USA > Maine > Kennebec County > Waterville > The history of Colby College > Part 16
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The Fourth of July in 1846 saw no exception to the usual disturbance on that festive day. The faculty record tells us that "there was great disturbance during the recitation hours by students passing before the recitation rooms, blow- ing horns and ringing bells." Two prominent participators were expelled from college. Interestingly enough one of the offenders was Charles E. Hamlin, who was later to teach at the College for many years and gain fame as a brilliant
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HISTORY OF COLBY COLLEGE
paleontologist. Both he and his co-conspirator were later reinstated, and both received their diplomas in 1847.
Plans for the annual Commencement called for more than engaging a con- stabulary. In 1847 Professor Champlin was authorized to make a contract with one Chipman to put up the commencement stage, perform all the sexton's duties on the occasion, furnish necessary help to attend the door at all exercises, take down the stage, return the carpet, settees and chairs to the College, and put the meetinghouse in a suitable state for worship; for all of which Chipman would receive twelve dollars.
Anxious as the faculty were to increase student enrollment, they tried hard to maintain high standards. A record in the fall of 1847 tells us that one Brown had presented himself for admission although he had read only three pages of Greek and but little more Latin. He was advised to devote another year to the study of languages before trying to do college work. If, however, he chose now to make the attempt, he could do so in the partial course, but he would not be admitted into the regular course without better preparation in the languages.
Courtesies between colleges extend far back into the past, and as early as 1847 Waterville College was meticulous in observance of its intercollegiate rela- tions. Henry A- had applied for admission, having been required to leave Columbian College in Washington. He was informed that he could be admitted at Waterville only on the written request of the President of Columbian. That courteous action was criticized. An angry letter appeared in Zion's Advocate protesting against Waterville's cruel rejection of a pious young man. The faculty then voted to publish a careful statement of the whole affair in the Advocate.
At last, in 1848, the faculty submitted to the long repeated protest against classes on the Fourth of July. "Voted, to announce to the students that here- after the recitations required on the morning of the Fourth of July will be dis- pensed with, and that in their place an extra recitation will be expected on the morning after the Fourth."
Of the persons who became part-time instructors or visiting lecturers at the College during its early years, the most interesting was Dr. Ezekiel Holmes. When President Babcock learned that Holmes, his classmate at Brown, was prac- ticing medicine in Winthrop, Maine, he felt that here was just the man to in- troduce the students of Waterville College to some of the already specialized fields of science. Dr. Holmes could easily stop at Waterville on his regular trips to the family farm in Starks, which he was still trying to operate along with his medical practice sixty miles distant.
In the fall of 1835 Holmes began his lectures to the junior class in chem- istry, mineralogy and botany. Mr. L. M. Sturtevant of Belgrade, who has made a study of Holmes' life and work, says:
Because of his constant commuting between Winthrop and Starks, Holmes could hardly have been an efficient teacher at Waterville Col- lege. He thought much on science, however, and he was able to put some of his ideas in practice. While riding in a rain storm one day from Starks to Waterville, he conceived of a 'dress of India rubber,' and thought 'there is much to be learned of this curious gum.' He once lectured upon 'Alumina, Silicum, Coleum and Silver.' He re- ported that his phosphorus did not succeed well, but other experiments did not go too badly in spite of his few specimens and the fact that he had no literature on alumina.
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COLLEGE LIFE IN THE EARLY DAYS
Benjamin F. Butler was a student at Waterville College when Holmes was a lecturer. In his autobiography, Butler's Book, the general later recorded: "I was farther advanced in science than most of the students, and I was allowed access to the chemical laboratory as assistant to Professor Holmes, who was not there. I had one mate in these studies, Mr. David Wadleigh, and we devoted ourselves to chemical experiments together, with the natural result of actually blowing each other up with explosive preparations."
Butler's clause "who was not there" makes it clear that Holmes was not a professor in residence. The fact is that his lectures, though intended to be on regular schedule, proved to be most irregular. To make up for a week when he would fail to appear for his single day of lectures, he would put in two days during the following week. Because every class had a lot of free time in the hours not assigned to its three daily recitations, it was easy to fit in a lecture by Holmes whenever he arrived.
In his plans for instruction, if not in his practice, Holmes was ahead of his time. In those days and long afterward, science students performed no labora- tory experiments. Everything was demonstrated by the instructor, the students merely noting what happened. After Holmes died, there was found among his papers a plan for a suite of rooms for the science department of Waterville Col- lege-a plan that was never realized. In it Holmes had incorporated individual experimental equipment for each student.
Dr. Holmes ended his teaching at Waterville in 1837. His commuting had become increasingly inconvenient, and he was getting very little remuneration for his trouble. He had been promised $200 a year, but never got all of it. In 1834-35 he received only $37. The national panic of 1837 made the plight of the struggling college almost desperate. It was difficult to maintain the regular classes, and such 'luxuries' as science lectures had to go.
In later years Dr. Ezekiel Holmes became better known as editor of the Maine Farmer, a newspaper celebrated at one time as having the largest circula- tion in the state. For five successive years he was Winthrop's representative in the Maine legislature. He was appointed surveyor of the public lands still held jointly by Maine and Massachusetts, and was influential in the final settlement of that contentious question. He was the first secretary of the State Board of Agri- culture and of the State Agricultural Society. He helped organize the impor- tant annual exhibition at Springfield, Massachusetts, which continues to this day.
In 1849 the faculty gave their first attention to what for more than sixty years would be known as "false orders." It became almost an annual occurrence for faked, burlesqued programs to turn up at some solemn event. This kind of prank may have begun earlier, but it was not until October, 1849, that it became a matter of faculty record. The faculty then ordered Professor Champlin to write letters to three printers-Dickinson of Boston, Wardwell of Andover, and Metcalf of Cambridge-inquiring whether the Greek type of the false order of exercises at the Senior Exhibition was furnished or used at their offices; also to write to Attorney Henry W. Paine at Hallowell, sending him a copy of the false order and asking him if legal action could be taken against a person who cir- culated such papers. Professor Loomis was commissioned to inquire of the post- masters, expressmen and stage drivers, to discover how the false orders reached town. Evidently Detectives Champlin and Loomis did a good job, for a week later Isaac Kalloch was expelled from college for circulating false orders at the Senior Exhibition.
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HISTORY OF COLBY COLLEGE
Isaac Smith Kalloch had a spectacular and notorious career. A relenting faculty let him return to college in the spring of 1848, but he remained only another year. Although he never attended theological school he became a preacher of note, for five years dispensing fiery brimstone from the pulpit of Tremont Temple in Boston, and during the Civil War from one of the leading New York churches. He went to Kansas and founded Ottawa University, of which he was for three years the dictator president. On the west coast he gained a wide reputa- tion as the crusading pastor of the San Francisco Tabernacle, and on one occa- sion engaged in a pistol duel on Market Street. For three years he was Mayor and political boss of the city at the Golden Gate. Isaac Kalloch lived up to the reputation he had made in college when he had begun the long-lived practice of false orders.
It is good for us to know that those students of more than a hundred years ago, though most of them were looking forward to the ministry, were not much different from young men of any time or place. Boys will indeed be boys, but the alumni records of Colby College make it equally clear that boys will also some day be men. The college days were not spent entirely in pranks and misbehavior. The young men studied under teachers who would compare favor- ably with the faculty of any later day; they discussed in their societies the great issues of their time; they struggled against grinding poverty to secure the coveted diploma; and they went out into the world to be indeed men of their time.
CHAPTER XIII
The Martyr And The General
A MONG the several thousand alumni of Colby College it would be diffi- cult to find two men more unlike than Elijah Parish Lovejoy and Benjamin Frank- lin Butler. They come together in this chapter because, of all Colby graduates, they became most widely known, and both received their diplomas before the little Maine college had graduated twenty classes. Lovejoy was a preacher and publisher who laid down his life for the freedom of the press. Butler was a military genius whose impulsive actions and unbridled tongue caused him to be one of the most hated men of his time. Well into the twentieth century, his- torians were referring to "the saintly Lovejoy" and "Beast Butler." Neither epithet was deserved. Lovejoy, though richly deserving of a hero's fame, was no saint; Butler, though storming his way through a hectic political career, was no beast. Both men made bitter enemies; both had staunch friends; and both possessed grim, undaunted determination.
Elijah Parish Lovejoy gained lasting fame when he was shot down by an angry mob while defending his press at Alton, Illinois. His persistent publica- tion of anti-slavery articles had already caused the destruction of three presses, and when he and his friends decided to arm themselves for the defense of his fourth press, stored in the Gilman warehouse on Alton's Mississippi shore, it was certain that tragedy would result. On the night of November 7, 1837, the mob got completely out of control. Though only a few shots were fired by either side, one bullet hit Lovejoy in the chest, causing almost instant death.
Elijah Lovejoy was born in Albion, Maine, on November 9, 1802, the oldest son of the Reverend Daniel and Elizabeth Pattee Lovejoy. His grandfather, Francis Lovejoy, had settled the farm on the shore of the pond which received his name soon after the Revolution, and there his son Daniel was maintaining a precarious existence as preacher and farmer when Elijah was born. Deprived of more than a meager rural education in his childhood, Daniel Lovejoy, for several winters, left his wife on the Maine farm, while he studied the classics at Byfield Academy in Massachusetts, and pursued theological studies with the local minister, Reverend Elijah Parish. That Congregationalist minister was a man of sufficient prominence to rate a page in the Dictionary of American Biog- raphy. A staunch Calvinist and unyielding Federalist, he was the target of many an attack from liberals both in theology and in politics. If they regarded him as convincing proof of man's depravity, he regarded them as agents of the Devil and rulers of the "New Babylon," his favorite term for the city of Washington under Jefferson's administration. So thoroughly was Daniel Love- joy imbued with this minister's philosophy and so highly did he respect the man that he named his first son Elijah Parish Lovejoy.
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At an early age the boy showed that he possessed a quick and active in- tellect. "At four he started to read, taking his first lessons from the large family Bible. He would go to his mother, ask her what a certain letter was, then move back to his corner to draw it and puzzle out the word. . . He had his father's drive for learning and a prodigious memory. He rarely needed to be told any- thing more than once. He went through his father's theological books; then he went through the little library in the neighboring town. He could memorize a poem or psalm at a single reading. Before he was through the village school, he was reading Greek and Latin writers easily. He tutored his younger brothers and sisters as they came along."1
Such a youth would naturally be determined to get formal education be- yond that afforded by the common school. But money was scarce and the father was an obscure country preacher with few influential friends. Elijah Lovejoy had therefore passed his nineteenth birthday before he got a chance to attend an academy, which in those days was the surest way to prepare for college.
The Albion youth had probably approached other leading citizens of Maine before he addressed a letter to the Governor himself. Fortunately that letter is preserved, and this is what Elijah Lovejoy wrote to Governor William King on July 24, 1821:
Sir: I address myself to you, not through mere speculation, but from immediate necessity. I wish to go to a private school in town, but am so circumscribed as to efficient means that I know not what to do. In this emergency I have determined to apply to you, hoping from your Honor's known liberality I may obtain the relief which I so much need. If you could put in the way so that I could labor half the day on Saturdays, or in any other way assist me, you would gladden the heart of the despairing. Who knows, Honorable Sir, you may assist one in coming forward who shall take a part in the political theatre of the age, in which you have borne so distinguished a figure.
If you should, Honored Sir, think this worth your notice (which I pray you may) you will have opportunity to see me, when perhaps I can give all the information which you wish. With the highest regards, I have the honor to be, Sir, your most obedient servant,
Elijah Parish Lovejoy2
William King received many letters like the appeal that came from the shore of Lovejoy Pond. He may not have replied at all to Elijah's letter; at any rate he gave the young man no financial aid.3 The benefactor who finally heard the youth's urgent plea was his father's friend, Reverend Benjamin Tappan, pastor of the South Parish Congregational Church at Augusta. With a modest sum supplied by Tappan, Elijah attended a term of eleven weeks at Monmouth Academy in the spring of 1822.
In the autumn of the same year, still with help from Tappan, Elijah entered China Academy. That school had first opened its doors in September, 1818, and during its brief existence had already sought its principals from Jeremiah Chaplin's new institution at Waterville. When Elijah Lovejoy enrolled at China, its head was Henry Stanwood, who had just completed the theological course at Waterville College and was only four years older than his pupil from Albion. There sprang up at once a close attachment between pupil and teacher, and Stanwood persuaded Lovejoy to prepare to attend Waterville College the follow- ing year.
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THE MARTYR AND THE GENERAL
There were several reasons why Lovejoy should have gone to another col- lege, to Bowdoin or Dartmouth or Williams. His father was an ordained minister of the Congregationalist denomination, and those colleges were under the con- trol of that church. Furthermore Daniel Lovejoy was an unrelenting Federalist, as were the administrations of those three colleges. Of course Waterville Col- lege was only a few miles from Albion, but its Board of Trustees was made up largely of Jeffersonian Democrats, among them the very William King who had turned a cold shoulder to Elijah's appeal for help. But Henry Stanwood was a persuasive man. He assured Elijah that Jeremiah Chaplin, Avery Briggs and Stephen Chapin were brilliant scholars and teachers, and that one would go far to find a better tutor than George Dana Boardman. Young Lovejoy was per- suaded that Waterville was the college for him, and even after Stanwood left China at the end of the winter term, the lad's decision did not waver. Stan- wood's successor in the academy principalship was Hadley Proctor, who actually presided at China in the spring term of his own senior year, for he did not re- ceive his college diploma until August, 1823.
In 1824 Lovejoy became acquainted with a man of the race that was to have such a profound effect upon his life. The faculty voted that "J. B. Russ- man, a man of color, may, if he enters college next term, have liberty to be absent a part of the year."
The first official reference to Lovejoy in the college records, following his matriculation in 1823, came at the end of his very first year. Two weeks be- fore the young man started his junior year in the college, the faculty voted that "Lovejoy be appointed to take charge of the Latin School during the ensuing year and have the same compensation that has been given heretofore." Almost as soon as Jeremiah Chaplin had started his theological classes in Waterville, he had seen the need for a preparatory school. So he started a kind of Latin Grammar School, modeled after the famous Roxbury and Boston Latin Schools, but much more informal and more loosely organized. At Waterville it was at first a minor adjunct of the College, without a separate building, and with only one teacher, usually provided from the student body of the college itself. It was this school that later became Waterville Academy and finally Coburn Classical Institute.
When Lovejoy was a senior, one Sanborn was fined fifty cents for damag- ing the cellar door of South College, and a fine four times as heavy was exacted from one Thompson for cutting a hole through the front door of the college. One Jayner had to pay fifty cents for drawing figures in the college entry, making it necessary, for the sake of decency, to have the walls whitewashed. So much of this kind of celebrating was going on that it was voted that "each student shall be assessed 25 cents for every pane of glass by him wantonly broken." Elijah Lovejoy was impervious to this sort of temptation. He went his studious way as pupil and teacher, getting his Latin school students ready for college and himself ready for the beckoning world. In August, 1826, he was graduated valedictorian of his class. At the commencement exercises he was class poet as well as valedictorian.
President Chaplin later expressed extravagant praise-and he was a man not given to extravagant utterance-concerning his star student of the Class of 1826.
In regard to his intellectual powers, he seems to have approached very near to the rank of those distinguished men who have been honored
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by the title of universal genius. During his collegiate course he ap- peared to have an almost equal adaptation of mind to the various branches of science and literature; and what is more, he took hold of each with giant strength.+
Upon graduating, Lovejoy at once accepted the principalship of his old school, China Academy. In those days the little Maine academies were ac- customed to changing principals every year, sometimes two or three times within a year. Elijah Lovejoy stayed as the China principal only for the three terms of a single year. Hardly had the school closed for the summer when, in May, 1827, he started for the fascinatingly new and adventurous West.
What prompted this recent graduate of a backwoods college in Maine to seek his fortune in the even newer backwoods of the Mississippi Valley is not at all clear. There is no evidence that he had as yet had immediate contact with anyone who knew the lands west of the Appalachians, but somehow, long before Horace Greeley urged it, he had heard the call, "Go west, young man, go west." John Gill's explanation may be as good as any.
He [Elijah] wanted to see the world, to become a famous man and make his mark. There was not room for his ambition in the small town en- vironment after he had taken all the honors it had to offer . . . Elijah, the oldest son and pride of the family, had decided to go west and seek his fortune.5
When the schools opened in September, Elijah Lovejoy was a teacher in St. Louis. Lovejoy's introduction to newspaper work was a part-time job on the St. Louis Times. He rose rapidly to assistant editor, and finally to editor and publisher. He gave up teaching to devote full time to the paper. "He now had assistants working for him, as well as printers, journeymen and apprentices, with a number of Negroes to clean the office and run errands."6
In 1832, when the Great Revival hit St. Louis, Elijah Lovejoy was con- verted and committed himself to the Christian ministry. Because he was. af- filiated with the First Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, he determined to become a preacher of that denomination and at once enrolled in its leading theological school at Princeton, New Jersey. In 1833 he was licensed to preach and for a brief time supplied several New York pulpits. But his real call was to St. Louis, and when he was offered the editorship of a religious weekly, The St. Louis Ob- server, he accepted with alacrity.
At first The Observer was a conventional religious paper of the time, de- nouncing the sins of the era, including slave-holding. Although slavery as an institution was more or less taken for granted in Missouri, the slave-holder him- self was not regarded with favor. Lovejoy printed impartially letters and articles submitted to him on both sides of the slavery question. Although he insisted that slavery was wrong, as Lincoln did, he held the same view as Lincoln con- cerning its ultimate end. He favored gradual emancipation, with compensation to the slave owners. He once wrote, "Slavery could not be abolished suddenly without doing untold damage to both masters and slaves."
In St. Louis the issue came to a head in the killing of the Negro McIntosh by an angry mob. At the farcical trial of the murderers, the judge attacked Love- joy's paper, reading sentences taken out of context, and saying:
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THE MARTYR AND THE GENERAL
It seems to me impossible that, while such language is published as that which I have just cited from the St. Louis Observer, there can be any safety in a slave-holding state.
At once Lovejoy took his stand. It was not a stand for abolition, but for freedom of the press. In a flaming editorial, he wrote:
To establish our institutions of civil and religious liberty, to obtain freedom of opinion and of the press, cost thousands of lives. We covet not the loss of property nor the honors of martyrdom, but far better that the office of the Observer should be scattered in fragments, better that the editor should be chained to the same tree as McIntosh and share his fate than that the doctrines promulgated by the Judge should prevail in this community.7
Finding it impossible to continue his paper in St. Louis, Lovejoy decided to move it to the Illinois side of the river in Alton. There he was welcomed by all except ardent sympathizers with the South. But when his press was brought over, in July, 1836, it was seized by a gang of St. Louis toughs and thrown into the river. Alton friends at once raised funds for a new press. The paper be- came popular and built up a large circulation, but Lovejoy was becoming more and more drawn to the abolitionist cause. He saw that moral appeal was of no avail when directed at the cotton states. He saw too that his pleas for gradual emancipation fell on deaf ears. So the editor turned his attention to arousing the whole nation against the moral wrong of the slave system. In his issue of July 6, 1837, Lovejoy proposed the formation of an Illinois State Anti-Slavery Society.
The situation in Alton soon became so tense that even some of Lovejoy's supporters urged him to soften his tone. Leading business men demanded that he maintain a discreet silence on the explosive issue. It was afterwards con- tended that Lovejoy made and later broke such a pledge of silence, but in a careful study of the evidence John Gill has shown that this contention was only one of many slanders directed against the man.8
On August 21, 1837, Lovejoy's second press was destroyed, and a month later his third press was smashed and hurled into the river while awaiting trans- portation from the wharf to the Observer office. Lovejoy took care that the fourth press should be landed secretly and stored in the Gilman warehouse near the river bank. News that the press had arrived during the night of November 6 spread rapidly, and when darkness came on the following evening, a mob was already assembling.
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