843, p. 5; 1846, p. 7.

29. Deep divisions existed within Baptist circles in both Indiana and Illinois over the propriety of founding colleges at all. Antimission elements in the denomination, migrating especially from southern states, were highly suspicious of the efforts of former New England Baptists and their western allies to advocate a learned ministry and the colleges necessary for such a development. The antimission Baptists attracted wide support in the frontier society of the 1830s and 1840s. See Cady, John F., The Origin and Development of the Missionary Baptist Church in Indiana (Berne, Ind., 1942).Google Scholar

30. The Baptist college at Alton, Illinois became Shurtleff College in 1836 in honor of Benjamin Shurtleff, a wealthy Boston physician who gave the college $10,000 in 1835 and made other donations later. “Minutes of the Board of Trustees, Shurtleff College,” 25 November 1835, 29 January 1836. Franklin's eastern connections are demonstrated in John M. Peck to Jesse Holman, July 1834, and Garah Markland to Jesse Holman, 16 September 1836, Holman Correspondence, Franklin College Archives; “Minutes of the Massachusetts Baptist Missionary Society,” 13 February, 12 August, 12 November 1838, 11 February 1829, Archives, Andover Newton Seminary.

31. A major denominational source of support for both Shurtleff and Franklin was the statewide Baptist Education Societies. In each state these societies were organized to collect money to support at Shurtleff and Franklin indigent students intending to enter the ministry. Over time the educational societies also became a denominational means of informal policy control at the two schools because they worked closely with the respective Boards of Trustees. “Minutes of the Board of Trustees, Shurtleff College,” 30 October, 4, 5 December 1850; “Minutes of the Indiana Baptist Education Society,” 5 July 1834, 30 January 1836, 10 October 1840, 7 October 1841, 24 October 1861, Archives, Franklin College.

32. E. O. Hovey to Mary Hovey, 23 May 1839, Hovey Letters, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis; John M. Peck to J. N. Tolman, 24 December 1852, J. M. Peck Papers, Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield, Illinois. In 1856 the president of Wabash College netted about $11,500 on agency, even though expenses were reported as almost $3,000—an unusually successful venture. Agents for Franklin College are estimated to have raised $10,600 over seven years for that school. “Minutes of the Board of Trustees, Wabash College,” 22 July 1856; Scott, William T., History of Franklin College: A Brief Sketch (Indianapolis, Ind., 1874), p. 4.Google Scholar See also “Report of Agency for Knox College from July to December 1847,” in folder entitled “Trustees' Minutes,” George W. Gale Correspondence, Knox College Archives.

33. Only rough guesses can be made about the proportion of annual college budgets that were supported by the efforts of the agents. The Trustees of Shurtleff College published in 1849 a summary of receipts and expenditures for the previous four years, with no breakdown of figures on an annual basis. The agent of the college reported cash collections of $2,565 during this time, about one-third of the monies disbursed finally by the college. At Knox in 1847 the president of the college reported that from July to December of that year he collected $1,789.50 in “cash obligations [pledges] and property.” There is no record of the relationship of this sum to the total costs of the school for that year, but even six years later Knox's total annual expenses were only $4,340. It seems fair to assume that agencies like Blanchard's were crucial in sustaining the college. At Illinois College in 1855 the college debits were $6,653. The SPCTEW provided an “appropriation” of $1,500, thus covering almost twenty-five per cent of the annual operating expenses. Money from the SPCTEW aided Knox in a similar manner in 1851 and 1853. Detailed records of collections of agents at Indiana Asbury, similar in total annual amounts gathered to those mentioned above, are also available for 1839 and 1844. Watchman of the Prairies, 28 August 1849, p. 2; “Report of Agency for Knox College from July to December 1849,” “Trustees' Minutes” folder, G. W. Gale Correspondence, Knox College Archives; “Trustees' Minutes,” 25 June 1851, 22 June 1853, Knox College; Account Book of Agent S. C. Cooper, 1838–1844, Indiana Asbury University; “Trustees' Minutes,” Illinois College, 12 July 1855.

34. The documentation is not overwhelming, but we can develop a fairly clear idea of the nature of these agency networks. For example, Wabash College reported contributions through agency solicitations from twenty-seven localities in Indiana during 1847, including towns like Indianapolis, Lafayette and Terre Haute and small villages like Putnamville, Sugar Creek and Hickory. A similar pattern of giving appeared in reporting building fund collections in 1850. Money for Wabash was also solicited and received from twelve towns in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Vermont in 1834, the first year the college was fully in operation. “Subscription Books, Wabash College, 1834–1852,” Wabash College Archives. The files of the SPCTEW also reveal in considerable detail the workings of the agency system of that organization throughout New England. See, for example, Theron Baldwin to John M. Ellis, 8 August 1849, SPCTEW Letterbooks; J. W. Wood to Baldwin, 28 November 1851, B. C. Webster to Baldwin, 30 June 1855, SPCTEW Correspondence, Box 1, Congregational Library, Boston.

35. Subscription Books, Wabash College, 1834–1852; Account Book of Agent S. C. Cooper, 1838–1844; “Notes, Endowment Funds,” of William DeMotte, 1837–1857, Indiana Asbury University, in DePauw University Archives. Each annual report of the SPCTEW included a detailed breakdown of contributions to the Society and to specific western colleges which confirms decisively the fact that most donations were very small amounts of money given by hundreds of largely unknown churchgoers.

36. I have yet to come across a printed version of one of these talks or sermons that minister-agents of the colleges must have delivered by the hundreds over the years. The content of these addresses probably paralleled the ideas regarding the nature and purposes of the western colleges articulated in presidential inaugural addresses, in statements by college officials in denominational periodicals, in printed copies of orations before student literary societies, and the like. Permanent Documents, SPCTEW contains vintage material in this regard.

37. The following citations are merely suggestive of the documentation possible. Regarding individual donations to the colleges, see “Minutes of the Board of Trustees, Illinois College,” March 1829; “Report of Agency for Knox College, January-December, 1847,” G. W. Gale Correspondence, Knox College Archives. Concerning land sold by the colleges to aid finances, see “Minutes of the Board of Trustees, Shurtleff College,” 7 March 1835, 7 April 1837; Jonathan B. Turner to Rodolphia Kibbe, 25 June 1835, Turner Papers, Illinois College Archives; concerning land held by colleges as donations, see Silvanus Ferris to George W. Gale, 10 October 1835, and “Report of the Agent,” 1 November 1836, both in “Trustees' Minutes” folder, G. W. Gale Correspondence, Knox College Archives. For evidence concerning student scholarships, see The Western Star, 4 February 1845, p. 1; “Trustees' Minutes,” Illinois College, 24 June 1845, 17 May 1856, 14 June 1864. For references to government aid, possible and actual, see Watchman of the Prairies, 18 March 1851, p. 2; “Minutes of the Indiana Baptist General Association,” October 1837, p. 9.

38. Continuities and discontinuities with fundraising practices of colleges in the colonial and early national period should also be commented upon briefly. Long before the founding of the schools studied in this essay, colonial colleges began to develop funding techniques that were often similar to the techniques used in the Jacksonian era. By the time of the Revolution, land grants, money from private donors, fund raising among alumni, funding appeals to the general populace and frequent approaches to the colonial legislatures for grants from public monies had all been attempted. Parallels with the practices of the colleges of the mid-nineteenth century are striking. Representatives of King's (later Columbia) College in New York and of Princeton in New Jersey visited the mother country of England in search of funds, just as Presbyterian and Congregational agents from the Midwest scoured home parishes in New England for support in the 1840s and 1850s.

The colonial colleges, however, asumed the characteristics of public institutions even more than was the case with the ante-bellum schools. The powerful denominational ties so evident in the nineteenth century developed mostly from the time of the Revolution, the result of the separation of church and state that came with independence and the subsequent rise of a national system of voluntaristic, evangelical churches. This voluntary system was fully articulated by 1830 and the fund raising practices of the colleges founded after that date accurately reflected these postrevolutionary ecclesiastical arrangements. Humphrey, David C., From King's College to Columbia, 1746–1800 (New York, 1976), pp. 96–97,Google Scholar 121–122, 131–134, and Miller, Howard, The Revolutionary College: American Presbyterian Higher Education, 1707–1837 (New York, 1976), 72–75, 149–159, 254–258.Google Scholar