USA > North Carolina > Sketches of North Carolina, historical and biographical : illustrative of the principles of a portion of her early settlers > Part 53
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Without waiting for Mr. Caldwell to reply, the Dr. said, somewhat abruptly, "he is on his way to Carolina, and to Carolina he is cer- tainly to go. To speak of other places will be in vain." How true it is that words fitly spoken are like apples of gold in baskets of silver, even though uttered, as Mr. Caldwell thought these were, with abruptness. It was good counsel to a worthy person, well followed, and crowned with great success, by God's blessing. And was it not of God that Joseph Caldwell went to Chapel Hill ? The widow nursed the infant boy, on whom a father's face never smiled ; a southern boy gives him his grammar to begin his lite- rary course ; the President of Nassau Hall, Dr. Witherspoon, takes him from an unemployed life, and puts him to the college desk ; Austin leads him into the study of Theology; Harris, the Pro- fessor, turns his attention to Chapel Hill, and secures his election ; and Green, wise in counsel, sends him on to his field of labor, where many trials awaited him before he should get his crown. And no one of these ever seemed to be influenced by an opinion that he possessed splendid talents, uncommon genius, or peculiar faculties for some wonderful work ; but by a conviction that there was in him a certain something, made up of a well-balanced mind, probity of heart, sense of propriety, and desire of usefulness, all clothed with great modesty, that marked him out as the man to accomplish a work that called for piety, humility, patience, pru- dence, and untiring industry. Evidently God sent him to Chapel Hill.
In November, 1796, he entered on his duties in the infant uni- versity. Rightly to understand his labors, it is absolutely neces- sary to take a survey of the advantages and disadvantages under which he labored in the performance of his duties, and in his efforts to rear the institution to vigor and usefulness. His advantages were, 1st : The State patronage ; some permanent funds in hand, and much more in prospect from the increased price of lands, and the escheats and debts of the State, which had been appropriated by law. However small the patronage of the State may be, yet, if it be constant, it gives an advantage in gathering students and in keeping the public attention so as to increase the number he might have at any given time. And 2d : The influence of the forty members of the Board of Trustees, afterwards increased to sixty-five, all of them intelligent and influential men, and desirous of building a State institution, who might be expected to assist in gathering students, and also in collecting funds. Being chosen from all parts of the State, and not confined to politics or denomi-
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nation, he had the privilege of looking, through them, to the whole State, for his help. And 3d : The institution being entirely in its infancy, he had the opportunity of forming its first shape and spirit ; on the given spot and with the given advantages, he planted the acorn, which he watered and cherished and pruned to the vigor- ous oak, whose branches now overshadow the land.
His difficulties were great, arising from the nature of the case and from human nature. 1st. There were in operation in the State, particularly in the upper part of it, some academies of high merit and established reputation. The embryo university, without apparatus and without a competent number of teachers to perform the labors of the university, could, after all the patronage of the State, offer little to draw students from these established, well known schools, to come to Chapel Hill. It was by no means evi- dent that Mr. Caldwell was superior to those well tried teachers : he might not even be equal, and at the best there was little proba- bility that he would immediately surpass any of these academies. There was the school of David Caldwell in Guilford, in active operation, sending out its pupils to be divines, physicians and law- yers, and ultimately professors in institutions and judges of the courts : the public were not sure that Joseph Caldwell could equal, much less excel him. And then there was the academy of Dr. McCorkle, one of the Board of Trustees, a man of literature and reading, kept in the bounds of Thyatira congregation, near to Sal- isbury. And a little further on was the school of Rev. Mr. Wal- lis, at Providence, twelve miles from Charlotte, a man of logical mind, connected with a vehement spirit, afterwards a member of the Board of Trustees. And next the school in Bethany, Iredell county, under the direction of the well known servant of God, the Rev. Capt. James Hall, D.D., the soldier of the Revolution, and the leading domestic missionary of the South. Next, the school at Rocky River, from which many excellent men came. And next, in the mountains, now a part of Tennessee, was Martin Academy, planted by Mr. Doak, and by him enlarged to a college, the nur- sery of many professional men. To these add the public acade- mies of Charlotte, Mecklenburg, which occupied the place of Liberty Hall and Queen's Museum; the Academy in Duplin, which has been more or less flourishing; Science Hall, near Hillsboro'; Warrenton Academy, under Mr. George, who, with Bingham and Kerr, were graduates of Trinity College, Dublin ; Granville Hall, and the academies in Edenton, Newbern and Onslow. In all these different places it had been customary for
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young men to complete their classic education, if, through want of funds or other circumstances, they did not seek for further instruc- tion at Nassau Hall, or some New England or foreign college. And it could not immediately appear that Chapel Hill, with the name of University, could do more for the pupils, or as much as some of these institutions.
2d. In the next place the Board of Trustees were almost en- tirely unacquainted with the system of management proper for an University. The only Literary and Scientific institution of any importance in the management of which any of them had been en- gaged was Liberty Hall, unfortunately of too short duration, on account of the invasion of Cornwallis. Many of them had never even been members of a well endowed college, having received their education at one of these Academies, or at some institution of a similar kind. Mr. Caldwell probably understood the proper management of a University better than the whole Board by whom he was to be guided, and to whose will he not unfrequently with reluctance yielded, till longer acquaintance convinced them of the propriety of listening to his counsels in things pertaining to the dis- cipline of the students, and the course of studies. The plan of studies at first proposed partook of the spirit of the day, and is mentioned not as singular, for all public institutions felt the shock, but as a part of that peculiar influence on a new institution, mould- ing its form and directing its course, more decidedly than it could have done with an University or college of long standing. From a card published by a Committee of the Board in the North Caro- lina Journal of December 12th, 1792, is the following extract :- " The objects to which it is contemplated to turn the attention of the students, on the first establishment, are the study of languages, particularly the English ; History, ancient and modern ; the Belles Lettres ; Logic and Moral Philosophy ; Agriculture and Botany, with the principles of Architecture." This list of studies is faulty, not in what it embraces, but in what it leaves out. There was a disposition then growing in the United States to put a lower esti- mate on the acquisition of what are called the " Dead Languages," than had been previously the habit of colleges consecrated by im- memorial usage, or than is now put on them by universal consent. It was more difficult to displace them from their seat of preemi- nence in established colleges, than to introduce them to an institu- tion from which they had been excluded. Had Joseph Caldwell attempted to build the University on the principle of giving the Dead or Classic languages a lower place than Logic or Belles Let-
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tres, or the English language, the University would not now be that flourishing institution, the ornament of the State. He must gain the confidence of a Board who were prepared cheerfully to em- ploy him as the teacher of youth, but not at all ready to receive from his hands the actual direction of the whole course of study and general discipline. One glance at the subject will show the difficulty involved in the situation of the young professor. How many trials must be made ; how many years pass before he could gain that hold on the confidence of the trustees and the commu- nity at large, to enable him to put the University on a firm founda- tion of usefulness and success. It is interesting to look at the progress of the confidential feeling that commenced immediately on his entrance upon the duties of his office. After acting one year as Professor of Mathematics and the head of the institution, here- signed the superintendance, and held the office of Professor of Mathematics ; his successor failing to gain the confidence of the Board, Mr. Caldwell was induced to become head professor again in 1799. In 1804 he was elected to the office of President, being the first to fill that chair in the University. In 1812 he resigned that office, and confined himself to the Mathematical department ; but his successor, as in the former instance, failing to gain the con- fidence necessary to give efficiency to his discipline and instruc- tion, Mr. Caldwell was again called to the chair, in 1816, and con- tinued to hold the office till the day of his death, Tuesday, Jan- uary 27th, 1835. It was under his management that the Univer- sity grew from a high school to the flourishing condition in which his successor found it so favorable for his talents and energy to make it a blessing to his native State in the education of her sons.
The third difficulty was perhaps the more perplexing, requiring prudence, forbearance, and yet great resolution, together with con- fidence, the child of experience and trial ; this was the religious state of the university and of the public mind at the time Mr .. Caldwell became Professor. It is now a matter of history in. philosophy, politics, and religion, that the discussion that had been progressing in France, in which all religious things had undergone the same revolutionizing scrutiny as the errors in politics and the misrule of the government, reached America some time previous to Mr. Caldwell's connection with the University. The whole subject of religion was investigated anew. The arguments against the Bible were set forth in formidable array ; Paine's Age of Rea- son passed from hand to hand, and the Infidel productions of France flooded the country ; the strongest holds of religion were
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shaken ; and in many places the arguments for reason, as para- mount to revelation, gained a temporary victory. Where there were faithful and learned ministers of the gospel the battle was fierce ; where there were none, the infidel argument for a time possessed undisputedly the public mind. In France there were hurtful, degrading superstitions, and wrongs, and outrages, justified openly in the view of the nation by antiquity and the claims of religion, on which the excited revolutionary multitude fed and fat- tened to madness ; and in tearing down the gross deceptions that had been built up through the land as castles, and convents, and tithes, and orders of prelates, and of nobility, without number or mercy, they set fire to the whole edifice of religion in France, and in the dreadful conflagration of ignorance, and superstition, and misrule, and notorious falsehood, they verily believed the Everlast- ing Word had perished. The gospel had, in the opinion of the Infidel party, gone with the royal house and the nobility ; and France expected liberty "when the neck of the last king was strangled by the bowels of the last priest."
In America there were no such evils. The Revolution had swept off the political wrongs and the civil misrule, and what- ever there was, in the different States, of oppression in reli- gious things. There were no superstitious or hereditary wrongs in sacred things to search out ; no time-honored observances to undo ; no lost rights of conscience to recover. The ques- tion was, whether the Bible was true; and all the influence of France, fresh from her sympathies in our contest for liberty, and hot in her struggle for her own, and fervid in her pursuit of science, of fashion, and gaiety, was thrown against the Bible. In France they were already wicked; and the sweeping away of superstition gave relief from oppression, and the commission of some sins ; and France appeared to the philosopher to be regene- rated by the change. In America the war against the Bible proved, in the end, a war against morality and domestic enjoyments, and wherever infidelity got the mastery, there the community suffered. In France rivers of blood washed out the stains of Atheism; in Ame- rica the voice of the Bible and the claims of society were at length heard, and without bloodshed or civil commotion, religion, the reli- gion of the Bible, regained her ascendency. The evil was great, but the remedy has been sure. There was a time when the best men feared lest infidelity should first get the mastery as in France, and then rivers of American blood wash out the stains. It was while infidelity, of which Paine's Age of Reason was a text-book,
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was striding our land, the University went into operation. The first professor, Mr. Kerr, who had been a Presbyterian minister, and had preached in Fayetteville some two years after his arrival in this country, had abandoned the belief in inspiration, and while he was at Chapel Hill was an infidel. Holmes, his assistant teacher, and subsequently a professor of languages, had also given up the gospel, and its hopes, and was a believer in Paine, whose writings he so highly prized, that the only volume he gave the University library, contained the works of that arch-infidel. This unbelief was no silent exercise of his own opinion permitting the community to go on in the belief and practice of Christianity, each man acting as he might choose ; in the communication drawn up by the Faculty requesting his dismission from the University, they say, " he teaches that there is no such thing as virtue; that the love of virtue is no more than superstition, degrading to the minds of men, and not sure to answer their purposes. That to shake off its obligations, and bend with ease to the character and circum- stances of the times so as to advance our own interest or ambition, is the best morality. That therefore, for any person to profess to be governed by the fixed principles of justice or honor, of truth or generosity, is sufficient to stamp him as a hypocrite and a designing knave, "that is lying in wait under these characters for the happiness of others." Kerr left the University in 1795, and Holmes in 1799. While multitudes in Carolina were, as in other parts of the United States, prepared first to doubt and then to disbelieve the Bible, and consequently to set aside religion as a superstition, few were prepared to go the length of Paine and his disciple Holmes, and deny the existence of moral virtue. And when the matter was fairly presented by the amiable and clear minded Caldwell, the board of trustees felt that if rejecting the Bible was rejecting morality, the Bible with all the objections that had been urged, must be retained. Mr. Caldwell tells us that he looked to General Davie, one of the leaders of the Legislature, "the father of the house " as he was styled, that session of the Legislature he attended soon after his arrival in Carolina, and that he was a warm friend, supporter, and trustee of the University. He tells us that he had long and most interesting communications with him on the subject of the truth of the Scriptures, and that his mind was deeply impressed with the conversation. Davie had been taught in his youth to believe the Bible, had passed through the Revolution with honor, doing good service for his country in the camp, was high in the respect of his constituents, and had
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fallen from his belief in the Bible taught him by his maternal uncle, the Rev. William Richardson, whose name he bore, and whose estate he inherited, more probably by sympathy with the popular distrust, than by argument. Caldwell gained his confi- dence and possessed his friendship to the last, reviving the belief of his youth; and who can say but that, like the hero of the Cow- pens, he at last looked to Jesus and found life. Harris, who di- rected the attention of the trustees to Mr. Caldwell as his suc- cessor, was at that time himself shaken in his belief, and thought the Bible was to be abandoned. But his young successor stood up for the gospel of Christ; all that he saw of the fruits and workings of infidelity only turned his heart more strongly to his God and Saviour. "Religion," he says, in 1797, soon after his arrival, "is so little in vogue and in such a state of depression, that it affords no prospect sufficient to tempt people here to un- dertake its cause. In New Jersey it has the public respect and support ; but in North Carolina, particularly in that part that lies east of us, every one believes that the first step he ought to take to rise into respectability is to disavow, as often and as publicly as he can, all regard for the leading doctrines of the Scriptures. They are bugbears very well fitted to scare the mass of the ig- norant, and the weak, into order and obedience to the laws; but for men of letters and cultivated reason, the laws of morality and honor should, and will be sufficient for the regulation of their conduct."
" How unhappy is it for these men, and how instructive to the rest of mankind, that the whole tenor of their lives, and the wretched state of their society, combine to exhibit their doctrines in all their haggardness and shocking deformity." This strong disgust to infidelity from its effects was not confined to the Pro- fessor ; there being no superstitions and erroneous observances to be thrown off, by a rejection of the religion of Protestant Carolina, the denial of the Bible could only weaken the sanctions of virtue and morality, and taking away the fears of future retribution, take away the fear of crime. This fact staring the community in the face, gave the amiable Professor the advantage in his argument ; the thinking and intelligent were made to feel they needed some- thing like the Bible, which men should believe to be true, to hold society together. Caldwell was not what is termed a genius, and probably it is well he was not ; but with clearness and meekness, he could and did defend the religion of his Lord and Master, in a most difficult position, the number of trustees that were at that time firm
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supporters of the Bible being few, though there were some. Whether he could have raised the University, had he yielded to the wave that went over the land and swept off so many, we need not now inquire ; but this is certain, he fought a great battle without noise, and gained a great victory without triumphing ; and permitted the anxiety of the contest, and the blessedness of the victory, to pass along the current of events without exclamation, or demand from his coevals or posterity. We may say of him, as was said of a modest and noble Virginian, by the Speaker of the House-" Sit down, sir, sit down, your modesty is equalled only by your worth."
The last difficulty was, the smallness of the funds and the inade- quate support yielded by the patronage of the State. The funds appropriated by the State were, in part, soon withdrawn, and the rest, together with the donations of individuals, were, for a time, unproductive. It was not till 1811, that by an excursion through the State, and making application to individuals, a list of whose names . he preserved, and the amount of their individual donations, he ob- tained funds to erect buildings sufficient to accommodate the students. In the excursion, he received $12,000. Notwithstanding all this, there was great difficulty in obtaining sufficient means to afford a proper support for the necessary teachers. The wonder is, in looking over the small salaries given for the great labor required, in a situation that offered little attractive in the forests of Carolina, that able men could be obtained to bring talents, and acquirements, and labor adequate to the demands of the rising institution. How could a President, whose doors must be open to a succession of visitors, sustain himself on a thousand dollars a year, and get his own library-and the professors and tutors on a proportionable salary-when a library itself costs some thousands of dollars ? It is a matter of surprise that men could be found to attempt, and more so, that they should succeed in, such an enterprise.
Happy in the choice of his assistant Faculty, and blessed with invincible perseverance, he rejoiced to see all these difficulties overcome. In 1824 he was sent to Europe "in order to direct in person the construction of a Philosophical Apparatus, and to select books for the library." At his death he left the University, still limited in its means, with buildings for the accommodation of a large number of students, with funds for the honorable support of the instructors, with a respectable library and apparatus, and an able Faculty. When he went to Chapel Hill, in 1796, it was doubtful whether anything was to be gained in literary advantages
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at the Hill over the private schools and public academies in the State ; and certain that the morals and principles of the young men were in great danger from the infidel principles that prevailed among the teachers :- When he died, January 27th, 1835, it was the best institution in the State for a complete classical or scientific course, held a respectable stand abroad, and in point of morals as safe as any in the land, and increasing in its reputation. So it is now ; and so may it be for ever.
It was affirmed that the building of the University exemplified the genius of Presbyterianism. This it does in the following par- ticulars : 1st, It shows the unconquerable attachment of its clergy to a sound and liberal education of youth : 2d, their ability to rear a proper institution in very unpropitious circumstances : 3d, their invincible attachment to sound principles of religion and morality : and 4th, their public spirit ; that, while it was well known the University never could become a Presbyterian institution, or be under the direction of that denomination, but, on the contrary, would belong to the State, and very likely always be under a board, the large majority of whom should not be Presbyterians, and an equal proportion of the Faculty, or even all, might at any time be adverse to Presbyterian creed and order, the efforts to make the institutions of the State worthy of the State, and safe for her sons, were unremitted and unequalled. Let religion, and science, and morality, and literature prevail in the Alma Mater of the future children of Carolina, and Joseph Caldwell was satisfied : if his denomination, which he loved, might not have its control, let it be controlled by whom it may, only let the streams that flow from it be pure.
The false notions of what constituted education for young men, that prevailed in the early part of his labors, might have been men- tioned as a serious difficulty for our young professor to encounter. In the year 1797, one warm friend of the University, a member of the board, of high political standing, sent up to Chapel Hill, with letters of introduction to Mr. Caldwell, and high recommendation of excellence in his profession, a dancing-master, to teach the boys manners, with expressions of a hope that the students, with the youths in the neighborhood, would form a school of sufficient in- come to secure the services of this eminent gentleman, with his little son. This was not done in opposition to Mr. Caldwell ; there is every evidence of frankness and candor and conviction of propriety in the gentleman. The difficulty was, that very many in the board who wished well to the institution, did not understand
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fully what a proper education was ; how much attention should be given to the mental, and how much to the physical training ; or even what this training should be. By his kindness and firmness, Mr. Caldwell kept the confidence of the board, and led them to the establishment of a sound and liberal course of education, that may advantageously compare with other institutions ; and under the in- fluence of strict, religious, and elevated morality. Such a man is an ornament of his church and generation.
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