The history of Colby College, Part 11

Author: Colby College
Publication date: 1963
Publisher: Waterville, Colby College Press
Number of Pages: 716

USA > Maine > Kennebec County > Waterville > The history of Colby College > Part 11

Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).

HISTORY OF COLBY COLLEGE

acter so necessary to be exercised in the discipline of a college. This causes him sometimes to shirk when troubles rise and enemies assail. He is uncommonly averse to the noise and bustle of the world, is passionately fond of retired study, and he considers the use of a single hour in attending to college discipline as irreparable loss. We strongly feel that prompt attention to college discipline is one of the most im- portant duties that devolves upon all officers of the College. We could wish that Prof. Keely had felt the same, for in that case discipline in this college would have been administered with much greater effect.

Unlike Professor Keely, Professor Newton has manifested an unusual readiness to assist us in the discipline of the College. But since the beginning of the last college year he has not been so ready nor so firm in respect to discipline. And for that change we can find a ready expla- nation. During the past nine months, Prof. Newton has lost the con- fidence of many students. When, in the first term, he was hearing the junior class in Haines' Elements of Criticism, a work which requires great attention on the part of the instructor, he failed to furnish such illustrations as the work requires. Members of the class complained that they derived no benefit from his instruction and they found his illustrations coarse and homely, not suited to the dignity of literary sub- jects. His students in declamation complained bitterly that he did not help them improve their manner of speaking. Last May, a senior told Prof. Conant that the reason why the members of his class protested against a third recitation was because it would have to be conducted by Prof. Newton.

We admit that Prof. Newton had strong inducements to be on his guard and use every precaution to avoid giving offense to the students. It is an apology of some weight, but it does not excuse him from the use of expedients he has recently resorted to in order to establish himself in the good graces of the students. That he has employed improper expedients can hardly be doubted, when it is considered that he has, all at once, risen from the bottom to the top of the wheel. We are not insensible that this surprising revolution may have been due in part to the maneuvers of the disaffected students, who in their desire to divide the faculty, have labored to bring Prof. Newton over to their side by a marked change in their manner of treating him. But unless he had welcomed the maneuver, it would have accomplished little.

One fact furnishes direct evidence that Prof. Newton was willing to court favor with the students. The members of the United Brethren Society were, in their collective capacity, chargeable with aiding in the late rebellion. Their petition was put into my hands on Monday. On Thursday, when the clouds hanging over us had become unusually thick and portentous, and when the least countenance given to the rebellious students was tantamount to participation in their rebellion-on that morning Prof. Newton attended the weekly meeting of the United Brethren and, most surprising of all, made an address on Decision of Character. One of the leaders of the rebellion followed with remarks on the same subject and closed with the significant remark, 'We have been decided hitherto; I hope we shall be decided still.' If Prof. New- ton wished to encourage the members of that society to persevere in efforts to humble and subdue the faculty, he certainly took the proper course. He knew perfectly well how the disaffected students would ap- ply his remarks.

THE END OF A REIGN

There are several other topics to which we might have adverted. But, fearing lest we have already trespassed on your patience, we will say no more at present except that we are

Your most obedient serv'ts,

Jer. Chaplin Thos. J. Conant

Waterville College, July 31, 1833

It was after the Trustees had heard both statements that they appointed the Committee of Reconciliation. On the following morning, at the final session of the meeting, the committee's chairman, John Butler, made the following report.

The committee appointed yesterday to attempt a reconciliation between President Chaplin and Prof. Conant on the one part and Professors Keely and Newton on the other part report that it has not been in their power to effect any reconciliation between the disaffected officers. The President informed the committee that the resignation of himself and Prof. Conant could not be recalled unless the Board of Trustees, by vote, should approve of all measures in the recent difficulties, and in his opinion, even if the Trustees should so approve, the situation of him- self and Prof. Conant in relation to the other officers would be very unhappy, and most of the students would then leave.

The closing sentence of the committee's report shows that Chaplin gave the Trustees no recourse but to accept his resignation. His statement that, even if the Trustees supported him completely, the difficulty would still remain unre- solved, was practically saying to the Board, "You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't."

One action of the Board, as soon as they had accepted the resignation, re- veals clearly that they did not approve of the President's severe disciplinary ac- tion in this instance, but sided with Keely and Newton. That action was their immediate appointment of Keely, first to preside at the commencement exercises on the next day, and later to serve as Acting President until a new president should be elected.

It therefore turned out that nine young men received their diplomas from the hands of Professor Keely on August 1, 1833. They were Daniel Cook, son of one of Waterville's earliest settlers; Oliver Dodge, who died only seven years later; Jonathan Farnham, who became Professor of Natural Sciences at the col- lege in Georgetown, Kentucky; Rockwood Giddings, who joined Farnham in Kentucky and became President of Georgetown College; Walter Gould, who had a distinguished career as an attorney in Alabama; William Howe, one of Bos- ton's best known ministers; Josiah Pillsbury, who also went to Kentucky, but as a lawyer rather than teacher; William Stratton, Kennebec County's clerk of courts for 47 years; and Nahum Wood, who, after teaching mathematics at Franklin College in Athens, Georgia, became a noted southern planter of the period just preceding the Civil War.

Although the Trustees felt finally obliged to accept Chaplin's resignation, they did everything possible, consistent with their best judgment, to bring har- mony between him and the two professors who had already done much for the college and in whom the Board still had confidence. But Jeremiah Chaplin was a man of granite convictions. It made no difference how many people thought

HISTORY OF COLBY COLLEGE

he was wrong. If his own conscience told him that he was right, no one could swerve him from his self-imposed duty.

It is remarkable that no rift occurred between Chaplin and the Trustees. They immediately elected him a member of the Board, on which he served faith- fully until 1840, only a few months before his death. Not for a moment did he lose his devotion to the College. He had come simply, but firmly to the con- clusion that he was not the man to head it, just as he had allegedly told them in 1821, when he had refused the position and insisted upon another election, only to take the post reluctantly when Daniel Barnes turned it down.

The Trustees instructed a committee to supply Chaplin with testimonials of their esteem and to proceed at once to make proper financial settlement with him. The latter order was not easy to carry out, because Chaplin had to a large ex- tent himself been the college and had of necessity made financial commitments on its behalf-commitments for which he had taken personal responsibility. There were notes with his endorsement at the Waterville Bank, there were College bills he had paid out of his own pocket, and there was back salary long due him. It was a whole year after his resignation before final adjustment was made. The Board, on its committee's recommendation, then voted:

In consideration of the service rendered by Dr. Chaplin and the dona- tions made by him in aid of the College, the Trustees consider it their duty to allow the late president one thousand dollars, and that all claims of the College on a note given by Dr. Chaplin to the Samaritan Society be relinquished.

Do the facts as related in the lengthy documents tell the whole story? Is there anything to be read between the lines of the old, fading papers? Can any further light be cast on the unfortunate end of a valiant presidential career?

One cause of the dissension within the faculty was certainly the common but always volcanic issue of nepotism. Although, in the preserved documents, the only name associated with Chaplin's side in the affair is that of his son-in-law, Professor Conant, the newest professor on the faculty was also involved. He was John O'Brien Chaplin, the President's son, who had just been promoted from tutor to professor. That the son resigned along with his father and his brother- in-law is shown by the Trustees' vote authorizing their committee "to make suitable remuneration for President Chaplin, Professor Conant his son-in-law, and Professor Chaplin his son." Perhaps some significance can also be attached to the designation of relationship in the trustee record. When Professors Keely and Newton urged some retraction of remarks and more lenient action toward the disaffected students, they were well aware that family relationship would af- fect the views, or at least the position taken before the Trustees, of the other members of the faculty.

The incident of July 4, 1833, had not been the first occasion when Presi- dent Chaplin's stand on matters of discipline had caused resentment. On October 24, 1825, the faculty had been called into special session by the President "in consequence of a riot which took place on Saturday evening." About ten o'clock on the autumn night, "several students, with handkerchiefs tied around their heads, made an assault on Tutor Parker's room by throwing volleys of brickbats against the door and shouting vociferously." Investigation produced no tangible results, but within a few days twenty students confessed to the act. President Chaplin was all for taking stern action, involving suspension of all twenty men,

THE END OF A REIGN

though it was known that only six had participated actively in the affair. The President was overruled, for the faculty record tells us, "After much delibera- tion, the government thought best, for particular reasons, to forgive the de- linquents, and requested the President to write an address and read it to the stu- dents in chapel."

In 1826 Chaplin severely castigated the students because of trouble with a resident of the town, Moses Healy. Healy complained that a group of students had insulted him on the street. The faculty informed the man that, if he would supply evidence identifying the students, the offenders would be promptly pun- ished. Although Healy could not meet those conditions, he was not satisfied, but laid his case before the Grand Jury of Kennebec County. For lack of evi- dence, the case was thrown out of court. Chaplin was deeply grieved that the offending students had never come forward and confessed. He was very harsh in his denunciation from the chapel platform.

Even more revealing is a matter which was not settled by the faculty, but reached the Board of Trustees in 1831. The faculty had appealed to the Board for instructions concerning their right to compel students to give testimony in disciplinary cases. As long ago as 1831 on American college campuses, it was a firm tenet of the student code that "to tell on" another student was an un- pardonable offense. Such an offender would be promptly and effectively os- tracized. But the older generation had little sympathy with that student view. If order was to be maintained, if offenders were to be punished, students would have to testify, just as their civic duty expected them to testify in the courts of the state. So we find in the records of the trustees for July 26, 1831, the fol- lowing vote:

Whereas in all colleges there is found among students a strong reluctance to giving testimony before the government against their fellow students, and usually an appalling odium is cast on those who do this; and whereas the good of our colleges urgently demands that false delicacy on this sub- ject should be sternly discountenanced; therefore, resolved that the Trus- tees recommend to the Executive Government a rigid adherence to the 12th section of the 6th chapter of the college laws, and that all students refusing to give testimony, when required by the government, and all stu- dents endeavoring to ease odium on those who do give testimony shall be dealt with according to the provisions of said article. Submission to law is honorable and indicative of a truly noble spirit. We would hope that the students of this College will be distinguished for this spirit, that a high tone of morality will prevail within its walls, and that vice of every description will be frowned upon. And should there be among so many young men any of vicious character, for their own sake as well as that of the College, it is important that they should not be able, undetected, to practice mischief. Therefore, he who, required by the College Govern- ment, testifies against an offender, does an act worthy of praise.

A President determined to enforce that kind of resolution-and it clearly was at Chaplin's recommendation that the Trustees adopted it-was in for trouble. Only two years later the lid blew off the volcano in the celebration at that anti- slavery meeting on the Fourth of July.

For many years the bitter controversy which caused Chaplin's resignation obscured the tremendous contribution which the man had made in placing the new institution on an enduring basis. Although a devout Baptist and an ex-

HISTORY OF COLBY COLLEGE

perienced teacher of theological students, he had the wisdom and the courage to see that the institution in Waterville had no permanent future as a theo- logical school. He was not driven to the concept of a four-year college against his will. The tragic episode of 1833 is sufficient evidence that others could not drive Jeremiah Chaplin to any decision against his principles or his conscience. He was in fact the leader of the movement to make the institution primarily a col- lege and only secondarily a theological seminary. He did not deliberately plan to abandon the latter, and he cooperated faithfully in all endeavors to save it, but he shed no tears when it finally had to go. That Colby became and re- mained an undergraduate college of increasing quality and standing was due chiefly to the very stubbornness which caused the President's resignation. Had Jeremiah Chaplin held different convictions, Waterville College might have gone on with divided goals and splintered curricula, eventually trying to be all things to all men, instead of achieving its single purpose of becoming a high grade undergraduate college of liberal arts.

As one contemplates the account of Chaplin's departure from the college presidency, it is easy to attribute the outcome solely to his own sternness and stubbornness. But such controversies are seldom one-sided. Fault lay also with the students. Thirty years after the event, one of the students who had signed the petition demanding retraction had come to a mellowed view. James Upham wrote:

It is a pity that the students, justly incensed as they were, could not have realized that, in smiting the venerable president they were smiting their own father-the father, at least, of the college; the one man with- out whom the college would have had no existence; who had begotten it, cherished it, and brought it up through the perils of childhood with such toils, self-sacrifices and heartaches as are beyond the possibilities of the present generation to conceive; that they were striking down one of the most godly men of the age, who walked with God as closely as did Isaiah or Enoch; one who was as humble as he was great, and habitually suffered from a conviction of unfitness for the work; one who was eminent in scholarly worth and must ever occupy a high place in a roll of distinguished educators and college founders. It is to our shame that we thus struck him down.11

In that letter lies a valuable clue to what may have been the outstanding cause of Chaplin's resignation. It was not so much his uncompromising stub- bornness as it was his deep, sincere humility. Perhaps the modern psychiatrist would say that Chaplin's determined sternness was the outward cover for an inferiority complex. Jeremiah Chaplin had never wanted to be a college presi- dent. He had been reluctant to accept any position at the Maine Literary and Theological Institution when the proffered position was only one of professor of theology. When the institution obtained a college charter and the Trustees decided they must have a president, Chaplin insisted that they elect someone else, and it was only when Daniel Barnes refused the presidency that Chaplin reluctantly ac- cepted it. When the crisis came in 1833, when he saw no way of settling the dispute without sacrifice of principle, this devout man who tried so hard to "walk with God" decided humbly and soul-searchingly that the fault must be his. So he abandoned the office but not the College. His love for it never waned and he worked in its behalf all the rest of his life.

CHAPTER IX

Dynamo From Salem

HEN President Chaplin resigned, Waterville College was faced with a double crisis. Not only must it find a new president; it must also find a way to meet its mounting debts or close its doors. Writing many years later, Edward W. Hall said of the situation: "The College had no means to meet more than three-fifths of its current expenses, and its creditors were becoming uneasy. The resignation of Dr. Chaplin, and with him two of the professors, under circum- stances full of peril to the College, added to the embarrassment of the situation. Many of its friends were almost disposed to abandon the enterprise."1

The very circles in which the Trustees had to operate, in their search for Chaplin's successor, were those Baptist associations which were most aware of the precarious state of the College. Baptist ministers with a scholarly reputation were loath to leave good parishes for the risk of such a college presidency. Such was indeed the attitude of the man to whom the Trustees turned in their dire emergency. Rufus Babcock was pastor of the prominent Baptist Church at Salem, Massachusetts. He was the type of man whom the college trustees ardently sought: a Baptist minister, a graduate of a leading American college, and an experienced teacher and administrator.

Rufus Babcock, born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1798, was only thirty- five years old, but already a recognized leader in the Baptist denomination, when he was invited to take the presidency of Waterville College. He had graduated from Brown in 1822, and had then served as senior tutor at Columbian College, the Baptist institution in the national capital, where he had gained a reputation as a brilliant teacher and competent administrator in the president's absence.

Babcock, secure in his Salem pastorate, wanted nothing to do with a col- lege which he regarded as near to bankruptcy. He suspected that Waterville College was so deeply in debt that neither he nor anyone else could save it. He respectfully declined the invitation and suggested that the Trustees consider his fellow tutor at Columbian, who had been promoted to a professorship at Brown. Impressed by Babcock's recommendation, the Waterville Trustees at once pro- ceeded to invite the Reverend Alexis Caswell to the presidency, at a special meet- ing on August 21, 1833. Caswell waited six weeks before giving his answer. When that answer was finally made in the negative the Trustees were really in a bad plight. The new college year had already opened without any president to extricate the institution from its financial doldrums, although internal adminis- tration was in the capable hands of Professor Keely.

The Trustees turned again to Babcock, with a plea that was difficult for him to ignore. In Waterville, as well as in other parts of New England, the religious

HISTORY OF COLBY COLLEGE

sect which was then making gains against the conservative Baptists was the liberal Universalists. Only a few years earlier they had organized, right under the eaves of Waterville College, the first Universalist Church in Maine, and they were now erecting a church edifice of their own in the college town where the Baptists had the only earlier denominational meetinghouse. Feeling between the two denominations was often heated and harsh. The appeal which the Trus- tees made to Babcock was based on those strained relations with the Universalists. If he declined to become their president, the Trustees told the Salem pastor, the institution would have to be sold to meet the pressing claims of creditors, and the most likely purchaser was a Universalist corporation that was anxious to grab the property at a bargain price and turn it into their own denominational school.2

Babcock was now faced with a dilemma. If he accepted the presidency, he would be taking on a very risky job; if he refused it, and the Baptists lost the college, he might always retain a feeling of personal guilt. He therefore decided to go to Waterville and make thorough investigation. He spent a week at the College, conferring with the professors, the members of the Prudential Committee, and especially with Dr. Daniel Cook, the treasurer. The treasurer's accounts showed an accumulated debt of $10,000, which was bad enough, but it was not until several months later that Babcock discovered that Cook had not included an earlier obligation of $8,000, which had never been liquidated, although Cook thought Timothy Boutelle had long ago absorbed it. The debt of the struggling institution, which had been in existence only fifteen years, was actually in excess of $18,000.

Reluctant, but impelled by a strong sense of religious duty, Babcock finally decided to accept the unappealing job of presiding over Waterville College. At a hastily called meeting on September 25, 1833, the Trustees confirmed his elec- tion at a salary of one thousand dollars a year. To prepare for his coming with his family to Waterville, the Board authorized the Prudential Committee to "cause window blinds to be furnished to the President's house, paint said house and the fences connected with it." At the same time the Board postponed action on a national issue which had been involved in Chaplin's resignation: "Resolved, that the petition of several students for permission to form two societies relative to colonization and anti-slavery be referred to the consideration of the Board at their next annual meeting."

Rufus Babcock plunged into his new task with tremendous energy. He at once visited most of the colleges in New England and New York, to learn what other institutions were doing. He moved his family to Waterville just in time to participate in oral examination of the students at the end of the fall term.

His first task was to attack vigorously the financial problem. In 1831 the Trustees had set out to raise by subscription a fund of $20,000, under the agency of Rev. J. C. Merrill. It had been only partially successful, and Babcock de- cided to revive it. In doing so, he added a device he had picked up in his visits to other colleges. He proposed that anyone who would give $600 to the fund would have a scholarship under which the donor could annually designate a student to receive its benefits in the form of free tuition and room rent. It was a dubious method of financing, because the Trustees intended to use the money to pay debts and put up a third building. Now they obligated their treasurer to cancel the individual bills for tuition and room rent of every student who came under those donor-controlled scholarships. They were, in effect, spending the same money twice.

DYNAMO FROM SALEM

Babcock thought it disgraceful that a Baptist college should have no de- cently appointed chapel, and he persuaded the Trustees to earmark a sufficient portion of the $20,000 fund to erect a building for general classroom purposes, in which a large and well equipped chapel should be arranged. Chapel had previously been held in small, crowded rooms, either in North College or in South College. All previous attempts to raise money especially for a chapel had failed. Babcock was determined that there should be no failure this time, and at their annual meeting in 1835 the Trustees approved the following form of certificate for scholarship subscribers to the fund:

Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.

The history of Colby College, Part 11

Author: Colby College Publication date: 1963 Publisher: Waterville, Colby College Press Number of Pages: 716

Author: Colby College
Publication date: 1963
Publisher: Waterville, Colby College Press
Number of Pages: 716