History of Burlington and Mercer counties, New Jersey : with biographical sketches of many of their pioneers and prominent men, Part 48

Author: Woodward, E. M. (Evan Morrison) cn; Hageman, John Frelinghuysen
Publication date: 1883
Publisher: Philadelphia, Pa. : Everts & Peck
Number of Pages: 1096

USA > New Jersey > Burlington County > Burlington > History of Burlington and Mercer counties, New Jersey : with biographical sketches of many of their pioneers and prominent men > Part 48
USA > New Jersey > Mercer County > History of Burlington and Mercer counties, New Jersey : with biographical sketches of many of their pioneers and prominent men > Part 48

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he wrote for newspapers over the familiar signature of " A. A." could be gathered together in a book. The volume entitled " Religious Experience" comes nearest to the picture of his actual preaching. Other productions of his pen, sneh as " Evidence of Chris- tianity," " Moral Science," " History of Colonization," "Log College," etc., give him high rank as a writer, while the pulpit was his throne, and the colloquies of class-room and conference were the ministration with which he impressed the wide world, through living preachers, from his school.

THE REV. JOHN BRECKINRIDGE, D.D., is another of the sainted dead whose praise as a preacher, more than anthor, is yet fragrant in the churches. He was born of an historical and brilliant family iu Ken -. tucky, educated at Princeton College and Seminary. Ile married the eldest daughter of Dr. Samuel Miller, was called to a church in Lexington, Ky., to another in Baltimore, MId., then to the Presbyterian Board of Education, as secretary, in Philadelphia. There hc had a memorable controversy with a Roman Catholic

New Orleans, he served it for a year, until his health failed, wheu, retiring from public duty to the home of his mother in Kentucky, he died iu the forty-fifth year of his age.

The pulpit eloquence of Dr. Alexander was the realization of that best ideal in effective public speech, DR. JAMES W. ALEXANDER, the eldest son of the first professor, was elected by the General Assembly of 1849. IIis career to this date was remarkable. Coming with his father to Princeton at the age of eight years, and prepared for college by several good teachers, he was graduated at the early age of six- teen, and after serving as tutor in college, and pass- ing through the full course of the seminary, he was licensed to preach at the age of twenty-one. Settled as a pastor, first in Virginia, his native State, and next at Trenton, N. J., where he was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church four years. he became Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres in Princeton College in 1833. Here he remained eleven years, a popular teacher, a busy preacher to the colored church, the chapel of the college, and the pulpits of neighboring congregations. A busy author also, ver- satile and facile with the pen, adorning every subject he touched with singular excellence of style and rare adaptation to usefulness in meeting the wants of his time. From the college he removed to New York at the age of forty; and there, in the pastorate which had been adorned by the ministry of Dr. Romeyn, when this accomplished successor was a child, he thorough thinking in preparation, and freedom from artificial prompting by manuscript or notes. Un- equal as it must be, in the changing moods of sensi- bility and emotion belonging to a nature like his, it will sustain, nevertheless, an average of superiority which no other method can approach ; and the fluctuations of frame, which often perhaps mortify the preacher and disappoint his audience, tell the discerning hearer that the faltering energy upon his ear is that of an honest man, who appears to be only what he is and disdains a factitious level of unetion and auima- tion which would conceal the frequent ebbing of mind or heart. Whitefield, in repeating old sermons so con- stantly with ever-sustained power of oratory, was an itineraut, and his fervor was habitual. But Dr. Alex- ander, in one locality for almost forty years, seldom repeated himself, and when he did, substantially, the fresh variety of stress and animation was such that sameness could seldom be recognized. Like George Whitefield, he was too vivid and copious to be printed well. His extant and published sermons have not transmitted the strength and lustre which belonged to the living preacher, and yet these might reappear in great measure if the seasonable and pithy articles . laid anew the foundations of that great church, then

Alerg. J. McGill

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the Duane Street, now the Fifth Avenue Chureli, Gen. D. B. Mitchell. and Judge William H. Craw- ford, who had been Secretary of the Treasury and a nominee for the Presidency of the United States. Constrained by such friends to remain at Milledge- ville, he began the study of law under the guidance of ex-Governor Mitchell, and was admitted to the bar by a license from the hand of Judge Crawford, in 1830, at the age of twenty-three. and in numbers, wealth, liberality, and influence the strongest of Protestant churches in America. For an interval of two years,-1849-51,-it has been well said, lie was but loaned to the seminary. Notwith- ! standing the delicacy of his health, which, it had been supposed, would be benefited by a return to the scholar's life in Princeton, he was by the irresistible impulses of his nature, as well as the urgency of his flock, drawu back to the pastoral care, where he un- dertook more toil than ever. The critical task of ! elianging the locality of an old historie church, aud filling the grand edifice, built up-town, on the most fashionable thoroughfare of the metropolis, with an andience capable of appreciating his unrivaled com- position and delivery of sermons, and that without the opportunity of repeating old sermons in another place, must have been enough to kill a giant in bodily health. His success in such circumstances, continued for eight years more of fragile life, was almost mir- aeulons. Ile died in 1859, and the only biography , government at Washington to extinguish the Indian extant of this great and good man is the fascinating book, in two volumes, of " Forty Years' Correspond- enee" between him and Dr. John Hall, of Trenton.

DR. ALEXANDER T. McGILL was born in 1807, at Cauonsburg, Pa. His primary education preparing . in fulfilling this condition, which involved the re-

him for college was had at Pittsburgh, Pa., and in 1822 he entered, as a freshman, Jefferson College in his native town. There he became a student of some distinction in his class, notwithstanding a delicate and fragile constitution which seriously interfered with study. During his four years at college he was re- peatedly honored for composition and oratory, and graduated with honor, being valedictorian of his class. At the age of nineteen he was made tutor in college, and began at the same time the study of Hebrew and theology in the oldest theological seminary of this country, organized in the last century among the woods of Western Pennsylvania. It was then located at Canonsburg, nuder the authority and control of the . tribution among the citizens of Georgia.

Shortly after this admission the Legislature of Georgia convened, and Mr. McGill, having secured the favor of leading members in both Houses the previous year, was now the recipient of appointments by both Houses, honorable and lucrative, such as secretary to the Joint Committee on Education, and assistant clerk in the House of Representatives. But the most important appointment, conferred by joint ballot of the Senate and Honse of Representatives, was that of surveyor of the Cherokee land reservation in that State. The statute creating this office was made in pursuance of a claim by Georgia upon the title within her established limits, as a condition sub- scqueut to the eession of her vast colonial territory, which had now become the States of Alabama and Mississippi. The general government was too slow

moval of the Cherokees to another reservation west of the Mississippi, and Georgia, becoming impatient, at length determined to remove them by her own force. Hence the act of her Legislature and Execu- tive, under which Mr. McGill and eleven others were elected to survey at once the Cherokee lands. Of the twelve elected he and Col. Thomas, a man of middle age and a distinguished geometer, were selected to begin the survey by running the inter-State lines, and making a base for the division of that territory into four parts by sectional lines north and south, in order to lay out the work for the other ten surveyors, who were to parcel the land into small lots for dis-

Associate Presbyterian Synod, now incorporated with This movement was condemned at Washington by the retiring authorities there,-President Adams and Attorney-General Wirt,-and but for the accession of Andrew Jackson to power at the erisis it would have made a terrible collision. The Cherokees were exasperated, and threatened death to the first man that would stretch a chain over their land; so that when the day eame for beginning the survey, Col. Thomas was sick in his tent, and devolved on his junior the task of setting a "Jacob's staff" and un- rolling the chain. This was done by Mr. McGill, between a hostile parade of Indians on the one side and a protecting guard of forty dragoons on the other. After this beginning Thomas left for his home, and McGill alone accomplished the survey. Throughout the work of three months' duration he had to eneoun- ter many dangers. The military escort was of little avail on the straight lines he measured over moun- the United Presbyterian General Assembly. After one year of theological study, along with arduous labor of teaching in the college, he became despond- ent in regard to his health. By the advice of friends and physicians he determined to try a more Southern climate, and accordingly went as far as Milledgeville, then the capital of Georgia. Having testimonials with him of his character and scholarship, he was chosen "reetor of Baldwin Academy," in that city, a position of great responsibility and usefulness, the germ of Oglethorpe University, organized not long afterwards. But, althoughi assisted by able teachers, the burden of teaching Latin, Greek, and mathematics together proved too much for his health, and in less than a year he resigned the position. Yet he had found the climate beneficial, and had won many friends, who became personally interested in his welfare, among whom were Governor George R. Gilmer, ex-Governor | tains and thiekets and swamps. Hostile surprises

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HISTORY OF MERCER COUNTY, NEW JERSEY.

had to be met with personal courage and courtesy orator in the cause of temperance and, other good combined, and with a constant appeal to an intluence works of moral reform. over the Cherokee nation at that time more puissant

He was ordained to the ministry at Carlisle, Pa., by far than the armies of Georgia, and that was the . in 1835, after itincrating one year, as the rule was in friendly favor of Butler and Worcester, the illustrious : in the Seceder Synod (now United Presbyterian missionaries, who suffered in the sequel the punish- Church). Three competing calls to Baltimore, Car- ment of felons at the hands of Georgia justice for . lisle, and Lewistown had been put into his hands, passive resistance to the act which ordered that survey.

The young surveyor was received on "Missionary Ridge" with hospitality and kindness. His errand was eondemned, but his person was more than re- speeted. In attempting to expostulate with them he was made a captive to the moral heroism of their op- position. He left them with regret for what he al- ways considered a mistake of their judgment and a fault of their conscience, but with an inward resolve to forsake the world and return to his own first love, a life of consecration like theirs. That survey was finished with celerity and success. Governor Gilmer asked a delegation from the Cherokee people, " What about that slim young man who goes through your land stretching a chain and hacking your trees ?" A half-breed answered, "Oh, he's a leather string: the harder you pull him the tougher he grows." This name, "leather-string," greeted him on every hand when he returned to Milledgeville and filed his re- port in the surveyor's office of the government. His praise was published throughout the commonwealth, lawyers of the highest rank offered him a partnership in the practice of law, and even a nomination for con- gressman-at-large was informally tendered him when he was but twenty-four years of age.

But his resolution was fixed; his health had been tested and invigorated beyond his hope in regard to it when he left home in the North, and he returned to a pious mother whom he had idolized from his infancy. In the summer of 1831 he traveled from Milledgeville to Canonsburg on horseback, a distance of seven hundred miles, and resumed studies in preparation for the ministry, which he there pursued for three years more. During that period all his vacation time was spent in traversing his native hills and valleys,- first, for the diffusion of the Bible to every family in Washington County, and next, for the cause of tem- perance reform. Both these enterprises were at first unwelcome to the rigid and austere denomination with which he was identified, Presbyterian Seceders, who largely filled the settlements of Western Penn- sylvania from the beginning. He was reproached as a latitudinarian innovator. But soon his persever- ance and address gained their confidence. In almost every school-house of the county his audiences were gathered and crowded with Seccders. In almost every home of the elder he procured signatures to the pledge of abstinence. Distilleries among thein ceased. Liberality and the spirit of co-operative union were awakened, and before his lieense to preach was ob- tained he had acquired the reputation of an effective

and he submitted the decision to the Presbytery of Philadelphia, which licensed him. They settled him at Carlisle, where he had in charge four places of preaching, all of them feeble, and not one of them a nucleus even for a fair prospect of success to any man in gathering a church. His salary was four hundred and fifty dollars per annum, and he had to keep a horse at his own expense in meeting his appointments. The toil and self-sacrifice, however, proved a benefit and blessing at his chosen work of preaching the gospel. Each station of his widely-scattered charge 'was crowded with audiences from other churches, and thus his usefulness extended over a large area in Middle Pennsylvania, without the slightest effort or aim at proselyting. In 1837 he was married to Eleanor Acheson, the eldest daughter of Gen. George McCulloch, of Lewistown, Pa., then State senator, and afterwards member of Congress. In the same year he was called to a new organization in the city of Philadelphia, which he served without installation for six months, resigning the country circuit of which he was pastor.

i But in the spring of 1838, being discontented with I the feuds and cramping rigidities of the " Associate Synod," in which he was born, and seeing at that time conservative elements of the Old-School Pres- byterian Church sifted out and separately organized, he determined to east in his lot with this body, and towards the autumn of that year he asked for dismis- sion to the Presbytery of Carlisle, in connection with the Old-School General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. His reasons were detailed candidly and re- spectfully in making the application, but he was in- Istantly suspended from the ministry for making such request by a vote of two ministers and three elders. The Presbytery of Carlisle, however, just as instantly declared the suspension "null and void," and a call from the Second Presbyterian Church of Carlisle was put into his hands and accepted. This rough transi- tion began a happy life of usefulness in his sacred office. Settled with a people who had known well his manner of life, in connection with another body, he was unanimously welcomed, and greatly pros- pered as a preacher, until called to be a theological professor at Alleghany, 1842.

The General Assembly of that year elected him unanimously to the seminary at Alleghany, but with some hesitation and debate about the expediency of continuing that institution at all. Without endow- ment and almost without students, and the title to the ground itself on a public common of pasture being in litigation, and many of the people in that

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PRINCETON.

region of dense Presbyterianism having little or no confidence in the experiment of its continuance by yearly collections in the churches to support it, there was on every hand only a forlorn hope of success.

But it was a good hope, genial to the heart of one so fond of adventure, and now at home, among his native hill's and a people whom be understood from his youth. At great privation and without a dollar of : him to frequent responsibilities of an occasional salary for a year and more Dr. McGill accepted and persisted. The flock at Carlisle seeing the struggle called him back with perfect unanimity and urgent entreaty ; a second offer to him of the presidency at Lafayette College was declined, so also the presi- dency of Ohio University was twice declined. The presidency of Washington College, near his birth- place, and afterwards that of Jefferson, at his birth- place, were declined, not to mention calls from im- portant churches East and West, and the tender of his resignation in 1851 was refused by the directors and the General Assembly.

Meanwhile the seminary prospered after his acces- sion, going up in the number of students from four- teeu to fifty-four. Engaging again the interest of the churches in that favored country and the confi- dence of wealthy men in the cities, endowments were subscribed, but the progress was comparatively slow. One of the three professors resigned iu discourage- ment, and his department of Hebrew and Exegesis devolved on Dr. McGill for five years, additional work too much for his health. The two professors, left with fifty students, had to submit to a reductiou of twenty per cent. on their salaries to assist in gather- ing the foundation of any salary at all. The pastorate of a large Presbyterian congregation in Pittsburgh, the Second Church, was offered in the circumstances to Dr. McGill at a salary of twelve hundred dollars, , without parsonage or any additional means to pay rent. He consented to try for a year this plurality of charges, both salaries amounting by addition to two thousand four hundred dollars without a house. Meanwhile, and indeed all the time he served the seminary at Alleghany, he was exhausting private means to support his family, and depended on a valuable farm he owned at Carlisle.

It is a significant fact, worthy of note in this record, that thronghout a ministry of forty-seven years, in which time he has reared a family of seven children, all of them liberally educated, Dr. McGill has expended twice as much at least as the aggregate of all the salaries and compensations he has ever re- ceived from the church. Without inheriting a dollar, the little sum he earned and saved before he entered the ministry has been like the "handful of meal in a barrel" at Zarephath. Instead of being " wasted," it has been increased as consuming increased by thrift of the servant and care of "a faithful creator." The , Charleston ; Thornwell. president of South Carolina God of the church is always more liberal than the church herself in providing for the man whose "meat and drink" is to do His will.

An extremely delicate constitution from his youth was now overloaded with toil and care. Besides the double capacity of teacher and preacher, three de- partments of the seminary as it now is at Alleghany, , and a large congregation to be served in Pittsburgh were not all the burdens of work assigned to him. : The whole community of evangelical ministers held

nature. When Louis Kossuth, the great Hungarian exile, came to the country and traversed the West as well as the East with his entrancing eloquence, the Protestant ministers of both cities invited Dr. McGill to address him on their behalf with a speech of wel- come. Irritated, perhaps, with the significance of that grand reception, and still more with a sermon preached by him at Baltimore, according to previous appointment of the General Assembly in 1848, when Dr. McGill, the author, was moderator of that body, entitled " Popery the Punishment of Unbelief," a ser- mon sent by the board of publication to every church in the connection, Bishop O'Conner, of the Roman Catholic Church in Pittsburgh, assailed the whole Protestant community in a public lecture which claimed that everything good in modern civilization, even the common law of England, was derived from the Church of Rome. Dr. McGill was called again to represent the ministry in refuting that claim. Al- ternately lecturing in the Masonic Hall for weeks against each other, without acrimony or personal abuse, these champions made immense excitement through Western Pennsylvania, the whole debate being published from week to week in the daily papers. The prelate, on the one side, was known to be scholarly and eloquent ; the professor, on the other, was known to be at home in history, and otherwise equal in accomplishments. The result ap- peared to be the greatest triumph on the platform in his life. The bishop lost the favor of Rome by his defeat, and was soon afterwards retired to conventual life.

This debate, however, proved that the winner bim- self had overtaxed, by his many labors, a physical framework which had never been strong. In one of' his public lectures during that controversy, after speaking about an hour, he fainted away on the plat- form, alarming his friends, and indicating plainly that his life itself demanded a limitation of toil, either by cessation or change. Accordingly, an offer of a chair in the Theological Seminary at Columbia, S. C., which hal been declined a year previously, was unex- pectedly renewed, and was now accepted. He re- signed at Alleghany in 1852, and tried the Southern climate, which had been so beneficial in his early manhood. A cordial welcome greeted his accession there by such representative men as Drs. Smyth, of College ; Howe, Lelaud, Palmer, etc., of Columbia. But he could not remain more than one winter. I Symptoms of hepatic trouble in the spring, reluctance

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HISTORY OF MERCER COUNTY, NEW JERSEY.

of his family to leave Pennsylvania for the South, and

Here the eventfulness of his life has been no longer tokens of approaching civil convulsion, on account ' salient in the ministry, and needs no special record. of slavery, combined to determine him to return and retire to his farm at Carlisle, Pa. exeept that of sad bereavement and vicissitude in his family relations. For twenty-eight years of laborious But when the General Assembly met in 1853, he . devotion he has lived and prospered in theological found that these movements were grievously misun- derstood by the church at large, and ascribed by many to indeeision of mind or debility of will, anything but the true cause, a broken constitution by hard education at Princeton. Failing, indeed, all this time to sceure alleviation of task in his work, having one professorship which is two in other conspicuous institutions of the kind, loaded with financial agency work and inadequate support among the people he . and care by special appointment of the board occa- served. The representatives of this people at that sionally, as well as by the faculty all the time, he has carried a fragile body beyond the limit of three- score years and ten. Authorship, long projected, has been made impossible, as yet, by the multiplied cares and busy engagements of his position. Many Assembly were discerning enough, however, to vin- dieate him from such reproaches by having him recalled to Alleghany with acclamation. He re- turned there, and resumed the duties of the chair he had resigned; his family being there all the while, | published sermons, addresses, discussions, and re- and the material interest of the seminary being much views might be mentioned here as from his pen. improved. He now felt sincerely that the home of | Four of his sons have been liberally edueated and his youth was to be the home of his remaining life- grown to manhood in New Jersey. The eldest fills an honored grave at Princeton, a soldier and surgeon of brilliant though short career in the regular United States army ; the second, bearing his own name, a jurist of acknowledged ability and success in Jersey City ; the third, a physician and surgeon in the same city, of large practice in his profession, as well as usefulness in important municipal offices ; the fourth, a lawyer, recently admitted to the bar after an ample and liberal education. His eldest daughter is mar- ried to the Rev. Joseph Gamble, of St. Louis, now settled as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, Plattsburgh, N. Y .; his second daughter is wife of Charles S. Lane, banker in Hagerstown, Md., aud the youngest daughter is unmarried. time. Sundry mortifications, however, molested his comfort. A degree of coldness on the part of his colleagues, natural enough in view of his deliberate · separation from them for a time ; a demand from lead- ing trustees that a residence for him on seminary ground, like those now provided for the other profes- sors, should be built by his own means, or by what he could beg from his particular friends,-these and other like frigid realizations were sufficiently disappointing and depressing. Thoughts of retirement to his farm, in the midst of another people, where he had been a happy pastor, again brought him to the point of re- signing his professorship and devoting himself to the edueation of his children at home ; the eldest, a son, being almost prepared for eollege.

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History of Burlington and Mercer counties, New Jersey : with biographical sketches of many of their pioneers and prominent men, Part 48

Author: Woodward, E. M. (Evan Morrison) cn; Hageman, John Frelinghuysen Publication date: 1883 Publisher: Philadelphia, Pa. : Everts & Peck Number of Pages: 1096

Author: Woodward, E. M. (Evan Morrison) cn; Hageman, John Frelinghuysen
Publication date: 1883
Publisher: Philadelphia, Pa. : Everts & Peck
Number of Pages: 1096