STORY OF EGE ING A HISTORY OF WILLIAMS COLLEGE MARK HOPKINS PRESIDENT OF WILLIAMS COLLEGE 1836-1872 A HISTORY OF WILLIAMS COLLEGE BY LEVERETT WILSON SPRING EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY <*fc tttoetfibe $re&* CambriDge 1917 $ COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY LEVERRTT WILSON SPRING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published June igrj CONTENTS I. THE FOUNDER i II. WEST TOWNSHIP AND THE FREE SCHOOL . . . .17 III. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE 42 IV. WlLLIAMSTOWN OR ELSEWHERE? 94 V. A SECOND AND GREATER CRISIS 124 VI. HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR OF THE OLDER WILLIAMS . 154 VII. A PERIOD OF TRANSITION 227 VIII. THE NEW WILLIAMS 243 IX. LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER 277 APPENDIX I. Inventory of Ye Late Eph m Williams Chest . . .323 II. Ephraim Williams Library 324 III. New York and Vermont Stages 325 IV. Extract from an Old Letter 325 V. Williams College: an announcement 326 VI. Penalties or "Mulcts" according to the By-Laws of 1795 327 VII. Letter to President John Adams, and President Adams' Reply 329 VIII. Williams Volunteers, Graduate and Non-Graduate, in the Civil War, and their Rank 332 IX. Bill Pratt 333 INDEX . . . ., .335 369906 ILLUSTRATIONS MARK HOPKINS Frontispiece WEST COLLEGE, FROM A DAGUERREOTYPE TAKEN FOR THE CLASS OF 1848 38 WEST COLLEGE AS IT is IN 1917 38 ZEPHANIAH SWIFT MOORE 98 EDWARD DORR GRIFFIN 124 GRIFFIN HALL 132 SKETCH OF THE CAMPUS MADE BETWEEN 1828 AND 1837 H 6 MARK HOPKINS 154 From a daguerreotype taken probably in 1844 HOPKINS OBSERVATORY 164 PAUL ANSEL CHADBOURNE 228 FRANKLIN CARTER 244 THOMPSON MEMORIAL CHAPEL 248 JOHN HASKELL HEWITT 254 HENRY HOPKINS 256 HARRY AUGUSTUS GARFIELD 260 GRACE HALL AND WILLIAMS HALL 306 GREYLOCK AND THE HOPPER 312 FACSIMILE OF "THE MOUNTAINS" 318 A HISTORY OF WILLIAMS COLLEGE CHAPTER I THE FOUNDER FOR the first two thirds of the forty years and six months which comprise the lifetime of Colonel Ephraim Williams, founder of the college, biographic materials are few and meagre. The vital records of his native town, the will of his grandfather, and an unsigned "Sketch" in the eighth volume of the " Col- lections" of the Massachusetts Historical Society seem to be the only available sources of information. It appears that April I, 1713, Ephraim Williams, Senior, of Newton, married Elizabeth, daughter of Abraham Jackson, a substantial and reputable towns- man, and that their eldest son, Ephraim, Junior, was born March 7, 1715, or, by old style, February 24, 1714. On the I2th of April, 1718, and a few days after the birth of a second son, Thomas, Elizabeth Williams died, and her two children were practically adopted by their grandfather. From the date of his mother's death until January 3, 1738-39, when Abra- ham Jackson, "Being under the Decays and Infirmi- ties of Age, But of perfect Mind and Memory, thanks be given to God," executed his last will and testa- ment, an interval of twenty-one years, no ref- i WILLIAMS COLLEGE erence to the founder has been discovered in any contemporary document or publication. Of this last will and testament he was naturally one of the bene- ficiaries: "I give and Bequeath to my Grandson Ephraim Williams . . . the sum of Fifty Pounds in Money to be paid . . . within Five years Next after my Decease." Whatever the reason for discrimina- tion may have been, and it is not now obvious, the younger brother received a much larger share of the estate than the elder. " I have expended a consider- able Sum," the testator observes, "for bringing up and educating my Grandson, Thomas Williams . . . and have put into the hands of his Father . . . one hundred and Forty Pounds in Money to be Im- proved and laid out to the Best advantage of my said Grandson." l The "Sketch," printed nearly half a century after the death of the founder, devotes only two sentences to the long pre-Berkshire period of his career: "For several years in early life [he] followed the seas; but by persuasion of his father relinquished that business. In his several voyages to Europe he visited England, Spain and Holland; acquired graceful manners and a considerable stock of useful knowledge." Ebenezer Fitch, first president of Williams Col- lege and heretofore supposed to have been sole author of the "Sketch," had an important collaborator. "I have received a letter," the former wrote the Secretary 1 Witt of Abraham Jackson, Registry of Probate, East Cambridge. Thomas Williams, a prominent physician and surgeon, settled at Deerfield in 1739 and died there in 1775. He entered Yale in the class of 1738, but did not graduate. In 1741 Yale gave him the honorary degree of A.M. 2 THE FOUNDER of the Historical Society, January 26, 1801, "from the Rev. Dr. Miller of New York, requesting informa- tion about the rise and progress of this institution, its friends, Library, Apparatus, courses of instruction, expenses of education, &c. In answering this letter I have nearly drawn up the historical account you desire. I wish to insert some further Memoirs of our Founder. . . . These I have requested Dr. [Stephen] West of Stockbridge to furnish. He married Col. Williams' [hal^-sister. 1 1 expect his response this week. I will improve the first opportunity after I get it to complete the account and send it to you." 2 The "further Memoirs," therefore, of the "historical ac- count" embody the recollections and impressions of surviving members of the Williams family. It is not until November 3, 1742, that the biog- raphy of the founder becomes definitely legible. On that day a Berkshire Justice of the Peace made the following entry in his records: " Personally appeared Eph m Williams, Jun. the Surveyor . . . Joseph Allen, one of the Chainmen, and made Solemn oath that in their Several Capacities . . . they acted Honestly and faithfully according to their best Skill and Judg- ment. The other Chainman (Viz) Joseph Wattkins, being removed to a Considerable Distance Could not be Sworn." 3 The exact date of the arrival of " Eph m 1 Dr. West, a graduate of Yale, chaplain at Fort Massachusetts for a year or more, vice-president of Williams College from 1793 to 1812, was a prominent clergyman in the Berkshires for sixty years. He mar- ried Elizabeth Williams, who died in 1804 at the age of seventy-four years. Elijah Williams, half-brother of the founder, was also a resident of Stockbridge at this time. * Fitch, MS. letter, Mass. His. Society, 41 F. 207. 3 Mass. Archives, Maps and Plans, xxxin, 24. 3 WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williams, Jun.," at Stockbridge an Indian Mission where his father settled in 1737 is uncertain, but when he appeared before the justice he had been in that town long enough to become known as "the Surveyor/' After the lapse of eighteen months when no trace of him survives, he reappeared and as representative of Stockbridge at the General Court for the session beginning May 30, 1744, and concluding the 25th of the next April. 1 He served on two important com- mittees, and "his politeness and address," it is said, "procured for him greater influence than any other person at that day possessed." 2 Then, in the summer of 1745, he received a captain's commission and was assigned to the command of Fort Shirley one of the small military stations established along the western frontier of Massachusetts. From thence he presently transferred his headquarters to Fort Mas- sachusetts, a later and more important post between East Hoosac and West Township, renamed North Adams and Williamstown, and continued in ac- tive service until 1748 when the treaty of Aix la Chapelle brought King George's War to an end. During this desultory border struggle only one local event has much present interest or importance the capture and destruction of Fort Massachu- setts by a few hundred French and Indians under the command of Rigaud Vaudreuil, Town Major of Three Rivers, Canada. The disaster occurred in August, 1746, and when Captain Williams was absent in Al- 1 Journal, Mass. H.R., July I, 1744. * Mass. His. Society, Collections, viu, 48. 4 THE FOUNDER bany whither he had gone to take part in a projected attack upon Montreal. 1 Two years later the fort having been rebuilt meantime another skulking band of hostiles made an unsuccessful attempt to re- peat the exploit. A few weeks before the second raid upon Fort Massachusetts Colonel John Stoddard, of North- ampton, died. He was the man whom Ephraim Wil- liams characterized in his will as "my great benefac- tor." This event a ministerial friend the Rev. Tim- othy Woodbridge, of Hatfield made the occasion of a letter in which he set forth with unmistakable earnestness and perhaps with a shade of solicitude his conception of that happy warrior, ''Whom every man in arms should wish to be." "I cannot forget you at Fort Massachusetts, " so this letter, written July 21, 1748, begins, "but fre- quently paint you in my mind, sometimes laughing and in a merry mood, sometimes thinking. ... It is in the latter circumstances that I view you whilst writing, and here suffer me to say that to do what good we can in the Station which providence has as- signed us is our indispensable Duty and [I] hope Constantly governs you. The opportunity that either you or I shall have to do any good in this world is but short and . . . the Supreme Judge will one day demand an account of our Conduct. Let us do nothing now that we will then be ashamed of. ... You will allow me to add that it is but part of the business ... of an 1 Stone, Life and Times of Sir William Johnson, I, 225. Sheldon, History of Deerfield, I, 543. 5 WILLIAMS COLLEGE officer to instruct his men in their Duty as soldiers and see that they do it, but to suppress vice and . . . immorality, to inculcate sobriety, temperance and Christian virtue; . . . and I hope that you will leave this witness in the breasts ... of your soldiers that you have led them by your precepts and example in the paths of virtue. What a noble Example has Col. Stoddard left every military officer who had the happiness to be acquainted with him. . . . Whilst I mention that great man whose face we shall see no more, I would Drop a tear with you over his grave. I know his Death must sensibly touch you. . . . Let his shining example continually live with us. I hope a good providence will preserve health to you and your Soldiers & save you from falling into the hands of the Enemy/' l The seven years of King George's War were fol- lowed by seven years of peace. For the first half of this latter period the years from 1748 until well on into 1752 Captain Williams seems to have re- mained at Fort Massachusetts, where life must have been somewhat vacant and monotonous. He had the respect and affection of the little garrison and that was something. " His kind and obliging deportment," Dr. West wrote, "his generosity and condescension greatly endeared him to his soldiers He frequently entered into the pastimes . . . upon an equal footing with them and permitted every decent freedom; and again, when the diversions were over, he, with ease and dignity, became the Captain." His official duties, 1 Israel Williams, Letters and Papers, I, 32. 2 Mass. His. Society, Collections, vni, 48. 6 THE FOUNDER such as making out muster-rolls, ordering supplies of medicine, provisions, and New England rum, were not burdensome. On one occasion the usual routine was interrupted by the appearance of a deputation of Indians, who claimed to own the land upon which the fort stood and wanted to be paid for it. These enter- prising aborigines did not succeed in collecting their bill. At least one parcel of books was forwarded to the founder in the months of relative quiet. It would be interesting to know something more about these books than that he was impatient to get them and that they were packed with care. "I will Do 'em up well," his half-sister, Mrs. Abigail Sergeant, wrote Thomas Williams, July 18, 1750, "Send 'em to ye fort [Massa- chusetts] Next week. They shall Be Sealed with orders not to Be Broke. Books gett much Damage by Transport.' 1 * Tiring of the petty round of garrison life, Ephraim Williams spent the second half of this peaceful inter- val partly at Stockbridge where a serious crisis in the affairs of his family required attention, and partly at Hatfield, the home of an attractive cousin, Eliza- beth Williams, to whom, if a persistent tradition may be trusted, he was by no means indifferent. But this intermediate period, wherever he may have spent it, was essentially a time of waiting and vacuum. Viewed in their larger aspects these seven years must be reckoned merely as a truce during the long fight for North America, while the combatants took breath and prepared to renew the undecided struggle. 1 R. H. W. Dwight, Collection. 7 WILLIAMS COLLEGE In this critical time of suspense, when it became evi- dent that hostilities would presently be resumed, the most active and efficient leader among the colonials was William Shirley, Governor of Massachusetts. He drew up plans for fitting out four considerable expeditions which were to attempt the capture of as many French military posts Crown Point, on Lake Champlain; Fort Beausejour, in Acadia; Fort Duquesne, at the junction of the Allegheny and Mo- nongahela Rivers; and Fort Niagara, dominating the passage between Lakes Ontario and Erie. This com- prehensive plan received the formal approval of a council of war held in Alexandria, Virginia, April 14, 1755, at which General Edward Braddock, commander- in-chief of His Majesty's forces, and five colonial governors were present. The only one of these campaigns with which we are particularly concerned is that against Crown Point, a fortified post of great strategic importance, as it practically controlled the most practicable route from New York to Montreal. Since several colonies Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York were to take part in the expedition and jealousies abounded, it was not easy to find a satisfactory leader. Governor Shirley solved the problem by selecting a civilian for the position William Johnson, who had lived in the Mohawk country seventeen years and developed remarkable skill in dealing with Indians. The Alexandria coun- cil, fully persuaded that a man who could manage the Six Nations would be able to capture Crown Point, not only confirmed his appointment, but declared 8 THE FOUNDER him to be "the properest person to have command of the expedition." 1 Johnson himself, however, was not so sure about it and accepted the position with some reluctance and misgiving. 2 The Massachusetts quota of troops comprised three regiments, one of which Hampshire County, then including the Berkshires, must furnish. Nobody in that county could undertake the task of recruiting it with any such assurance of success as Ephraim Wil- liams. Every one liked and trusted him. "His ad- dress/' Dr. West tells us, "was easy and his manners pleasing and conciliatory. Affable and facetious, he could make himself agreeable in all companies; and was very generally esteemed, respected and beloved." 3 The four hundred and twenty "private men," whose names appear on the muster-roll of this Hampshire regiment, were readily secured. Commissioned as their colonel March 28, 1755, Ephraim Williams en- tered upon the final period of his military service a brief period of twenty-three weeks and three days. 4 He seems to have perceived, indistinctly it may be, the momentous nature of the issues involved in the re- awakened struggle. Though he had probably never heard of the ambitious schemes that fascinated dar- ing spirits in the cabinet of Louis XV, schemes to check the westward movement of English colonists by a chain of forts from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and perhaps ultimately drive them out 1 Documentary History of the State of New York, II, 379. 2 Correspondence of William Shirley, n, 169. 8 Mass. His. Society, Collections, vin, 48. 4 Mass. Archives, Muster-Rolls, xciv, 7. WILLIAMS COLLEGE of the continent, yet he did not fail to realize the necessity of putting an end once for all to the French peril. " I have a great desire," he wrote, " I have a great desire Canada should be demolished." l Albany, then a palisaded, frontier town of twenty- eight hundred inhabitants, was the natural base for the expedition against Crown Point, and on the 3ist of May the Hampshire regiment began to move to- ward this rendezvous "each man being allowed 6 days for his march" of fifty or sixty miles. By the middle of July three thousand provincials and two or three hundred Indians had reached the camp. The personal letters of Colonel Williams, written during the two months he remained in Albany, four of which have been preserved, are unmistakably ap- prehensive and despondent. Especially is this true of the latest, dated Tuesday, July 22. Local condi- tions what with the little army of undisciplined yeomanry and Mohawk Indians mustered for the expedition, the inadequacy of the commissariat, the primitive means of transportation, and the obtrusive evidence of confusion everywhere were sufficiently unpromising, but during the preceding evening ru- mors reached him that the expedition against Fort Duquesne had met with a crushing disaster. Colonel Williams was greatly depressed by the news, and in this despondent mood wrote his final letter from Al- bany: "It is to be feared that General Braddock is cut to pieces and a great part of his army. . . . The Lord have mercy upon poor New England." 2 The period of delay continued eleven days after 1 Israel Williams, Letters and Papers, I, 120. * Ibid., I., 156. IO THE FOUNDER this black Tuesday. On the 2d of August, Colonel Williams broke camp and set out for Great Carrying Place, a military station on the Hudson River about sixty miles above Albany. 1 He made slow progress, and did not reach his destination until August 14. It was a hard trip and the men are said to "have been extremely beat out in hauling the battoes over the several falls." General Johnson also arrived the same day "with about 20 Indians fit for war," 2 and remained until August 26, in doubt what to do next whether to move northeast to Wood Creek or north- west to the foot of Lake George. Three of Colonel Williams* letters, written during the time of hesitation at Great Carrying Place, have been preserved. From the tenor of the first, dated August 1 6, it would seem that some vague, undefined presentment of evil haunted him. "I hereby mourn with you in the loss of y'r Brother," he wrote Israel Williams. " Pray God to sanctify itjio all of us, & fit us for our own turns which will soon arrive how soon God only knows. I beg your prayers for us all & me in perticular." 3 In the last letter, dated August 23, personal considerations give place to anxieties about the conditions and prospects of the expedition, which could hardly fail to be disquieting. Other adverse ele- ments were plenty, but, in the opinion of Colonel Wil- 1 The post had an unusual succession of names. A letter from Moses Porter captain in Ephraim Williams' regiment is " Dated at the Carrying Place, alias Fort Nicholson, alias Lydius fort, alias Tadmor in the Wilderness i6th of August." The next letter, however, written at the same place two days later, gives his address as "The Fort without a Name." (Porter, MSS. letters, Mass. His. Society.) The modern name of the town is Fort Edward. 1 Israel Williams, Letters and Papers, I, 170. 8 Ibid., I, 170. II WILLIAMS COLLEGE liams, General Johnson could not capture Crown Point with his present force. Instead of three thousand men there ought to have been ten or twelve thousand. " If we should be beat," he wrote, "our country is lost." 1 General Johnson finally decided to proceed toward Crown Point by way of Lake George and ordered the pioneers to hew a passable road through the four- teen miles of pine forest that lay between him and the foot of it. 2 Leaving a garrison at Great Carrying Place, he started Tuesday, August 26, with the rest of his army for the new camp in a wilderness where "no house was ever before built nor a rod of land cleared," 3 and reached his destination late Thursday afternoon. The secular activities and emergencies of the situation did not prevent a due religious observance of the two following Sundays, as preaching services, attended by Mohawks as well as colonials, were held on both of them. But the enemy a mixed force of Indians, Canadians, and French regulars under the command of Baron Dieskau 4 did not spend these Sundays in divine worship. Whatever they may have been about on the first of them, on the other they " marched nine leagues, always through woods and over mountains," 5 and reached the vicinity of the English forces. During the evening of the second Sunday September 7 General Johnson learned, and evidently to his sur- prise, that the invaders were in the neighborhood. 1 Israel Williams, Letters and Papers, I, 170. 2 Stone, Life and Times of Sir William Johnson, i, 507. 3 Documentary History of the State of New York, n, 689. 4 "An elderly man and very much of a gentleman." (Captain Peter Wraxall, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, VI, 1003.) 6 Ibid., x, 339. 12 THE FOUNDER After a council of war, held the next morning, he or- dered Colonel Williams, who possessed his confidence in a greater degree than any other officer of the staff, 1 to make a reconnoissance for the purpose of discover- ing their whereabouts and intentions. The latter left the camp, " between eight and nine o'clock," with one thousand colonials and two hundred Indians. Though an experienced frontiersman and familiar with the tactics of border warfare, he failed to protect his front and flanks with scouts and consequently fell into a disastrous ambuscade. "My dear brother Ephraim," wrote Thomas Wil- liams in a letter to his wife, ". . . was killed in the be- ginning of the action by a ball through his head." 2 The provincials, thrown into confusion by the sudden attack and the loss of their commander, fled toward the camp, which the enemy, in hot pursuit, attempted unsuccessfully to carry by storm. Though failing in their first dash, they did not give up the fight on that account. "The fire began between n and 12 of the clock," wrote Seth Pomeroy, lieutenant-colonel of Ephraim Williams' regiment, "and continued until near five in the afternoon the most violent fire perhaps that was ever heard of in any battle in this country. Then we beat them off the ground." 3 This 1 American Review, VH, 602. 2 Historical Magazine, vn, 212. Thomas Williams was surgeon of the Hampshire regiment. "It is said that one of our men, observing an Indian taking his aim at Colonel Williams, fired his piece at the In- dian and shot him dead upon the spot ; so that this worthy commander, and his savage slaughterer fell at once and probably at the same in- stant." (Niles, History of the French and Indian Wars, in Collections, Mass. His. Society, Fourth Series, v, 393.) * Seth Pomeroy, Diary', quoted in Trumbull's History of Northampton, 13 WILLIAMS COLLEGE inconclusive victory was acclaimed far and wide among the colonies. The Governor of New York ap- pointed Tuesday, October 2, "as a day of public Thanksgiving to Almighty God " * and Johnson him- self received from King George " the dignity of a Baro- net of Great Britain." One Massachusetts colonel, Timothy Ruggles, who sometimes spoke his mind with astonishing freedom, took a different view of the situation. "General/' he said to Johnson after the battle, "General, I hope the damnable blunders you have made this day may be sanctified to your spiritual and everlasting good." 2 The best that can be said for the expedition is that it achieved a qualified and negative success. The body of Colonel Williams remained undisturbed on the spot where he fell until the morning after the fight, when it was recovered and buried under a neighboring pine tree. A week later Thomas Wil- liams made an inventory of the contents of his army chest. 3 Among the items in this inventory were not only such articles of a Berkshire gentleman's ward- robe as a pair of leather breeches, a broadcloth coat with yellow metal buttons and a French bearskin coat, but also eleven books a species of baggage which none of the other New England colonels, though two of them, Timothy Ruggles and Phineas Lyman, were college graduates, seem to have in- II, 269. " Our cannon . . . were heard down as low as Saratoga," Thomas Williams wrote, " notwithstanding the wind was in the north and something considerable." (Historical Magazine, vn, 212.) 1 Documentary History of the State of New York, 698. 2 Jonathan Smith, in Proceedings, Mass. His. Society, XLVIII, 43. 8 Appendix I. 14 THE FOUNDER eluded in their outfitting for the campaign. What were the books which Ephraim Williams did include among his necessaries? Four of them a New Testa- ment, the Psalms of David, an Annual, "The Court and City Kalendar," and Eland's "Military Dis- cipline" one might expect to find in the list, but that is hardly the case with the others, "Roman History . . . By way of dialogue," 1 the " Independent Whig" in two volumes, and " Cato's Letters" in four. The history is perhaps less surprising than the remain- ing six books, written by Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, whose names can scarcely be called house- hold words at the present day. They are a series of vigorous, aggressive, hard-hitting essays on a great variety of subjects social, political, theological, and academic. While they may not rival the "Letters of Junius" in declamatory invective, like them they belong to the literature of protest, assailing in par- ticular the High Church propaganda of the day and in general anybody and everybody who "played the devil in God's name." That they would stir up con- troversy was to be expected. At least one " Fanatical and Dissatisfied Clergyman" the Bishop of Sodor and Mann " bellowed out his curse " 2 against them. For Ephraim Williams these militant books must have had special attractions or he would hardly have taken the trouble to transport them over the rough, primi- 1 A New and Easy Method to understand the Roman History . . . By way of dialogue; for the use of the Duke of Burgundy. Done out of French. ... By Mr. T. Brown: pp. 324. R. Baldwin: London, 1695. 12. Eighth edition, 1731. There is a copy of this book in the Collection of Mr. R. H. W. Dwight. * Independent Whig, I, xc. 15 WILLIAMS COLLEGE tive highway from Stockbridge to Albany, up the Hudson River to Great Carrying Place and through fourteen miles of wilderness to Lake George. That a colonial colonel, who on going to the wars put eleven books into his army chest, became the founder of a college, should not occasion surprise. 1 The memorable day in the forty years and six months of Ephraim Williams' life was that black Tues- day at Albany July 22, 1755 when he "made and published" his last will and testament, declaring it to be his ' ' Pleasure & Desire ' ' that his residuary estate should be "Appropriated toward the Support and maintenance of a free School (in a township . . . Com- monly Called the west township) for Ever," provided that it " fall within the Jurisdiction of Massachusetts bay," and also that "the Governor & General Court give the Said township the name of Williamstown." A project of this kind had been long in mind. Dr. West says that he "witnessed with humane and painful sensations, the dangers, difficulties and hardships" which the first settlers of the region encountered. "To encourage them, he intimated his intention of doing something liberal and handsome for them." 2 That "something," which took definite shape in his will, gave distinction to a career otherwise incon- spicuous. 1 Appendix II. * Mass. His. Society, Collections, vin, 48. CHAPTER II WEST TOWNSHIP AND THE FREE SCHOOL I N J 755 West Township, the site of the proposed Free School, was an insignificant hamlet on the southern border of "a great and terrible wilderness . . . which reached to Canada." 1 Only sixteen years had elapsed since Ephraim Williams, Senior, and Thomas Wells made the first survey of the region. Their work, prose- cuted under serious difficulties, appears to have been indifferently well done, and in 1749 the Legislature directed Oliver Partridge and two associates "to repair to the Province Lands near Hoosuck . . . with a skilful surveyor and chainman under oath . . . lay out Two Townships . . . and return a correct Plat." 2 April 6, 1750, a third legislative committee divided the "Westernmost" of them into "63 Houselots," which the authorities sold two years later to forty- six purchasers, thirteen of whom were soldiers at Fort M assachuse t ts . 3 Ephraim Williams, Senior, thought that the new town on the Hoosac was "very accommodable for settlements," 4 but families in search of homes had their doubts about it. Reasons for hesitation were numerous the remoteness of the " plantation," the 1 Jones, History of Stockbridge, 78. 2 Journal, H.R., April 18, 1749. 8 Mass. Archives, cxv, 634. Perry, Origins in Williamstown, 382. 4 Mass. Archives, CCXLIII, 75. 17 WILLIAMS COLLEGE evil reputation of the winter climate, and the still more dissuasive circumstance that this region, across which the Old Mohawk Trail ran, was notoriously "vulnerable to the guns and tomahawks of Canada." Though the French and Indian Terror came to an end with the surrender of Montreal in 1760, the isolation continued, with slow and grudging abatement, for almost a century after that decisive event. West Township, renamed Williamstown in 1765, had no post-office until 1797. During this long period mail fa- cilities were a matter of accident or personal favor. In the last decade of it Simon Hough, who rode up and down the county delivering to subscribers their copies of the "Western Star" published at Stock- bridge, acted on occasion as postman, but his weekly visits did little to break the solitude. 1 There was, it is true, an early and ambitious at- tempt to establish tri-weekly communications with the outside world. Toward the close of the year 1796 "the proprietors . . . inform the Public that they have started a Line of Stages from New York to Bennington in Vermont," by way of the Berkshires. 2 These stages continued in operation at least a year, since on the 6th of October, 1797, the postmaster at Stockbridge announced that they had begun to carry the mails. 3 But the enterprise was short-lived 1 From his rather frequent " Notices to Patrons," it would appear that Simon often found collections slow. "I suppose the quarters seem to be soon out to you, my friends," he said in one of them, " but as I have to run in debt 20 dollars for your papers, and then tug around thirteen weeks before I get my pay, it seems long enough to me." (Western Star, June 30, 1795.) 2 Appendix n. 8 Western Star, October 17, 1797. 18 WEST TOWNSHIP AND THE FREE SCHOOL and nobody attempted anything of the sort again until 1826 when another tri- weekly line of stages began to run from Bennington to Pittsfield. 1 In 1859 the opening of the Troy and Boston Railroad put this line out of business, and then in a certain limited sense former things may be said to have passed away. While the paragraph in the founder's will which contained the bequest failed to give definite instruc- tions in regard to the character of the proposed school, it was specific and positive upon two points West Township must become Williamstown and remain within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. If these conditions should not be "complied with/' the ex- ecutors were directed to appropriate "the moneys ... to some pious and charitable uses." The change of name gave no trouble, but a rather serious con- troversy arose over the question of jurisdiction whether the region now known as the Berkshires be- longed to New York or Massachusetts a con- troversy which was brought to the attention of the General Court for the first time January 3, 1738-39, when Thomas Wells, of Deerfield, presented a me- morial protesting against the encroachments of " the Dutch" upon the western borders of the province. 2 Ephraim Williams, Senior, and the complainant were ordered to "view the Land on the Ousac River" 3 and to lay out there two townships. This was the survey of 1739 to which attention has al- 1 Field, History of Pittsfield, 24. 2 Journal, H.R., January 3, 1738-39. 8 Ibid., January 26, 1738-39. 19 WILLIAMS COLLEGE ready been called. June 7 the committee made a brief written report to the Legislature, in which they regretted that some lines of the new townships could not be "perfected" in consequence of "the Great Opposition of Sundry Gent n from Albany." As they intimated they would like to speak more in detail about their experiences, the General Court decided to hear them the next day, when "Captain Ephraim Williams and Captain Thomas Wells," so the legis- lative journal runs, "attending at the door . . . were admitted in and gave a Particular Account ... of the Treatment they met with from Some Dutch Gen- tlemen of Albany while they were on the Land." Evidently Ephraim Williams, Senior, got a very un- favorable impression of them and his son did not pur- pose to found a Free School at West Township for their benefit. 1 Then only a few weeks before the founder made his will there had been alarming disorders in the disputed territory between the partisans of New York and Massachusetts Bay disorders which resulted in "the murder of William Rees," in the destruction of considerable property and the arrest of " Rioters" by the authorities of both provinces. This regrettable border feud affected not only the will of Ephraim Williams, but the military campaign 1 This Albany brand of people also grievously displeased an Indian missionary whose post was a few miles west of Stockbridge, as appears from the following entry in his diary: " Lord's- Day, Aug. 28 (1743). Was much perplex'd with some irreligious Dutch-men. All their dis- courses turned upon Things of the World. ... Oh! what a Hell it would be to spend an Eternity with such Men." (Jonathan Edwards, Life of David Brainerd, 79.) 20 WEST TOWNSHIP AND THE FREE SCHOOL in which he was engaged. The chief New York claim- ant of the lands in controversy was the proprie- tor of "the Manor of Livingston/' and public sen- timent among the Massachusetts settlers ran high against him. May 6 a gang of them raided the iron mills which he had built at Ancram, a town well within the boundaries of New York, carried off the workmen and locked them up in jail at Spring- field. Livingston, writing to the Governor of New York, June 23, said they were still there and his mills idle. The raid, he continued, "has put it out of my power to furnish . . . the Carriage wheels and . . . the Quantity of Shot I engaged to deliver for the Expe- dition to ... Crown point. ... As I had the Expedi- tion very much at heart I ordered my Furnace to be immediately repaired at a great Expense . . . that I still might be able to furnish the Shott . . . that the Expedition might not be retarded . . . but no workmen yett so that I cannot proceed in the casting of them." l The executors of the founder's will were his half cousin, Colonel Israel Williams, of Hatfield, and Colo- nel John Worthington, of Springfield. A vigorous, brainy, dominating "river-god," the former became a conspicuous figure in the Western Massachusetts of his time. Unfortunately for his personal comfort and local reputation he espoused the royalist cause at the opening of the Revolutionary War. In a letter to Governor Gage, August 10, 1774, ne asked for sup- port against the fury of mobs which seemed to be stirring in many places. 2 He had occasion for dis- 1 Documentary History of the State of New York, m, 484, 485. 2 Mass. His. Society, Collections, Fourth Series, x, 515. 21 WILLIAMS COLLEGE quietude, as his indignant neighbors subsequently attempted "to smoke him to a Whig" and the au- thorities, considering this penalty inadequate, sup- plemented it by confining him in jail at Northampton for seven months. Colonel Worthington, the other executor, was also a Tory, but of a less aggressive type and escaped serious annoyance. The estate of Colonel Williams turned out to be a modest one, amounting to only 1733-8-10 or $5788.07. Yet more than ten years elapsed before the appraisal was completed and the inventory ap- peared in three instalments the first of them dated "May and June," 1756; the second, December 28, 1761 ; and the last, May, I766. 1 One item only in this inventory requires any present notice the Stock- bridge homestead of fifteen hundred and five acres sold to the founder by his father, September 28, 1752, for the sum of 1000. The purchase included also certain rights of land in neighboring towns and three slaves "my negro servant . . . Moni, my negro boy . . . London, also my negro girl Cloe the latter not to be for his use or service until after my own and my wife's death." 2 Ephraim Williams, Senior, not only disposed of his property in Stockbridge, but presently removed to Deerfield where he spent the brief remainder of his life. What led him to abandon the town with which he had been so long and so prominently connected? 1 Registry of Probate, Northampton. 9 X 216 Registry of Deeds, Springfield. Another negro boy, J. Ro- mano, was added by purchase to the establishment the following February. (Sheldon, History of Deerfield, n, 903.) 22 WEST TOWNSHIP AND THE FREE SCHOOL It should, perhaps, be mentioned, in passing, what- ever connection this circumstance may have with his change of residence, that during the spring of 1752 - five or six months before the transactions of Sep- tember 27 he had a serious attack of what he calls "numb Palsy." 1 Though he rallied from this attack, his state of mind as well as of body gave friends occa- sion for worry and alarm. " He went away from us," his daughter Mrs. Abigail Dwight wrote her brother, Thomas Williams, November I, 1752, "about 3 weeks past for Wethersfield. Prornised us he would go no- where Else. But ye first News we had from him was that He Rid all one Day in a bad Storm, got to Wethers d late at Night. Sett out Next morning for Newhaven, rid all ye Day in a hard South westerly wind, there he got in ye Notion of treating with their General Assembly Day after Day on Indian affairs, then returns to Newington, there writes us He is go- ing to Stonington, then to Deerfield, then to Boston." Mrs. Dwight is especially anxious in regard to the pro- posed visit to Boston "it will vastly disserve our Public affairs & I know not but intirely ruin us." Thomas Williams was urged to prevent the Boston trip "by one wile or other. ... I Beg you Do all in your Power to get him in ye mind of Coming Home as Soon as may Be, if you have any love for him or us." 2 No doubt the anxieties which appear so unmis- 1 Some Old Letters, Scribner's Magazine, xvii, 294. These letters were nineteen in number, the first dated January 16, 1749, and the last March 30, 1754. (Appendix III.) 1 R. H. W. Dwight, Collection. 23 WILLIAMS COLLEGE takably in the letter of Mrs. Dwight were in part oc- casioned by her father's precarious state of health. But another matter of large family importance con- tributed materially to them certain "unhappy differences" that had arisen at Stockbridge. These differences grew out of an attempt on the part of Ephraim Williams, Senior, aided by a little group of friends, to get control of the local Indian school with its considerable patronage and revenues. 1 As the resident missionary, Jonathan Edwards, with whom the Williams family had been on bad terms since the recent ecclesiastical disturbances at Northampton, stood in the way of their schemes, he must be pushed out of it, and they did not mince their words in set- ting forth his disqualifications for the post "an unfit person, of no service, nor likely to be of service in the work of the ministry in this place ... a trouble- some person, a busybody in other mens matters, one whom the Indians disaffect, whose preaching is short and unintelligible." 2 Jonathan Edwards, though "unspeakably embar- rassed" by the situation, did not propose to flee be- fore his enemies, new or old. When aroused he was, it is hardly necessary to remark, a controversialist of the most formidable character. January 13, 1753, he wrote Governor Pepperrell a letter in which he re- viewed the whole question in dispute with victorious clearness and force. And at the same time another long and vigorous communication was sent to the 1 The school was established in 1734, with the Rev. John Sergeant as the first missionary in charge. Jonathan Edwards succeeded him in 1750. 2 Mass. Archives, xxxn, 370, 371. 24 WEST TOWNSHIP AND THE FREE SCHOOL authorities at Boston signed by twelve white men and forty- two Indians, comprising the entire male adult population of the mission except the little Williams faction a communication describing at some length the miserable and broken condition into which the restless, haughty, and selfish conduct of that faction had brought them. The missionary was not driven away. He remained at Stockbridge until the great treatises which gave him his reputation as a philo- sophical theologian were written remained until 1758 and then accepted a call to the presidency of the College of New Jersey, while Ephraim Williams, Senior, leader of the opposition, left that town five years before, and, if we may believe his enemies, "in chagrin and mortification and entire loss of influence and respect." l The latter removed to Deerfield, where he died August n, 1754. Like an early constable of England, Ephraim Wil- liams, Senior, seemed to have two souls in one body. The twelve white men and forty- two Indians of Stockbridge who signed the accusing letter sent to the authorities at Boston might denounce him as avaricious, intriguing, unscrupulous, but his friends saw him in a different light. The Rev. Mr. Ashley, of Deerfield, preached the sermon at his funeral, and it stands out in sharp contrast to the communication of the twelve white men and forty- two Indians. Our brother, said the clergyman, "always bore a testi- mony against vice and held a disposition to terrify the worker of iniquity. . . . He was the most delightful companion in the world. ... In every relation his 1 S. E. Dwight, Life of Edwards, 518. 25 WILLIAMS COLLEGE memory will be precious. . . . He was a lovely friend and an excellent Christian." 1 If funeral eulogies happen to be under suspicion, there remain "Some Old Letters" of the Senior Wil- liams, wise, comprehending, affectionate, most of them written during the Stockbridge troubles, and with a single exception to his son Elijah, half- brother of the founder and then a student in the College of New Jersey. He was interested in the studies of the young man and urged him to pay special attention to his English. " You have made but poor proficiency," he remarked, "in writing & Spell- ing. If you don't mind: it would have been better . . . that you had never gon to College: a scholar that can neither write nor Spell nor Read is a terrible Solecism: your brother Eph[rai]m earnestly desires that you would mind in every article mentioned in the Premises, or he says your sisters will be the Better Schollars." 2 This letter was written in May, 1752. A year later he resumed the subject "I observe that you have minded much in your Wrighting, never- theless you have left Room to Grow, therefore shall continue my Instructions to you. . . . You must not follow my Hand wrighting for an Example: for I am apt to mistake: I never had but Common English Learning." 3 There would be little occasion to recall in these pages the unhappy differences at Stockbridge, had they not touched the younger as well as the elder 1 R. H. W. Dwight, Collection. * Some Old Letters, Scribner's Magazine, xvn, 254. * Ibid., xvn, 256. 26 WEST TOWNSHIP AND THE FREE SCHOOL Ephraim Williams. A letter of the former on the subject to the Rev. Mr. Ashley, May 2, 1751, has recently come to light. It was printed for the first time in an appendix to the second edition of Professor Perry's " Origins in Williamstown." l " Mr. Edwards lately wrote," said the founder in this letter, "to Mr. Woodbridge of Stockbridge . . . that I have done all I can to prevent his coming (to the Indian Mission). I am sorry that a head so full of Divinity should be so empty of Politics. I would not have him fail of going for 500 pounds, since they are so set for him, not that I think that he will ever do much more good than an other, but on acct. of raising the price of my land. Its true when they first talk d of settling him I was against it, gave my reasons, & sent them to him like an honest fellow, when to my certain knowledge some in the place could say as much against him behind his back, but darnt open their mouths in any shape to his face. Perhaps you have not heard the reasons I had to object to his coming which if you have not I will let you know them." They are practically identical with the list of shortcomings and disqualifications which the Williams faction had already sent to the authorities at Boston Mr. Edwards is unsociable, too old to learn the Mohawk language, astray in his theology and "a very great Bigot." "The above rea- sons," said the writer in conclusion, "I sent to him by Lt. Brown, who has since told me that he deliver d 1 Origins in Williamstown, 639. One afternoon in the summer of 1896 and before the publication of the second edition of his Origins, Profes- sor Perry invited John Bascom and the present writer to his study and read to them this appendix, as his " final word in the Edwards- Williams controversy." 27 WILLIAMS COLLEGE to him verbatim, which I believe did not suit him/' This letter, straightforward and downright, takes a disagreeable coloring from the unfortunate contro- versy at Stockbridge. West Township showed little immediate interest in the will of the founder. Two months before the change of name the proprietors called a meeting of the citizens to determine among other things whether they "will Chuse a Committee to Geat a Coppy of Colonel Ephraim Williams Jnr. Will out of Probate Office in the County of Hampshire." 1 The committee decided that a " Coppy" should be obtained and "Chose Benjamin Simons to Geat it," for which serv- ice he received 0-3-4. Among the articles in the warrant calling a public meeting June 15 was one "To Chuse a Committee on the Affairs of Colonel Williams Willing Land or money to ward a free School in West Hoosuck and Said Committee to Prosecute the Same." The Proprietors, when the sub- ject was reached at the meeting, "Voted to dismiss this article." Somebody seems to have been dissatis- fied with the curt, half-contemptuous treatment which the article received and it reappeared in the next warrant dated October 8: "To see if the Proprietors will chuse a Committee to make application to the Executors of Colonel Ephraim Williams, Jnr., to See Whearse we may have the Benefit of the Donation made this town by him." The Proprietors did not change their minds in the intervening three months and on the 22d of October again "Voted this article Dismissed." 2 But in 1770 the wind blew from another 1 Proprietors' Book. 2 Ibid. 28 WEST TOWNSHIP AND THE FREE SCHOOL quarter, and the Free School then appeared to them as an institution so much to be desired that they haled the executors before the Legislature, charging them with neglect of duty because they had done nothing to enable Williamstown to "reap the intended benefit of so noble and worthy donation." l There was a note of unmistakable anxiety in their appeal. "The inhabitants not knowing where to apply for relief, " they observed in concluding it, "by their agents Do humbly represent their Case to this hon ble Court and pray they would Grant them . . . aid and direction." 2 The Legislature was in a friendly mood and promptly ordered the executors to appear before it on the second Wednesday of the next session and "show cause," if they could, why the petition of the worried and aggrieved inhabitants should not be granted. The executors had little occasion to be unhappy over the issue of the controversy. In reply to the charges they began by calling attention to the over- looked fact that the petitioners "have no more In- terest or Concern in the Devise or Donation referred to than any other Members of the State. They might indeed from their Local Circumstances very probably receive more Benefit from Such School than others . . . but as it was expressly ordered to be a free School no Inhabitant of Williams Town could have any right to enjoy the privilege of it to the exclusion of any other english Subject whatever. The petitioners therefore have no private reason to complain." 1 Israel Williams, Letters and Papers, n, 177. 2 Court Records, October 9, 1770. 29 WILLIAMS COLLEGE After this preliminary observation the executors passed to the consideration of the principal, and in their judgment decisive, reason for the delay. "The testator," they continued, "designed to set up a School free for all the King's Subjects equally with- out exception, but he designed his money should be expended within the province. When he made his . . . Will, he then well knew that the place where (on certain Conditions) he ordered his School to be set up was within the jurisdiction of this province, as it is now, but he well knew that New York claimed the Jurisdiction of it, that the Governor . . . had long before made Patents of these Lands & that this prov- ince and New York were then in Dispute about the Jurisdiction. And the Testator had fearful apprehen- sions then as his Executors have now that through the Remissness of this Province & Vigilance of that, these Lands would finally fall within the Jurisdiction of New York. ... He determined not to have the money expended there till the dispute was finally settled." Further, they took occasion to say, and the obvious threat must have awakened apprehension at Williams- town, that they were "not satisfied how long they ought to wait . . . before they proceed to the other Method of Disposition & whether, having waited till this time & fifteen years have elapsed since the death of the Testator and the State of these Lands remain- ing just the Same in regard to Jurisdiction . . . they ought not to apply the Monies to the other Purposes Directed." * The Legislature declined to interfere and the peti- 1 Mass. Archives, LVIII, 586. 30 WEST TOWNSHIP AND THE FREE SCHOOL tioners failed to get "the aid and direction*' which they sought. The inaction of the executors continued until "the anno domini of 1784," when they sent a communica- tion to the Legislature announcing that they were ready to make a final report. In this communication they reviewed briefly the history of their administra- tion of the trust, repeating substantially what they had said in answer to the Williamstown petitioners of 1770. They also discussed another interesting sub- ject and were the only contemporaries of Ephraim Williams who had anything to say upon it. "By reason of the Embarrassed Situation," they observed, "in which the Testator was at the Time of Making his last Will and Testament between having a Regi- ment under his Command and marching on a military Expedition the said Testator did not make Such Pro- vision and Direction as were absolutely necessary in order to effectuate his Charitable Intention and such as by Advice and Assistance of Council he might and doubtless would have made, had he not, in the Hurry of a Military March, been deprived of Counsel, Op- portunity and Leisure." 1 The executors now asked the Legislature to pass an act declaring their duty in reference to the Free School and creating a corpora- tion of "Meet Persons" to carry into effect "the pious and Charitable Intention of the Testator." The Legislature decided that the bequest "ought to be presently applied and appropriated" and on the 8th of March, 1785, incorporated "The Trustees of 1 Petition accompanying Chap. 49, Acts and Resolves of Mass., 1784-85- 31 WILLIAMS COLLEGE the donation of Ephraim Williams, Esq., for maintain- ing a Free School in Williamstown." l The "Meet Persons," nine in number and all of Berkshire County, "elected and appointed" as trustees, were the Rev. Seth Swift (Yale 1774), tne " much esteemed, dearly beloved and very faithful and laborious pastor" 2 of the church at Williamstown; the Rev. Daniel Collins (Yale 1760), pastor of the church in Lanesboro nearly fifty-nine years, moderate loyalist who wore "the clerical wig and three-cor- nered hat to the end of his days " ; Daniel Noble (Yale 1764), of Williamstown, able lawyer and man of af- fairs, judge of the Court of Common Pleas for six years; Israel Jones, of North Adams, member of the Massachusetts Legislature, owner of the land on which Fort Massachusetts stood, member of the com- mission appointed by President John Adams to es- tablish the northeast boundary between Canada and the United States; Woodbridge Little (Yale 1760), clergyman, lawyer, Tory, who in 1777 publicly took an oath of allegiance to the United States, Represen- tative in the General Court, and first individual con- tributor to the funds of the college; John Bacon (Princeton 1765), pastor of the Old South Church in Boston, 1771-75, farmer in Stockbridge, judge of the Court of Common Pleas, State Senator, Member of Congress, a man of intellectual force and independ- ence; Thompson J. Skinner, of Williamstown, car- penter and builder, captain of a local military com- 1 Chap. 49, Acts and Resolves of Mass., 1784-85. 2 Records of the Church, quoted in Field's History of the County of Berkshire, 410. 32 WEST TOWNSHIP AND THE FREE SCHOOL pany, major-general of militia, member of both branches of the State Legislature and of the Na- tional House of Representatives, judge of the Court of Common Pleas, treasurer of Massachusetts, 1806- 08; William Williams (Yale 1754) of Dalton, cousin of the founder, moderate loyalist, State Senator, clerk of the court of Hampshire County for twenty years; Theodore Sedgwick (Yale 176s), 1 of Stock- bridge, jurist and statesman, justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, Member of the Continental Congress, of the Federal House of Representatives, and of the Federal Senate. At their first meeting held in Pittsfield, April 24, the new board elected William Williams chairman and the Rev. Seth Swift secretary, appointed a commit- tee to "circulate subscriptions/' voted that no pupils should be admitted to the school who had not "been previously taught to read English well," and adopted a resolution to the effect that the purpose of the founder would be most fully realized by devoting his whole gift to the enterprise in Williamstown. The will provided that if any surplus remained after establish- ing the Free School, it should be appropriated to " the East Township where the fort now stands." Writing Israel Williams, May 3, the chairman said with excel- lent sense that "parcelling out the money between the two towns would render both schools mean and indifferent." 2 The funds turned over to the Williams- 1 J u $g e Sedgwick did not finish his course, but was restored to his class and enrolled with it in 1772. (Dexter, Yale Biographies 1763-78, 147.) 2 Israel Williams, Letters and Papers, n, 183. 33 WILLIAMS COLLEGE town trustees by the executors of the founder July 7, 1785, amounted to only 3383-3-7, or $n,277. 1 A local subscription of $903.58 made the available re- sources $12,785.58. No further efforts to increase the endowment seem to have been made until their meeting August 19, 1788, when the trustees voted to petition the General Court for the grant of a lottery to raise a sum not exceeding twelve hundred pounds. " By the local situation . . . our youth," the trustees urged, "are, in a great meas- ure, excluded from the advantages which are en- joyed by their fellow youths, whose happy lot is cast in the interior parts of the state and near those seats of literature which adorn and bless our world." 2 February II, 1789, the Legislature voted to grant the petition and the trustees appointed three of their number Messrs. Sedgwick, Skinner and Little a committee to manage the enterprise, which was shortly announced in the advertising columns of the newspaper press: 3 NOTHING VENTURE NOTHING HAVE NOT TWO BLANKS TO A PRIZE SCHEME OF WILLIAMSTOWN FREE SCHOOL LOTTERY 4 Occasional variations appear in the head-lines "A Grand Chance" 5 and the more urgent "Now or 1 A List of the Debts due to the Executors, Mass. His. Society, 8i-G-8i. 2 Berkshire Chronicle, November 30, 1789. 3 Yale had resorted to a lottery for raising funds in 1747, Columbia in 1754, and Harvard in 1722. 4 Western Star, January 19, 1790. 5 Massachusetts Sentinel, November 14, 1789. 34 WEST TOWNSHIP AND THE FREE SCHOOL Never" * taking the place of the usual "Nothing Venture, Nothing Have." Thirty-four hundred tick- ets were offered at two dollars each. As the prizes amounted to fifty-eight hundred dollars, the margin of profit could not in any event have been very large. Altogether eight " classes " were drawn, three of them -the third, fourth, and fifth in Boston. This tem- porary change of place was made, the managers said, 11 in order to gratify those in or near Boston who have discovered a disposition to encourage a lottery . . . for the sole purpose of promoting education." 2 in a neglected part of the Commonwealth. The advent of the Williamstown enterprise in Boston raised an instant commotion. It made a Charlestown com- mittee, who were supervising a local lottery, then in operation, very nervous. In fact they were so much disturbed that they published a belligerent " Address to the Public" in order to discredit the unexpected and irritating competitor. After eight " classes " of the Charlestown lottery had been drawn, the angry com- mittee explained, they decided to reduce the commis- sion of agents. "One of them not only declined sell- ing tickets but informed us ... that he intended to use his influence" to bring the Williamstown lottery to town. When the threat of the disgruntled agent became a reality and this lottery from the western frontier of the State announced a drawing four days earlier than one advertised by the Charlestown com- mittee, the latter, much perturbed, summoned a town meeting to advise them in the emergency. The town 1 Western Star, February 16, 1790. * Boston Gazette, February i, 1790. 35 WILLIAMS COLLEGE meeting ordered them to change the date of the draw- ings as often as they "thought prudent, but at all events to precede the other lottery." l The Williams- town managers promptly issued a counter-address "To the Impartial Public," declaring that they came to Boston "at the solicitation of several respectable characters. . . . They are extremely sorry to find that, while pursuing the line of their duty, they should be obstructed by others whose interest cannot be served by it. They would observe that as they have undertaken this business they will pursue it with firmness and integrity." 2 They did pursue it two months or more and then printed a card in the news- papers to the effect that the condition of their private affairs, which had suffered during this interval, neces- sitated their return to Williamstown. Probably the fact that the town of Boston bought relatively few tickets a fact not mentioned in the card was the real cause of their abandoning the campaign in Eastern Massachusetts. Then in addition to other difficulties the managers were embarrassed by the primitive currency to which they reverted in their transactions. "A very great failure," they announced December 21, 1789, "in the sale of tickets in the second class of the Williams- town Free School Lottery has obliged the managers to postpone the drawing to the twelfth day of January next. . . . The extreme scarcity of cash has also in- duced them to determine upon making sale of the re- maining tickets on contracts for neat cattle. . . . The 1 Massachusetts Sentinel, February 18, 1790. 2 Independent Chronicle, February n, 1790. 36 WEST TOWNSHIP AND THE FREE SCHOOL managers had no view, when they published their scheme, ... of proposing to the public the purchase of their tickets with anything but money." * This financial makeshift gave all concerned an infinite deal of trouble. It complicated and embarrassed the whole transaction, since managers and adventurers had difficulty in agreeing upon the cash value of live- stock payments. Some of the settlements dragged on several years and provoked an uncomfortable amount of dissatisfaction. But however various the sorts of currency which must be reckoned with, consoli- dated notes, new emission, old Continental money, wheat or neat cattle, 2 the lottery prospered fairly well and contributed $3449.09 to the treasury of the Free School. At this second meeting, held August 3, 1785, the trustees began a discussion concerning the site, di- mensions, and architecture of "the house for the use of the Free School," which continued intermittently and indecisively until May 25, 1790, when the suc- cess of the lottery had been assured. They then voted that it should be built on the second eminence as one enters the town from the east and in the middle of the broad main street. During the following year this "house " - a building eighty-four feet long, forty- two feet wide, four stories high, and with an east and west archway through the centre was sub- stantially completed. To the committee of trustees in charge of the enterprise Messrs. Skinner, Jones, and Noble the board added an outsider Colonel Benjamin Simonds, not only a prominent citizen of 1 Berkshire Chronicle, December 28, 1789. 2 Ibid. 37 WILLIAMS COLLEGE the town, but a soldier at Fort Massachusetts and a friend of Colonel Williams. 1 The committee entered upon their task at once and pushed the work with vigor. Only one contemporary notice of their opera- tions appears to have survived and that is brief and incidental. Monday forenoon, August 30, 1790, Wil- liam Smith, Member of Congress from South Carolina and afterwards Minister to Portugal, who was mak- ing a brief tour in Southern New England, rode over Stone Hill and his attention was attracted by what might seem, for so small and remote a town, rather unusual building operations. " Fifteen miles from Lebanon," wrote the Con- gressman, "we breakfasted at Sloan's Tavern at Williamstown in Massachusetts. The principal part of the town is about four miles further on where they are building a handsome brick college; ... a dona- tion from Mr. Williams . . . applied by his executors to the erection of this college, which will be in a fine, healthy country." 2 The house for the Free School plain, unpreten- tious, yet having a certain quiet dignity withal has been known for more than a hundred years as West College. Originally it had a wide range of uses, since it contained not only dormitories, but a kitchen, dining-room, library, and chapel. Gradually these va- riorum features were eliminated until finally noth- ing but dormitories remained. There have been two reconstructions and modernizations of the building, one of them occurring in 1854 and the other in 1894. 1 Perry, Williamstown and Williams College, 190, 191. 2 New York Evening Post, May I, 1888. 38 WEST COLLEGE, FROM A DAGUERREOTYPE TAKEN FOR THE CLASS OF 1848 WEST COLLEGE AS IT IS IN 1917 WEST TOWNSHIP AND THE FREE SCHOOL October 26, nearly two months after the visit of William Smith, the trustees appointed three of their number William Williams, John Bacon, and Seth Swift a committee "to provide a schoolmaster . . . suitably qualified" to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. They were also directed "to employ, as soon as may be after the building is completed, an instructor" who should teach the more advanced pupils and have charge of the whole enterprise. In regard to the qualifications of the instructor they were quite specific he must have a good moral character of the Protestant type, all-round scholar- ship, skill in teaching and managing schoolboys, pol- ished manners, and "a mild disposition." One is a little surprised that the last trait should have been included in the catalogue of requirements. A distin- guished contemporary of the trustees, however, seems to agree with them about its pedagogic value. " Good temper," wrote James Boswell, "is a most essential requisite in a preceptor." 1 The schoolmaster could be easily found, but a com- petent instructor was another matter. The committee naturally repaired to New Haven and consulted Presi- dent Stiles, who said that Ebenezer Fitch, senior tutor in the college, was the man for them a conclusion in which they, and subsequently all their associates, concurred. He was formally elected to office, with "the style of Preceptor," October n, 1791. Ebenezer Fitch, a native of Norwich, Connecticut, son of a prominent physician, graduated at Yale in 1777 and with the highest honors. Two years more of 1 Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, Birrell's Ed., 1, 67. 39 WILLIAMS COLLEGE study followed and some months of teaching in an academy at Hanover, New Jersey. Then he returned to New Haven and references to him begin to appear in the " Diary " of President Stiles. "This day," the latter wrote January 1, 1780, " Mr. Fitch, Tutor- Elect, arrived in town. I examined him in regard to his re- ligious principles and found him sound." 1 His schol- arship, which the President seemed to take for granted, was quite as "sound " as his theology. He held office until March, 1783, when he resigned in order to visit Europe. Intending to abandon teaching for a mer- cantile career, and forming a partnership with Henry Daggett, Jr., of New Haven, he went abroad the fol- lowing May to make purchases and returned with a large stock of unsalable goods. The inevitable result was bankruptcy and the burden of heavy, obstinate debts. Writing a friend in 1797 eleven or twelve years after the failure he said that these debts had then shrunk to "a little more than six hundred dol- lars," 2 and that he hoped to make a speedy end of them an expectation which was not realized. On the collapse of his business venture, he again became a member of the Yale faculty, having been appointed "Senior Tutor" in the autumn of I786. 3 This posi- tion he held until the close of the college year 1790-91. The preceptor reached Williamstown October 8. He found much still remaining to be done, as the building had not been finished nor had laws and regulations for the school been drawn up. The preliminary work, 1 Stiles, Diary, January I, 1780. 2 Durfee, Sketch of the Rev. Ebenezer Pitch, D.D., 36. 3 Stiles, Diary, September 14, 1786. 40 WEST TOWNSHIP AND THE FREE SCHOOL however, was soon disposed of and the following an- nouncement presently appeared in local newspapers : THE ACADEMY AND FREE SCHOOL IN WILLIAMSTOWN will be open for the admission of young Gentlemen and Masters, on Monday the 24th day of October current. 1 When the new institution, with Mr. John Lester as assistant master, actually began, it was two days be- hind the programme. ''The 26th Ult.," wrote the pre- ceptor November 3, 1791, "the Building was so far in readiness that I entered on business; and with the Master of the English Free School admitted ... 45 scholars. The Students in the Academy pass no ex- aminations. . . . The number of these is as yet under twenty, but it will probably be forty in a few weeks/' * 1 Western Star, October 25, 1791. * Williams Centennial Anniversary, 263. CHAPTER III THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE EVIDENTLY Preceptor Fitch and the trustees looked upon the Free School as a provisional and temporary affair, since on the 22d of May, 1792, only seven months after the opening, they sent a petition to the Legislature praying that it " may be incorporated into a college by the name of Williams Hall." In support of this petition they urged various considerations the quick and large success of the present venture; the small cost of living which would bring a liberal edu- cation " within the power of the middling and lower classes "; the fortunate situation of Williamstown "an enclosed place" free from "the temptations and allurements . . . incident to seaport towns," and the obvious advantages that would accrue to the neigh- boring States of Vermont and New York. This petition of May 22, 1792, was not the first of the sort from Western Massachusetts. Thirty years earlier a movement got under way there to establish Queen's College at Hatfield, and the promoters of the enterprise made a plausible appeal in behalf of it. Now, at last, after a century of border war, they urged, a time of peace had come, a time "longed, wished, and prayed for," but never seen before, and, in order to save their children from growing up "barbarous and uncivilized," they were seizing upon 42 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE this favorable opportunity to establish a seminary of learning in Hampshire County. 1 January 29, 1762, the memorial reached the Legis- lature, and the House of Representatives, though by a narrow majority, voted to grant it. In the Council, however, after a long debate, it was defeated. The promoters then appealed to Governor Bernard, and persuaded him to issue a charter in the King's name dated "at Boston the 27th day of Feb'y In the Sec- ond year of Our Reign, Anno Domini 1762." After some preliminary statements the document proceeds : "We have accordingly, of Our Meer Motion, Certain Knowledge & Special grace given & granted & by these presents We do give and grant unto . . . Israel Wil- liams, John Worthington, Oliver Partridge, Elijah Williams, Josiah Dwight, Joseph Hawley, Stephen Williams, David Parsons, Jonathan Ashley, Timothy Woodbridge, Samuel Hopkins & John Hooker and such others as shall be joined with them, in manner hereafter mentioned, that they be & We hereby make & incorporate them as a Corporation or Body Politic by the name of the President & Fellows of Queen's College in New England." 2 Two of these twelve trustees, it will be observed, were Ephraim Williams' executors, and among the other ten we find a son-in- law, a brother-in-law, two cousins, and two towns- men of Israel Williams. The action of Governor Bernard awakened alarm and protest at Harvard. It was feared that the found- ing of another college in Massachusetts would prove disastrous to the older institution. The Board of 1 Israel Williams, Letters and Papers, n, 178. * Ibid., 177. 43 WILLIAMS COLLEGE Overseers held a special meeting to determine what should be done to avert the impending calamity. This meeting the Governor attended and brought with him the charter, but the conference seems to have been futile, since the Overseers subsequently issued a formal Remonstrance in which they discussed the subject under twenty-four heads. All these numerous heads were variations upon a single theme the pro- posed "seminary" in Hampshire County will hurt Harvard, and tend to " make learning contemptible." 1 Then the oratorical "clamor" of young James Otis converted the House of Representatives from a friendly to a hostile assembly. 2 Even the ministers of Boston joined in the senseless hue and cry, and the opposi- tion finally reached such a pitch that Governor Ber- nard was " terrorized" and revoked its charter. 3 The memorial of the trustees of the Free School was presented to the Legislature in June, 1792, the Senate appointing members of a committee to con- sider it on the i8th and the House of Representatives on the i Qth of that month. For some reason, not very clear at the present day, the charter hung fire until June 22, 1793, a year after the appearance of the memorial at the State House. If the opposition that killed Queen's College in 1763 again took the field in 1792 and fought this second attempt to establish a college in Western Massachusetts, it won the barren victory of a twelvemonth's hold-up. The new institution, "to be known and called by 1 Quincy, History of Harvard College, n, 105-11, 464. * Israel Williams, Letters and Papers, II, 180. 1 Journal, H.R., April 17, 1762. 44 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE the name of Williams College, " established for the very general "purpose of educating youth," and with no theological conditions, took over everything that belonged to the Free School trustees, plant, funds, and preceptor now styled President everything except the tutor, John Lester, who was succeeded by Noah Linsly (Yale 1791). Four new members, in- creasing the number to thirteen, were added to the Board of Trustees the President of the College; Henry Van Schaak, of Pittsfield, a wealthy business man, who, to the disappointment of the corporation, failed to remember the institution in his will; Elijah Williams, of Stockbridge, half-brother of the founder; and the Rev. Dr. Stephen West, his brother-in-law. The charter provided that the membership of the Board should never be less than eleven nor more than seventeen, 1 and in 1794 it was raised to sixteen by the election of the Hon. Stephen Van Rensselaer, of Al- bany, New York, founder of the Polytechnic Insti- tute at Troy; the Rev. Dr. Job Swift, of Bennington, Vermont, in whose household Zephaniah Swift Moore, second president of Williams, lived for a time ; and the Rev. Ammi Ruhamah Robbins, of Norfolk, Connecti- cut, pastor of the church in that town upwards of half a century, chaplain in the Revolutionary army, suc- cessful teacher of boys preparing for college. The cor- poration was authorized to hold property yielding an annual income not to exceed six thousand pounds; to establish reasonable rules, orders, and by-laws for the government of the institution, and to confer aca- demic degrees. 1 Vermont Gazette, August 16, 1793. 45 WILLIAMS COLLEGE Six or seven weeks after the charter had been se- cured, the corporation published a prospectus of the college in local newspapers. 1 The terms of admission, mostly imported from New Haven, were not difficult judged by modern standards, as they included noth- ing more than a passable acquaintance with arith- metic and grammar, with Cicero's Orations, Virgil's ^Eneid, and the Evangelists in Greek or an approved French author. The option which allowed the sub- stitution of French for Greek was an unexpected and not wholly explicable innovation. President Fitch in his sketch of the college, written for the Massachusetts Historical Society, remarks that students from Can- ada attended the Free School when it opened in 1791. The innovation, which flew in the face of academic tradition, may have been a bid for patronage from that quarter. Students had an easy entrance into the college, but when admitted, they found themselves in a much- regulated little world where fines were a favorite medium of discipline. The list of things they were forbidden to do is long and curious, and the penalties, if they were done, ranged from one penny to ten shil- lings. 2 For other and graver offences, which fines did not seem to punish adequately, the authorities had in reserve such penalties as public confession, suspen- sion, rustication, and expulsion. 3 1 Appendix III. * Appendix IV. 8 The Laws of Williams College, Stockbridge, 1795. President Fitch followed New Haven presidents and adapted to his uses the Laws of Yale College, 1787. During the eighteenth century fines played a promi- nent part in college administration. At Harvard " pecuniary mulcts," ranging from one penny to two pounds and ten shillings, were the pen- THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE Compared with the formidable system of rules, the curriculum was a simple affair. A faculty of two mem- bers, instructing a handful of crude undergraduates, would quickly find anything else impracticable. As the entire teaching staff and seven of the twelve trus- tees were graduates of Yale, the precedents of that institution would naturally be followed. Freshman year was given up to the study of languages Eng- lish, Latin, Greek, and French. In Sophomore year geography, arithmetic, rhetoric, logic, algebra, and "the mensuration of superficies and solids/' partly replaced linguistic subjects. Junior year was devoted to the higher mathematics, natural philosophy, astron- omy, and chemistry. In Senior year, when the weekly classroom exercises were reduced from sixteen to twelve hours, the list comprised history, ethics, meta- physics, theology, natural law, and civil polity. Wednesday, October 9, 1793, the Free School opened its doors as Williams College with a registra- tion of eighteen undergraduates eleven Freshmen, three Sophomores, and four Juniors. The transition, though it turned out to be a matter of some impor- tance, attracted no attention, and for the next two years the new institution was seldom heard of. An official notice or two, the announcement that Presi- dent Fitch, on June 24, 1794, would preach " a sermon alty for fifty-two offences. The greatest of these sins, measured by its cost, was " tarrying out of town one month without leave," and the least, " tardiness at prayers." (Quincy, A History of Harvard University, II, 499.) Opposition to the system of fines began about the middle of the century. (See " A Letter to a Member of the Lower House of Assembly, New Haven, 1759.") Fines at Yale in the last three years according to the anonymous author of this "Letter" amounted to 172-16-1. 47 WILLIAMS COLLEGE before Friendship Lodge of Free and Accepted Ma- sons," 1 and an account of a celebration July 4, 1795, in which town and college joined, 2 are all one can find during these years in the files of local newspapers. As a sort of theological prerequisite to the decorous performance of his duties at the first Commencement, President Fitch was ordained to the ministry. The event took place June 17, and the Rev. Ephraim Jud- son, pastor of the Congregational Church at Sheffield, delivered the sermon, in which he insisted that clergy- men must "preach the word," whether the laity like it or not. He had no doubt about the fate of unfaith- ful pastors. "They go from the pulpit," he declared, " to the tribunal of Christ and from the tribunal down to hell." 3 Stockbridge and Bennington newspapers, the only available sources of information, published with some detail accounts of the graduating exercises in 1795: Wittiamstown, Sept. 8th, 1795. On Wednesday the second instant was celebrated here the first Commencement of Williams College. About eleven o'clock the procession moved from the college in the following order: The Scholars of the Academy The Students of the College The Sheriff of the County acting as Bedellus The Reverend President and Vice- President and other members of the Corporation The Tutors The Reverend Clergy and other respectable Gentlemen 1 Western Star, June 10, 1794. 2 Vermont Gazette, July 10, 1795. 3 Judson, A Sermon delivered in Williamstown, June 17, 1795, at the Ordination of Rev. Ebenezer Fitch, President of Williams College. ' 48 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE The exercises of the day were introduced by prayer by the President and an anthem sung by students and ladies and gentlemen of the town. Order of Exercises A Salutatory Oration in Latin, by Mr. Lusk. An English Oration on the French Revolution, by Mr. Bishop. A Forensic Disputation, by Messrs. Lusk and Stone, on the question, "Can the differences in the complexion and features of the human race be accounted for by natural causes?" An English Oration on the Government of the United States, by Mr. Collins. A Forensic Disputation, in the manner of Harvard, by Messrs. Bishop and Collins, on the question, "Is a Re- publican government like that of the United States as well calculated as monarchy to promote the security and happiness of a numerous and extensive people?" An English Oration on female education, by Mr. Stone. The Exercises of the afternoon were introduced by Redemption, an Ode. A French Oration on the oratory of the ancients and moderns, showing the advantage of the latter over the former, and the importance of oratory in general by Mr. Collins. A Dialogue on the folly and impertinence of frivolous conversation, by Messrs. Bishop, Lusk, and Stone. An English Oration on the iniquity and impolicy of the slave trade, by Mr. Lusk. A Conference on the comparative importance to soci- ety of three institutions, civil government, religion, and marriage, by Messrs. Bishop, Collins, and Stone. A short but truly Shandean Oration by Mr. Daniel Dunbar, Preceptor of the Academy, since elected tutor of the college. 49 WILLIAMS COLLEGE The President pronounced a pathetic and excellent valedictory Address to the candidates for the first degree, in which he made many excellent moral and political observations to them respecting their future conduct in life, and then conferred the degree of batchelor of arts on . . . Samuel Bishop, John Collins, Chauncey Lusk and David Stone. 1 The graduates at this first Williams Commence- ment had a strenuous day, since each of them spoke four times. In 1796, when there was a Senior class of six, nobody made more than three appearances on the platform. Two years later there were twenty-eight young gentlemen to be heard and this great increase in numbers made a change of programme necessary. Consequently the secretary of the Trustees an- nounced that a part of them " would exhibit their literary productions on the evening preceding Com- mencement." In his opinion exercises of this sort would furnish a "more rational and agreeable enter- tainment than the idle show and parade usual at colleges on such occasions." 2 Meanwhile two buildings had been added to the campus a house for the President in 1794 an d the old East College in 1798. The latter, situated on the eastern "eminence" of the village, was of brick, four stories high, one hundred and four feet long and twenty-eight wide. In addition to recitation rooms for Seniors and Juniors, it contained thirty-two dor- mitories. These new student quarters, with their car- 1 Vermont Gazette, September 18, 1795. Western Star, September, 1795- No official programmes for the Commencements of 1795, 1796, 1798, 1 80 1, 1802, seem to be in existence. 2 Vermont Gazette, September i, 1798. 50 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE petless floors, unpapered walls, and scant, rough fur- niture, were scarcely more attractive than the older ones in West College. How the campus, in this first decade of its history, impressed travellers we have little knowledge. Few of them passed that way and the record of their journeys is for the most part brief and casual. Six years after the trip of William Smith, the South Carolinian, from Lebanon Springs to Bennington, Thomas Chap- man undertook a horseback "Tour of the Eastern States*' and kept a diary: " Tuesday, I3th of June [1796]. I went on [from Pittsfield] 8 Miles to Halls Tavern in Ashford dined & then proceeded 4 Miles to Rossetters Tavern in [South] Williamstown where I slept. "Wednesday, June I4th. Sett of in Company with a Student in Williamstown College, and rode 5 Miles to the thick Settled part of the Town where the College is built. I understand from the Young Man that his Uncle, Mr. Williams, at his Decease, about 4 Years agoe, bequeathed large Tracts of land for Building and support of a Free Academy in this Town, and these Tracts . . . being Sold by the Trustees for a large Sum of Money, the Academy is not only compleated and Indwed, but a great sur- plus remaining the Legislature have Incorporated a College and granted a Lottery, by the produce of wch the Buildings are already so extensive as to admit 100 Students. At Present the Academy & College are under one Roof, but they are now at Work upon an- other Brick Building 100 foot by 40 so that it bids fair to be an extensive Seminary of Learning. There is a WILLIAMS COLLEGE President & two Tutors, belonging to the College, but no Professors as yet. There are two large Taverns in this Town, at each of wch several of the Students board & pay 10 Sh s PR week. The Town lays low and is surrounded by high hills. From Williams Town I went three Miles & past the Line into the State of Vermont and breakfasted at Blins Tavern, 2 Miles further in the Town of Poonal." l After another six years had passed, a second dia- rist the Rev. John Taylor of Deerfield visited the Berkshires on his way to " the Mohawk and Black River country" : " Williamstown July 2Oth 1802: Rode from Deer- field to this town 40 miles. Weather, extremely un- comfortable from heat. . . . Proceeded from Cherla- ment, on the turnpike, over Housic mountain. . . . Having passed down the mountain I came into the town of Adams. ... 5 miles from Adams is Williams- town. The college consists of about 90 scholars a president and 4 tutors. There are two elegant build- ings standing on elevated ground about 40 rods from each other. I put up with Dr. Fitch a valu- able man and has an agreeable family." 2 Progress in equipment was quite as slow as in buildings. The Trustees announced in the prospectus for 1793-94 that "a decent library and apparatus would be immediately procured." During the follow- ing year the library was probably regarded as having 1 Historical Magazine, Second Series, vn, 17. The young man who accompanied Thomas Chapman, Esq., from South Williamstown " to the thick Settled part of the Town," told him a good many things that were not so. 2 Documentary History of the State of New York, m, 673, 684, 685. 52 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE reached that stage, since they then published a cata- logue which showed that it contained three hundred and sixty volumes. 1 In the prospectus for 1798-99 they content themselves with saying that it had been "very well chosen." 2 For a long period after 1793, when it consisted of a telescope with a wooden tube constructed by Mr. Tutor Dunbar, 3 and what else nobody knows, the apparatus seems to have remained at a standstill. Not until 1814 does any reference to it appear in official announcements, and then the au- thorities ventured to say that it was " respectable." To the very meagre equipment of 1793 there had been added a water- tank with reservoirs for gases, a com- pound blow-pipe, a slender stock of crucibles and re- torts, a miscellaneous assortment of glass and earthen ware for various substitute purposes, all of which was installed in a little reconstructed "hat-shop," brought from Spring Street and placed on the campus near East College. In regard to another matter of equipment, a college seal, the Trustees followed the line of least resistance and adopted that of the Free School with its legend, E Liberalitate E. Williams Armigeri, and its device, three scholars holding books in their hands standing before their instructor who is seated in a chair. Sep- tember i, 1802, they voted to procure a new one. There was delay in making the change and they did not actually "break and discontinue the former 1 Stiles, Diary, April 17, 1794. 2 Vermont Gazette, August, 1798. 3 Correspondence of Williams Review, April 16, 1874. " Voted that Professor Hopkins may exchange the old telescope for the bones of some animal found in Babylonia." (Records of the Trustees, August 16-18, 1852.) 53 WILLIAMS COLLEGE seal" l until 1805. Retaining the original legend they adopted a device in which a globe, telescope, scroll of manuscript, a sprig of laurel, and an ink bottle with a pen in it appear the whole design illumined by a burst of sunshine. The history of Williams professorships began in 1794 when the Trustees established the chair of Law and Civil Polity and invited one of their own number, Theodore Sedgwick, to take charge of it. He declined the position, which remained vacant until 1812, when Daniel Noble, of Williamstown, accepted an appoint- ment to it. His tenure of office was brief, as he died in 1815 and never had a successor. The first de facto Williams professorship, however, which went into operation in the autumn of 1795, was that of French, and the first Williams professor in active service a Canadian Samuel Mackay. In regard to the life of this first professor before he came to Williamstown comparatively little is known. He was born at Cham- bly, near Montreal, in 1764, and may have been an ensign for the two years 1784-86 in the Sixtieth Brit- ish Regiment stationed on the island of Jamaica. 2 Whatever obscurity rests upon this military episode, it is certain that he married a daughter of Marquis de Lotbeniere 3 and in 1793 was living at Bennington, 1 Records of the Trustees, September 3, 1805. 2 MS. letter, administrators of the estate of Gordon Mackay, a grand- son. 3 Marquis de Lotbeniere, military engineer, had in charge the whole system of Canadian defence from the defeat of Baron Dieskau at Lake George in 1755 until 1758, when he was superseded. He urged the authorities to fortify the heights of Quebec between Sillery and Anse- des-Meres and was assured that they could not be scaled. "But," replied the Marquis, " I used to climb them and with no great diffi- 54 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE Vermont. Possibly he may have taught French in the then well-known local academy, Clio Hall, and at- tracted the attention of the Rev. Dr. Job Swift, pas- tor of the Congregational Church and a Trustee of the college. At all events, whoever his sponsors were, he became Professor of French in 1795 and held the posi- tion until 1799. Our knowledge of his Williamstown life is scarcely less fragmentary than of that which preceded it. One point in regard to it the advertising columns of local newspapers make quite clear his salary, which never exceeded four hundred dollars a year, 1 failed to meet his expenses, and he attempted to pro- vide for the inevitable deficits by establishing a book- store: SAMUEL MACKAY Professor of the French Language in Williams College Begs leave to acquaint his friends in particular and the public in general that in order to obviate the inconven- ience of the want of a BOOK STORE in this place he has supplied himself with an assortment of American and Imported BOOKS and a general assortment of STATIONARY Which he will sell at the lowest Boston or Albany prices for ready pay only. 2 culty when I was a schoolboy." Subsequently General Wolfe also climbed them. (N.E. Historical and Genealogical Register, 50, 54-59; Francois Daniel, Histoire des Grandes Families Francises du Canada, 309-11.) 1 Records of the Trustees, September 4, 1798. 2 Vermont Gazette, October 14, 1796. Western Star, October 16, 1797. 55 WILLIAMS COLLEGE At their meeting September 3, 1799, the Trustees "voted to abolish the Professorship ... in French/' and so effectively did they accomplish their purpose that fifty-three years passed before it was reestab- lished. Though reasons for this measure may have been abundant, they did not think it necessary to give any of them and there is nothing better in the way of explanation than a "wavering conjecture." It seems hardly probable that the action of the trustees was inspired by hostility to Professor Mackay, since in their prospectus for 1798-99 the last year of his connection with the college he figured as " the able and accomplished'* head of the French department, and in 1801 they conferred upon him the honorary degree of Master of Arts. Probably he was a victim of the fierce anti-French sentiment which sprang up in the country during the last two years of the cen- tury. Though his connection with the college was at an end, Professor Mackay remained in Williamstown for the next four or five years. Whatever may have been the fate of his bookstore, he undertook some business in local real estate, purchasing in 1800-03 not ^ ess than eleven parcels of it. This business apparently continued until the autumn of 1804, when all the parcels with a single exception had been sold. 1 The only present memorial of his Williamstown period is found in the cemetery on Hemlock Brook a tomb- stone 1 Registry of Deeds, Adams. Professor Mackay's name appears in the directories of Boston for 1807-15. During these years he published three volumes of translations from the French. 56 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE Erected in Memory of M[ar]ia Lo[uis]a Cha[rti]er de Lotbiniere wife of Capt. Sam[ue]l McKay U. S. Inf[ant]ry She died July 10, 1802 Aged 41. l After the retirement of Professor Mackay the col- lege pulled along with instructors of no higher grade than tutors until 1806, when one of them, Gamaliel S. Olds (1801), was inducted into the new chair of Math- ematics and Natural Theology. On this occasion he delivered an inaugural oration, which attracted atten- tion and made a favorable impression. 2 Unfortunately Professor Olds* connection with the college was brief. It came to an abrupt termination during the autumn of 1808 in connection with a disas- trous undergraduate rebellion. This rebellion was the second in the history of the college. Our knowledge of the earlier disturbance, which grew out of some con- 1 This tombstone is also a memorial to Mrs. Mackay 's father: The right hon ble Chartier Marquis de Lotbiniere died N. York Oct. 7th 1798 Aged 75 His remains were buried in Potters field This was inscribed at the special request of his departed daughter Now Mouldering in this dust. 1 An Inaugural Oration, Delivered in the Chapel of Williams College, October 14, 1806. Monthly Anthology, January, 1807, 49, 50. 57 WILLIAMS COLLEGE troversy or other over the March examinations in 1802, is derived wholly from letters of President Fitch. " Three classes in succession," he wrote, " were in a state of insurrection. . . . For ten days we had a good deal of difficulty; but the faculty stood firm and determined to give up no right. At last, without the loss of a single member, we reduced all to due obedi- ence and subordination. Never had I ... occasion for so much firmness and prudence not even in the great rebellion of 1782 at Yale. . . . The present gen- eration, I trust, will never burn their fingers again." l President Fitch did not prove to be a very good prophet. A second and more formidable " insurrec- tion " was awaiting him barely six years after the date of his triumphant letter. It seems that the two tutors William Fitch Backus and Oliver Chapin fell into such grievous disfavor with the Sophomore class that a petition was prepared in the summer of 1808 and sent to the authorities, demanding their dismissal at the close of the college year. This petition did not please the President and Trustees. On the contrary, they considered it a rank exhibition of impertinence and retained the unpopular tutors. The autumn term opened peacefully and the troubles of the preceding summer might have remained quiescent if Professor Olds, unwilling to let well enough alone, had not in- sisted that the Sophomores, now become Juniors, should send the tutors a formal apology. This they emphatically refused to do, appealed to the President and won him over to their side of the controversy. For the tutors nothing remained but resignations, and 1 Durfee, History of Williams College, 85, 86. 58 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE they were quickly forthcoming. 1 Professor Olds, chivalrously making their cause his own, also retired, and the college lost a fine linguist, a mathematician of distinction, an attractive writer, and an inspiring teacher. After leaving Williamstown he studied the- ology and was settled from i8i3toi8i6as pastor of the Congregational Church in Greenfield. In 1815 he published a vigorous book designed to enlighten mis- informed people of that town who were saying that "nothing but ignorance prevented any intelligent man from becoming an Episcopalian.'* 2 Subse- quently he resumed teaching and in various institu- tions, in the University of Vermont, in Amherst, and the University of Georgia, but the Williams rebellion of 1808 dealt him a rude blow, from the shock of which he never fully recovered. And it also closed the college itself until a new faculty could be secured a period of four weeks. Chester Dewey, of the class of 1806, who succeeded Professor Olds, was tutor for two years and then pro- moted to a full professorship. He taught the Juniors mathematics, astronomy, and natural philosophy. One would suppose he had little occasion to look fur- ther for occupation. But, concluding that the cur- riculum ought to include chemistry, he visited New Haven, attended the lectures and experiments of 1 An entry in the minutes of the Trustees in regard to one of the tutors, though not a matter of particular importance, may possibly be worth quoting, since the incident occurred while he was under fire: "Voted to reimburse Tutor Backus for a counterfeit five dollar bill which had been paid him by the treasurer." (Records of the Trustees, September 6, 1808.) 2 Olds, Episcopacy and Presbyterian Parity, Greenfield, 1815, IV. 59 WILLIAMS COLLEGE Professor Silliman for a short time, and thereupon began to give instruction in the subject at Williams- town. 1 Though full professors may have been few in the time of President Fitch, tutors abounded there were thirty-nine of them between 1793 and 1815. Among the young men who had a temporary connec- tion with the college faculty two Jeremiah Day and Henry Davis achieved distinction in the edu- cational world. Of student life on its intimate and personal side relatively few contemporary data survive. The most important document of this sort is the diary of a Williams Senior, Thomas Robbins, begun January i, 1796, and continued with daily entries, not only to his graduation the following September, but nearly half a century beyond that event. It covers, therefore, eight months of the college year 1795-96, and might naturally be expected to present a semi-confidential report of undergraduate Williams in the third year of its history. But while unquestionably valuable, the diary on the whole is disappointing. It contains much scrappy, miscellaneous information. We find meteor- ological records for forty-eight days of the eight months. Then religious functions of various kinds conferences, prayer meetings, Sunday services are faithfully chronicled. Not less than eight mortuary notices appear. Health conditions in town and college get a good deal of attention and in this connection three interesting items are noted : 1 Durfee, History of Williams College, 358. Correspondent of Wil- liams Review, May 16, 1874. 60 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE " March 28th. A number of scholars went to Ben- nington to have small-pox. " April i6th. Scholars in small-pox have it hard. "April 31. Some of the scholars return from the smallpox." In Thomas Robbins' day students smoked, played cards, and sometimes gambled diversions which he regarded with great displeasure. Also they had such a craze for dancing that President Fitch, on the 3Oth of March, " put an entire stop " to a class in which it was taught, and "acted very wisely." Then the fellows celebrated the conclusion of examinations "by drink- ing companies," and their festivities at the close of the college year 1795-96 seem to have been unusually hilarious. "Last night," wrote the grieved and dis- gusted diarist, " the worst frolic here that I ever knew. . . . My feelings exceedingly wounded by the carouse." The feelings of the Rev. Jedediah Bushnell, who graduated the next year, were also deeply wounded by what he saw and heard in college where "the French Revolution was very popular." While few of the stu- dents may have been "in theory settled infidels," the great majority considered themselves deists and their morality was little better than their theology. 1 A Freshman, Timothy Woodbridge, grandson of Jonathan Edwards, once widely known as the "Blind Minister," wrote in 1799 that the state of college morals was "decidedly low." Plenty of "vices" abounded, though he mentioned none more serious than smoking and card-playing. 2 1 Durfee, History of Williams College, no, ill. 2 Woodbridge, Autobiography of a Blind Minister, 44. 61 WILLIAMS COLLEGE President Griffin, in his historical sermon at the dedication of the New Chapel, September 2, 1828, reviewed the early religious history of the college. Among the graduates of the first six classes, according to his statement, " exclusive of two . . . brought into the church by revivals in Litchfield County," there were only six professors of religion, and for seventeen months of the academic years 1798-1800 the statistics make a still worse showing, since in that interval there seems to have been only one undergraduate church-member in the institution. 1 Though enthusiasm for the sentiments and theories of the French Revolution may have cooled percepti- bly with the opening of the new century, the non- religious tone persisted until a revival, beginning in 1805 and continuing intermittently for a considerable period, changed the atmosphere and introduced a new era. 2 Whatever this revival may have done for individu- als and Gordon Hall was among the converts there also grew out of it an institution, the Theological Society, which had a long and important history. For the next forty years it was a large factor in determin- ing the tone and temper of the college. At the weekly meetings the subjects discussed included many of the toughest questions in the history of divinity, such as "Has God reprobated a part of mankind ?" " Did the human soul of Christ exist from eternity ?" " Are 1 Griffin, Sermon at the Dedication of the New Chapel, 19, 20. 2 There were two other religious quickenings in the time of President Fitch, one in 1812 and the other in 1815, but they awakened no general or continued interest. 62 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE we strictly guilty of Adam's sin?" "Ought a person to be willing to be damned to be saved?" " Is it con- sistent with the character of God to allow wicked men to work miracles?" Members of the society bought some rather for- midable theological treatises. Seven of them, for ex- ample, were among the subscribers to the eight- volume edition of Edwards* works published in 1808 a number not exceeded by the aggregate of under- graduate subscribers in all the other New England colleges. 1 Doubtless they generally accepted the doc- trines set forth in these tremendous books cer- tainly one of them, whose theology we know about, accepted them without much qualification. In order to enlighten or confound a troublesome objector he wrote out a formal statement of his creed. " In con- versation ... on the subject of religion," he said, "you have suggested that the doctrines I defended were more dangerous than infidelity, that I was en- thusiastic, deluded, and uncharitable." He then pro- ceeded to state his theological opinions and with unmistakable point and vigor: " I believe that all men are by nature depraved, incapable of performing a single action acceptable to God or originating a single good thought; . . . that the happiness or misery of every individual of the human race was known and determined by God from all eternity, yet without destroying our accountability." 2 The unconvinced objector persisted in the opinion that such doctrines were worse than infidelity. 1 Edwards 1 Works, VIIL List of Subscribers. 2 Charles Jenkins (1813), MS. letter, June 17, 1812. 63 WILLIAMS COLLEGE We are not to suppose that the Theological Society never lapsed from the contemplation of high themes of divinity. At times, and especially in later years, some more practical and mundane subjects emerged in the discussions, among which may be mentioned the tainted money of slave-holders, preaching without notes, the Bible as a college textbook, "the gloomy and deplorable condition of the Aborigines of our dark and trackless forests. " 1 Nor are the " Minutes" of the society wholly given over to discussions theological, missionary, or educa- tional. At times they lapse into such extraneous and unexpected matters as the discipline of misbehaving members. None of these young theologians ought to have troubled Israel, but some of them apparently had a defective sense of the proprieties. Two offend- ers "Cooley and Lansing" according to the records of June 17, 1813, "acknowledged their faults to the society and were accepted." In 1814 " Plumb, having been previously impeached and on being found not guilty, . . . was acquitted by ballot." A little later "Boltwood and Wing," a brace of refrac- tory sinners, "were dismembered for refusing to pay their fines, and on account of the disturbance they made, the society wisely adjourned until the next Lord's day evening." 2 But these matters of discipline are incidental curi- ous, rather than important. " The society has held on its way gloriously," said Albert Hopkins, in an anni- versary address, November n, 1841, "through the 1 Minutes of the Theological Society, March 6, 1825. 2 Minutes of the Theological Society. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE changes which have alternately obscured and bright- ened the prospects of the institution and of reli- gion." l The Theological Society had the field to itself for several years how many we do not know. It is certain, however, that in 1820 another religious or- ganization the Society of Inquiry was in exist- ence, as it held an adjourned meeting June 7. In 1833 it became the Mills Society of Inquiry, and in 1849 this organization and the older one were united and called the Mills Theological Society. That nomencla- ture did not prove very stable. It was changed first to the Mills Young Men's Christian Association and then to the Williams Christian Association. Nor is the history of the literary societies less inter- esting or important. The earliest of them was the Adelphic Union, a debating club, organized soon after the opening of the college. In 1795 membership had outgrown accommodations to such an extent that it was divided into two subsidiaries the Philologian and the Philotechnian societies. The Union survived, but with changed functions. For a long period occa- sional public debates and annual exhibitions were held under its auspices with speakers representing the two auxiliaries. Many distinguished men also delivered addresses before it at commencement. The list of ora- tors between 1850 and 1880 includes Rufus Choate, Henry Ward Beecher, Edwin P. Whipple, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison, George William Curtis, and Charles Francis Adams, Jr. Though the Union still exists, its functions have 1 Boston Recorder, December 17, 1841. 65 WILLIAMS COLLEGE shrunken to a formality to a sort of official patron- age of the intercollegiate debating league. At first and for reasons not very obvious, the debat- ing societies held their meetings behind closed doors protected themselves from the outside world by means of tokens, badges, and grips, were pledged to secrecy "on the honor of a gentleman." In spite of this boyish nonsense the members gave themselves seriously to the business in hand. They discussed immigration, the liberty of the press, novel-reading, lawyers, emancipation, universal salvation, the coun- try town as the seat of a college, the utility of religion, the relation of legislative representatives to their con- stituents, the dismemberment of the Union, theatres, a big navy, the conquest of Canada, divorce, the French Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase, and the education of girls. 1 These subjects, taken quite at random, would seem to show that Williams students, though living in a frontier settlement, were not wholly out of touch with the world. Concerning the classroom and its history in this period our knowledge is much less than in regard to what happened in the debating and theological socie- ties. Though a scholar and lover of books, Thomas Robbins contents himself with such barren entries in his diary as the Seniors began to " recite" Paley's " Moral Philosophy" January 2 and Vattel's " Law of Nations" March 22. A 1799 Freshman, writing dur- ing his autumn term, is a little more definite. He thought that the lessons were too short and conse- 1 Records of the Philotechnian Society, passim. The Philologian Records previous to 1817 were destroyed by " Philotechnian vandals." 66 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE quently the students did not have enough to do. "I often come up from morning recitation into my room/' he said, " sling my great coat over me and get my forenoon recitation before breakfast so that I have nothing to do before recitation except what I please. Sometimes I take up a Latin book that is out of our course and study a while; sometimes I read a book of travels and sometimes a novel. ... It is a dangerous thing I think for a boy of fifteen to have a whole fore- noon left to his own fancy." 1 This particular boy could "get his recitations " with very exceptional ease and facility. The college, in spite of its remoteness and seclusion, did not escape political excitements. In 1796 there was a violent contest over the election of a Repre- sentative to Congress. The opposing candidates were Thompson J. Skinner, Trustee and Treasurer of the College, and Ephraim Williams, of Stockbridge, kins- man and namesake of the founder. 2 Skinner fluent, plausible, sharp- tongued had plenty of enemies who laid to his charge such political sins as speaking disrespectfully of George Washington and opposing the treaty with England. These enemies also alleged that his private character was "doubtful and ques- tionable," and his friends thought that a "certificate" vouching for him politically and otherwise might be useful. President Fitch, asked to prepare one, good- naturedly consented. 3 This "certificate" did not 1 Woodbridge, Autobiography of a Blind Minister, 45. 2 Western Star, August 30, 1796. 3 Skinner was a Trustee of the College, 1793-1809, and its Treasurer, 1 793-98. A committee appointed to examine his accounts reported, September 31, 1799, that though he had kept them in "a singular man- 6? WILLIAMS COLLEGE please Skinner's opponents and they expressed their sentiments freely in the newspapers. "The President of Williams College/' wrote one of them, "has been duped." Another believed Mr. Fitch to be an honest man, but thought he had "been seduced to do a very weak and imprudent thing." * A third doubted whether one could have much confidence in a man, who after having been in public life eight or nine years "requires a certificate from the President of a College." 2 Mr. Skinner, however, managed to carry the election in spite of the hostile newspaper pother. The defeated candidate, we learn, suffered some dis- advantage from the fact that he happened to be a lawyer a fact which, in the opinion of "A True Friend to his Country," was a serious if not fatal dis- qualification. "We do not want so many lawyers in Congress," wrote this high-grade patriot. . . . "They live at hearts ease all their days men of pleasure that scarcely bring in water to wash their own hands. . . . We can never have things right in America until we change . . . and send [to Congress] good, sensible men of our own cloth." 3 The sort of cloth which this "True Friend" had in mind was the homespun to be found among the farmers of Berkshire County. The great political crisis through which the country passed in the last years of the eighteenth century had ner" the funds were intact. The State of Massachusetts, of which he was Treasurer, 1806-08, did not fare so well, as an investigation showed a shortage of $70,000. The defalcation made a tremendous sensation throughout the Commonwealth and must be reckoned among the greater misfortunes that befell the college in the hard times of 1808. 1 Western Star, October 31, 1796. 2 Ibid., August 30, 1796. 3 Ibid., October 31, 1796. 68 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE two distinct and appreciable consequences in Wil- liamstown. One of them has already been considered the summary action of the Trustees of Williams College in bundling the French language and litera- ture out of the curriculum. The other was a letter dated June 19, 1798, from four Williams Seniors ad- dressed to President John Adams. Speaking for the entire undergraduate body they applauded his course and offered their services in any emergency that might arise. To this letter the President made an ap- propriate and handsome response. 1 On the appoint- ment of Washington as commander-in-chief of the army three weeks later there was an enthusiastic demonstration in Williamstown. The college build- ings and private residences were illuminated and noisy processions of students marched about the streets. 2 The faculty and undergraduates were mainly Fed- eralists a circumstance likely sooner or later to provoke criticism. Whatever may have been said in private the partisanship apparently did not attract public attention until 1806, when the editor of the "Pittsfield Sun" attended Commencement and was so desperately displeased by the orations of the grad- uating class that in speaking of them his rhetoric ran wild. " It is with extreme regret," he wrote, "that we have occasion to indulge in unfavorable strictures. . . . The great sentiment of indignation excited . . . by the indecent streams of political violence which tarnished the annual Commencement at this college a few years ago ... in some measure checked the rag- 1 Appendix V. 2 Vermont Gazette, July 19, 1798. 69 WILLIAMS COLLEGE ing of that political mania which had so long infested the institution. Since that period the streams . . . were evidently less turbid and promised ere long to fertilize and improve the country through which they were destined to flow. The performances of the pres- ent year, however, have dashed from our lips the pleasing cup of expectation. And a fresh eruption of combustible and noisome matter warns Republicans to beware how they trust the education of their sons on the burning sides of a political volcano." * The following week the " Sun " printed a letter from a correspondent whom the orations disturbed quite as much as they did the editor, though he could not ex- press his sentiments in the same extraordinary fash- ion. "At this college," he wrote, "youth are taught to be heady, to despise government and to speak evil of dignitaries. ... No good Republican will retain any further connection with that society." He thought the Legislature ought to interfere and put an end to the "baneful influences" of this notorious institution, "on the morals and taste of our youth." 2 Whether in consequence of these criticisms or for some other reason the orations of the young men in 1807 seem to have been quite different in sentiment and temper from those of preceding years. The editor of the "Sun" was in attendance to hear them and went back to Pittsfield smiling. It gave him a lively satisfaction that for once at Commencement "this temple of science had not been prostituted to the low purposes of calumny and slander." 3 1 Pittsfield Sun, September 18, 1806. 2 Ibid., September 25, 1806. Ibid., September 19, 1807. 70 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE It was hardly to be expected that President Fitch with his aggressive Federalism would escape criticism, and some queer rumors got into the newspapers. One of them gave currency to the story that he refused to allow the students to celebrate the Fourth of July, because, such was the evil plight of national affairs, the day had become a curse rather than a blessing. 1 This old wives' tale, bruited abroad in the disastrous year of the Sophomore rebellion, probably did some mischief. Toward the close of his administration President Fitch appears as the leader of a crusade against Sab- bath-breaking and its attendant mischiefs in Western Massachusetts. On the organization of a society at Lenox, August 16, 1814, in the interest of this move- ment, he delivered an earnest address. Alarmed by present conditions and tendencies the promoters of the crusade attempted to effect a reformation in morals and manners throughout Berkshire County. 2 Their first demonstration was against Sunday travel- ling, which had become quite general. Suddenly the old blue laws against it awoke from their torpor. Somebody interested in the crusade counted one Lord's Day fifty "carriages, waggons and travellers" on the Lenox turnpike. They were detained until after sundown, and then allowed to proceed. Evi- dently the men and women who went out walking or driving on Sundays in the Berkshires a hundred years ago must have been a good-natured generation. Very few of them showed fight and there was little occasion 1 The World (Bennington, Vermont), July n, 1808. 2 An Address to Friends of Order, Morality, and Religion. 71 WILLIAMS COLLEGE for prosecutions or fines. Of the large number over- hauled at Lenox only two offered any defence. 1 Presi- dent Fitch and his associates had a signal though brief success in their propaganda. For three Sundays fol- lowing November 18, it is said that the Lenox turn- pike was practically deserted but a single traveller venturing upon it. The crusade, however, soon spent its force and the highways ceased to be a solitude on the Lord's Day. Not less than six hundred and eighty-nine students entered college and four hundred and fifty of them received degrees in the time of President Fitch. Two graduates became United States Senators, thirteen members of the National House of Representatives, ten professors in colleges or theological seminaries, and six justices of the Supreme Court in as many different States. One of the two Senators, Elijah Hunt Mills (1797), of Northampton, who had been prominent as lawyer and member of the State Legislature, was elected in 1820. After seven years of service his health failed and Daniel Webster succeeded him. A man of refined, scholarly, intellectual cast, his memory, if it survives at all, is kept alive chiefly by " Selections from his Correspondence," edited by Henry Cabot Lodge, and published in 1881. The career of the other Senator, Chester Ashley (1813), a native of Amherst, presents many points of contrast to the peaceful, unromantic life of Elijah Mills. After graduation and the study of law, he began the practice of his profession in Illinois. Two 1 Farmers' Herald, December 14, 1814. 72 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE years later he settled in Missouri and stayed twelve months. Then he removed to Little Rock, Arkansas, where he arrived penniless and unknown. A man of striking personality, 1 an effective stump-speaker, ab- solutely sincere and trustworthy withal, he quickly won recognition, and in 1844 had the great honor of a practically unanimous election to the Federal Senate. And in that body, though a newcomer, he was given the important chairmanship of the Judiciary Com- mittee. But his sudden death at Washington in 1848 cut short a career of brilliant promise. The little town of Westhampton sent to Williams in the first decade of the last century two students who became men of prominence in their day. One of them, Nathan Hale, son of the Rev. Enoch Hale, pastor of the Congregational Church, was for many years a prominent citizen of Boston editor of the " Daily Advertiser/' promoter of public improvements, mem- ber of the Legislature and of conventions in 1820 and 1853 for revising the State Constitution. In the autumn of 1800, when Nathan, then sixteen years old, was at work about the garden, his father called him to the house, where he found Vincent Cof- fin, college tutor, who had come to Westhampton in quest of students. An impromptu entrance examina- tion followed, and was passed without difficulty. The next February the lad rode on horseback across Berk- shire County and joined the Freshman class. He graduated in 1804, and on the one hundredth anni- versary of that event his son, Edward Everett Hale, 1 N. P. Willis said that Mr. Ashley " was the handsomest man in the Senate, perhaps in the world." (Trowbridge, Ashley Genealogy, 148-53.) 73 WILLIAMS COLLEGE was present and read a part of his father's Commence- ment oration, in which he discussed the question, " Has society for the last fifty years been in a state of improvement?" The young optimist took a hopeful view of things and concluded that "if a man were called upon to point out a model of national happi- ness, he would without hesitation name the last fifteen years in the history of the United States." l Justin Edwards, the other Westhampton boy and a pupil of the Rev. Enoch Hale, went to Williamstown in October, 1807, on foot a tramp of forty miles. Though he devoted only eighteen months to his pre- paratory studies and only three years to his college course, at graduation in 1810 he took the highest honors. The subject of his oration on that occasion was "The Signs of the Times." Conditions had changed somewhat since 1804 when his townsman, Nathan Hale, discussed the same topic. In Europe the tremendous disturbances of the Napoleonic era still continued; in America there were ominous inti- mations of trouble with England. The valedictorian of 1810 found hope and reassurance chiefly in the new missionary and humanitarian movement which a little band of his college associates " prayed into existence" on the banks of the Hoosac. Though Justin Edwards evidently did not slight the prescribed work of his college course, none of his class- mates and few undergraduates of any period could approach him as a reader of books. For the three years of his residence in Williamstown the number was upwards of two hundred volumes, and the list con- 1 Hale, A New England Boyhood. Memories of a Century. 74 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE tains such substantial works as Hume's " England, Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," the writings of Reid and Stewart, Edwards "On the Will," and Black- stone's "Commentaries." l The subsequent career of this wide- reading undergraduate, fulfilled measurably his early promise. A leader in temperance agitations, pastor of prominent churches, President of Andover Theological Seminary, he must be considered one of the greater lights of the New England pulpit in his time. 2 The name of another clergyman of this period Orville Dewey, a native of Sheffield in Southern Berk- shire, valedictorian of the class of 1814 was once "blown far and wide from the trump of fame." 3 Contemporary tribute to the charm of his personality and to his oratorical genius are many and unqualified. "God seems to have chosen Dewey," said Thomas Starr King, "to speak in his own tongue." 4 "I have heard," wrote the Rev. Dr. Morrison, "many of the greatest orators of our time. But with the exception of Daniel Webster and Dr. Channing in their highest moments, Mr. Dewey was the most eloquent man among them all." 6 The tribute of the Rev. Dr. Bel- lows, pastor of All Souls Church, New York, president of the Sanitary Commission in the Civil War, and no mean orator himself, is pitched in the same key. "Dewey," he wrote, "had every qualification for a great preacher." 6 Gordon Hall (1808), a man of singular attractive- 1 Hallock, Life of Justin Edwards, 18. 2 Sprague, Annals, n, 579. 8 Bartol, The Preacher, the Singer and the Doer, 3. 4 Ibid., 4. 5 Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, 148. fl Ibid., 358. 75 WILLIAMS COLLEGE ness and ability, spent the brief years of his active life as a missionary in India. A laborer on his father's farm in Tolland, Massachusetts, until the age of sev- enteen, he then began to prepare for college and en- tered the Sophomore class. President Fitch, who lis- tened while a tutor examined him orally for admission, remarked, "That young man has not studied the languages like a parrot, but has got hold of their very radix"] 1 and he easily surpassed all his classmates in scholarship. An intimate friend of Samuel J. Mills in college and theological seminary, he came to the con- clusion at an early period that his field lay in pagan lands. Unquestionably he might have had a distin- guished career as a preacher. " No, I must not settle in any parish in Christendom/' he said. " O, there will be left those whose health or pre-engagements require them to stay at home; but I can sleep on the ground, can endure hunger and hardship God calls me to the heathen." 2 And this splendid physical vitality made it possible for him to bear burdens of toil im- possible for most men. "I ... am able to labor hard," he wrote in November, 1815, "about sixteen hours from the twenty-four." 3 After fourteen years of heroic and successful work he fell a victim to cholera. The best scholar in the class of 1809 was Samuel Austin Talcott and the poorest Samuel John Mills. Talcott pronounced the valedictory under circum- stances that had not happened before and probably will not happen again. A most attractive and promis- ing man, an admirable writer and eloquent speaker, he unfortunately contracted during his college course 1 Bardwell, Memoir of Gordon Hall, 14. 2 Ibid., 249. 3 Ibid., 117. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE gross habits of intemperance. Classmates besought him to suspend these habits at least on Commence- ment Day. Their exhortations accomplished little, since, not long before his turn to speak would come, they discovered "he was n't in the church and found him asleep in the Old Mansion House. They woke him and ... he got up, dashed his head in a bowl of water, straightened out his hair, started for the church and went upon the stage. ... He wandered from his prepared address, but gave a valedictory that was never equalled in the old church. " 1 The scholarship of Samuel John Mills, a native of Torrington, Connecticut, son of the Congregational minister in that town, was so desperately poor that the faculty did not allow him to take part in the grad- uating exercises of his class. It was a case, not of intellectual deficiency, but of preoccupation. The cause which absorbed him and subordinated every other interest was then comparatively new in the American world the cause of foreign missions. A mature young man twenty-two years old, he went to Williamstown in the spring of 1806 to qualify himself for service in that field. The curriculum and the class- room were matters of minor importance. Finding no missionary interest among the students at Williams he set about the rather unpromising task of creating one. The first organized effort in support of the propa- ganda was a series of open-air prayer meetings in the summer of 1806 prayer meetings so quietly if not furtively conducted that the great majority of the 1 Danforth (1846), Boyhood Reminiscences, 112. 77 WILLIAMS COLLEGE students had no knowledge of their existence. 1 The Rev. Dr. Richard Salter Storrs, Sr., a prominent mem- ber of the class of 1807, wrote in 1840, that he never heard of them until after his graduation. 2 The obscurities resting upon one of them, now known as the " Haystack Prayer Meeting 1 ' and the most fa- mous event in the early history of the college, were not cleared up for almost half a century. It had long been understood that such a conference was held and that it led to the formation of the American Board of Com- missioners for Foreign Missions, but a full account of it, the details of place and circumstance, were not recovered until 1854 when Byram Green (1808), the only survivor of the five men in attendance, Mills died in 1818, James Richards in 1822, Harvey Loomis in 1825, and Francis Le Barron Robbins in 1850, visited Williamstown and put on record the lost history. "You request a statement of facts," Mr. Green wrote Albert Hopkins in 1854, "in relation to the prayer meeting which was held under the haystack by some students of Williams College in July or August, 1806. That prayer meeting becomes interesting to the Christian community, because it was then and there proposed to send the Gospel to the pagans of Asia and to the disciples of Mohammed. The stack of hay stood northerly from the West College, near a maple grove, in a field that was then called Sloan's meadow. . . . 1 Rev. Chauncey Eddy, MS. letter, April 13, 1885, Williams College Library. 2 MS. letter, Williams College Library. 78 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE "The afternoon was oppressively warm. . . . We went first to the grove . . . but a dark cloud was rising in the west and it soon began to thunder and lighten and we left the grove and went under the hay- stack. . . . "The subject of conversation under the stack be- fore and during the shower, was the moral darkness of Asia. Mills proposed to send the Gospel to that . . . heathen land ; and said that we could do it if we would. We were all agreed and delighted with the idea except Loomis, who contended that it was premature; . . . that Christian armies must subdue the country before the Gospel could be sent to the Turks and Arabs. In reply, it was said . . . that if the Christian public was willing and active the work would be done; that on this subject the Roman adage would be true, Vox populi vox dei. 'Come, 1 said Mills, 'let us make it a subject of prayer under the haystack, while the . . . clouds are going and the clear sky is coming.' " We all prayed . . . except Loomis, Mills made the last prayer and was in some degree enthusiastic; he prayed that God would strike down the arm, with the red artillery of heaven, that should be raised against a herald of the cross. We then sang one stanza. It was as follows: "Let all the heathen writers join To form one perfect book: Great God, if once compared with thine, How mean their writings look!" l Since forty-eight years intervened between the 1 Byram Green, MS. letter, August 22, 1854, Williams College Li- brary. 79 WILLIAMS COLLEGE making and the writing of this history, the trust- worthiness of Mr. Green's memory was called in ques- tion, but he insisted that no event, however recent, could be clearer or more unmistakable in his recollec- tion. ''The rooms occupied by Mills and Loomis, Bartlett and myself," he wrote in 1857, "the heat of the day, . . . the shower that drove us from the grove to the haystack, the small number who attended the meeting, there being no one present from East College, walking together from the stack to West College, are all circumstances which appear fresh and plain to my mind." 1 The second step in this missionary propaganda, though less striking and picturesque than the first, was scarcely less important the organization of a secret fraternity called "The Brethren" in the au- tumn of 1808. This fraternity, the constitution and records of which were written in cipher, served as an auxiliary and rallying-point in prosecuting the work. Mills and four of his friends Ezra Fisk, James Rich- ards, John Seward, and Luther Rice were the char- ter members of it. When Mills entered Andover The- ological Seminary in the spring of 1810 he took the fraternity with him, and it survived the transplanting sixty years. The members of this Williams- Andover institution, not content with exhorting others, pro- posed to go to pagan lands themselves. A third step was the memorial signed by Mills and three other Andover students Adoniram Judson, Samuel Nott, Jr., and Samuel Newell to the Gen- 1 Byram Green, MS. letter, February 15, 1857, Williams College Library. 80 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE eral Association of Massachusetts which met at Brad- ford in June, 1810, soliciting advice in regard to their ' 'attempting a mission to the heathen." 1 The me- morial resulted in the organization, a year and a half later, of the American Board, which then entered definitely upon the work of christianizing the pagan world by ordaining five young men at Salem, Feb- ruary 6, 1812, and sending them forth as its repre- sentatives, among whom for some reason Mills was not included. It would be a mistake to suppose that nobody had given serious thought to conditions existing in the pagan world before the day of the haystack prayer meeting. Mills and his associates focussed a scattered, unrelated interest already existing, and made it available for a great humanitarian and evangelizing movement. But Mills, with all his interest in the foreign work, was by no means indifferent to the claims of the home field. He made two Western tours, one of them in 1812-13 and the other in 1814-15, and they were re- markable achievements. They involved several thou- sand miles of travel, for his itinerary extended from Lake Erie to the Gulf of Mexico a vast region which seemed to Mills as the valley of the shadow of death. In these expeditions he struggled with bridge- less creeks, dense cane-brakes, wretched fare, and the thousand hardships of pioneer life, as well as with the difficulties incident to the establishment of Bible soci- eties and the distribution of tracts. He preached in every sort of place in public halls, schoolhouses, 1 Strong, The Story of the American Board, 5. 81 WILLIAMS COLLEGE and out of doors. On his second tour he reached New Orleans just after the defeat of the British by General Jackson. The town was full of soldiers, and he found in the camps and hospitals abundant opportunities for service of which he eagerly availed himself. One direct and tangible result of these missionary expe- ditions was the organization of a national Bible society. The pagans of Asia figured in Mills* arguing and praying under the haystack. He never saw that con- tinent, but he did visit the western coast of Africa as the representative of the American Colonization So- ciety which proposed to establish there a republic of free negroes. Accompanied by the Rev. Ebenezer Burgess, lately professor in the University of Ver- mont, Mills sailed, November 16, 1817. "We go," he wrote, " to lay the foundation of a free and independ- ent empire on the coast of poor, degraded Africa." The toil and exposure of the expedition proved fatal to him and he died on the homeward voyage, June 16, 1818, twelve years after the haystack prayer meeting. At the Commencement of 1861, in an address be- fore the alumni, the Rev. Dr. Emerson Davis, vice- president of the college, spoke of the greater fame of Mills compared with that of Gordon Hall, his asso- ciate at Williamstown and Andover, as a strange irony of fate. In his opinion the latter attractive in personality, a brilliant scholar, an effective speaker, and passionately devoted to the cause of missions was by far the more noticeable man. The puzzled vice-president may have been right in his contention, 82 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE yet it does not follow that the work of Mills has been overvalued. No man of his day knew the signs of the times better than he had a clearer, more urgent vision of the opportunities of the Church in foreign lands, in the slums of cities and in the newer parts of the country. And with this faculty of spiritual insight there was associated a positive genius for ini- tiative and organization, for procuring the best as- sociates and helpers in the prosecution of his great religious enterprises. Therefore, the influence of this quiet, unobtrusive man, without popular gifts, who never thought of himself, has gone to the ends of the earth. 1 Of the two hundred and thirty young men who en- tered Williams in the period of 1793-1815 but did not graduate, one was the Rev. Edwin Wells Dwight, pastor for many years of the Congregational Church in the Berkshire town of Richmond. A classmate of Mills, and belonging to his little band of intimates, he usually attended the open-air prayer meetings which they held in the summer of 1806, but missed the only 1 It ought to be said that he made a profound impression on some of his fellow students. "Samuel J. Mills ... is here," wrote one of them Timothy Woodbridge from Andover Theological Seminary, March 20, 1810, "and is my room-mate. If I read him aright, he is an extraordinary man." (Autobiography of a Blind Minister, 80.) A year later the Rev. Jeremiah Hallock of West Simsbury, Connecti- cut, made the following entry in his diary: "May iyth [1811]. To-day Mr. Samuel John Mills, Jun. candidate, preached for us. His first sermon was on depravity his second on giving all to Christ. O Lord, make me thankful for thy mercy to thy servant Mills in giving him such a son. . . . May my heart rejoice in the good of others, and O wilt thou remember my poor Jeremiah!" (Life of the Rev. Jeremiah Hallock, 103.) This "poor Jeremiah" became a distinguished lawyer. There was nothing the matter with him except that he declined to become a clergyman. Hence his father's tears. WILLIAMS COLLEGE one the world knows anything about. In his Senior year he left Williams and entered Yale. At New Haven he fell in with Henry Obookiah, a waif from Hawaii, seventeen or eighteen years old, and under- took his education. The young pagan made good progress and soon announced that he would return to his native land on a somewhat aggressive theological mission "Owhyhee gods! they wood; . . . me go home, put in a fire, burn 'em up. . . . We make 'em. Our God, he make us." The rather surprising success of this experiment led to the opening, at Cornwall, Connecticut, in May, 1817, of a school to train pagan youth, who might come to America, for religious work in their native lands. Mr. Dwight was the first principal of this school and held the position until May, 1818, when there were twenty-three students in the institution who spoke seven different native languages. Henry Obookiah died during the preceding February, and Lyman Beecher preached the sermon at his funeral. 11 Those feet," he said, " will not traverse the shores of Owhyhee, that tongue will not publish salvation to those for whom it uttered so many supplications. We behold the end of his race and bury with his dust in the grave all our high-raised hopes of his future activ- ity in the cause of Christ." 1 But the good that Henry Obookiah did was not interred with his bones at Cornwall. A memoir of him, written by Mr. Dwight 1 Memoirs of Henry Obookiah, Elizabeth, New Jersey, 1819. This edition contains besides the memoir and Dr. Beecher's sermon an inauguration sermon by the Rev. Joseph Harvey, an inauguration address by the Rev. Herman Daggett, and an inaugural address by the Hon. John Treadwell. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE and published in 1818, sold, it is said, to the extent of twelve editions and fifty thousand copies. This book, so directly and intimately associated with the haystack prayer meeting, was an important factor in the movement that led to the christianization of Hawaii. 1 Another student of this time, William Cullen Bry- ant, did not stay to graduate. Born at Cummington, a little, out-of-the way hill town in Western Massa- chusetts, he entered the Sophomore class in the au- tumn of 1810 a slender, shapely, unaffected, and attractive youth. He was the first, and so far as ap- pears the last, candidate for admission to Williams who had won distinction as a poet. In 1808 then a boy of thirteen he published "The Embargo/' a philippic against President Jefferson and his policies, which attracted immediate and at first incredulous attention. Interest in this precocious poem has con- tinued to such a degree that in 191 1 a copy of the first edition was sold at auction for $3350. Nor was "The Embargo" Bryant's only pre-college poem. A second edition of it in 1809 contained several additional 1 Memoirs of Henry Obookiah, Revised Edition, 1832. R. H. W. Dwight, Springfield Republican, January 23, 1910. " In the breezy morning we went ashore [at Kealakekua Bay] and visited the ruined temple of the last god Lono. The high chief cook of this temple the priest who presided over it and roasted the human sacrifices was uncle to Obookiah, and at one time that youth was an apprentice under him. . . . And this Obookiah was the very same sensi- tive savage who sat down on the church steps and wept because his people did not have the Bible. That incident has been very elabo- rately painted in many a charming Sunday-school book aye, and told so pathetically and tenderly that I have cried over it in Sun- day-school myself." (Mark Twain, Roughing It, Hilcrest Edition, vm, 279.) 85 WILLIAMS COLLEGE pieces, among which was a rather neatly turned ode of Horace: "The man whose life, devoid of guile, Is free from crimes and passions vile Needs not the aid of Moorish art, The bow, the shaft and venomed dart." l This boy, whose precocity of genius was hardly less remarkable than that of Cowley or Pope or Chatter- ton, put on no airs when he came to Williamstown. "He was entirely modest and unobtrusive in his de- portment, " said a classmate. 2 Relatively few details of Bryant's brief undergrad- uate career have been preserved. We know that he had little sympathy with the more turbulent side of college life, such as appeared in the rough horse-play called "gamutizing Freshmen," an early synonym for hazing; that he found the debating societies inter- esting; and that, in addition to preparation for the classroom, he managed to do considerable reading in general literature. On one occasion, it is said, he at- tempted to declaim a selection from Irving's " Knick- erbocker, " but as he proceeded the humor of it threw him into convulsions of laughter and he was obliged to sit down with his speech half unspoken to the amusement of his classmates and the disgust of the tutor. At Williamstown Bryant did not find himself in a community wholly indifferent to the muses. A recent graduate 3 had written an ambitious and creditable 1 Lib., i, Carm. xxn. 2 Quoted in Perry's Williamstown and Williams College, 338. 8 Aaron W. Leland (1808). 86 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE tragedy in blank verse, " The Fatal Error," which was presented before the college, and poems appeared not infrequently upon the commencement programmes. Two translations "A Version of a Fragment of Simonides," and an " Ode of Anacreon " and " Descriptio Gulielmopolis," seem to comprise the sum of Bryant's Williamstown verse. The " De- scriptio," a boyish satire upon the college and town and not to be taken very seriously, failed to get into print until 1891, thirteen years after the author's death. 1 It was a sort of mocking valediction when, at the conclusion of a seven months' residence, he left the Berkshire college with the expectation of entering Yale an expectation that failed. This cynical, rail- ing mood passed. " I regretted all my life afterwards," he wrote in his " Autobiography," "that I had not remained at Williams." 2 Bryant's relations with the college subsequently became very friendly. He was restored by vote of the Trustees to membership in his class and wrote a poem for the fiftieth anniversary of it in 1863, reviewing the half-century "since a gallant, youthful company went from these learned shades." Sometimes he attended the annual dinners of the alumni. Governor Emory Washburn, president of the Boston Association, asked him to contribute a few lines of verse for the meeting, New Year's Day, 1868. In reply he said that he had come to the December of life and that he had been ever ill at verse of the occa- sional sort. "You write as if I had nothing to do, in fulfilling your request, but to go out and gather, under 1 The Christian Union, June 25, 1891. 2 Goodwin, Life of Bryant, I, 36. 8? WILLIAMS COLLEGE the hedges and by the brooks, a bouquet of flowers that spring spontaneously, and throw them upon your table. If I were to try, what would you say if it proved to be only a little bundle of dead stalks and withered leaves, which my dim sight had mistaken for fresh green sprays and blooms?" 1 In 1869 he was elected president of the alumni and made a happy speech at Commencement dinner. As an after-piece of this pleasant anniversary he sent President Hopkins five hundred dollars for the uses of the college. "Strange times we live in," wrote the latter in acknowledging the gift, "when poets possess money and patronize literature and make better speeches than anybody else." 2 A newspaper correspondent caught a glimpse of the poet in these Williamstown days of 1869: "The venerable Bryant, looking with his long white hair and beard like Homer come to earth again, as he chatted quietly with some friend, while curious groups scrutinized and noted. Though upwards of seventy years old the author of ' Thanatopsis ' is straight as an arrow and his step as light as a boy's." 3 Mr. Bryant attended Commencement for the last time in 1876 and made a speech somewhat reminis- cential at the alumni dinner. Since his student days, he remarked, great changes had taken place. The faculty consisted of three tutors for Freshmen and Sophomores, a professor for Juniors, and President Fitch. Stiff rows of poplar trees connected the main buildings a great contrast to the spreading elms 1 Boston Daily Advertiser, January 2, 1868. 2 Godwin, Life of Bryant, n, 270. 3 Springfield Republican, June 25, 1869. 88 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE and maples of to-day. He dwelt with enthusiasm on the beauty of the town and the mountains that sur- round it. One of the graduating orations in which the speaker considered the problem of life and found it a baffling mystery interested him. But, he continued, we need no other solvent of doubt than that supplied by nature, and then recited a poem written by John Mason Good: "Not worlds on worlds in phalanx deep Need we to tell us God is here; The Daisy fresh from Winter's sleep Tells of his hand in lines as clear." 1 When he sat down, the Rev. Dr. Prime asked him if there were any truth in the tradition that he wrote " Thanatopsis " while a student in the College. "Mr. Bryant said that entering Williams in the Sophomore class of 1810, he left in May, 1811, expecting to go to Yale, but as his father's means did not permit it, he returned to his home in Cummington, and there one afternoon, after wandering through the woods, he rested beneath a group of majestic forest trees and wrote 'Thanatopsis."' 2 At the meeting of the Trustees May 2, 1815, Eben- ezer Fitch "signified his intention to resign" 3 at the close of the college year and was given leave of ab- sence until Commencement. To him the break-up 1 Gregory, Life of J. M. Good, 381. 2 Springfield Weekly Republican, June 30, 1876. " My poem Thana- topsis . . . was then a fragment beginning with the half line, ' Yet a few days and thee,' and ending with the half line, 'And make their bed with thee.' I am not quite certain whether this was in my eighteenth or nineteenth year, probably the latter." (Bryant, Letter to the Rev. Cal- vin Durfee, March 19, 1869. Obituary Record 1877-78.) 3 Records of the Trustees, May 2, 1815. WILLIAMS COLLEGE would seem to have been unexpected. "That spring (1814) at Philadelphia," said the Rev. Dr. Griffin, " I met the president, the revered tutor of my youth, and found him cheerful and happy and with no other thought than to lay his bones in this delightful valley." 1 In the next twelve months the whole aspect of the situation changed. For that unfriendly transforma- tion the declining fortunes of the institution fur- nished at least the occasion. The four classes on the ground at the beginning of the college year 1814-15 graduated sixty-eight men, while the four classes a decade earlier graduated one hundred and eleven. It was a serious decadence and led friends of the college to believe that it could not be kept alive in Williams- town, and should, therefore, be removed to some more promising location. Though not absolutely essential to the success of such a project, the resignation of the President would without much question facilitate it. But the processes, whatever they may have been, by which it came about disturbed and angered the com- munity. " It was with grief and indignation," wrote " Berk- shire," prominent among the warring pamphleteers of 1819-20, "the public saw an old and faithful serv- ant, with a numerous family, driven from an insti- tution which he had fostered to meet the buffets of the world and the caprices of fortune. . . . Age, pru- dent and timid, draws its fragile, weather-beaten bark within shore. . . . But he was pitilessly pushed to sea to find his grave in the deep, or to be stranded on 1 Griffin, Sermon at the Dedication of the New Chapel, 12. 90 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE some unknown, inhospitable shore. " l The rhetorical " Berkshire" may have done the Trustees scant jus- tice. Yet, though they did not perhaps exactly "push him to sea," their tears were few when he took passage from Williamstown. But after his resignation had been secured, they did not fail to treat the retiring President handsomely. They praised his work four complimentary adjectives were found to be necessary in describing it, "long, laborious, able, and useful" 2 and presented him a purse of twenty-two hundred dollars, a grant amounting to "more than one eighth of our productive funds." 3 The money and the four adjectives assuaged his griefs so effectually that he went away from Williamstown " perfectly satisfied." 4 He removed to West Bloomfield, New York, where for twelve years he was pastor of a small Presbyterian church. But the early mood of content did not last long. The ex-President could never make both ends meet financially and the twenty-two hundred dollars failed to afford any permanent relief. When after a little funds ran low and he found that he "must be indebted to the charity of friends for the education of a son," he came to feel that he had not been "very generously or even justly treated," 5 and requested "an additional allowance," which the Trustees re- fused. Though one may not be insensible to the pity of it all, in the straitened financial condition of the college, they could hardly have done otherwise. 1 Pittsfield Sun, August u, 1819. 2 Records of the Trustees, September 5, 1815. 3 Ibid., September 2, 1818. 4 Ibid., September 2, 1815. 6 President Fitch, MS. letter, October 5, 1816, Williams College Library. 91 WILLIAMS COLLEGE President Fitch died at West Bloomfield, March 21, 1833, and was buried in the local cemetery. Some report having reached the Williams alumni at their annual meeting in 1844 that his grave was in a neg- lected condition, they appointed a committee of in- vestigation. If this committee ever made a report, nothing came of it. The matter dropped out of sight until 1860, when an undergraduate who lived in West Bloomfield printed a communication on the subject in the " Quarterly." " I found the grave," he wrote, "in a low, damp corner of the churchyard where the rank weeds and swamp-grass vie with each other in impi- ous luxuriance and marked by a broken slab. . . . Even now decay has partially effaced the lettering, . . . and in a few short years the crumbling stone will mingle its dust with the marsh in which it stands." 1 There was a further delay of four years and then the remains of the first President were rescued from the West Bloomfield marsh, removed to Williamstown, and interred in the college cemetery, where a suitable monument had been erected to his memory. Immedi- ately after prayers on the evening of July 5, 1864, the faculty, three or four Trustees, a few graduates and friends of the college gathered about the new grave. Judge Henry W. Bishop (1817), of Lenox, made an appropriate and touching address. "Among those here ... I am the only one," he said, "who was a member of the college during Dr. Fitch's presidency. These relics before us bring back ... in full force the sentiments of reverence, which the living presence inspired. I see his dignified form again, his grave 1 A. C. Brown (1861), in Williams Quarterly, July, 1860. 92 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLLEGE and benignant features, his courteous demeanor, his happy smile, and feel again the veneration which the lapse of half a century has not extinguished. ... I have always regarded Dr. Fitch as the real founder of this institution. ... He came here early a ripe scholar . . . and eminently qualified to teach. He was thoroughly equal to impart all that an education then thought liberal required. . . . May he not, therefore, be permitted to share, without impairing, the just fame of him whose munificence is acknowledged by the name with which the institution has been chris- tened." l Thus, on a summer's evening, thirty-one years after his death, the mortal remains of President Fitch were interred in the cemetery of Williams College. He brought to the service of the institution at the crit- ical stage of its beginnings, not exceptional gifts of intellectual brilliancy or executive vigor, but a sound, ample scholarship a mild, courtly, gracious dis- pensation of good sense. 1 Pittsfield Sun, July 20, 1864. CHAPTER IV WILLIAMSTOWN OR ELSEWHERE? MAY 8,1815, Professor Chester Dewey wrote a former associate that the Trustees of the college, who met Tuesday night of the preceding week, "held a session till twelve o'clock," which they resumed " before breakfast on Wednesday/ 1 continued all that day, and finished Thursday morning. "They took hold in earnest and labored like men." l The matter which disturbed the Trustees so profoundly was a resolution introduced by the Rev. Dr. Theophilus Packard, of Shelburne, and finally adopted, that a committee of six be appointed to consider the question of removing the college from Williamstown. In this revolutionary proposition the master spirit seems to have been the shrewd, persistent, dogmatic, intellectual divine who offered the resolution. Yet though the leadership naturally fell into his hands, he did not originate the scheme. That distinction belongs to Timothy Wood- bridge, who happened to visit Williamstown in com- pany with his brother Joseph, then a Trustee of the college, some time during the year 1814. As they were returning from this visit, the former, in the course of a talk about the institution and its prospects, said he thought that the location was unfortunate and should be abandoned for some site like Amherst or Northampton, near the middle of the State. "These 1 Dewey, MS. letter, Williams College Library. 94 WILLIAMSTOWN OR ELSEWHERE? casual remarks/' he continued, "made a deep im- pression upon my brother, and after reflecting upon the subject he said to me, ' I shall take up the matter/ ... At a meeting of the Board of Trustees . . . soon after he opened the subject fully. The affair . . . escaped from the secrecy of the Board and spread like wild-fire." J The appointment of the committee of six was nat- urally regarded as a pretty certain indication that the institution would not remain at Williamstown, and a lively competition to secure it sprang up in Western Massachusetts. At the next meeting of the corpora- tion, September 5, communications were received from four towns in Hampshire and two in Berkshire all anxious to secure the college and pledging cer- tain sums of money on that condition. 2 Stockbridge with a tentative subscription of $13,000, and North- ampton with one of $12,500, were the leading com- petitors. These towns and all the others took one point for granted the college was on the downward road to extinction. What has Williamstown, it was urged, "that can attract the attention of the public or that can render a term of four years' residence agreeable or pleasant? . . . Many scholars . . . having entered the institution . . . soon became sick of the place and ob- tained dismissions." 3 This discouraged view of the situation was widely prevalent. " I perfectly agree in sentiment," wrote a correspondent of the "Hamp- 1 Woodbridge, Autobiography of a Blind Preacher, 158. * "X," in Berkshire Star, January 21, 1819. 8 Hampshire Gazette, July 5, 1815. 95 WILLIAMS COLLEGE shire Gazette" a month earlier, "with many gentle- men of both political parties in this country that it is expedient not only to rescue this seminary of learning from a natural death for want of support, but to transplant it to the soil of the old county of Hamp- shire." 1 Another interesting campaign document "An Appeal to the Reverend Clergy" discussed the question of "furnishings" proper for a college town. "Above all," according to the "Appeal," "it ought not to be in want of gentlemen in easy circum- stances, of leisure and literary taste, of refined man- ners, of moral and religious habits and of respectabil- ity at home and abroad." Evidently the pamphleteer meant to convey the impression that the Williams- town of 1 8 1 5 was ' ' in want of gentlemen * ' of this type. The competing towns also pushed their interests by holding public meetings. Of these the largest and most important assembled at Northampton June 24, when the question of removal is said to have been "dispassionately considered and ably discussed." The conclusions, however, of this highly impartial assembly were never in doubt. But the mass meetings, the provisional subscrip- tions, the appeals, and the letters to newspapers all proved to be an idle rub-a-dub, since the committee of six in their report, which the Trustees adopted, de- clared the proposed removal inexpedient "at the present time and under existing circumstances." 2 What considerations led the committee to this con- clusion they neglected to explain. The facts appear to 1 Hampshire Gazette, June 7, 1815. 2 Records of the Trustees, September 5, 1815. 96 WILLIAMSTOWN OR ELSEWHERE? have been that "some of the most respectable gentle- men in Berkshire pledged themselves to raise the col- lege from its present degraded condition if they might have opportunity/* and the corporation concluded to give the institution further days of grace "in the place where it had stood since its establishment. " 1 The report of the committee of six put an end to all official agitation for removal in the neighboring towns as well as in the Board of Trustees. Yet it is said to have been "a notorious fact" 2 that public interest in the subject continued. Nor did the college community lapse into indifference. July 14, 1816, ten months after the motion of the Rev. Dr. Theophi- lus Packard had been defeated, the question, "Ought Williams College to be removed from its present loca- tion?" was debated in the Philotechnian Society and decided, after a spirited discussion with but one dis- senting vote, in the affirmative. 3 The selection of a new President, which occurred at the stormy May meeting of the Trustees in 1815, seems to have been a wholly peaceable affair, un- vexed by discussion or difference of opinion, and their first choice was Professor Leonard Woods, of Andover Theological Seminary. To provide against the con- tingency that he might decline the offer, which he proceeded to do without much delay, they elected as a second choice Professor Zephaniah Swift Moore, of Dartmouth College. The Rev. Dr. Theophilus Packard visited Hanover to confer with the President 1 " Plain Dealing," in Hampshire Gazette, November 10, 1818. 2 Hampshire Gazette, October 27, 1818. * Records of the Philotechnian Society. 97 WILLIAMS COLLEGE elect, who accepted the position. What report in re- gard to the condition and prospects of the college this fierce, anti-Williamstown partisan would make, may be readily imagined. Born in Palmer November 20, 1770, President Moore lived there until he was eight years old, when he removed to Wilmington, Vermont, a raw, paltry, half -inaccessible mountain town, where his father undertook the rather unpromising business of farm- ing. In this business, with its exacting toil and meagre opportunity, Zephaniah was his chief assistant until he reached the age of eighteen. Then he began to fit for college at Clio Hall in the neighboring town of Bennington. 1 Entering Dartmouth he graduated with honor in 1793 three years earlier than his friend Theophilus Packard. In 1798, after theological studies lasting two years, he became pastor of the church at Leicester, Massachusetts. His success in the pulpit was quite beyond the ordinary. While not exactly rhetorical, much less sensational, at times his preaching was singularly impressive. A sermon of his at the ordination of the Rev. Absalom Peters in Ben- nington seemed, to one auditor at least, like "a new revelation of the oracles of God." 2 He remained at Leicester until 1811, when he accepted a call to the chair of Latin and Greek in Dartmouth College. The finale of his pastorate is a significant commentary on the quality of it. When he left town his parishioners assembled and many of them accompanied him sev- eral miles on the way to his new field of labor. 3 1 Sprague, Annals, I, 642. * Vermont Gazette, July II, 1820. 8 Historical and Genealogical Register, I, 136. ZEPHANIAH SWIFT MOORE I8I5-I82I WILLIAMSTOWN OR ELSEWHERE? President Moore was inaugurated September 3, 1815. His address on this occasion a clear, sound, well-built discourse in which the studies which a col- lege curriculum should offer were considered and appraised 1 pleased the Trustees, who thought it was " elegant " 2 and requested a copy for publication, but for some reason it never got into print. There was no reference in this discourse to the questions that had been so seriously troubling Williamstown and all Western Massachusetts. The college year 1815-16 began with a new Presi- dent and also with a new professor Ebenezer Kel- logg, a graduate of Yale in 1810 and salutatorian of his class, who was inducted into the recently established chair of Ancient Languages. Only fifty-eight students were in attendance a great falling-off from the maximum figures one hundred and fifteen in the preceding administration. Probably this omi- nous shrinkage in registration, which alarmed Wil- liamstown, did not displease President Moore and the Rev. Dr. Theophilus Packard. It lent a color of plau- sibility to their contention that the institution was in the earlier stages of a hopeless collapse. President Moore practically accepted conditions as he found them and attempted little in the line of re- form or innovation. There was, it is true, a revision of the formidable college laws of 1795, which fills thirty-seven pages in the "Records of the Trustees." While the code may have been modified in details, the old spirit and temper remained a fact made 1 Moore, MS. Sermon, Williams College Library. 2 Records of the Trustees, September 5, 1815, 99 WILLIAMS COLLEGE unmistakably clear by the provision that some mem- ber of the faculty must visit the rooms of students twice every day during study hours. 1 The only other change of any importance was in reference to the requirements for admission. Caesar's Commentaries, Graeca Minora, and Cummins' Geog- raphy were added to the list of them. With the excep- tion of a rather indefinite scheme for occasional classes in chemistry, law, and natural science, and a four- years' course of theological lectures by the President, which he did not find time to offer, there appears to have been little change in the curriculum. That the ordinary functions and processes of the college should suffer in the interval of suspended hos- tilities over the question of removal was inevitable. As a matter of fact only one event of exceptional im- portance occurred in the classrooms of 1815-21, and that event the lectures of Amos Eaton (1799) on Natural History was in a sense accidental. He had been out of college eighteen years, and had devoted, nominally at least, sixteen of them to the study and practice of law. But after " struggling . . . against difficulties almost ' insurmountable/ " 2 he aban- doned his profession, removed to New Haven, and put himself "under the direction of Professor Silli- man in the year 1816. . . . Having received an invita- tion to aid in the introduction of Natural Sciences at Williams College in Mass. I commenced a course of lectures at that institution in March 1817. ... Such 1 Records of the Trustees, September 5, 1815. * Eaton, Index to the Geology of the Northern States, Second Edition, Dedication. 100 WILLIAMSTOWN OR ELSEWHERE? was the zeal at this institution that an uncontrollable enthusiasm for Natural History took possession of every mind; and other departments of learning were for the time crowded out of College. The . . . author- ities allowed twelve students each day (72 per week) to devote their whole time to the collection of min- erals, plants &c in lieu of all other exercises " 1 "I have been told by students of that time," Albert Hop- kins wrote, "that it would be difficult to conceive of the enthusiasm which then prevailed in the pursuit of science." 2 To prepare for the second course, which dealt with the flora of the Northern States, the students no publisher being willing to take the risk printed five hundred copies of "A Manual of Botany," compiled from the lecturer 's "manuscript system" an en- terprise without precedent in the history of American colleges. This "Manual" contained an enthusiastic letter of appreciation addressed to Mr. Eaton and signed by all the undergraduates with the exception of one Sophomore and three Freshmen. 3 Amos Eaton devoted the years immediately suc- ceeding his great successes at Williamstown to writing books and to the lyceum platform. Of his numerous series of lectures the course most talked about and most important in practical results seems to have been the one delivered before the Legislature of New York. 1 Eaton, Geological Text Book, Second Edition, 16. 2 Williams Quarterly, June, 1864, p. 261. 8 Ballard, Amos Eaton, 265. July 19, 1817, Mr. Tutor Charles Jen- kins made the following entry in his Daily Notices, etc.: "Paid Prof. Dewey $5.00 for Mr. Eaton, subscription to lectures on Natural His- tory." IOI WILLIAMS COLLEGE "In the winter of 1819, through the exertions of Dr. Breck, seconded by Gov. Clinton ... I was employed in giving a course of lectures on Geology and Chem- istry with their applications to agriculture ... in the rooms of the Society of Arts in the Capitol." 1 This course of lectures awakened profound interest and created in some large measure the sentiment that led ultimately to the publication of "The Natural His- tory of New York." No one among the American pioneers in science approached Amos Eaton in popular exposition, in ability to awaken enthusiasm, whether he addressed a country lyceum, the students of Williams College, or the Senators and Representatives of the State of New York. 2 The armistice in the war against Williamstown came to an end in 1818. At a meeting of the Trustees August 6, the Rev. Dr. Theophilus Packard intro- duced a resolution to the effect that Williams College be removed to Amherst and united with a projected literary institution in that town. This unexpected resolution created consternation among "the very respectable men of Berkshire/' who had undertaken to put the college upon its feet and thought they were succeeding in the enterprise. "A fair contract," wrote one of them in 1818, "fully understood . . . was entered into. . . . The most unequivocal evidence is before the public that these efforts and sacrifices were not in vain. The number of students was grad- 1 Eaton, Geological Note Book, Second Edition, 18. 2 From 1824 to 1842, the year of his death, Amos Eaton was " Senior Professor" at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. IO2 WILLIAMSTOWN OR ELSEWHERE? ually increasing, the reputation of the institution was rising beyond the expectation of its most sanguine friends . . . when the Amherst project burst upon the college. " 1 Though President Moore favored the " Amherst Project," the Trustees promptly rejected it. While the rebuff scarcely pleased the Rev. Dr. Theophilus Packard, he intimated that it was only an incident in the campaign, regrettable, perhaps, but of no serious importance, and that turned out to be the case. At a special meeting of the Trustees November 10, a reso- lution was adopted by a vote of nine to three 2 author- izing the removal of the college from Williamstown provided the Legislature should sanction the project and sufficient funds be secured to finance it. This resolution differed from the earlier one in leaving the selection of the new site to a disinterested committee, which was authorized "to view the towns of Hamp- shire County and determine the place to which the college shall be removed." 3 The Trustees shrewdly put this part of the business into the hands of distinguished gentlemen who lent dignity and importance to the transaction James Kent, author of the famous "Commentaries on American Law"; Nathaniel Smith, a judge of the Supreme Court of Connecticut, and the Rev. Dr. Seth Payson, of Rindge, New Hampshire. At the November meeting two events occurred, no 1 "Plain Dealing," in Hampshire Gazette, November 10, 1818. 2 The Trustees who voted in the negative were Daniel Noble (1796), of Williamstown, Israel Jones, of North Adams, and Levi Glezen (1798), of Lenox. 8 Records of the Trustees, November 10, 1818. 103 WILLIAMS COLLEGE record of which appears in the minutes of the Trus- tees. One of them was the arrival of a committee from Amherst with Noah Webster, the lexicographer, for chairman. This committee wished to renew the overtures which had been rather unceremoniously re- jected in the preceding August, and especially to urge serious consideration of the resolutions of a conven- tion held at Amherst September 29 and attended by delegates thirty-seven of them were clergymen from many towns in the counties of Hampshire, Franklin, and Hampden. And a single question only came before the convention the question of es- tablishing a college in Hampshire County. After an exciting and prolonged debate the conclusion was reached that such an institution should be estab- lished in the town of Amherst. The other unre- corded event was the presence of a committee ap- pointed " at a meeting of a number of gentlemen from various parts of Old Hampden ... in Northampton on the twenty-second day of October" and directed to collect such facts as might be helpful in the matter of relocating Williams and to lay them before the Trustees of that institution. 1 But neither Noah Webster and his associates, nor the gentlemen from Northampton, accomplished anything. What should be done with the college, if it did not remain in Wil- liamstown, was a question which James Kent, Na- thaniel Swift, and Seth Payson would take under advisement and in due time decide. Probably the nine Trustees who advocated removal were divided 1 Hampshire Gazette, October 22, 1818. Franklin Herald, November 3, 1818. 104 WILLIAMSTOWN OR ELSEWHERE? the majority favoring Northampton. If we may trust the evidence of a crude cartoon that some unknown artist exhibited in Williamstown soon after the mem- orable loth of November, President Moore and the Rev. Dr. Theophilus Packard were partisans of Am- herst. The cartoon attracted the attention of a casual newspaper correspondent. "As I was travelling not long since," he wrote, "in the county of Berkshire], I called at a town in the north part of the county, where I saw a very ingeni- ous caricature painting. . . . On the canvas you have a correct view of the college buildings. At one end . . . a lazy-looking man in the dress of a clergyman, said to represent Parson P[ackard] is mounted on a small, lean pony . . . hitched to the building, whipping and spur- ring the poor beast to draw. ... At a little distance is a large, portly, smooth-faced gentleman in clerical dress [President Moore] with apparently two faces, from one of which goes a label pointing toward the Rev. Mr. Pfackard] on which is written in capitals, 'Whip up, Mr. P[ackard]. Now or Never.' From the other face proceeds another label, pointing toward a small collection of decent-looking people ... * I feel very friendly to the college. I think our experiment will prove successful.' "In the background . . . scarcely visible are one or two sable-looking gentlemen . . . diligently at work with crowbars, heaving at the building. In the fore- front of the picture is seen a small squad of little fel- lows with their faces toward A[mherst], each one with a little sack. From the foremost proceeds a label . . . ' How far is it to A[mherst]? . . . Also a label from one 105 WILLIAMS COLLEGE of the faces of the smooth-faced gentlemen, pointing toward the squad of boys ... Be still and contented, boys, the college will soon be at A[mherst].'" 1 This cartoon is probably the earliest in the reper- toire of Williams undergraduates. Whatever may be thought of its merits at the present day, some contemporaries felt that the traveller ought not to have sent an account of it to the newspapers. In their opinion he showed bad taste, if he did not violate the obligations of hospitality, by giving publicity to an incident which one might laugh over in private, but ought not to bruit abroad. 2 The dormant inter-town rivalry to secure the col- lege now broke out afresh and with no loss of inten- sity. Most of the previous competitors entered the reawakened contest, and one community the town of Greenfield that had been indifferent in 1815. This newcomer easily outdid its rivals in hortatory and oratorical fervor. "When we consider that the future usefulness of such an institution . . . depends in a great measure on being located in the right place," it was urged, "and when we look at the several places that have been proposed, and at the same time, as far as in us lies, look with a single eye to the best good of the present and all future generations, we cannot avoid concluding that Greenfield is the most available location for the college." 3 At a town- meeting January 28, 1819, a committee of forty-one members was appointed to raise funds a commit- 1 " A.B.," in Pittsfield Sun, December 30, 1818. * " Decus," in Pittsfield Sun, June 20, 1819. * Franklin Herald, January 12. 1819. 106 WILLIAMSTOWN OR ELSEWHERE? tee representing not only Greenfield, but Deerfield, Shelburne, Colerain, Leyden, Bernardston, Gill, and Montague. This committee issued a second circular, pitched on a higher rhetorical key than even the first and addressed "To all who are in favor of having Williams College located at Greenfield." "If you do what you have the power, ability and opportunity of doing," said these fluent promoters, "there is good reason to expect that the college may be located where you think it ought to be. ... If you suffer the present opportunity to pass away unimproved, it is very certain you will never have another. ... Be wise for society be wise for yourselves, your children and your children's children and all the people shall say Amen." 1 In a few days the subscriptions amounted to eight thousand dollars. If Greenfield had secured the coveted "seminary of learning," the name of it would have been changed to Washington College. 2 In the spring of 1819 the committee commissioned "to view the towns of Hampshire County" set out on their tour of investigation. Apparently they made a careful survey of the field, visiting the competing communities and listening to whatever statements might be presented. Their report, stiff with the dialect of legal phraseology, was as follows : "To all to whom these presents shall come or may concern Know Ye that we, the subscribers, having by a resolution of the President and Trustees of Wil- liams College been appointed a committee to view 1 Franklin Herald, February 2, 1819. 2 Thompson, History of Greenfield, I, 310. 107 WILLIAMS COLLEGE the towns in the old County of Hampshire and Com- monwealth of Massachusetts as far as might be proper and to determine and fix the place to which the said college should be removed, and having taken upon ourselves the said trust . . . and having duly consid- ered the subject Do determine and declare that the place to which the said college ought to be removed is the town of Northampton. ....,.-:/'** June 22 the day after receiving the report the Trustees issued an address to the public in which they explained and defended their action. Williams- town, they contended, with its inaccessibility, with the lessening number of students, with the alarming shrinkage of income, with the disastrous competition lately sprung up in Vermont and New York, was an impossible site, and the college must not be sacrificed to the interests of that town. 2 Preliminaries having been settled, there was no delay in beginning the contest. July 28, six days after the report of Messrs. Kent, Smith, and Payson, delegates from five counties Worcester, Franklin, Hampden, Berkshire, and Hampshire met in con- vention at Northampton to devise such measures as might be necessary to secure the removal of the col- lege to that town. President Moore attended the gathering and was elected chairman. 3 Some delay occurred in holding the counter, pro- Williamstown convention. It was not until the 6th of October that it assembled at Pittsfield, passed appro- 1 Records of the Trustees, June 22, 1819. 2 Berkshire Star, July 29, 1819. 1 Hampshire Gazette, August 3, 1819. 108 WILLIAMSTOWN OR ELSEWHERE? priate resolutions, and appointed a committee to fight the Northampton scheme. This committee presently published a belligerent pamphlet attacking the recent manifesto of the Trustees. In this second stage of the struggle it was now Northampton versus Williamstown the campaign of discrediting the latter as a practicable site for a college was resumed. On that score, however, little re- mained to be said the fields of abuse had been care- fully gleaned. Perhaps one of the scoffers at the town may have shown a trace of originality. He commis- erated the lot of the Berkshire alumni unless some- thing could be done for them. "They will find no pleasure," he observed, "in years to come in replying when asked the place of their education, 'There was once a college called Williams . . . where I took my degree/ ... It is unkind and unjust ... to permit its name and its honors to be lost." 1 The most impor- tant document, however, which the Trustees had in hand, whatever may have been the value of friendly communications in the newspapers, was a letter from the late President Dwight, of Yale College, in which he emphatically commended their plans. "At Wil- liamstown," he said, "the college was put under a bushel." 2 One essential condition of removing the college to Northampton was that .a fund of fifty thousand dol- lars should be raised by citizens of that town to under- 1 Hampshire Gazette, August 10, 1819. 2 This letter was written June 23, 1815, and printed in the Hampshire Gazette, January 5, 1819. "No man of the age," said the editor, " was more competent to settle the question upon which he offered his opin- ion." 109 WILLIAMS COLLEGE write the enterprise. 1 November 2, 1819, the com- mittee appointed to examine the subscriptions, having made a favorable report, the Trustees voted that "it is expedient to petition the legislature for the removal of Williams College ... to Northampton." 2 Also, President Moore was directed to sound the authori- ties at Amherst in regard to the possibility of their joining in the movement, but they would not listen to his overtures. January 17, 1820, the formal papers in the case the petition of President Moore and nine Trustees, the remonstrance of the three dissenting Trustees and the town of Williamstown reached the Legislature and were referred to a joint committee of the Senate and House of Representatives. After holding pro- tracted sessions and attending to "all that either party had seen fit to offer," the committee concluded that "it is neither lawful nor expedient" to remove the college to Northampton. The discussion of their report began in the Senate February 5, was resumed on the 8th, and concluded with the adoption of it by a vote of thirty to five. At least one vigorous and tell- ing speech the pro- Williamstown speech of Josiah Quincy enlivened the discussion. In the course of a violent attack upon the nine Trustees who favored removal, he drew a realistic picture of the local desola- tion that would follow if they should succeed in their campaign. "My honorable friend from Hampshire [Mr. Lyman]," he said, "treated very lightly the effects of removal. He forgot that though it might 1 Records of the Trustees, November 10, 1818. * Ibid., November 2, 1819. no WILLIAMSTOWN OR ELSEWHERE? be sport to Northampton it was death to Williams- town. He spoke as though it were a simple agricul- tural operation. . . . Then he told us what a soil that of Northampton is, rich, strong . . . the delight of all eyes, the desire of all hearts. The great rivers are there and the great post-road. . . . The place was adorned with all the beauties of Eden. . . . The only thing lacking was a tree of knowledge. This they asked permission to transplant. ... I then in imagi- nation recrossed the mountains to look, if I may be allowed the figure, at the hole out of which this great tree was taken. I see its severed fibres, its shattered roots, and the people of Williamstown sitting mourn- ing . . . the pride of their plain gone!" l The House referred the joint report to a committee of the whole, which devoted three sessions to a con- sideration of it. The contestants were fortunate in their spokesmen Daniel Noble (1796) appearing for Williamstown and Elijah Hunt Mills (1797) for Northampton. To the reporter of the " Daily Adver- tiser" - probably Nathan Hale (1804) the speech of the former seemed " ingenious and impressive" and that of the latter "very able and eloquent." 2 On the last day of the hearing debate continued until eve- ning, when the joint report was adopted by a vote of one hundred and thirty-five against twenty-three. The committee then arose and became the House of Representatives, which after an ineffectual effort to refer the question to the next Legislature, adopted the report in concurrence with the Senate the final vote 1 MS., Williams College Library. * Daily Advertiser, February 14, 1820. Ill WILLIAMS COLLEGE being one hundred and twenty-seven in the affirma- tive and twenty-four in the negative. 1 Various phases of the question were discussed in the Boston newspapers during the progress of the de- bate. The most important journalistic contribution to the controversy was an anti-Williamstown edi- torial, three columns and a half long, in the "Daily Advertiser/' written by Nathan Hale (1804). "It is with great reluctance," he said, speaking of the report of the joint committee, "that we dissent, . . . and no consideration but a sense of duty to the college would induce us to offer any reasons for an opposite opin- ion. . . . We enter upon the subject with the greater freedom because from the rough experience of three or four years* residence at the college in its present position we feel competent to form a very decided opin- ion." The village, he continued, is small, situated in 1 Journal of the House of Representatives. Columbian Centinel, Febru- ary 16, 1820. While the struggle over the removal of Williams was in progress the famous Dartmouth College litigation occurred. Here the question turned upon the right of the Legislature to revoke the charter of the college, notwithstanding the protests of the Trustees, and trans- fer its funds to another institution, Dartmouth University. The Su- preme Court of New Hampshire, at the November term, 1817, de- cided against the Trustees, who carried the case to the Supreme Court of the United States, which, in a decision rendered February 2, 1819, reversed the finding of the State Court. The argument of Daniel Webster, as everybody knows, won the case for the Trustees. Some recently discovered correspondence shows a lurking fear in their minds that he, single-handed, might not be equal to the emergencies of the case! "We expect Mr. Webster to take charge of the action," wrote President Francis Brown, of Dartmouth, November 15, 1817, to Presi- dent Kirkland, of Harvard, " and should feel perfectly safe to entrust it wholly to his management. But possibly he may request an associate, or not improbably it may be thought expedient by our friends and board that another able lawyer should join him." (Charles Warren, American Law Review, September-October, 1912. 112 WILLIAMSTOWN OR ELSEWHERE? a community of farmers "in a remote and thinly populated corner of the State and near to a slightly populated part of two neighboring States. . . . Within the distance of fifteen miles . . . there is but one settled minister ... of liberal education." In regard to a single point Nathan Hale hesitated "whether the college should not be allowed to die a lingering death where it is?" Removal seemed to him the only alternative, unless "some extraordinary aid, which we have no reason to hope for," 1 should in- tervene. The people of Williamstown won the fight, though at a heavy cost. In order to show their faith by their works and to put the college upon a better finan- cial basis, they raised funds for it to the amount of $18,186.15 2 under the circumstances a very large sum. The leading spirit in their successful campaign the man whose genius as organizer, pamphleteer, and public speaker saved the day was their towns- man, Daniel Noble, of the class of 1796. He died at Portland, Maine, whither he had gone on business for the college, November 22, 1830. The next morning, at the opening of the session of the Supreme Court, a member of the local bar, who "for nearly twenty years . . . had the pleasure of his acquaintance and friendship," announced his death in an appreciative address. 3 The Trustees in their record of it said that he had been "of vast service to the college," and 1 Daily Advertiser, February 4, 1820. 2 Trustees' Gift Book. Remarks on a Pamphlet of Citizens of Berk- shire. 9 American Advocate, December 8, 1830. 113 WILLIAMS COLLEGE should be "held in grateful and affectionate remem- brance." 1 Anticipating an easy and certain victory, the col- lapse of their campaign at Boston threw the Rev. Dr. Theophilus Packard and his confederates into a very sour mood. They denounced the report of the com- mittee, which the Legislature adopted, as partisan in its statements, fallacious in its logic, and calami- tous in its consequences. 2 The situation was decid- edly awkward. "We hear the enquiry often made/' wrote the editor of the "Hampshire Gazette," "what course will the trustees take? . . . We think there can be no doubt about it. At present they are under the censure . . . either of gross ignorance of the law and constitution or a wanton attempt to violate both . . . are under a strong and sacred obligation to procure a reversal of the attainder which has been passed upon them." 3 They attempted nothing of the sort. Not one of them was in any hurry to offer his resignation a much simpler and more practicable matter. Even the Rev. Dr. Theophilus Packard remained in office until 1825. In those confused and uncertain days, considerable division of opinion prevailed among the undergradu- ates. Some of them were in sympathy with the pro- posed removal, some opposed to it, and others unde- cided. When it was determined that the college should remain in Williamstown the excitement sub- sided, and the crisis seemed to have been safely weathered. 1 Records of the Trustees, September 7, 1831. 2 Hampshire Gazette, August 24, 1819. ' Ibid., February 15, 1820. 114 WILLIAMSTOWN OR ELSEWHERE? The period of quietude and recovery came to an abrupt close. At morning prayers, early in the sum- mer of 1821, President Moore announced that he had received and accepted an offer of the presidency of the Amherst Collegiate Institute. 1 This communication, which was presented to the Trustees at their meeting July 17, "fell upon the students like a thunderbolt." 2 There were about eighty in the institution, and at least half of them proposed to leave Williams and go to Amherst. Alarmed by the critical state of affairs the Trustees immediately elected Professor Thomas Macauley, of Union College, successor to President Moore, and issued a reassuring address to the public. And one of their number, the Rev. Dr. Alvan Hyde, of Lee, calling a meeting of the students, urged them to cooperate with the Trustees in their efforts to re- habilitate the institution. All these activities the address to the public, the prompt election of a new President, and Dr. Hyde's conference with the under- graduates occurred at the Senior examination, six weeks before Commencement. For a time the tonic of this stir was effective and a moderate degree of cheer- fulness prevailed on the campus. But the hopeful mood soon passed. Professor Macauley came to Wil- liamstown, looked about, and concluded to remain at Union. Then the Trustees asked Professor Chauncey A. Goodrich, of Yale, to undertake the presidency, and he declined. It seems that both of these gentle- men were elected without being consulted. This happy-go-lucky policy, which provoked a good deal 1 President Moore's letter of acceptance is dated June 12, 1821. 2 Cooke, Recollections, 35. WILLIAMS COLLEGE of criticism, was abandoned in the third quest for a President, when there were no premature announce- ments. At a special meeting of the Trustees, one of their number, Thaddeus Pomeroy, of Stockbridge, happened to mention the name of the Rev. Dr. Ed- ward Dorr Griffin, of Newark, New Jersey. Catching at the suggestion, they instantly sent him to visit Dr. Griffin and offer him the presidency of the college. Pomeroy conducted his mission so quietly that nobody got wind of it. Meanwhile, alarming signs of panic reappeared among the students. It soon began to look such was the despondency that set in as if Commence- ment exercises must be abandoned. At this crisis the Seniors called a class meeting to discuss the situation and to settle the matter definitely. It was settled, and by two of their number, Emerson Davis and Eras- tus Cornelius Benedict, who declared that, rather than allow the anniversary to fail, they would perform their own parts and also those of their classmates. 1 These two young men saved the Commencement of 1821, which, in spite of all discouraging antecedents, passed off creditably. President Moore presided with grace and dignity, and a newspaper reporter thought that the literary exercises had "on no occasion been surpassed in excellence." 2 Out of the turmoil and confusion there arose one new organization, suggested by a recent graduate, Emory Washburn The Society of Alumni, "for the promotion of literature and good fellowship among 1 Wells and Davis, Sketches of Williams College, 31. 2 Vermont Gazette, September 13, 1821. 116 WILLIAMSTOWN OR ELSEWHERE? ourselves and the better to advance the reputation and interest of our Alma Mater." 1 These expecta- tions have been fully realized, the innovation proving so successful that the whole college world presently adopted it. Some graduates during this brief and stormy ad- ministration were well known in their day. Two of them, members of the class of 1818, Ebenezer Em- mons and William Augustus Porter, became profes- sors in the college. Another member of that class was Daniel Dewey Barnard, accomplished scholar, lawyer of the first rank, member of the Legislature of New York and of the National House of Representatives, Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States at Berlin, and friend of Alexander von Humboldt. Emory Washburn, who graduated a year earlier, was the last Whig Governor of Massachusetts, his election occurring in 1854, 3 us t before the Know- Nothing craze confounded all the old political parties. Nominated "without his knowledge or anticipation while . . . absent in Europe," he first learned what had happened "as the steamer touched at Halifax." 2 When the Civil War broke out he was then Bussey Professor of Law at Harvard and more than threescore years old he joined a company of volunteers and "cheerfully bore the fatigue and burden ... of mili- tary drill." 3 Three prominent alumni of the period came from a private classical school in the little village of Plain- field. A year after his settlement there in 1792 as 1 Records of the Society of Alumni. Berkshire Star, August 25, 1821. 8 Mass. His. Society, Proceedings, xvn, 26. 3 Ibid., xvu, 30. 117 WILLIAMS COLLEGE pastor of the Congregational Church, the Rev. Moses Hallock, finding his salary inadequate, established this school, maintained it until 1824, and prepared for college one hundred and thirty- two young men, of whom fifty became clergymen. 1 It was the only school that could by any possibility be called a "feeder" to the college. In 1815 two of his own sons entered the Freshman class. The elder, William Allen Hallock, valedictorian, became the correspond- ing secretary of the American Tract Society, held that office nearly half a century, read all the multitudi- nous manuscripts submitted for publication, edited the " Messenger " and the "Child's Paper," and occa- sionally wrote books, one of which the "Life of Harlan Page" had a large circulation. The younger brother, Gerard, not only took a high rank as a scholar, though he fitted for college in seven months, but had the unique distinction of being assigned a poem on the Commencement programme of 1819. Yet it was as an editor rather than as a maker of verse that he won distinction. For thirty- three years from 1828 to 1861 he conducted the "New York Journal of Commerce" and made it the leading financial organ of the country. This long and distinguished newspaper career, quite as noteworthy in its way as that of his better known contemporaries, Horace Greeley and James Gordon Bennett, came to a sudden and involuntary close. A conservative, fully persuaded that Civil War meant disunion, he 1 Yale, Life of Rev. Moses Hallock, 312. Dyer, History of Plainfield, 36. Old John Brown and William Cullen Bryant were pupils in the Plainfield School. WILLIAMSTOWN OR ELSEWHERE? deplored coercive measures, at least until the re- sources of diplomacy had been exhausted. " Why not negotiate," he asked, though Fort Sumter had been fired upon, "and fight if we must afterwards?" Talk of this sort exasperated the public which was in no mood for compromise. A grand jury presented the "Journal," and the Postmaster-General excluded it from the mails. Though he had never been disloyal in word or deed, nothing remained for Gerard Hallock but to retire from the editorship. "He could surren- der his property but not his principles." x Jonas King, whose struggles for an education as well as his later history were exceptional, belongs to this time. A farmer's son, born in Hawley, a little hill town adjoining Plainfield in Western Massachusetts, he "learned English grammar while hoeing corn, read the twelve books of Virgil's ALneid in fifty-eight days and the New Testament in six weeks." 2 Though these inadequate days and weeks were supplemented by a brief attendance at Moses Hallock's school, the period of preparation for college was short and inter- mittent. With this very informal preparation he visited Williamstown and called upon President Fitch, who asked him how long he had been studying and how much Latin and Greek he had read. "I told him frankly and he shook his head, saying he could give me no encouragement of entering before another year. ... I went out from his presence with a heavy heart, but thought I would use one effort more; that was to call on the tutors and hear what they would say to me. I found two of them together. . . . One 1 Life of Gerard Hallock, 37. * Jonas King, Missionary, 21. 119 WILLIAMS COLLEGE replied very shortly that it was out of all question to think of entering and left the room. I then asked the other if I could not be admitted for a while on proba- tion. . . . Mr. E[merson] (the tutor) looked at me with attention and then demanded if I had been studying with the Rev. Mr. Wood of Halifax. I replied that I had. 'If/ said he, 'you are the same young man of whom I have heard him speak, I will guarantee that you will be admitted before the close of the year. Come on, and I will speak to the president in your behalf.' This was like the dawn of morning to a night- worn and weather-beaten sailor. ... I returned home with a light and gladsome heart, packed up my books and clothes which I had left there, and having re- ceived the prayers and benedictions of my parents, set out a second time for Williamstown. It was if I recol- lect rightly some time in March (1812). A thaw had taken place, the snow was rapidly melting, the roads were filled with water and mud, which rendered it extremely unpleasant and wearisome travelling. It began moreover to rain, but at length I saw the lights of the lamp of science beaming faintly on me through the intervening darkness . . . and I marched on with a quicker step and at about eleven o'clock reached an inn near the college. The next day I began to reside within the walls and was permitted to recite with the members of the Freshman class who entered college some time before I had read a single word of the Greek Testament or Graeca Minora. 'Hie labor, hoc opus fuit.' I was obliged to study night and day, to read for the first time long lessons which they were review- ing. Two hundred lines of the Georgics, seven or 1 20 WILLIAMSTOWN OR ELSEWHERE? eight sections of Cicero's Orations, together with a portion of the Graeca Minora, was a Herculean task for one day. It often seemed to me that my head would be crazed, or that I would sink into the earth under the burden laid upon me." Neither of these calamities happened. At the end of two months he passed successfully a public examination and was ad- mitted without conditions to the Freshman class. The struggle continued through Sophomore year and with such severity that King spent nine months of it in teaching. "My college classmates used some- times to rally me a little, saying I was a singular genius to keep up with them and yet be absent con- tinually." Junior year, though overshadowed at times by sea- sons of religious despondency, was on the whole a period of intellectual exaltation. " My mind was in a state of perpetual enchantment. I felt as if I had en- tered upon a new state of existence; that I had come out of darkness into marvelous light. What I had learned before seemed only as a pebble on the shore." "In September, 1816," the Journals continue, "I received my Bachelor's degree and a few weeks after settled all my bills. Sophomore year I had received from a friend twenty dollars; Junior year about the same. Senior year sixty and fifty more from the Edu- cation Society. In two instances I had received from private friends about one dollar and a half or two dollars, not more. This was all the aid I ever re- ceived from the time I left my father's house till I left college. I had furnished myself . . . with books, clothing, board, everything except a suit of clothes 121 WILLIAMS COLLEGE which my parents gave me at the age of twenty-one, which was called my freedom suit. When I had stud- ied one book, I sold that to purchase another, and at the close sold all I had left to bear my part of the ex- penses at Commencement.' 1 1 The latter career of Jonas King did not belie the promise of his college days. Five languages he could speak and had a working knowledge of six more. 2 He wrote Greek, Arabic, and French as well as English books. In 1867 he addressed the Evangelical Society at Paris for nearly an hour in French, and his fluency of diction, his mastery of accent and idiom are said to have astonished the audience. Then he was no less a man of affairs than of languages. He gave forty-one years of unstinted missionary service to Greece, and the opposition he encountered affords conclusive evi- dence of its importance and power. The Areopagus and Holy Synod attempted to drive him out of the country. They ultimately failed, but it was not in consequence of any lack of effort. One of their agents wrote Dr. King an interesting personal letter. " I am determined ... to pursue you through the whole world under the sun," this thorough-paced hench- man announced, "to set forth ... of what an utterly wicked and devilish spirit you are." 3 The rage and persecution gradually subsided and his last days were relatively untroubled. " We heard a sermon from him in Greek," said Professor Jacobus, of Allegheny Theo- logical Seminary, writing from Athens in the spring 1 Jonas King, Missionary, 27-32. 2 Jessup, Fifty-three Years in Syria, I, 41. 1 New York Observer, May 22, 1861. 122 WILLIAMSTOWN OR ELSEWHERE? of 1851, "and the noble language of Plato and De- mosthenes, though modernized, had a new charm and power." 1 That Zephaniah Moore should not have lingered in Williamstown is hardly surprising. On the morning after Commencement, accompanied by his zealous friend and ally, the Rev. Dr. Theophilus Packard, he started on horseback over Hoosac Mountain for Am- herst, where eleven days later "the Ceremonies of Dedication and the Inauguration of officers of the Collegiate Institute " 2 took place. A man of intellec- tual parts and personal charm, an efficient executive withal, he lacked only one thing as President of the Berkshire institution confidence in its future. 1 New York Observer, July 17, 1851. 2 Williams made large contributions to the Institute, furnishing it with a president, a professor, Gamaliel S. Olds, and fifteen under- graduates in a total of forty-seven. Besides, a Williams alumnus the Rev. Dr. Aaron W. Leland, of Charleston, South Carolina preached the inaugural sermon. (Ford, Notes on the Life of Noah Webster, n, 503.) CHAPTER V A SECOND AND GREATER CRISIS AN event not announced on the programme occurred during the Commencement exercises September 7, 1821, the appearance of a stranger in the little group of Trustees upon the platform, "a person about fifty years of age, of most commanding figure and presence." 1 This magnificent stranger was the Rev. Dr. Edward Dorr Griffin, whom Thaddeus Pomeroy had persuaded to visit Williamstown. Favorably im- pressed by what he saw and heard, he accepted the presidency of the college greatly to the relief of the Trustees and to the surprise of the public. A native of East Haddam, Connecticut, born January 6, 1770, and a farmer's son, the successor of Ebenezer Swift Moore graduated at New Haven in the class of 1790. He was a scholar of high rank and author of the comedy presented by the Linonian So- ciety in I789. 2 Studying theology with the younger Edwards, he entered upon his ministerial novitiate June 4, 1795, at New Hartford, Connecticut. After six years of successful service he accepted a call to the First Presbyterian Church at Newark, New Jersey, where his congregation is said to have been one of the largest and most respectable in the United States. 3 This pastorate lasted until 1 809, a period of eight years, 1 Cooke, Recollections, 38. 2 Kingsley, Yale College, n, 315. 8 Sprague, Annals, iv, 29. 124 EDWARD DORR GRIFFIN 1821-1836 A SECOND AND GREATER CRISIS when he accepted the chair of Pulpit Eloquence in Andover Theological Seminary. He had scarcely begun his work there when Park Street Church, Bos- ton, recently founded in the interest of orthodox the- ology, which the popularity of liberal preachers like Buckminster and Channing had put somewhat on the defensive, began to solicit him to undertake its pastor- ate. This he finally consented to do, resigned the pro- fessorship, and was installed as the first minister of the church, July 31,1811. In his pastorate of three years and nine months, whatever else may have been ac- complished, he failed to restore Calvinism to its lost seat of authority. When Dr. Griffin left Andover and reentered the ministry he did not, as it turned out, wholly sever his connection with the educational world. "I have lately become one of the overseers of Cambridge College," he wrote the Rev. James Richards, May 2, 1812. "About the time of my coming here the So- cinians got a law passed ... to disfranchise the six towns 1 whose ministers were ex officio members of the Board. . . . Last winter the Democratic Assembly re- pealed the law . . . and Mr. Thacher and I rode in on their shoulders." 2 But this academic episode contributed little to Dr. Griffin 's happiness. The tone of satisfaction which pervades his letter to the Rev. Mr. Richards is wholly wanting in one to the Rev. Parsons Cooke (1822) written after the lapse of sixteen years. In 1 The six towns were Cambridge, Watertown, Boston, Charlestown, Dorchester, and Roxbury. 2 Sprague, Sermons by the late E. D. Griffin, D.D., I, 126. 125 WILLIAMS COLLEGE this second letter he gives an account of his brief experiences as a member of the Harvard Governing Boards. It seems that notwithstanding the action of the Democratic Assembly the secretary of the Board of Overseers neglected to send him notices of meet- ings. He waited two years and then it was at the Commencement of 1813 ventured to attend one of them. His unexpected advent made a commotion and a committee was appointed to examine his "pre- tentions." The committee could not agree on a re- port and the Board appointed a day to hear Dr. Griffin in his own behalf. He appeared before it at the State House and spoke an hour spoke trium- phantly, he thought. But his eloquence proved un- availing. A bill was "slipped" through the Legisla- ture "to alter the constitution of the Board, retaining all the existing members except myself." l Though the academic year began in October, Presi- dent Griffin, detained at Albany by serious and pro- tracted illness in his family, was not inducted into office until the I4th of November. 2 On the day of inauguration, "dark, chilly, rainy ... a handful of students forty-eight all told . . . gathered with a few townspeople into what was then one of the largest and dreariest of country meeting-houses." 3 And President Griffin's address did not show him at his best. He regretted that the distractions of domestic anxieties had made careful and elaborate preparation for the occasion impossible. The most interesting part of the discourse is the statement of the reasons which 1 Griffin, MS. letter, November 24, 1826, in Williams College Library. * Albany Gazette, November 2, 1821. 3 Cooke, Recollections, 47. 126 A SECOND AND GREATER CRISIS led him to venture into the wilderness and assume the management of an institution whose "only chance of life stood in the reputation of its president/ 1 l We have no reason to believe that he would have under- taken the desperate enterprise of rehabilitating the Berkshire college had it not been for his fervid, half- romantic interest in Samuel John Mills and the hay- stack prayer meeting. 2 The depression which clouded the inauguration soon passed and a season of fair weather began. Ap- parently the tide had turned the registration of students rising from eighty-four in November, 1822, to one hundred and eighteen in October, 1823, an increase of forty per cent. But the early sunshine days were brief. Scarcely more than a year elapsed when the Amherst Institute sent a petition to the Legislature asking for a college charter. The Williams Trustees took instant alarm and drew up a protest to the effect that a second college in Western Massachu- setts would destroy the one already established. 3 They disclaimed all personal feeling on the subject. With a single exception they were not residents of Williams- town. To them the location of the college was a mat- ter of indifference, but it should have the support of the whole neighboring section of the Commonwealth. 4 Harvard and Brown as well as Williams opposed the charter and succeeded in blocking it for upwards of two years. The slow-paced controversy did not 1 Cooke, Recolkctions, 44. 2 Griffin, MS. discourse, in Williams College Library. Cox, New York Evangelist, August 21, 1856. 8 Records of the Trustees, November 19, 1822. 4 Mass. Archives, Memorial of the Trustees of Williams College. 127 WILLIAMS COLLEGE enter upon its final stages until the loth of June, 1824, when a committee of investigation began hearings at Amherst, continued them a fortnight, then recom- mended that the charter should be granted and the Legislature adopted their report. Upon one point the Williams Trustees and the leg- islative committee agreed Western Massachusetts could not adequately support two colleges. The latter hoped and believed that at some future and happier period, when present controversies had been forgotten, they would be united and in the town of Amherst. For this reason the committee advised and the suggestion pleased the Legislature that a section should be incorporated in the charter providing for the ultimate union of the colleges. 1 Nor was the senti- ment exactly a passing legislative mood. In 1827 Amherst and Williams both solicited grants of money from the State and failed to get them. The committee which had the business in charge included in its report a vigorous protest against the two-college folly. 2 In Williamstown the Amherst charter created a panic which, said President Griffin, " seized the public mind and extended to the college. About thirty took dismissions in the spring and summer; and at com- mencement a class came in of seven. . . . Our number sunk from 120 to 80. ... The heavens were covered with blackness; and during the awful syncope that succeeded in vacation, we often looked up and in- quired l Is this death?'"* 1 Mass. Archives, Report of the Committee, January 8, 1825. * Ibid., February 19, 1827. 8 Griffin, Sermon at the Dedication of the New Chapel, 27, 28. Am- 128 A SECOND AND GREATER CRISIS The college and its fortunes had, indeed, come to a desperate pass students "taking dismissions," the faculty showing ominous signs of disintegration, and a legislative committee recommending a union with Amherst. President Griffin perceived that the chief source of trouble lay in the persistent talk about removal and that something must be done to stop it. He thought that if twenty-five thousand dollars should be raised a new professorship established and a new building added to the campus the mis- chievous talk would cease. All the plans and hopes would probably have failed had it not been for the intervention of an ex- traordinary, perhaps we may say unexpected, event. Soon after the opening of the college year in the autumn of 1825, when conditions seemed at the worst, a great religious awakening began. For a considerable period it pushed aside every other interest and dom- inated the community. Even the exercises of the lit- erary societies were opened and concluded with prayer. Under the date of December 7, 1825, an un- wonted paragraph appears in the Philotechnian records : "Owing to the high state of religious feeling in Col- lege, several were excused from fulfilling their appoint- ments. As it is from the Almighty that we receive the mental powers by which we are enabled to pursue science and literature . . . the secretaiy does not deem it out of place to record here the humble acknowledge- ments that are due to God for the glorious displays of herst opened in the autumn of 1825 with a registration of one hun- dred and fifty-two students. 129 WILLIAMS COLLEGE divine grace and mercy which he is now manifesting among us. ... When all learning shall be of no ac- count; when all that genius and art have done shall decay, and this society be numbered among the vast assemblage . . . around the judgment seat of the great Eternal, then shall we view the scenes which are now here exhibiting with unspeakable interest then shall we render higher ascriptions of praise to God." This revival, in which about seventy of the eighty students enrolled were converted, saved the college saved it by the faith and hope imparted to the only man in the world who could have raised the twenty- five thousand dollars. To secure at that time and in the depressed financial condition of the country so large a sum for an institution, generally thought to be misplaced and "struggling in the agonies of death/' 1 was an almost hopeless task. President Griffin undertook the task and accomplished it. But he declared in the most emphatic manner that with- out the push and inspiration of the revival he " could never have been wrought up to so mighty a work/' Had it not inspired him with "a sweet and sustaining confidence" he would have turned back a hundred times during the progress of the money-raising cam- paign. 2 The twenty-five thousand dollars were secured, and the Trustees at their meeting December 5, 1826, appropriated fifteen thousand dollars to endow a professorship of Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy and "the remainder (if so much be necessary) to the 1 Griffin, Sermon at the Dedication of the New Chapel, 31. * Ibid., 30. 130 A SECOND AND GREATER CRISIS building of a chapel." l It is evident from an advertise- ment of the contractors which appeared in the local newspaper that this remainder did not consist wholly of money; as they requested all who had made sub- scriptions in timber, plank, and boards to deliver them by the 1st of June. 2 The Trustees appointed the President, Dr. Lyndon A. Smith, and Daniel Noble a building committee, who carried forward the work with so much energy that the corner-stone was laid June 27. On that inter- esting occasion Dr. Griffin "made a short but very eloquent address ... in which he remarked that the permanence of the college might, from the erection of another edifice, be considered as established beyond a doubt." He hoped that "the foundation of the building would remain unmoved until the last con- vulsion of nature." 3 In the corner-stone a box was placed containing the names of the Trustees, the fac- ulty, and the students, together with those of the architect, the carpenters, and the building committee. President Griffin said that "he sent the names down to posterity and if they should not be brought to light till the final consummation of all things he hoped they might be found registered in the Book of Life." 4 The new chapel, now called Griffin Hall, beautiful in the harmony of its proportions, exhibiting all the "sweet symplicity" which Carlyle said distinguishes the architecture of Sir Christopher Wren, was dedi- 1 Records of the Trustees, December 5, 1826. 1 American Advocate, April 24, 1827. 1 Ibid., July 4, 1827. 4 Ibid. WILLIAMS COLLEGE cated September 2, 1828.* It was the end of an era a despondent era of debate and uncertainty. To all arguments of sceptics a practical and conclusive an- swer had now been made. The victorious energy which built the chapel and endowed the professorship would be able to cope with the emergencies of the future. As for the chapel it was financially, architec- turally, and in all other respects the creation of the man whose name it now bears. "If you knew how much has come upon me," he wrote, regretting his inability to speak at the anniversary of the Education Society, "in consequence of building the new chapel (the direction of everything in doors and out) in addi- tion to my other cares you would not wonder at my declining." 2 A noticeable group of men came into the faculty during the third administration William Augustus Porter (1818), Ebenezer Emmons (1818), Mark Hopkins (1824), Albert Hopkins (1826), Joseph Alden (Union 1829), and Edward Lasell (1828). These men all continued in the service of the college long after the date of President Griffin, with a single exception. 1 In 1904 Griffin Hall was moved a few rods northeast from its orig- inal position to bring it into line with Thompson Memorial Chapel, and the Trustees caused a tablet to be placed upon the walls with the following inscription: 1828 Griffin Hall 1904 A monument to the faith and skill of President Edward Dorr Griffin Moved, reconstructed, and furnished as a tribute to his Alma Mater by Francis Lynde Stetson of the class of 1867 * Griffin, MS. letter, November 12, 1828. 132 A SECOND AND GREATER CRISIS Professor Porter, elected to the chair of Ancient Languages in 1826, and transferred the next year to that of Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy, died April 2, 1830, greatly lamented by his colleagues and the whole community. 1 In 1827 the teaching staff suffered serious loss in the resignation of Chester Dewey an event which drew from the Trustees a colorless and inadequate resolution, thanking him for his "long, faithful, and laborious service." It had been all that and a great deal more. By his energy and scientific aptitude, by his ability to get the most out of a meagre, primitive apparatus, 2 and by his effective gifts of speech he made natural science a prominent feature in the intel- lectual life of the college during the seventeen years of his professorship. Whether fully appreciated at Williamstown or not, he was rated in Europe and America as the highest authority on sedges. In the curriculum no important or unusual changes occurred. The Catalogue of 1822-23 announced courses for graduate students, but they appear to have been discontinued at the end of the year. Though the chair of Political Economy was not established until 1836, lectures on the subject began in i827. 3 Another and passing innovation also belongs to that year " extra-mural " instruction in Spanish by a Mr. Casas, whoever he may have been. The only informa- 1 American Advocate, April 7, 1830. 2 Blackboards were not known in any college course, Professor Dewey drew his illustrations and worked his problems with chalk on the floor of the recitation room." (William Hyde (1826), in the Athenceum, May 21, 1881.) 3 Records of the Trustees, September 5, 1827. 133 WILLIAMS COLLEGE tion available about the matter is a paragraph in the local newspaper. "On Monday last/' wrote the re- porter, " the Spanish class in Williams College was ex- amined before the faculty." l During the last year of the third administration the year 1835-36 there were two events of some importance which directly or indirectly affected the curriculum. One of them was the establishing of a chair of Latin which previously had been included in that of the Ancient Languages. The other was the reorganization of the society now called the Lyceum of Natural History. It seems to have had two earlier names, the Linnaean Society and Phi Beta Theta, but the records have been lost and our knowledge of them is mostly conjectural. Not content with local work, in this year of reorganization the society sent an expedition to Nova Scotia for scientific purposes, which was the first enterprise of the sort undertaken by any American college. The party, consisting of three members of the faculty, Professor Albert Hopkins, Dr. Emmons, and Mr. Tutor Calhoun, fifteen undergraduates, and "one or two young men of liberal curiosity," 2 sailed from Boston August 25, and had considerable success in making collections for the museum. What of Williams students in the fifteen years of the third administration? According to the Rev. Dr. Prime, a prominent graduate of the class of 1829, the reputation of the institution as the seat of a vigorous revivalism had unexpected consequences. "At that time," he said, speaking of conditions in 1826-29, 1 American Advocate, August 2, 1827. 2 American Traveller, November 13, 17, 20, 1835. 134 A SECOND AND GREATER CRISIS " there were in the lower classes of the college some of the wickedest youth I ever knew. . . . Parents who had profligate sons sent them here that they might come under the power of divine grace." 1 And Dr. Prime's statement seems to be confirmed by Albert Hopkins, who deplored the lawless, in some cases sacrilegious undergraduate activities, which preceded, and after no very long interval followed, the great revival of i825. 2 The vicious young men, sent to Williamstown as a promising reformatory, found themselves in a com- munity where religious services abounded. From the opening of the college year until the 1st of May the day began with prayers in the chapel, "at sunrise or a little before." 3 Vespers came late in the afternoon the faculty, dissatisfied for some unknown reason with the existing schedule, voted in November, 1831, that they " should begin exactly at sundown." 4 On Sunday there were religious services morning, after- noon, and evening, with attendance required at the first two. How the experiment turned out, what effect life at Williams had upon those "wickedest youth," Dr. Prime fails to tell us. We are not to suppose that prayer meetings and revivals supplanted the ordinary machineries of disci- pline, though President Griffin was not particularly skilful or successful in managing these machineries. On the contrary, except in periods of revival, they were in active operation. Some rather serious offences 1 Prime, Autobiography and Memorials, 167. 1 Durfee, History of Williams College, 224-25. 8 President Griffin, MS. Notebook, 1827. 4 Records of the Faculty, 1821-36. 135 WILLIAMS COLLEGE are noted in the meagre records of the faculty such as desecrations of the chapel, assaults upon the houses of professors and upon a "citizen of the town," " offering personal violence and great indignity to a fellow-student" and "setting fire to a college build- ing." For these graver offences summary expulsion was the penalty. Other and lesser misdeeds were ex- piated by suspension, rustication, confession in the chapel, or "a solemn talk" with members of the fac- ulty. One young man who declined to answer ques- tions "concerning some late riotous proceedings in college was directed to go home to-morrow." An enterprising fellow who "took spirits from Professor Kellogg's room . . . where it had been placed by the professor himself," got off with nothing worse than a public admonition. For the great majority of trans- gressions, however, fines were still the favorite penalty. 1 Occasionally a student, who had been disciplined, retaliated. There was an astonishing instance of counter-attack in the case of Alexander Hanson Strong. His misfortunes began with participation in "a riot," which was followed by an unusual see- saw of experiences rustication and pardon, then expulsion and a second pardon. At the conclusion of this unhappy series of events, the young man, who denied most of the charges against him, returned to college, "with a bitterness that never lost the sweet- ness of its gall," and patiently awaited an opportu- nity for redressing his heavy wrongs and exposing ' ' the drivelling subterfuges of the faculty." 2 That oppor- 1 Records of the Faculty, 1821-36, passim. 2 Strong, The Expelled, An Oration, Second Edition, 1843. 136 A SECOND AND GREATER CRISIS tunity came at the exhibition of the Adelphic Union July 15, 1835, when he delivered the valedictory oration and assailed the faculty with a sophomoric fury. He declared that the institution, piloted by superannuated bigotry, was driving straight upon the rocks, and regretted that he could not tarry to witness the approaching catastrophe. " Most gladly," he an- nounced, "would I remain to hear the last groans of its dividing timbers," but circumstances compelled him to forego that satisfaction. Two editions of the oration were printed, the first of them appearing in 1835, the second in 1843. The latter contained a note to the effect that conditions at Williamstown had radically changed for the better and that the college was then to be applauded rather than "cursed out." * Though some undergraduates in the second and third decades of the last century may have been sent to Williamstown as a moral sanitarium, the great ma- jority were clean, earnest, studious fellows, who got their education at the cost of no little resolution and self-denial. Nor should the fact be overlooked that in spite of all the distractions of the period they made a creditable intellectual record. As in the case of their 1 None of the contemporary newspapers mentioned this event in their accounts of the Commencement of 1835. According to traditions in the Strong family the young man did not finish his oration, but was removed from the platform vi et armis by the faculty. That may have been a reason for its immediate publication. The trouble is said to have grown out of disturbances in a village prayer meeting which was broken up one evening by a volley of pickles, some of them quite soft, wickedly fired through an open window at the officiating clergyman. Though Strong denied any participation in the affair, the faculty brought him to book for it. He was a fine, sensitive, high-strung, brilliant fellow sadly mismanaged. 137 WILLIAMS COLLEGE predecessors the "minutes" of the debating societies exhibit an interesting phase of it. The members of these societies discussed political, Biblical, and philo- sophical questions, though not to the exclusion of per- sonal and local matters, and reached some rather unexpected conclusions; such as, Christianity has been unfavorable to the development of literature; the society of ladies should be avoided by undergraduates ; students who "know of scrapes " ought to report them; and "people of color" should not be admitted to "the colleges of New England." l The last question was debated in the Philotechnian Society, June 9, 1834. Some time in the administra- tion of President Fitch the exact date of the event is unknown the Trustees found themselves in a position where they must not only discuss the ques- tion, but take action in regard to it. Lucy Prince, a colored woman and a verse-maker of some reputation, appeared before them and made a vigorous plea for the admission of her son to the institution. 2 Though her request was not granted, yet we should misjudge these Trustees if we rated them as exceptionally 1 Records, Philotechnian and Philologian Societies, 1821-36. The young men, it seems, sometimes failed to observe the conventions of propriety at the meetings of the societies. For all offences there appears to have been a uniform penalty of six and a quarter cents, though they ranged through a considerable scale of objectionable qualities. A par- tial and random list of them between October 30, 1830, and March 26, 1836, comprises reading during the exercises, whispering, disorderly conduct, eating chestnuts, making various and uncouth noises, lying down, snoring, pulling Helmes' hair and beating his head with a cane. October n, 1832, a bylaw was passed declaring that it " shall be con- sidered disorderly and ungentlemanlike ... to stamp on the floor dur- ing the time of meeting." 2 Sheldon, History of Deerfield, n, 900. 138 A SECOND AND GREATER CRISIS conservative. Long after the advent of Lucy Prince in Williamstown, an attempt to establish a training- school for negroes in New Haven was defeated on the ground that it would hurt Yale; the Trustees of Phillips Andover suppressed an anti-slavery society, which the boys, stirred by the eloquence of George Thompson, had organized; and Harvard dismissed a professor because he was an abolitionist. Whatever the dominant sentiment among the Trustees may have been in the time of President Fitch, and however the adverse vote of the debating society may be explained, Williams students, in the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century, were not unfriendly to the negro. On the contrary, under the lead of Professor Chester Dewey, they es- tablished the first anti-slavery society in Massachu- setts. This was in I823, 1 eight years before William Lloyd Garrison began to publish the "Liberator." A majority of the students belonged to the organiza- tion. They held annual meetings for a considerable period at least until 1831 on the Fourth of July, listened to appropriate orations, and sang original odes. One of the latter, written for the anniversary of 1830, is a fair specimen of this occasional verse: While millions hail the joyous morn When freedom rose in all her pride; While shouts that welcome its return Swell with the breeze that sweeps the tide; Why sounds from far the cry of woe? Why blends the voice of joy and pain? 1 Noble, Centennial Discourse, 30. 139 WILLIAMS COLLEGE Oh, who this day can sorrow know, Or wear, when all are free a chain? The light of Freedom, broad and fair, Meets not the slave's benighted eye; He hopeless groans in dark despair In fetters forced to toil and die. 1 Then follows a stanza to the effect that America should never be called the land of liberty until slav- ery has been destroyed. The society was invited to send delegates to the annual meeting of the " American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and Improving the Condition of the African Race," held at Philadel- phia in 1826, but found it more practicable to send a communication. And this document, moderate in tone, inclined to projects of gradual colonization rather than of immediate emancipation, is positive enough on the general issue. "The question/' we are told in the concluding paragraph of the communica- tion, "the question whether the negroes shall be free is settled; for the Almighty will undertake their cause. What remains to be developed is whether in the mysteriousness of His ways, he designs to visit our nation in wrath and suffer the history of its ruin to be written ... for the admonition of all succeeding ages." 2 1 American Advocate, July 7, 1830. 2 Minutes of the American Convention, 1826. The officers of the Wil- liams Society for 1826 were Professor Chester Dewey, president, Joseph Merrill Sadd (1827), vice-president, and Fordyce Mitchell Hubbard (1828), secretary. All the records of the society appear to have been lost. 140 A SECOND AND GREATER CRISIS In 1827 another reform began a vigorous student movement against the use of intoxicating liquors. The need of reform was evident and had been for a long period. Emory Washburn said that in his day 4 ' everybody drank. ' ' Some undergraduates then kept liquor in their rooms and " indulged in its use . . . without concealment or disguise." He insisted, how- ever, that nothing "like a prevailing vice of drunken- ness" existed, and he did not believe that any of them carried away from Williamstown "a habit of intem- perance contracted there." l Probably conditions were not then essentially different from what they had been during the twenty preceding years and con- tinued to be in the decade that followed. " Drunken- ness," said Albert Hopkins in reference to his under- graduate days, which began in 1824 and came to an end in 1826, " was an experience not infrequent; . . . the gravest men in college, certainly with one or two exceptions did not scruple to drink (or at least drank) on set occasions." 2 Emory Washburn wrote his " Introduction" to Dr. Durfee's "History" in 1859, forty-two years after his graduation. That "most favorable change," to which he called attention, "in the matter of intoxicating drinks," dates from Sunday, July 8, 1827, when the Rev. Henry G. Ludlow, 3 of New York City, preached in Williamstown on the subject of intemperance, and preached so effectively that the students immediately 1 Durfee, History of Williams College, 24. * Ibid., 216. 1 American Advocate, July 19, 1827. At the following commence- ment the college conferred upon the Rev. Mr. Ludlow the honorary degree of Master of Arts. 141 WILLIAMS COLLEGE formed an anti-drinking association with fifty-seven members, and called it The Williams Temperate So- ciety. They adopted a constitution which prohibited the use of ardent spirits and wine except " for wounds, in case of sickness, by the advice of a physician, at the sacrament, or when necessary for the preserva- tion of life." Some of the undergraduates objected to this pledge as extreme and impracticable. "It is true," said the advocates of it, "we were ahead of public opinion. . . . But we are not of the number of those who idly pretend that we must merely keep pace with the public . . . and not attempt to lead it." 1 The dissatisfaction resulted in the formation of a second organization, The New Temperance Society of Williams College, in the spring of 1828, with a milder constitution. At its annual meeting the next year this society passed a resolution declaring "that the use of ardent spirits in any quantity by the stu- dent is most sincerely to be deprecated." Members of the older organization denounced this resolution as a dangerous heresy and read its supporters out of the ranks of temperance workers a proceeding which enraged the New Society people. "We have met with opposition," they said in their annual report for 1829, "from those whose babblings we fear not and whose praise would disgrace us. ... The effects of their bigotry will recoil on themselves. We would smile on their malice if we did not pity the ignorance that produces it!" 2 These societies soon passed, but the faculty pres- ently took the field. For a considerable period every 1 American Advocate, July 15, 1829. * Ibid., July 8, 1829. 142 A SECOND AND GREATER CRISIS student was required to sign a pledge to the effect that he would neither drink intoxicating liquor him- self nor supply it to others while residing in college. 1 This stringent regulation had a longer life than the temperance societies, but gradually fell into dis- use. The honor roll of Williams graduates in the period of President Griffin is a creditable one. Besides the names of Mark and Albert Hopkins and of others who became essential factors in the subsequent history of the college, it contains those of Calvin Durfee (1825), historian and necrologist; of Parsons Cooke (1822), formidable theological controversialist, founder of the " Puritan Recorder*' newspaper, author of the " Re- collections" of President Griffin; of Nicholas Murray (1826), popular preacher, once famous as the ''Kir- wan" whose letters to Archbishop Hughes created a world-wide sensation; of Samuel Irenaeus Prime (1829), author of many books, editor of the "New York Observer" for more than forty years; and of Simeon Howard Calhoun (1829), tutor, 1833-36, prin- cipal of a seminary for boys at Mount Lebanon, Syria, unsurpassed among the missionary graduates of the college in consecration, in attractiveness of person- ality, and in intellectual force. All these men were clergymen, but some prominent alumni of the period failed to take orders. The lay- man of largest fame among them was David Dudley Field (1825) "for at least a third of a century . . . the most commanding figure at the American bar." Yet in a sense the practice of his profession was incidental. 1 New York Evangelist, July 8, 1847. 143 WILLIAMS COLLEGE The purpose, which ruled his career from early man- hood to the day of his death in 1894, * s happily re- corded on his tomb in Stockbridge: To codify the common law; To simplify legal procedure; To substitute arbitration for war; To bring justice within the reach of all men. 1 This greater work of his life, to which he devoted more than forty years of incessant toil, was his code of civil and of criminal procedure. Twenty-four States have adopted the former and eighteen the lat- ter, and these facts would seem to be a sufficient answer to the ridicule and abuse which the reform encountered. No alumnus of the college had a more romantic affection for his Alma Mater than David Dudley Field. Scenery, campus, instructors, classmates, all appeared to him in a glorified light. "The sight of these faces, of these old roofs and halls, of these mea- dows and streams and of these encircling hills," he said in an oration before the Adelphic Union, fifty years after graduation, "so quickens the inward sense that it sees forms that have vanished, and hears voices that are silent. I behold my classmates as I beheld them filing into the chapel, or gathered at reci- tations, or sauntering along the walks, or resting beneath the trees. I mark their gait, I hear their ear- nest debate, their hearty laugh, and I recall the strifes, the greetings and the partings of those far-off days. I look into the sky it is the sky of my boyhood; the 1 H. M. Field, Life of David Dudley Field, x. 144 A SECOND AND GREATER CRISIS stars, clear and silent, shine upon me and seem to say We shine upon you just the same as we shone fifty years ago." 1 In the autumn of 1830 an astrayed Georgian, Wil- liam Lowndes Yancey, entered the Sophomore class. The Northern episode in his career, which lasted twelve years, came about in consequence of two events the death of his father in 1817 and the subsequent marriage of his mother to the Rev. N. S. S. Beman, who became pastor of a Presbyterian church at Troy, New York, in 1822. Of his three years in college few details have survived. He joined the Philotechnian Society immediately and took an active interest in its various exercises debates, critiques, and orations. October 17, 1832, the year of an exciting Presidential campaign, he was the leading disputant for the nega- tive in a discussion of the question " Would the election of General Jackson tend to destroy the Union? " and lost the debate. 2 Later, at an exhibition of his class he was Senior Orator, and at one of the Adelphic Union First Orator. In the publication of "The Adelphi" 3 he seems to have been a leading spirit, and that may explain partly the rather sur- prising freshness and vigor of that earliest and short- lived Williams periodical. He might have had a degree, but did not remain to take it financial troubles sending him back to Georgia immediately after the Senior examinations and six weeks before Commencement. 1 D. D. Field, Speeches, Arguments, and Miscellaneous Papers, n, 300. 2 Records, Philotechnian Society, -1832. 3 Miscellaneous Collections of the Alabama Historical Society, I, 191. 145 WILLIAMS COLLEGE Some vague prophecy of the Yancey that was to be emerged at Williamstown. Local politicians in the Presidential campaign of 1832, it is said, discovering that he could speak effectively, included him in the list of their " spell-binders." This Berkshire experi- ence on the stump brief, tentative, almost acci- dental, the record of it dimly preserved by tradition may be regarded as a sort of prelude to his real life. Though his reputation is now somewhat faded, he must be conceded "a place among the half-dozen men who have had most to do in shaping American history in this [nineteenth] century." 1 He was the original apostle of disunion, championing it as a practicable escape from a more grievous calamity, the subversion of state rights and the destruction of slavery. The political theories of the Georgian stepson present a violent contrast to those of his Puritan stepfather. No Southern heresies got a footing in the creed of that aggressive and intellectual Presbyterian divine, the Rev. Dr. N. S. S. Beman. " Democracy and slavery," he exclaimed in a Thanksgiving sermon, "what a brotherhood. It seems to me like an alliance between Jerusalem and Sodom ... a treaty of amity and com- mercial and mutual defence between heaven and hell." 2 And even in the South Yancey 's extreme the- ories did not find immediate acceptance. His pre- mature proclamation of the doctrine of secession cost him twenty years of political ostracism. A splendid though long-delayed triumph awaited him at the Democratic Convention of 1860 in Charleston, since 1 Brown, The Lower South, 117. 2 Beman, Thanksgiving Sermon, November 18, 1858. 146 A SECOND AND GREATER CRISIS "his epochal speech " on that occasion "became the Southern platform." 1 Yancey's contemporaries regarded him as "the greatest orator ever heard in the South." 2 He had a voice of singular sweetness, clarity, and compass "the most perfect voice," it has been said, " that ever roused a friendly audience to enthusiasm or curbed to silence the tumults of the most inimical." 3 Natural in gesticulation, given to none of the arts of the dema- gogue, sincere in his convictions, felicitous in state- ment, and unsurpassed in invective, he swayed his audiences with a mastery seldom attained by the ora- tors of our own or any other time. His native genius for public speech undoubtedly received no small stim- ulus from the finished elocution and impressive rheto- ric of President Griffin. 4 That stimulus may have been the chief contribution of Williams College toward the making of "the orator of secession." In 1833 it began to be evident that the day of Dr. Griffin was almost spent. "The health of the Presi- dent," wrote an undergraduate the next year, "is very poor. He cannot perform the duties of the col- lege as they ought to be performed." 5 August 18, 1835, having reached the same conclusion himself, he handed his resignation to the Trustees, who concluded to do nothing until "the indications of Providence shall better enable them to act thereon." They did 1 The South in the Building of the Nation, xn, 578. 2 Flemming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, 13; Brown, Lower South, 118. 8 Quoted in Brown, Lower South, 148. 4 Du Bose, Life 'and Times of Yancey, 31. 6 W. G. Brown, MS. letter, December 4, 1834, Backus Library, Boston. 147 WILLIAMS COLLEGE vote, however, "after much consideration, " that Pro- fessor Mark Hopkins "be requested to take the en- tire charge of the classical work of the Senior class." 1 In 1836 the indications of Providence had become unmistakable, as President Griffin's health then ap- peared to be shattered beyond all hope of recovery, and the Trustees accepted his resignation. He left Williamstown on the morning of September 28 for Newark, New Jersey, where he resided with his son- in-law, Dr. Lyndon A. Smith, until his death, Novem- ber 8, 1837. His departure was attended by demon- strations of appreciation and affection on the part of the college. It is to the credit of students and faculty that they were not indifferent when the man who saved the institution from serene anchorage "amid the sunk reefs of oblivion," 2 was passing from its life forever. The qualities which made success possible for Presi- dent Griffin in the desperate Northern Berkshire enterprise were various. No doubt his genius as a preacher, to which there is abundant contemporary testimony, counted largely among them. "We had the pleasure for the first time," wrote the editor of a free-lance Boston periodical, wholly out of sympathy 1 Records of the Trustees, August 18, 1835. " It is known to many that the health of the distinguished Head of this Institution has been very much impaired the last two years. . . . His place in the Senior Class will be supplied by Dr. Hopkins, the very able and popular Professor of Moral Philosophy and Rhetoric. Dr. Hopkins will be assisted in his duties as Professor of Rhetoric by the new Professor of Latin, the Rev. Joseph Alden, a gentleman already advantageously known as a man of talents and an experienced teacher." (Correspondent, American Trav- eller, August 19, 1835.) 2 Rev. Dr. S. H. Cox, in New York Evangelist, August 14, 1856. 148 A SECOND AND GREATER CRISIS with orthodox theology, "of attending Park Street Meeting House on Sunday last, and a sincere pleasure we experienced, for we witnessed in the delivery of the preacher all the various . . . powers of oratory. A strong, clear voice, capable of every modulation from the thunder of denunciation to the softest tones of persuasion an action at one moment commanding and impressive, at another softening into . . . endear- ment and affection composed part of the accom- plishments of this interesting preacher.'* 1 Nor were President Griffin's sermons at Williams- town less brilliant or effective. To the Rev. Dr. Prime, writing many years after his student days, they still seemed to be "surpassingly eloquent. ... I heard . . . the most celebrated discourses which have been pub- lished since his death and remember all the splendid passages and the manner in which he rendered them." 2 The most remarkable description of President Griffin's preaching during the Williamstown period, however, appeared in "The Adelphi." It is an under- graduate poem of four stanzas in blank verse, two of which the second grim and realistic as the vision of hell chiselled upon the facade of the cathedral at Orvieto are as follows : He spoke of heaven ! and on the listening Ear enraptured, fell the symphonies of Paradise, awaked by Gabriel's ever Tuneful lyre on the admiring vision Burst the dazzling throne the angel choir the Tree of life, where happy spirits bathe, and 1 Something, March 24, 1810. * Prime, Autobiography and Memorials, 163, 164. 149 WILLIAMS COLLEGE Drink immortal fulness in the fields of Light, where freed from sin and pain, delighted Rove the ransomed heirs of bliss. He spoke of Hell ! and with instinctive dread The affrighted heart recoiled. Despair's last Agonizing shriek ascending pierced the Soul and drunk its spirits up the never Dying worm with closer grasp embrac'd its Victim and deeper thrust its deadly fangs The lurid fires that quenchless burn, arose In forky flames, and threw their painful light Upon the drear abode, where restless toss On raging seas of flame the sinner lost, While on their heads the wrath of God in one Eternal storm descends. 1 At the present day nobody reads President Griffin's sermons, once famous in Williamstown and elsewhere. Students in modern schools of theology do not study them as models of pulpit eloquence. Lacking range and depth of thought and the distinction of style necessary to great literature, dwelling too constantly upon the terrors of the law, these sermons had only an immediate and passing mission, and that in spite of their admirable clearness, their driving force, their resounding rhetoric, and not infrequent beauty of phrase. Then the personality of Dr. Griffin made a profound impression upon young men who came to Williams- town. "The first time I saw him," wrote one of them, "was at the . . . Commencement of 1822. ... I was 1 W. L. in The Adelphi, May 10, 1832. The author of this dreadful verse may have been Willis Lord (1833), afterward a distinguished Pres- byterian theological professor. 150 A SECOND AND GREATER CRISIS then entering college and not qualified to appreciate the literary character of his performances on that occasion; but I had never felt such reverence at the sight of any man as when I saw Dr. Griffin in his high chair in the pulpit, presiding over the public exercises. His hair was . . . white, and his gigantic and sym- metrical person, his rich, full and penetrating voice, and the formal dignity of his movements, altogether peculiar to himself, gave what seemed to me a wonder- ful majesty to the occasion." l Nor was this enthusiasm confined to Subfreshmen. The Rev. Dr. Samuel H. Cox, well known in his time as a clergyman, theological professor, and orator, attended the Commencement of 1828 and published an account of his impressions. " Once only," he wrote, "had I the pleasure of witnessing the scenery of Com- mencement when Dr. Griffin presided . . . conferred the degrees, and figured as the master of the assem- bly with a grace and awe-inspiring presence, not only unsurpassed, but never equalled by any other person- age, so far as I have had opportunity to observe. I have . . . witnessed many occasions of Commence- ment in different places, as well as Speakers and Presi- dents in Congress, in legislatures and on special occa- sions, administering order and ceremony with eleva- tion and felicity of manner; but for entire success and almost histrionic power of display and influence, I always recur to that scene at Williams, though all raining and storming without, in 1828 as ... the cli- max of majesty, propriety, and excellence." 2 1 Sprague, Annals, iv, 41. 8 Presbyterian Quarterly Review, vi, 588. WILLIAMS COLLEGE Moreover, in certain exercises of the classroom President Griffin did not appear to less advantage than in the pulpit or upon the Commencement stage. This became apparent during his brief service on the teaching staff of Andover Theological Seminary. "Our professor of sacred rhetoric, Dr. Griffin, is a man of genius," wrote Timothy Woodbridge, then a student in the institution, February 10, 1810. "He is unrivalled as a teacher of elocution. Professor Stuart says that in regard to the composition and delivery of sermons he is the best critic in the United States." 1 Another Andover colleague was quite as positive in his eulogy "It quickly became evident," said Professor Woods, "that Dr. Griffin possessed extraor- dinary qualifications for the work he had under- taken. . . . Had he devoted himself without interrup- tion to his official duties in the Seminary he might have reached the highest eminence and usefulness both as a critic and a lecturer." 2 And at Williamstown there were illuminated hours in the classroom of President Griffin, one of which occurred during a weekly exercise in elocution and literary interpretation which he conducted stu- dents making their own selections for the reading. On this occasion a member of the class chose the passage from the third book of " Paradise Lost," beginning Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born! " During the reading he seemed in rapture with the poetry and . . . after some remarks ... he asked for 1 Woodbridge, Autobiography of a Blind Preacher, 78. a Woods, History of Andover Theological Seminary, 149, 150. 152 A SECOND AND GREATER CRISIS the book, erected himself in his chair ... his counte- nance suffused, his voice mellow and tremulous . . . and read the passage with an effect, which, I am sure, no member of the class can ever forget." 1 In the situation at Williamstown there were strik- ing contrasts and anomalies. Here we find a man of magnificent physique he was six feet and three inches in- height and weighed two hundred and fifty pounds a cultivated, polished, distinguished gentle- man - " any party or social circle in the world might have felt enriched by the accession of his companion- ship and presence" 2 set down in a remote, primi- tive country town to attempt a task which his predecessor had abandoned in despair. But whatever anxieties, struggles and failures a retrospect of the closing period of his active life may have disclosed, the satisfaction of knowing that he had accomplished the work which brought him to Williamstown the establishment of the college upon a permanent foun- dation was not denied to President Griffin. 1 Sprague, Annals, iv, 42. 2 Rev. Dr. S. H. Cox, Presbyterian Quarterly Review, vi, 591. CHAPTER VI HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR OF THE OLDER WILLIAMS ONE would naturally infer from the records of their meeting August 17, 1836, that the Trustees, on re- ceiving President Griffin's resignation, instantly elected Professor Mark Hopkins as his successor. These reticent records afford no hint that he was a second and reluctant choice; that they offered the position to the Rev. Dr. Absalom Peters, a man inex- perienced in college work, who fortunately declined it. 1 What caused their hesitation? They undoubtedly thought that the President of the college should be a clergyman, and as the professional studies of Professor Hopkins had been medical, that circumstance might tell against him. Or possibly, since he was only thirty- four years of age, they considered him too young for the post. If scruples of this sort troubled them, they should have remembered that two famous contempo- raries Eliphalet Nott of Union and Francis Way- land of Brown became college presidents at the earlier age of thirty-one and thirty respectively. The hesitation of 1836 was not the first. Six years earlier, when the death of Professor Porter made a vacancy in the chair of Rhetoric and Philosophy, 1 Perry, Williamstown and Williams College, 496. Dr. Peters, then Secretary of the American Home Missionary Society, was afterwards pastor of the Congregational Church in Williamstown. 154 MARK HOPKINS 1836-1872 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR President Griffin and some of the Trustees wished to fill it by the election of the Rev. Azariah Giles Orton (1813), alumni orator at the Commencement of 1830. When the matter came before the Board the speech of a recent member of it, Colonel Henry W. Dwight, of Stockbridge, is said to have defeated the opposition and carried the election in favor of Mark Hopkins. It was not a speech in the Board of Trustees which broke the second hesitation, whatever the cause of it may have been, but a communication from the Sen- iors of 1836. The teaching of Professor Hopkins, they remarked in this communication, had impressed them profoundly and they ventured to make the suggestion that future classes also ought to have the benefit of it. " If the boys want him," the Rev. Dr. Shepard, vice- president of the Board, is reported to have said when the letter was read, "let them have him." 1 In 1826 the election of Francis Wayland to the vacant presidency of Brown University was urged by leading Baptists, by prominent Congregationalists, by influential newspapers in New York, Massachu- setts, and Connecticut. 2 The chief partisans and sponsors of Mark Hopkins ten years later were the thirty- two young men in the graduating class of 1836. The long career of the new President, in spite of numerous and urgent calls to important positions elsewhere, lay almost wholly in Berkshire County. He was born at Stockbridge in 1802, and like his two immediate predecessors was the son of a farmer. At 1 Perry, Williamstown and Williams College, 496. Carter, Mark Hopkins, 60. " The appointment meets with the approbation of every student." (American Traveller, August 23, 1836.) 2 Murray, Francis Wayland, 62. 155 WILLIAMS COLLEGE the age of four he began to attend school. Though he is said to have astonished his teacher by a precocious ability to read, arithmetic gravelled him badly. "I well remember when I commenced the study," he said in an address at Lenox on the "Effect of Common Schools," " taking my slate the first day to the master to have him set me a sum. He immediately wrote six or eight long rows of figures. I took the slate and for several days, in the intervals of reading and writing, looked upon that sum in silent despair without know- ing how to begin. ... On reaching at last compound addition I well remember the mysterious look of those figures placed over the denominators by which I was to carry without knowing why or scarcely what carry- ing was. The same feeling of mystery and difficulty was continued more or less through the book." l In 1816 the Rev. Edwin W. Dwight, author of the "Life of Obookiah," visited the Hopkins family at Stockbridge and was attracted to the eldest son, then fourteen years old. " Mark," he wrote, " is a fine boy, grown very much, a noble scholar, and I suspect ought to be educated." 2 Five years and a half elapsed be- fore the date of his matriculation in college. How much of this period he devoted to preparatory studies is uncertain, as other vocations interrupted them. For a time he lived at Green River, a town twelve miles from Stockbridge, which took its name from the lit- tle stream, "lonely, lovely and still," celebrated in one of Bryant's earlier poems. Here he was in the serv- ice of the blind minister, Timothy Woodbridge. "I 1 American Advocate, November 17, 1830. 2 MS. letter, April 18, 1816, in R. H. W. Dwight's Collection. 156 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR always kept a gentle and efficient horse, " the latter wrote, "and a boy to drive, who had also been well educated, so that he could read and write for me. Everybody who depends on hearing reading knows that a boy is commonly a poor reader and a worse writer; but I was very lucky. . . . My first boy . . . at Green River was Mark Hopkins . . . and nobody will doubt his ability to read and write well at seven- teen." In the spring of 1820 the blind minister's boy went to Mecklenburg, Virginia, where for eighteen months he taught a private school. At first this new experi- ence interested and contented him. " I need nothing that any mortal can give me," he wrote July 4, 1820, "except money." But the isolation and remoteness of the place "There is not a person of my age with whom I am acquainted and would associate within ten miles ' ' and the fact that the school was small and elementary the exercises soon becoming a "dull iteration" led inevitably to weariness and discontent. And toward the close of the eighteen months his last letter is dated August 17, 1821 he wrote that "I see comparatively nobody" and "have sunk into a state of indifference in regard to study." 2 Returning from Virginia, Mark Hopkins entered Williams as a Sophomore in the autumn of 1821 and graduated in 1824 with the highest honors. The next year he spent in teaching at Stockbridge and in the 1 Woodbridge, Autobiography of a Blind Minister, 167. 2 Mark Hopkins, ten manuscript letters, in possession of Colonel Archibald Hopkins. 157 WILLIAMS COLLEGE study of medicine at Pittsfield. Then from 1825 to 1827 he was tutor in the college and brought his first period of academic work to a close with a Master's oration on " Mystery." This oration, though scarcely appealing to the average auditor, the reporter of the local newspaper failed to notice it in his account of the exercises, interested Professor Silliman, of Yale, who happened to be present, and was subse- quently published in his "American Journal of Sci- ence and Arts." After a period of study at the Berk- shire Medical Institution he received the degree of M.D. and began the practice of medicine in New York City. The death of Professor Porter and his election to the chair of Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy turned the current of his life in another direction. 1 The induction took place Thursday, September 15, 1836, the first day of the college year. A small audience, made up of Trustees, professors, students, and people of the village, assembled in the chapel. The Rev. Dr. Field, of Stockbridge, offered prayer; Daniel Noble Dewey, of Williamstown, read the min- utes of the Board; the Rev. Dr. Shepard, of Lenox, "performed the act of inauguration" and delivered the charge. It was a quiet, undemonstrative, local affair, in sharp contrast to the exaggerated modern custom of inaugurating college presidents "with a degree of ceremonial pomp that suggests a world event of the first magnitude." 2 The subject of Dr. Hopkins' address on this pro- 1 " Dr. Mark Hopkins, of the City of New York, formerly a tutor in the College, was appointed to the Professorship of Moral Philosophy and Rhetoric." (American Advocate, September 8, 1830.) * New Republic, September 25, 1915. 158 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR vincial and unacclaimed occasion was "Education in general, and more particularly . . . collegiate educa- tion, as adapted ... to meet the wants of the com- munity." 1 If the latter be properly organized and adj usted, he said, ' ' we shall have physical vigor, knowl- edge and intellectual power, refined taste and moral excellence; in other words, we shall have formed the mind to the love and pursuit of truth, of beauty and of holiness." 2 After setting forth "the high mission" of colleges, he proceeded to inquire how far they ful- filled it, and to consider certain adverse views which had become current. These adverse views were that they impair the physical vitality, cultivate a vision- ary, impracticable temper, follow aristocratic ideals, and "do not teach manners." In regard to the last objection he confessed that "this is not one of the things for which we give a diploma." Yet he did not underrate their importance, and doubtless would have concurred with Viscount Haldane, who, addressing the Associated Societies of the University of Edin- burgh in 1913, urged all their members to read Emer- son's "admirable essay" on this subject. 3 A sober, comprehending, unelated tone pervades this prelude to Mark Hopkins' career as President of Williams College. "I enter upon it," he was careful to say, "with no excitement of novelty, with no buzz of expectation, with no accession of influence from abroad." To build up "what would be called a great institution" never entered into his plans. That "here may be health and cheerful study and kind 1 Hopkins, Miscellaneous Essays and Discourses, 232. * Ibid., 243. Haldane, The Conduct of Life, 19. 159 WILLIAMS COLLEGE feelings and pure morals " was the consummation he devoutly wished. 1 Certain important questions did not come to the surface at all in the inaugural questions of endow- ment, of buildings, and of apparatus. President Hop- kins knew well enough that the college had urgent need of all these things, but he rated his genius as a solicitor of funds very low. This disagreeable business he hoped to transact eventually by indirection by building up an educational institution of such repute that the public would voluntarily provide an ade- quate support. In 1836 the theory was not practi- cable, and barely four months after the inauguration he went to Boston for the purpose of securing state aid. The legislative committee to which his petition was referred made a favorable report. But before any action had been taken another Berkshire petition, of a different complexion, appeared on Beacon Hill: To the Hon. Senate and House of Representatives Of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Your Petitioners Inhabitants Of the Town of Williams- town County of Berkshire and Commonwealth of Mas- sachusetts Do Petition to you Hon. Body to Repeal the Law that Exemps the College Corporation from Taxation as there is Near one hundred thousand Dollars In s'd town of Williamstown Exemped from Taxation Belonging to the s'd Corporation it having in Lands, Mortgages, Moneys &c and that the taxes in s'd town are Oppressive on the Taxible Inhabitants of s'd town. Your petion there- fore Prays that they may be h heard Concerning the Same. . . . 1 Hopkins, Miscellaneous Essays and Discourses, 253. 160 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR Col. Waterman Sir Pleas present this to the house as soon as you Receive it It is Signed by John P. Jordan & 95 others. 1 March 25 the Legislature voted that it was "inex- pedient to legislate" upon the subject of college taxa- tion, and four days afterwards postponed indefinitely the request of Williams for state aid. 2 Notwithstanding this rebuff, President Hopkins in 1839 again sought financial assistance from the Legis- lature. The second petition, as well as the first, is in his handwriting and dated January 12. In their re- port, the committee in charge of it rehearsed with con- siderable detail the history of the college. " It is situ- ated," they remarked, "in a part of the State which enables it to afford peculiar facilities for giving the means of education to the middling classes and at the same time is beyond the sphere of the rich." The petition was finally referred to the next Legislature a decorous method of killing it. Whatever financial emergency there may have been in 1837 and 1839, a more serious and alarming one arose in 1841, when the old East College burned down. Though recent experiences could hardly be thought reassuring, President Hopkins appealed to the Legislature once more in behalf of the college which, he said, was "much resorted to for education by individuals of small pecuniary means." His peti- tion, dated Boston, January 14, 1842, was accom- panied by nine auxiliary petitions from citizens of as many Berkshire towns Great Barrington, Peru, 1 Mass. H.R. Fiks (1837), 229. Ibid., 310. 161 WILLIAMS COLLEGE Stockbridge, Sheffield, Pittsfield, Lenox, Plainfield, Lee, and Williamstown. But the formidable array of documents failed to accomplish anything. The legis- lative committee recommended an appropriation of $12,000, which the Legislature refused to make. 1 In this grave emergency graduates and friends of the col- lege came to the rescue and raised $8949, a sum which, with an unexpected gift of $5000 from Amos Law- rence in 1844, carried it safely over the crisis. 2 Though relatively a secondary matter during the fourth administration, the campus was by no means wholly neglected. Nine new buildings were then erected the Hopkins Astronomical Observatory (1837), South College (1842), East College (1842), Lawrence Hall (1846), Kellogg Hall (1847), Jackson Hall (1855), Alumni Hall Chapel (1859), Goodrich Hall (1864), and College Hall (1872). Of the last five buildings in this list, four became obsolete and were pulled down after an average life of hardly more than fifty years, and the single survivor among them Alumni Hall Chapel has lost its original name and most of its original uses. In 1905 it became Goodrich Hall and is now devoted chiefly to recitation and seminar purposes. On the completion and dedication of this chapel the college withdrew from its connec- tion with the village church, which had continued with little interruption since I793. 3 President Fitch 1 Mass. H.R. Files (1842), 1159. 2 The Trustees made two subsequent appeals to the Legislature for aid and succeeded in both of them, securing $25,000 in 1849 and $75,000 in 1868. The college first and last has received from the State $150,500. (Trustees' Gift Book.) 8 Dr. Durfee says that "in 1809 public worship was attended on the Sabbath in the chapel." (History of Williams College, 99.) 162 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR and his successors supplied the village pulpit for a part of the time, the amount of service varying at different periods. None of the earlier buildings have histories of spe- cial interest except Kellogg Hall and the Hopkins Astronomical Observatory. The former stood a few rods southeast of West College an inconsiderable brick structure three stories high, the first of them containing two large rooms where the recitations of the Freshmen and Sophomore classes were held for many years. If the experiences, academic and other, associated with them could be fully recovered, the story would not be a dull one. James Hulme Canfield recalled some of them in his preface to "The Class of 1868 after Thirty-Five Years." "Do you remember our first recitation," he wrote, "in the room on the ground floor west side improperly lighted with hanging kerosene lamps? Or the afternoon of the early fall when the Sophs broke all the windows, and we poured out of the west door led by Horace Henry ... our first conflict? Or the morning of the next June, when we found the room full of hay, stored there during the previous rainy night, in our desire to 'save it* for the college? Can you ever forget the recitations in the room on the east side, in Sopho- more year? when Latin and Greek first came to have position ; when Perry took us through Wilson's ' Out- lines of History ' concluding with his four lectures and the renowned enquiry as to the whereabouts of one Grouchy, on a somewhat memorable occasion; when 'Tat' was alternately locked out or barred in, by a class which always presumed upon his patience 163 WILLIAMS COLLEGE and good humor. And do you remember the weekly class prayer-meetings held in each of those rooms; in which the boys, first as strangers, then as friends, came very near to each other, and we talked together soberly and earnestly, if not altogether wisely, of the better life and the higher thoughts and the more gen- erous service . . . possible in even the weakest of us, under the love and providence of God?" The Astronomical Observatory was begun in 1836 and dedicated the next year. Professor Albert Hop- kins visited Europe in 1834 an d bought of Trough ton a transit instrument. But there was no building in Williamstown suitable for the uses of this instrument and he immediately set about the task of providing one. He succeeded in raising four hundred dollars in Boston for the enterprise and that gave him sufficient encouragement to begin the work. "The practical part was commenced by several of us shouldering our implements and proceeding to a flint quarry em- bedded in a spur of the Green Mountains lying a mile or two northeast of the college. The impression at the time was that the observatory, like some of the old castles, was to crown the summit of the mountains. This idea, however, was relieved by our returning with a load of stone, which was thrown off in the col- lege yard." l At their annual meeting in 1839 the alumni passed an eminently appropriate resolution to the effect that the new building finished and dedicated in 1837, should be called the Hopkins Observatory. 2 1 Boston Courier, March 30, 1841. 2 The observatory cost, exclusive of fixtures, $2075. Of this sum the Trustees furnished $1200, the " liberal-hearted " Boston friends $400, and Professor Hopkins himself, $475. (Records of the Trustees, August 20, 1 839.) 164 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR It barely missed the honor of being the first in the United States that distinction belonging to one, fairly furnished, though unsubstantial and tempo- rary, which the University of North Carolina built in 1831. 1 Sunday, October 17, 1841, an alarm of fire broke up the afternoon services at the village church serv- ices which the students attended. It turned out that the old East College was burning. The suites all had fireplaces and some careless fellow, who lived on the fourth floor, " having used the broom before leaving set it in the wood-closet with fire in it." 2 The young men, reaching the scene, made a wild dash to save the contents of the building. In the ex- citement books, clothing, and furniture were handled roughly thrown into a promiscuous heap on the green. The disaster, though sufficiently grave, did not interrupt the usual exercises of the college for more than a single day. October 27, the Trustees met and voted to erect two buildings South and East Col- leges and in the course of the next year they were completed. In 1905 South College was modernized and renamed Fayerweather Hall. On the whole the college fared better in the matter of buildings than of equipment. The latter was still meagre. An incident, which belongs to the year of the fire, 1841, illustrates one phase of the struggle to en- 1 Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, I, 335, 336. 2 Records of the Trustees, October 22, 1841. " Last Sabbath went to Pownal. On my return saw East College burning. Felt an affection for the building where I had so many happy occasions." (Albert Hopkins, Diary, October 27, 1841, in Sewall's Life of Professor Albert Hopkins, 180.) 165 WILLIAMS COLLEGE large it. "I have incurred an expense of near $800, " wrote President Hopkins, "for a manikin." l The Trustees advanced this sum on the security of his per- sonal note, and he attempted to raise money to pay it by a series of public lectures, the first of which was delivered at Stockbridge. He made the trip from Wil- liamstown, a journey of thirty miles, on a winter day. The box containing the manikin "so filled up the sleigh that the lecturer had to ride with his feet hang- ing outside of the vehicle." 2 While the lectures inter- ested those who heard them, they do not seem to have been a pecuniary success, and the Trustees voted a few months later to cancel the eight-hundred-dollar note. 3 Requirements for admission during the period were gradually increased algebra through simple equa- tions being added to them in 1842-43; Greek prosody in 1846-47; two books of the Anabasis which dis- placed the Greek Testament in 1856-57; one book of the Iliad or Odyssey in 1858-59; two books of geom- etry and the first twelve chapters of Arnold's Latin Prose in 1861-62; the third and fourth books of the Anabasis and Outlines of Greek and Roman History in 1871-72. Then the growth of the curriculum pro- ceeded along natural lines and by easy stages. The department of Political Economy was established in 1836; of Astronomy in 1838; of American Literature in 1842; of Geology in 1852; of German in 1854; and of Mineralogy in 1859. Moreover, the French depart- ment, summarily "abolished" in 1799, and the de- 1 Mark Hopkins, MS. letter to the Rev. Dr. Rufus Anderson, Octo- ber 9, 1841. f Carter, Mark Hopkins, 65. 1 Records of the Trustees, August 16, 1842. 166 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR partment of Latin, founded in 1835 and merged the next year with that of Ancient Languages, in 1853 were reestablished. A serious effort to stiffen the courses, old and new/ took the shape in 1855-56 of written biennial exanv^ inations at the close of the Sophomore year. These examinations, held in Alumni Chapel Hall every other day for a fortnight, lasting four hours and including all the studies pursued in the first half of the college course, were a source of anxiety if not disaster to eleven generations of Sophomores. 1 Great was the contrast between the beginning and the ending of the ordeal. On the first morning of the dreaded fortnight the class marched to the Hall in procession, two abreast, singing "Biennial is a bore" to that melan- choly old tune "Lenox." At the conclusion of it there was a "Jubilee Supper," for which appropriate origi- nal songs must be provided. Eighty-eight are still extant, most of them being of no present account, as they ring changes upon narrow and transitory themes suggested by the scenes, incidents, and consequences of the examinations. Other notes were sometimes heard ; as Towering around us The mountains stand, Lifting their summits Massive and grand; Resting in beauty The green valley lies, 1 " If any student of the present thinks it was particularly easy to get through the Williams of fifty years ago, let him try to pass these exami- nations at the end of his Sophomore year." (Raymond, Fiftieth Anni- versary Report, Class of '62, n.) 167 WILLIAMS COLLEGE Spanned by the glory Of azure skies. Peaceful the summers Glide on their way; Glorious the mountains E'en in decay; Gentle the breezes Of the gladsome spring; Joyful the pleasures The winters bring. 1 When the biennials were abolished in 1866-67, the Sophomores of that year celebrated the event in a triumphant ode of eight stanzas, the last of which ran on this wise: Biennial f s dead and we are free, Biennial 's had its day, There's not a man in all the class Who wished for it to stay. 2 Whatever effect these examinations may have had in stimulating scholarship, and it seems to have been considerable, they certainly induced "Pega- sus to take the air." If Williams students could write satisfactory biennial songs, why should they not write other sorts as well? Their earlier repertoire had been almost exclusively a borrowed one. It com- prised little more than "Gaudeamus Igitur," " In- teger Vitae," and a few jingles like "Landlords, fill your flowing bowls," and "Go tell Aunt Nancy her old grey goose is dead." "Williams Songs" a thin volume with forty-eight pieces, edited by Washington 1 Biennial Songs of the Class of '61, II. * Cooley, The Class of '69 after Forty Years, 9. 168 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR Gladden and dedicated to William Cullen Bryant was an immediate consequence of the new verse- making impulse. When college began in the autumn of 1836 there were five full professors on the faculty staff Eben- ezer Kellogg, Ebenezer Emmons, Edward Lasell, Joseph Alden, and Albert Hopkins, all of whom came down from the former dispensation. In 1844 Professor Kellogg, who had been at his post twenty-nine years, was compelled by ill-health to re- sign. An accurate, painstaking scholar, a writer of ability, greatly useful in the executive affairs of the college, he lacked the intellectual scope and vigor, the clarity and attractiveness of speech necessary to give the classics special prominence in the Williams of his day. Edward Lasell (1828) died in 1852, after twenty- one years of service as tutor and professor of chemis- try. He was a man of attractive personality, who brought to his work contagious enthusiasm and effec- tive gifts for exposition. Moreover, having bought the " Sloan place," now the President's house, he lived in a style quite new to the time and commu- nity. According to Judge Danforth " he was the first man to set up an establishment of horses and carriages in town with a colored driver." 1 The name of Ebenezer Emmons, a pupil of Chester Dewey and Amos Eaton, appears in the annual cata- logues as lecturer or professor from 1 828 to 1 863. Dur- ing these thirty-three years he taught chemistry, nat- ural history, geology, and mineralogy. Yet he gave 1 Danforth, Reminiscences, 95. 169 WILLIAMS COLLEGE only a part of his time to college work. In 1836 Gov- ernor Marcy appointed him one of four experts to make a survey of the State of New York, and the great work was not completed until 1854. I* 1 con- nection with the survey he not only brought the Adirondack region to the attention of the public, but also announced a discovery in geology, which he called the "Taconic System." This alleged discovery quickly blew up a tempest of dissent and ridicule. " I told the Doctor on one occasion/* said Albert Hop- kins, " that all the authorities were combining against him. He answered in his dry way, ' I shall floor them yet.'" l And the confidence of the good doctor was not wholly misplaced. Though changes may have been made in terminology and classification, later investigations confirmed the accuracy of his observa- tions. A quiet, unpretending, homespun sort of man, Professor Emmons was not an effective teacher for a class of miscellaneous students. To them his exposi- tions in geology or mineralogy, however clear, method- ical, and learned, seemed remote and dull. He had all the disabilities of the specialist dealing with imma- ture and indifferent scholars. 2 But in the field, ac- companied by a few interested students, he was an- other man. The prosy lecturer of the classroom now became an enthusiast, quick in perception, fluent in speech, felicitous in description and generalization. On one occasion his zeal led to what might have been a serious accident. " Attracted by a vein of fluor-spar 1 Williams Quarterly, June, 1864. * Yeomans, Pioneers of Science in America, 349. 170 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR on a cliff overhanging a lake he climbed to it and con- tinued the strokes of his chisel to detach the spar, until the whole superincumbent mass gave way and he was precipitated with it into the lake twenty-five feet below. The great depth of the water probably saved his life. Presently, when the cloud of dust subsided, his companions saw him come to the surface, and strike out for the shore which he reached compara- tively uninjured." * In 1851 Dr. Emmons was appointed State Geol- ogist of North Carolina, and published three vol- umes of valuable reports, one of them appearing in 1856, another in 1858, and the last in 1860. But the agitation which preceded the Civil War began to dis- turb him. "I cannot but look with great fear," he wrote a Northern friend, "upon the results of agita- tion and it unfits me for work." 2 The anxiety and isolation doubtless shortened his life, for he died at Brunswick, Georgia, October I, 1863. His place among the greater men of science would seem to be secure, since, in the words of Jules Marcou, he was "the founder of American stratigraphy and the first discoverer of primordial fauna in any country." 3 Joseph Alden, a graduate of Union College in the class of 1829, student of theology in Princeton Sem- inary and tutor in Princeton College, came to Wil- liamstown in 1834 as pastor of the Congregational Church. The next year the Trustees elected him Professor of Latin and the year following transferred him to the chair of Political Economy, which he 1 Albert Hopkins, in Williams Quarterly, June, 1864, 261. * Marcou, American Geologist, 14. 3 Ibid., i. 171 WILLIAMS COLLEGE occupied until 1854, when he became President of Lafayette. A man of culture, an attractive speaker, and a considerable author, the list of his publica- tions, mostly Sunday-School books and short sketches, during the twenty years of his residence in Williams- town, reached a total of fifty-four titles, he was also a progressive and stimulating instructor. "Your counsel and encouragement/' he wrote in dedicating one of his books to Joseph White (1836), the Secre- tary of Education in Massachusetts, "led me to give in my college teaching greater prominence to studies calculated to prepare young men for their duties as citizens than is usual." l And William Cullen Bryant, who contributed an introduction to another volume, called attention to Professor Alden's singular "facility in teaching his pupils to think." 2 In the gallery of Williams professors, Albert Hop- kins is a striking and distinguished figure "tall, erect, dignified . . . with a frame that would have suited an athlete, and a head such as the Greek sculp- tors gave to their great orators . . . and eyes of un- matched brilliancy." 3 The words of President Chad- bourne at his funeral in 1872 should stand unabated and unqualified: "In later life when age had whitened his locks, and moral conflicts and triumphs had deep- ened the lines upon his face, he stood before us a form of dignity and beauty which no ideal of patriarch or prophet ever surpassed." 4 1 Science of Government in Connection with American Institutions, 1866. 2 Studies in Bryant, 7. 3 Professor J. L. T. Phillips, quoted in Perry's Williamstown and Williams College, 582. 4 Chadbourne, The Hope of the Righteous, 17. 172 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR This younger brother of Mark Hopkins joined the teaching staff of the college in 1827 and continued in service the rest of his life a period of forty-five years. In the early part of this period, at least, he threw himself with enthusiasm into the work of his department, organized the scientific expedition to Nova Scotia in 1835, and built the Astronomical Observatory in 1837. Later, and partly in conse- quence of heavy domestic sorrows, his enthusiasm waned and his classroom did not always escape the blight of dulness. The quality which set Albert Hop- kins apart from all Williams professors, past and present, was a certain indubitable strain of religious genius refined, poetical, intense. A striking and tangible evidence of this genius is seen in the noon prayer meetings which he began in 1832. Antedating by two years the organization of a college church, it was hoped that they might prove a defence against the easily besetting sins of indifference and worldli- ness. The first in the long series was held one pleas- ant day in June with an attendance of five students. "Numbers were on the green and under the shade of the maples as these brethren . . . passed ... to the conference room." 1 Professor Hopkins always con- ducted the meetings and the simple programme never varied stanzas of a familiar hymn, texts of Scrip- ture, brief prayers, a word of exposition or exhorta- tion by the leader, and then a concluding hymn. They continued for the space of thirty-nine years, and were in the opinion of John Bascom the most efficient means of promoting the spiritual life that he had ever 1 Durfee, History of Williams College, 232. 173 WILLIAMS COLLEGE known. 1 In later times, when interest in them had begun to slacken, he became absorbed in neighbor- hood mission work. In this field his monument is the reformed White Oaks, where his labors effected some such social transformation as the ministry of Richard Baxter at Kidderminster. At times and under favoring circumstances, when the tremendous spiritual intensities slumbering in his nature were awakened, Albert Hopkins was an extra- ordinary preacher. He had the dramatic sensibility of the greater Hebrew prophets. Now and then during periods of religious quickening flashes of imaginative splendor burst forth in his speech and with startling effect. None of his few printed sermons afford much evidence of what may have happened when they were delivered. They are the ashes of a burnt-out fire. John Tatlock, a native of North Wales, who came to the United States in 1830 at the age of twenty-two years, valedictorian of the class of 1836, has the honor of the first appointment to the teaching staff in the administration of Mark Hopkins. For the two years following his graduation he was tutor, then became Professor of Mathematics, and held that position, with the exception of a single year when he taught the ancient languages, until 1867. He had unusual in- tellectual quickness and versatility together with a bright turn for humorous speech. But some malign influence blighted what ought to have been a career of more than ordinary note the isolation of the college, the absence of stimulus, the mischiefs that wait on great mental facility and a temperament lack- 1 Berkshire His. Society, Collections, I, 42. 174 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR ing initiative and lapsing readily into indolence. Yet in the biennial songs of the eleven classes that wrote such verse, no member of the faculty is cele- brated so constantly or so affectionately as Professor Tatlock. The second name on the list of these first appoint- ments is that of Nathaniel Herrick Griffin (1834) a sound scholar, a competent teacher, and an inter- esting preacher of the reflective, cultivated, polished order. He gave the college thirty-two years of varied and efficient service as tutor, librarian, and Professor, first of the Ancient Languages, then of Greek. To a student of his, writing after an interval of sixty years, he seemed "rare, refined, gentle, beauty-loving ... a Southern rose, transplanted to the sterile granite soil of New England, fading in color, wasting its perfume, shedding its petals on our northeast winds." 1 Three professors, elected later than John Tatlock and Nathaniel Herrick Griffin, whose term of service did not outlast the administration of Mark Hopkins, were Isaac Newton Lincoln (1847), Professor of Latin and French, 1853-62, a vigorous advocate of the doc- trine that college ought to be a place for serious work and consequently incurring some misplaced disfavor among under-class men; John Lemuel Thomas Phil- lips (1847), Professor of Greek, 1857-68, able to inter- est his classes in the grammar, dialects, and sentence structure of Homer, Xenophon, or ^schylus; William Reynolds Dimmock (1855), Professor of Greek, 1868- 72, attractive, scholarly, chafing overmuch perhaps 1 Norman Seaver (1854), Williams Alumni Review, April, 1911, pp. 7,8. 175 WILLIAMS COLLEGE against conditions at Williamstown, and inclined to radical if not impracticable remedies. Another group of men, seven in number, were elected to various chairs in this period, men who bulked large in the immediate and subsequent history of the college, Paul Ansel Chadbourne (1848); John Bascom (1849); Arthur Latham Perry (1852); Sanborn Tenney (Amherst, 1853); Franklin Gilson (1855); Cyrus Morris Dodd (1855); and Franklin Carter (1862). Probably no better teaching could be found in any New England college than in Williams during the last twenty years of Dr. Hopkins' admin- istration. President Angell makes a similar claim for Brown in the preceding decade and fortifies it by quo- tations from the " Recollections " of Senator Hoar and the "Autobiography" of Andrew D. White in regard to classroom conditions at Harvard and Yale. 1 The two debating societies, with pleasant quarters in South College and libraries of four or five thousand volumes each, quite held their own. A large majority of the questions discussed at their meetings were polit- ical, and some of the decisions handed down have a queer look at the present day, since they announced that "the nullification act" of South Carolina was " justifiable"; that old John Brown deserved hang- ing; that the fugitive slave law ought not to be re- pealed; that it would be impossible to restore the Union at the close of the Civil War (September 17, 1862); and that Abraham Lincoln should be defeated in the campaign for reelection (February 10, 1864). These debating society findings touched educational 1 Reminiscences, 37. 176 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR as well as political questions. In 1839 they declared that the present Williams curriculum did not tend to develop the mental powers, and in 1850 that "the recent course of study*' advocated by President Wayland of Brown "is not adapted to American Colleges." l The Philologian Society abolished the office of Reader in 1840. It seems that this office, the chief function of which was the presentation of volunteer communications, had been in existence a number of years and on the whole served an amusing and useful purpose. But it was this sort of thing that readily lent itself to abuse. From the beginning there had been complaints of varying intensity and volume. The character of the communications finally fell so low that the Reader asked to be relieved from duty. His request was granted, the office discontinued, and the secretary directed to draw up and spread upon the records a statement of reasons for the summary ac- tion. "The pieces in this department," said the secre- tary in his affluent indictment, " tend directly to foster vice; to excite hatred, animosity, revenge, and the like; to blunt the moral perceptions; to make enemies of friends." 2 Evidently the Philologians of 1840 had ample reasons for abolishing the wicked office. In these later times of indifference and collapse the fierce rivalry which existed between the debating societies appears childish and absurd. A trivial mat- ter sometimes produced violent disturbance. The Philotechnians to cite an illustration of this in- 1 Records of the Philologian and Philotechnian Societies, passim. * Records of the Philologian Society, April 15, 1840. 177 WILLIAMS COLLEGE flammable temper were surprised at their meeting, October 9, 1850, by the entrance of two former mem- bers of the society, President Hopkins and Professor Tatlock. Naturally they were asked "to make some remarks" and accepted the invitation. This innocent visit roused instant and tremendous indignation among the Philologians. At a special meeting held forthwith they passed resolutions denouncing the visit as an act of favoritism to a rival society "unprece- dented since our connection with the college. . . . We must and do unanimously protest against all such interferences as most unwise and ungenerous." * A committee, appointed by the society, presented a copy of the resolutions to President Hopkins and Professor Tatlock. Their interview with these gentle- men must have been interesting, but no report of it has been preserved. Occasionally there were great internal commotions. One of them, and presumably the worst, convulsed the Philologian Society in the autumn of 1843. The occasion of this phenomenal rumpus was an election of speakers for the Adelphic Union Exhibition hardly a matter of supreme importance. Just what caused the trouble is not clear, but great confusion prevailed. "Shouting, hissing, clapping, stamping mingled in one wild uproar." 2 The next week a vociferous dis- cussion instantly sprung up over the legality of the election and raged "until near eleven o'clock," when "President Hopkins came slowly into the room and, having made some conciliatory remarks, suggested 1 Records of the Philologian Society, October 10, 1850. 2 Ibid., October 25, 1843. I 7 8 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR the propriety of adjourning." 1 After an ineffectual motion or two the society accepted his advice. The feud, however, was not yet finally composed, as the discussion blazed up afresh at the next meeting, and with such fury that President Hopkins again inter- vened and proposed that the matter at issue should be submitted to arbitration a suggestion which the fiery belligerents adopted. Two professors, Albert Hopkins and Joseph Alden, and Daniel Noble Dewey, Treasurer of the college, were appointed referees. They prepared a written report which President Hopkins himself carried to a meeting of the society. He said he did not know what the referees had done and hoped neither side would make any demonstra- tion when the report was read, and this violent tem- pest in a teapot subsided. Foolish rivalry and tumult at elections, however, did not interfere very seriously with the proper work of the societies. In general it may be said that they reached the point of culmination about the middle of the century, and that a decline then began, which continued until 1914, when they became practically extinct. 2 Their successors, so far as they have any, are courses in argumentation and intercollegiate debating leagues. In these years the relations of faculty and students were generally peaceful. The following extract from the diary of an 1843 Freshman is probably a fair statement of the usual status: "Called on the Presi- dent and two or three of the Professors to-day. Was 1 Records of the Philologian Society, November I, 1843. 2 Springfield Republican, March 3, 1914. 179 WILLIAMS COLLEGE struck with the[ir] affable and familiar manner. How different from my old Academy teacher who used, when I called upon him, to assume the dignity of a Turkish Sultan. The instructors here, on the con- trary, seem to consider the students as young gentle- men, desirous of an education and themselves as their friendly guides, not sentinels nor police officers. The result is that the students almost universally regard the faculty as their friends." It is not to be supposed that the reign of peace was perpetual. As a matter of fact occasional interrup- tions of it and one or two of them were rather serious did occur. The overshadowing popularity of President Hopkins continued from first to last with little fluctuation, but his colleagues sometimes encountered seasons of rough weather. Anonymous publications, like the "College Reflector" of August, 1 851 , now and then appeared and gave vent to passing phases of ill-temper. There were also sporadic epi- demics of lawlessness. One of them, which occasioned considerable disturbance, broke out shortly after the inauguration of Mark Hopkins. "We have had re- markable times here of late," wrote a Sophomore, November 6, 1836. "The spirit of innovation rages beyond anything ever witnessed before. The Dare- Devil Club (shame to Old Williams) makes tremen- dous havoc among the Freshmen and Townspeople. Freshmen rooms are haunted by Ghosts and Devils. Their windows are broken and shattered shockingly. Their keys are laid up in 'highways and hedges.* Their halls are ornamented with the feathers and skel- 1 Wells and Davis, Sketches of Williams College, 73. 1 80 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR etons of chickens. Townspeople are tormented . . . in ways too numerous to mention. Professor Kellogg has a regular court for bringing culprits to justice 2 hours per day for three weeks. The cunning of the Dare Devils has as yet baffled the wary old man. I hope they will soon be cast out of the synagogue. Such doings are unprecedented here." 1 The only serious interruption of friendly relations occurred in 1868 when the students at a college meet- ing, November 10, passed without dissent a resolution severing their connection with the institution. What desperate grievance provoked this ordinance of seces- sion? Nothing more than the rule, announced No- vember 5, that any absence from recitation, " whether excused or unexcused, will count as zero in the record of standing." Some question arose, during the final deliberations of the faculty, in regard to the practical enforcement of this rule. "It will execute itself," Professor Bascom explained. "Perhaps," retorted Professor Carter, "it will execute the college first." And that was what very nearly happened. The stu- dents lost no time in denouncing the new regulation and in demanding that it should be "annulled," but the faculty declined to make any concessions what- ever. Then followed secession and a total suspension of college exercises. It was an awkward situation. Yet, though intense excitement prevailed, Williams- town was outwardly peaceful. No acts of violence attended this revolution. The students agreed to re- main in the neighborhood and to refrain from "all 1 W. W. Mitchell (1839), MS. letter, November 6, 1836, in Williams College Library. 181 WILLIAMS COLLEGE objectionable conduct " until some settlement of the controversy should be effected. " We feel proud that a body of young men," said a spokesman for them, "have been found in this generation, who proceeded carefully, consistently, and unanimously against in- justice and tyranny." 1 Both parties, faculty and students, anxiously awaited the return of President Hopkins, who had gone to Marietta, Ohio, to preach an anniversary ser- mon. He returned Saturday, November 14, preached Sunday morning in the chapel, and at the conclusion of the services announced that a college meeting would be held the next morning. It was a large gath- ering which then assembled and included many friends of the institution, drawn to Williamstown by alarming reports of the revolt. When President Hop- kins rose to speak there could be no doubt that he was master of the situation. 2 With consummate tact, with a logic, a fairness and lucidity which compelled con- viction, he argued that the laws of the institution must be maintained, and that there were wiser methods for redressing supposed wrongs than rebellion and seces- sion. This felicitous and persuasive address, the great prestige of Dr. Hopkins, and the knowledge that he favored some modification of the new rule brought the ugly crisis to a peaceful end. At this time of day appraisal of the controversy presents no serious diffi- culties. While the evils the faculty sought to sup- press were real, it was a mistake to attempt a sudden and radical reformation in the President's absence. 3 1 Williams Vidette. 2 Perry, Williamstown and Williams Colkge, 644. 8 Carter, Mark Hopkins, chap. V. 182 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR The rowdyism of 1836 and the rebellion of 1868 were emergencies that must be met by special meas- ures. In the ordinary administration of discipline the ancient penalty of fines still held a prominent place. Of the offenders punished by this penalty there was one who failed " to recite on the morning after thanks- giving"; another who "went to Troy when excused to go to Bennington " ; and a third who "put up a flag on the Sabbath" -that particular Sabbath being the 4th of July, I84I. 1 Celebrations of three important anniversaries took place in Dr. Hopkins' time. The first of them was the semi-centennial commemorated Wednesday, August 16, 1843. It fell upon a period of depression, as only two years had elapsed since East College burned down, and the struggle to rebuild it was still in prog- ress. The authorities attempted little in the way of decoration and display the total expenses for the anniversary amounting to only $i97,i6. 2 Like the inauguration of Mark Hopkins, it was a modest, sober, undemonstrative affair and attended by no delegates from other institutions. The solitary dis- tinguished guest in attendance seems to have been Marcus Morton, Governor of the State. But the alumni came in relatively large numbers- "prob- ably not far from three hundred " 3 of them, one third of all the living graduates. Wednesday morning at eight o'clock they held a meeting for greetings and reminiscences, "a most delightful family gathering." 1 Records of the Faculty, 1836-72, passim. f Records of the Trustees, August 20, 1844. 8 Durfee, History of Williams College, 251. 183 WILLIAMS COLLEGE The enchanted Long Ago Murmur'd and smiled anew. Then at ten o'clock they formed in procession, marched to the Congregational Church at the head of Main Street and heard President Hopkins and the Rev. Dr. Thomas Robbins. The oration of the former on the "Law of Progress" was the chief event of the anniversary an event that lifted it high above all routine, commonplace, or provincialism. Not more than two or three of the baccalaureate sermons which gave distinction to subsequent Commencements rival it in intellectual force, in breadth of thought and felicity of phrase. Thomas Robbins, the second speaker, a slight, quaint, picturesque figure in the small-clothes of the preceding century, said his address was " too long an hour and forty-five minutes but kindly heard." l This highly respectable address, in which the obligations of educated men to the community were considered, had the misfortune to follow one of much greater brilliancy and power. After the exercises in the church came the banquet. Tables were spread in "a spacious booth" on East College campus and the festivities continued until evening. Samuel R. Betts (1806) presided and intro- duced Governor Morton, who made a happy response, congratulating the college particularly upon its situa- tion, which seemed to him to be " in some respects . . . unrivalled." 2 Addresses by alumni followed, only two of which have been preserved, those of Charles A. 1 Robbins, Diary, n, 705. 8 New York Observer, August 26, 1843. 184 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR Dewey and Emory Washburn, and they dwell upon various phases of college history. Dr. Alonzo Calkins (1825) offered the parting sentiment: " O fortes, peioraque passi Mecum saepe viri, nunc risa pellite curas; Cras ingens iterabimus aequor." l The one-hundredth anniversary of the death of Colonel Williams occurred in 1855. His name had not been very constantly in mind during the sixty- two years since the founding of the college. So early as 1812 the Trustees felt that something should be done to rescue it from the gathering shadows. At their meeting, September I, they appointed a com- mittee "to devise some plan to perpetuate the mem- ory of it." After considering the subject a year this committee reported that a marble tablet, "with suit- able inscriptions thereon in the chapel which it is the intention of the board to build, . . . would be the most eligible method." The Trustees approved of the suggestion and then voted to postpone the sub- ject "for the present." 2 But this "intention of the Board" did not become a reality until 1828 fif- teen years later when the new chapel was erected and the proposed tablet placed upon its walls. A quarter of a century elapsed before anything more was done. At their annual meeting in 1853 the alumni appointed a committee to remove the remains of the founder to the college cemetery and " to erect a monument to his memory. . . on the spot where he 1 Horatii Carmina, i, vn, 30-32. The second line Dr. Calkins emended by substituting risa for vino. 2 Records of the Trustees, September I, 1812, and August I, 1813. 185 WILLIAMS COLLEGE fell." l The first part of their commission the com- mittee found it impossible to execute, since, some twenty years earlier, the grave had been opened by a member of the Williams family, who is said to have carried off a part of the remains. 2 But they did erect the monument "an honorable memorial" of grey marble with suitable inscriptions. Then, at the Com- mencement of 1855, the centennial anniversary of the founder's death was observed, when Edward W. B. Canning (1834) read a well-turned poem and James White (1836) pronounced an eloquent historical oration. The visit of Byram Green to Williamstown in 1854, of which some account has already been given, had two immediate and relatively important results the purchase of Mission Park, "the most sacred of God's temples in the Western world," 3 and the cele- bration of the fiftieth anniversary of the haystack prayer meeting. It was intended that the exercises of the Jubilee should be held in the open air and on the ground where Mills and his companions prayed in 1 806. Not only seats, but, in order to visualize in some vague yet suggestive fashion the connections of past and present, a haystack and bungalow were erected in the grove. 4 A violent rainstorm, however, which "con- tinued almost without interruption through the ... day and evening," 6 made it necessary to hold the exercises in the church. Albert Hopkins delivered the 1 Durfee, History of Williams College, 269. 2 Ibid., 270. 3 Williams Quarterly, Editor's Table, December, 1856. 4 Missionary Jubilee, 12. 6 Williams Quarterly, December, 1856. 1 86 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR principal oration and discoursed impressively, with characteristic touches of humor, upon the times and men of the famous prayer meeting. A series of short addresses, thirteen in number, followed this principal oration. The exercises, broken only by an intermis- sion of fifteen minutes, lasted six hours, and in spite of their length stirred to enthusiasm that keen, vet- eran observer and critic, the Rev. Dr. Samuel H. Cox. "Old men said," he remarked, '"We never saw the like,* and I say, 'Beat it if you can, O ye scholars of the coming age, in your centennial celebration.'*' 1 These scholars did not and could not beat it in elo- quence, though they surpassed it in pomp and cir- cumstance. Wednesday, October 10, 1906, a great multitude of people gathered in Williamstown the annual meeting of the American Board was held there and in North Adams to celebrate the centennial. The programme included a sunrise service in Mission Park, addresses in the Thompson Memorial Chapel and in the Congregational Church during the fore- noon, and an open-air meeting at the park in the after- noon. A cold, heavy rain partly broke up the sunrise service, but some remained in spite of it to offer their prayers on the ground hallowed by Mills and his companions. A thousand people attended the " aca- demic" service in the Thompson Chapel, where three college presidents Hopkins of Williams, Tucker of Dartmouth, and Hyde of Bowdoin and the son of a famous missionary, the Rev. Dr. Edward Judson, of New York, spoke on various phases of the haystack prayer meeting and its consequences. 1 Cox, New York Evangelist, August 14, 1856. WILLIAMS COLLEGE For the afternoon service a platform had been erected and chairs provided on the north side of Mis- sion Park, where there is a natural amphitheatre ad- mirably adapted to the purposes of a great outdoor assembly. Twenty-five hundred people attended this service. Beautiful autumnal sunshine followed the cloud and storm of the morning, and the exercises were not unworthy of their splendid setting, espe- cially the addresses of ten young men, converts in mission fields, "all the way from Europe and Africa to Hawaii and Mexico." 1 The first commemoration awakened comparatively little interest, but the sec- ond was one of the great religious anniversaries of the year. " Meetings in five continents this Wednesday," some one then said of the haystack men, "celebrate their centennial." 2 There was no hesitation or uncertainty in the re- sponse of Williams men to the calls of patriotism during the great national crisis of 1861-65. Three hundred and seventeen of them entered the Federal service, two hundred and forty-nine graduates and sixty-eight non-graduates, representatives of thirty-eight classes from 1825 to 1870. In this esti- mate thirty-six volunteers for work in the Christian or Sanitary Commissions are not included. 3 Little happened on the campus during the war which is of present interest or importance. News that 1 Missionary Herald, November, 1906, p. 520. 2 The Haystack Centennial, 96. 3 See Appendix. Eight non-graduates entered the Confederate army. One of them, William Farley Storrow Lovell (1849), reached the rank of inspector-general, and another, Joseph Lovell, that of brigadier- general. 188 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR Fort Sumter had surrendered to the South Carolinians reached Williamstown April 15 the last day of the second term of the college year. This news, wrote a Junior in his journal, "caused intense excitement" - "the students all swear they will enlist." l First and last twenty-nine of them seem to have left college to join the army. But the shrinkage in the registra- tion of Freshmen was a more serious and alarming matter. For the four years preceding the Civil War it had averaged fifty-nine for the next four it fell to thirty-seven. When the third term began, in the spring of 1861 after a vacation of two weeks, the undergraduates organized themselves into a battalion, and drilled an hour daily. Subsequently the faculty took the busi- ness in charge and made military training a required exercise with a schedule of three hours a week. At the Commencement of 1863, the battalion, mustered in front of Griffin Hall, listened to a stirring address by Governor John A. Andrew. Another interesting event of this Commencement was a poem written by William Cullen Bryant and read at the fiftieth anniversary of his college class. In this poem the great war its causes and inevi- table outcome were his theme "Fierce is the strife, As when of old the shining angels strove To whelm, beneath the uprooted hills of heaven, The warriors of the Lord. Yet now as then God and the Right shall give the victory." 1 Raymond, Fiftieth Anniversary Report, Class of '62, 17. 189 WILLIAMS COLLEGE A few days before Commencement yet another event, of no particular importance, it may be, caused considerable excitement on the campus. "Mrs. McClellan, who spends her summers here," wrote a member of the graduating class, "had a letter from her son own cousin of General McClellan in the Rebel army, wanting to know where her property in Washington is, that he may protect it when the cap- ital falls into Rebel hands. She thinks her two sons in General Meade's army quite as competent for the task." 1 Perhaps the most touching event in local history during the war was the reinterment of the remains of Lieutenant Edward Payson Hopkins, the only son of Albert Hopkins, who fell May 4, 1864, in a cavalry charge at Ashland, Virginia. After a futile attempt early in June to recover them, the stricken father re- turned home "grown ten years older than when he went away." His second expedition proved success- ful, and, December 31, 1864, they were buried in the college cemetery. Chaplain Henry Hopkins made a touching address at the funeral exercises in the Con- gregational Church, and the choir, of which the gal- lant young soldier had been a member, sang Mont- gomery's hymn "Go to the grave in all thy glorious prime." 2 The patriotic enthusiasm of the Berkshire students, which marked the beginning of the Civil War, was no less demonstrative at its conclusion. Recitations were i S. W. Dike, MS. letter, July 11, 1863. * Prentiss, Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss, 228. 190 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR in progress when they heard that Lee's army had sur- rendered at Appomattox Court House. Without wait- ing for the formalities of dismission, they rushed with tumultuous cheers to the chapel and sang " America " and the "Doxology." x Thirty Williams men lost their lives in the war. A monument, erected on the campus to their memory, was dedicated July 28, 1868, one graduate of the class of 1825, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Porter, offering the consecrating prayer, and another graduate of the same class, David Dudley Field, pronouncing the oration. "The statue which we this day uncover," said the latter, " is a tribute and a memorial. It is the tribute of this generation to patriotism, fidelity, and heroic virtue. It is the memorial to future generations of a great war and a great peace. . . . Such a war and such a peace deserve a memorial that shall last as long as yonder mountains shall look upon this valley. . . . Here let it remain . . . standing like a sentinel at the dawn of morning, at noon, at eventide, in the soft moonlight and beneath the stars." 2 Upwards of fifteen hundred Williams graduates re- ceived their diplomas from Mark Hopkins and the registration of non-graduates in his time reached at least half that number. Many of them, men of note in business, in the professions, in scholarship, or in literature, deserve a recognition which the compass of the present volume does not permit. Nothing more can be attempted than short sketches of a few who became widely known and are no longer living. 1 Williams Quarterly, June, 1865. 2 D. D. Field, Speeches, Arguments, and Miscellaneous Papers, n, 275. 191 WILLIAMS COLLEGE One non-graduate, Eugene Field, prepared for col- lege at a private school in Monson, under the care of a genial, old-fashioned master, the Rev. Mr. Tufts, who seems to have been his friend as well as teacher. He entered the Freshman class in the autumn of 1868 and remained a member of it about eight months. Apparently the boy gave little attention to his proper duties in these months and developed certain "excen- trisities" which so much disturbed the orderly life at Williamstown that President Hopkins is said to have advised Mr. Tufts to take him out of college. There was no official reprimand or dismissal he simply withdrew. 1 In two other institutions, Knox Col- lege and the University of Missouri, where he was a student for a time, he repeated substantially his Williamstown history. What Eugene Field got out of his varied academic experience is uncertain. Nor has the final rating of this whimsical, rollicking, improvident, brilliant lit- terateur, whose books were put together out of contri- butions to Denver or Chicago newspapers, as yet been fully settled. His " Love-Songs of Childhood " quite as finely imagined and quite as free from grown- up qualities as Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses" have the best promise. Another non-graduate, Edward Payson Roe, came to Williamstown in 1859. During the winter term of Freshman year some eye-trouble grew so serious that he became discouraged and was about to leave col- lege. Calling upon President Hopkins, he told him his perplexities and fears. " Never can I forget how the 1 Thompson, Eugene Field, 81. 192 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR grand old man met the disheartened boy. . . . The half-hour spent with him [was] the turning point of my life." l He joined the Senior class the next autumn, thus becoming a University or partial-course student. The instructions of that Senior year were, he said, invaluable to him. Whatever the worth of literary criticism by the event may be, and Professor Saintsbury is inclined to take issue with Dr. Johnson's hostile dictum on this question, in the case of Edward P. Roe's books the event was a sale of 1,400,000 copies in his lifetime and a considerable subsequent vogue. To professional critics these books seem crude, ill-made, and lacking in essential qualities of literary art. But multitudes of intelligent men and women, English as well as American, read them with pleasure and profit. He wrote for the masses, and gloried in his mission scarcely less than a once well-known contemporary, who declared that "he would crawl on his hands and knees until he sank if he could write a book which the plain people would read and love." 2 Stephen Johnson Field (1837) was valedictorian of the first class that graduated under Mark Hopkins. Few Williams men have had a more varied or roman- tic career. In 1829, then a boy of thirteen, he accom- panied his sister and her missionary husband, the Rev. Josiah Brewer, to Smyrna for the purpose of qualifying himself as a teacher of Oriental languages. The project did not succeed and was followed by four years at Williams College, by the study of law and 1 Roe, Autobiography, Lippincotfs Magazine, October, 1888. 2 Plunkett, Josiah Gilbert Holland, 43. 193 WILLIAMS COLLEGE partnership with his brother, David Dudley Field, in New York. Later he joined the great migration of "forty-niners" to California and settled at Marys- ville, a town eight days old, with a single adobe house and one thousand inhabitants ! 1 This pioneer period continued until 1863 and abounded in such uncom- fortable incidents as disbarment, imprisonment for contempt of court, and challenging a scoundrel, who did not keep the appointment, to fight a duel. On another occasion, happening to be in a saloon with David C. Broderick, subsequently United States Senator, the latter suddenly thrust him through an open door and shut it much to his astonishment and anger. Broderick explained afterwards that as they were standing at the bar a desperado with a grievance against Field entered the saloon and was drawing a pistol to shoot. 2 The feuds of these turbu- lent times pursued him long after their date. In 1889 he visited California and an old-time ruffian nearly succeeded in assassinating him. His service to that Commonwealth in the early chaotic period of its history was very great. As a member of the first Legislature and then of the highest State Court, he probably had more influence than any other man in settling the vexed legal questions which arose over disputed mining claims. In 1863 President Lincoln appointed Stephen Field an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and he held that position thirty-four years and seven months, surpassing all the records in 1 Field, Early Days in California, 223. 2 Strong, Landmarks of a Lawyer's Lifetime, 185. 194 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR tenure of office. And certainly none of his associates came up out of such turbulent experiences. One sel- dom finds a more striking contrast than that between the fighting "forty-niner" in California and the spec- tacled, silk-gowned justice in Washington, with his flowing beard, his massive figure, his courtly bearing, his refined and strikingly intellectual face. And his career on the bench of the Supreme Court was distin- guished not only by length of days, but also by fear- less independence, ample learning, devotion to prin- ciples rather than rules, and rare power of creative exposition. 1 Samuel Green Wheeler Benjamin (1859) had a longer, more intimate connection with the Orient than Stephen Field. The son of a missionary, he was born in Argos, on the southeastern coast of Greece, where he spent the first seven months of his life. Then for the next seven years he lived in Athens; then, and until he entered Williams College at the age of eighteen , in Trebizond, Smyrna, or Constantinople. Benjamin had a versatile genius, since he was a diplomatist, an artist, a journalist, and a man of let- ters. His service as a diplomat was in Persia, where he held the office of United States Minister from 1883 to 1885, when a change of administration at Washington brought it to a close. A partial list of his paintings in his autobiography contains one hundred and thirty- seven titles. Besides contributing many articles to the magazines, he published sixteen books, some of which were praised by the critics and had considerable sale. His first venture as an author he made during 1 Some Accounts of the Work of Stephen Johnson Field, 1881. 195 WILLIAMS COLLEGE Freshman year in college, when he offered an article to the "Williams Quarterly." That he should then have aspired to the honor of becoming a contributor to it was probably due, he said, to his "extreme ver- dancy," but he took the chance and knocked early one morning, manuscript in hand, at the door of the sanctum, which was opened by James A. Garfield, a member of the editorial board. "He was putting on a clean shirt . . . and good-naturedly invited me to enter. ... I modestly declined, apologized for intrud- ing at such an hour, and placed in his hands a poem. He took it politely and replied that he would carefully read my manuscript. There was, however, a quizzi- cal, half -humorous look in his eye at the assurance of a Freshman who ventured ... to invite inevitable rejection." l The poem, two hundred lines of blank verse about the Bosphorus, seems to have pleased Garfield and his associates and they printed it in the "Quarterly." Two graduates David Ames Wells (1847) and Samuel Warren Dike (1863) were men of mark in the field of economics and sociology. It was by a paper, "Our Burden and Our Strength," read before a literary club in Troy, New York, that Wells, then an unknown young man, first attracted atten- tion. The paper was an examination of our national resources to determine our ability to bear taxation, 2 and when brought to the attention of Mr. Lincoln, it led to his appointment first as Chairman of the Reve- nue Commission and subsequently as Special Com- 1 Benjamin, The Life and Adventures of a Free Lance, 140. 1 Godkin, Harvard Graduates' Magazine, vn, 353. 196 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR missioner of Revenue, positions which he held from 1865 to 1870. During this period he visited Europe in search of information, became a free-trader, and con- sequently laid himself open to charges of having been bought with British gold. These charges, to which Horace Greeley gave a wide and emphatic publicity, depressed his reputation for a time, but the recovery has been substantial. While Wells published a great number of scientific works and they had an immense sale, he won his most distinctive and brilliant success in the field of taxa- tion. Contrary to what one might have anticipated, his discussion of the subject attracted more attention abroad than at home a fact amply attested by the extraordinary honors which foreign societies and uni- versities conferred upon him. 1 David Wells' first book " Sketches of Williams College" was an undergraduate venture, written in collaboration with his classmate Samuel Henry Davis. The preface has the date of "June, 1847" a date belonging to the last weeks of his Senior year. "We have clothed the facts given us," the authors modestly explained, "in the best garments to be found in our scanty wardrobe." The most interesting and valuable part of the book is the chapter on college life, composed largely of ex- tracts from a student's journal. It may be pretty con- fidently assumed that Wells himself was the diarist. He made his first entry "Tuesday 10 o'clock P.M.," when he had been a member of the Freshman class one day, and the last at the close of Senior examina- 1 Godkin, Harvard Graduates' Magazine, vn, 355. 197 WILLIAMS COLLEGE tion with Commencement only six weeks away. What had the Williams of 1843-47 done for the diarist? This question occurred to him as he was bringing his journal to a close and he answered it "I believe I have gained some facility in directing and fixing my powers on a specific object. ... I can look longer and steadier than I could four years ago. I have not richly freighted my ship, but I trust I have acquired some little skill in managing its helm and sails ; I know where the freight is, where my course lies, where the rocks are hid, and I humbly hope I may reach the port towards which I steer." 1 Samuel Warren Dike died in 1913 at the age of seventy-four. Having a hurried and indifferent prepa- ration for college, he said that he was enabled to enter Williams only "by the very generous consideration then given to poor scholars who seemed to be in ear- nest/' In spite of this original handicap his grades were so good at the close of the course that the faculty as- signed him the Metaphysical Oration, then one of the most coveted honors. Graduating from Andover Theological Seminary in 1866, he entered upon the work of the ministry and continued in it until 1881, mainly in Congregational churches at West Ran- dolph, Vermont, and at the neighboring town of Royalton, when he became corresponding secre- tary of the National League for the Protection of the Family, and held this position for the thirty-two re- maining years of his life. Though he did not write books, his annual reports, his addresses before learned societies, and his papers in magazines and quarterlies, 1 Wells and Davis, Sketches of Williams College, So. I 9 8 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR written in perspicuous English with "a strong home touch," gave him wide reputation as a sociological expert. "Marriage is a subject I should be afraid to handle," wrote Goldwin Smith, replying in 1890 to a correspondent. "So much special knowledge is re- quired. The best authority on it, so far as the United States are concerned, is the Rev. Samuel W. Dike." 1 First and last he gave addresses at sixty colleges, uni- versities, and theological seminaries visiting some of them repeatedly. According to the late Professor Herbert Adams, of Johns Hopkins, a certain trip of his to educational institutions in the eighties of the last century did more to stimulate the study of social science than any event in the history of the country up to that time. 2 James Hulme Canfield (1868), orator at the cen- tennial commemoration of the college, after some ven- tures in business, studied law and began practice at St. Joseph, Michigan, which continued until 1877, when he accepted a call to the chair of English and History in the University of Kansas, where he had among his contemporaries on the teaching staff or Board of Regents six Williams alumni. Though he entered upon his new vocation without special prepa- ration, his alertness, magnetism, and genius for rapid work carried him triumphantly through the Kansas novitiate. This new vocation continued for twenty- one years fourteen of them as a professor in the University of Kansas, four as Chancellor of the Uni- versity of Nebraska, and three as President of the 1 Goldwin Smith, Correspondence, 224. * MS. Autobiographic sketch. 199 WILLIAMS COLLEGE Ohio State University. At the conclusion of these twenty-one years he removed to New York and be- came librarian of Columbia University. "And there he remaineth till this day," he wrote in April, 1903, "and his office hours for '68 men are from seven in the morning till midnight." 1 He was a man of various and signal gifts genial, resourceful, in sympathy with all that made for progress, an effective writer and teacher, an admirable after-dinner speaker, and an unsurpassed raconteur. John BoydThacher (1869), "a man of marvellously vivid and most lovable personality," 2 was twice Mayor of Albany, New York, and once State Senator. An ardent supporter of Grover Cleveland, he can- vassed the State during his first campaign, travelling in a boat through the Erie Canal and addressing what- ever audiences could be collected along the banks. In 1896 he declined the Democratic nomination for Governor. His deeper, more abiding interests, how- ever, were literary, not political. A bibliophile of the first rank, his invaluable "Collection of Incunabula," now in custody of the Library of Congress, contains eight hundred and forty titles. His writings comprise a slender volume of "Little Speeches"; " Charlecote, or the Trial of William Shakespeare," a brochure in which "we have run the Landorean thread in and out of our poor loom"; "The Continent of America, its Discovery and its Baptism " ; " The Cabotian Dis- covery " ; " Christopher Columbus," and " Outlines of the French Revolution." 1 The Class of Sixty-Eight after Thirty- Five Years, 12. 2 Catalogue of the John Boyd Collection of Incunabula, 17. 200 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR Three graduates of the period William Keith Brooks (1870), Frank Huntington Snow (1862), and William Dwight Whitney (1845) spent their lives in university work and made substantial contribu- tions to the sum of human knowledge. Professor Brooks, who died in 1908, was perhaps "the greatest American zoologist, at least from the viewpoint of philosophical thinking." 1 His most im- portant contribution to this phase of the subject is "Foundations of Zoology," published in 1898. On the practical side of it he did notable work in connec- tion with the Maryland Oyster Commission. What- ever his native genius may have been, and it was not small, pertinacity of purpose and a stubborn industry contributed largely to his success. At Williams he absorbed "everything that stuffy old Jackson Hall had to offer, and lived out of doors and knew all the fauna and flora around." 2 Frank Huntington Snow, valedictorian of the class of 1862, an attractive teacher and successful execu- tive, had been connected with the University of Kansas forty-two years at the time of his death in 1908 eleven of them as Chancellor and the remain- der as Professor of Natural History. During this term of service, and in addition to the current tasks of teaching and administration, he conducted twenty- six summer expeditions for scientific purposes, visit- ing various Western regions Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona and collecting a large amount of valua- ble material. Incidentally he discovered a parasite 1 Leading American Men of Science, 432. 1 G. Stanley Hall (1867), Gulielmensian, XLI, 7. 2O I WILLIAMS COLLEGE deadly to the chinch bug and a practicable method of distributing it. Though he published no books, he was the author of one hundred and sixty papers and pam- phlets, mostly on scientific subjects. While there has been much turmoil in the Sunflower State over the award of political credits, no one will question the claims of Frank Snow to a conspicuous place among Kansas educators. The undergraduate life of William Dwight Whitney first scholar in the class of 1845, professor in Yale University from 1854 to 1894 can hardly be con- sidered a prophecy of his subsequent career. Neither the ancient nor modern languages, that are so con- spicuous in his later activities, had any prominence among his undergraduate enthusiasms, which centred chiefly about Albert Hopkins and the Natural His- tory Society. "No small part of my time in college/' he said, in the " Forty Years' Record" of his class, "was spent in roaming over the hills and through the valleys collecting birds . . . and setting them up." * This impulse toward out-of-door things was not exactly a passing mood. It persisted for a consider- able period, as we find him taking part in the survey of the Lake Superior region in 1849 and of Colorado in 1873. Professor Whitney spent the four years immediately succeeding graduation in his father's bank at North- ampton. He did not resume his studies until the autumn of 1849, when he went to New Haven, joined President Woolsey's class in Thucydides and Pro- fessor Salisbury's in Sanscrit. These men quickly 1 Forty Years' Record, 176. 000 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR perceived that he " had the scholar's gifts and nature." Following their advice he spent three years in study at the universities of Tubingen and Berlin, returning to the United States in 1853. The next year he began his long and distinguished Yalensian career in the department of Sanscrit and Comparative Philology. The bibliography of Professor Whitney's publica- tions contains three hundred and sixty titles, and these publications brought him abundant recognition at home and abroad. In 1870 he received the first Bopp Prize, awarded by the Berlin Academy of Sci- ence for making within the three preceding years the most important contributions to Sanscrit philology. On the death of Thomas Carlyle in 1881 he succeeded him as a member of the Prussian Order of Merit. While the general public may have known him chiefly as the editor of the " Century Dictionary," no man of his time did more to stimulate and develop American scholarship. A great light went out in that world when, on the 7th of June, 1894, an d at the age of sixty-seven, he passed away. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, an educator of quite another type than the three university professors, came directly from the Sandwich Islands, the place of his birth, to Williamstown, and entered the class of 1862 at the beginning of the Junior year. "You must ... see my new chum," said John Henry Denison (1862) to a classmate. "Who's he?" "A savage, a genuine savage . . . just caught. You ought to see him knock me down when I try to box with him but he 's intensely interesting." 1 It was a total 1 Raymond, Fiftieth Anniversary Report, Class of '62, 26. 203 WILLIAMS COLLEGE change in environment and civilization this emi- gration from the tropics to Northern Berkshire. "I remember well," wrote another classmate, "standing by his side as he caught and curiously examined the first snowflake he had ever seen." 1 Though Armstrong wished to go to New Haven, he never regretted that he had been overruled in the matter. "I am more and more thankful," he said twenty years after graduation, "that I went to Williams College. . . . For a man's own upbuilding . . . Dr. Hopkins' teaching is the best human help I know." 2 Entering the army in 1862, he continued in active service until the close of the war and reached the rank of brevet brigadier-general of colored troops. Then followed his appointment as Assistant Commis- sioner of the Freedmen's Bureau at Fortress Monroe, a position which he relinquished in 1867 to undertake the founding of Hampton Institute. "I have a re- markable machine," he wrote to the secretary of his class in 1874, "f r the education of our colored brethren. . . . Put in a raw plantation darkey and he comes out a gentleman of the nineteenth century. The problem is to skip three centuries in the line of development and atone for the loss and injustice of ages." The attempt to set up this remarkable machine was regarded in some quarters as a blunder. "I'm sorry for Armstrong," said one of his classmates. " If he had stayed in the Freedmen's Bureau, he might have risen to a high government position, but now 1 Noble, Report of '62 to 1902, 11. 2 Noble, ibid., 13. 204 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR he's thrown up all his chances and gone down there to teach in a small, insignificant darkey school." 1 This classmate lacked the modest prescience of Shakspere's Egyptian soothsayer: "In nature's infinite book of secrecy A little I can read." He could not read at all in that book. So far from throwing up his chances, Armstrong inaugurated at Hampton one of the great educational movements of the nineteenth century. Ranald Slidell Mackenzie (1859), whom General Grant considered "the most promising young officer in the army," 2 entered Williams in the autumn of 1855. "I think," wrote his classmate Washington Gladden, "he could not have been more than sixteen when he entered college and wore roundabouts a kind of Eton jacket. Very quiet, modest to shyness, and with a little lisp, Ranald was a good fellow; we all loved him and were both sorry and proud when the appointment [at West Point] came to him. ... He left us early in our Junior year, but we did not . . . forecast his future; he had not at that time given any indications of the kind of character he was to de- velop." 3 Subsequent indications did not leave the matter in doubt. He graduated from West Point, June 17, 1862, number one in his class, entered the army immediately as second lieutenant, and was brevetted for gallant conduct at Manassas, Chancel- 1 Raymond, Fiftieth Anniversary Report, Class of '62, 26. 2 Grant, Personal Memoirs, n, 385. The Century Co., N.Y. 1895. 8 Washington Gladden, MS. letter, July 15, 1913. 205 WILLIAMS COLLEGE lorsville, Gettysburg, Cedar Creek, and Petersburg. And he had no charmed life on the battle-field. At South Mountain he was "left for dead . . . plundered by the rebels, but managed to crawl off the field." Later he lost a hand, " had a bullet through his lungs/ 1 and in the frontier campaigns subsequent to the Civil War was " variously perforated by Indian arrows." l Though Mackenzie's military career began when the war had been in progress a year, he won advance- ment on merit alone, with no help from outside sources, to the grade of brevet brigadier-general in the regular army and brevet major-general of volun- teers the youngest officer of his rank in the service. Two graduates of President Hopkins' time John James Ingalls (1855) and James Abram Garfield (1856) won fame in political life. For a year they were contemporaries at Williams. Then their paths lay apart until 1873 when they renewed the inter- rupted acquaintance as Members of Congress. On the completion of his legal studies in 1858, Ingalls removed to Kansas, and in 1873 was elected United States Senator. He held the position eighteen years and became a conspicuous figure in the upper house of Congress. Senator Hoar, of Massachusetts, regarded him as one of the most intellectual men whom he had known in the course of a long and varied experience. 2 When Ingalls was announced to speak the galleries of the Senate were thronged by expectant auditors. His clear, incisive, polished oratory often rose to a stately and noble eloquence. 1 Reports, Class of 1859, January i, 1863, July 23, 1877. 2 Hoar, Recollections of Seventy Years, II, 86. 2O6 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR For a long period he was President pro tempore of the Senate and performed the duties of that office, whether ordinary or occasional, with a high-bred, distinguished air and dignity. A function of the spe- cial sort occurred on one 22d of February. In the first Administration of Cleveland, Senator Hoar, of Massachusetts, offered a resolution that Washington's "Farewell Address" should be read that day. As the Vice- President had died, Ingalls, "with his frock coat buttoned tightly about him, his linen like snow, and his resonant voice at its best, stood forth at the hour of noon" and read the "Address" with such elocutionary and interpretative power that the Senate made the custom perpetual. 1 In 1891 Ingalls was defeated in his candidacy for a fourth senatorial term by the Farmers' Alliance j( an organization that grew up overnight, threw to the discard a man of national reputation, and put in his place an unknown and negligible successor. This dis- aster might have been avoided if he had been willing to pay the price of success. Friends of his, it seems, quietly and without consulting him bought up enough representatives of the Alliance to insure his reelection. When these very practical friends called at his quar- ters and reported what had been done, he paced the floor in silence for a time, and then said: "No, I don't have to go back to Washington, but I do have to keep my own self-respect. The whole sordid deal is off." Fourteen years later and five years after Ingalls' death, which occurred in 1900, Kansas was in a re- pentant mood and made all the atonement then 1 Boston Transcript, February 21, 1916. 207 WILLIAMS COLLEGE possible for its political folly by placing a bust of him in Statuary Hall. This bust was received and ac- cepted by Congress January 2, 1905. On that occa- sion no less than eighteen members of the Senate and House of Representatives paid tribute to his memory. 1 One uncomfortable trait a penchant for sarcasm was a prolific source of trouble to Ingalls all along the line from Williamstown to Washington. In his undergraduate days nobody on the campus Mark Hopkins always excepted escaped the lash of his satire. This early phase of it is seen at its worst in " A Brace of College Characters" an essay in the " Quarterly" describing two fellows who belonged to the deplorable race of "vitalized tailor's models, animated wig-and-whiskers blocks, having just soul enough to keep the body from decomposition." 2 The bad habit persisted to the close of his college career and there was a flagrant exhibition of it in his gradu- ating oration on " Mummy Life." Samuel Bowles, editor of the "Springfield Republican," who attended the Commencement of 1855, said it was "bitter and sarcastic, but beautifully written." 3 In Washington his genius for biting speech did not fail to make enemies. Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that Ingalls was only or chiefly a satirist. Carlyle often concluded his outbursts of invective with a loud guffaw, as much as to say, "See what a sad dog I am." 4 The Kansan's violences of language need some such key to their 1 Senate Docs., 58th Congress, 3d Session, xvi. 2 Williams Quarterly, September, 1855. 8 Springfield Weekly Republican, August 18, 1855. 4 Redesdale, Memories, n, 650. 208 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR interpretation. At all events, they represent only a fraction of the man. That he was no inconsiderable poet one could argue confidently from such verse as " Opportunity," or "The Sculptor to his Statue." 1 Of landscape beauty he had the keenest appreciation. Riding early one day up the left bank of the Kaw, a Topeka friend whom he was visiting relates, "We came upon a glorious stretch of bluff and meadow, such as can be seen only in Kansas. Ingalls raised his hand and repeated Shakspere's thirty-second sonnet 'Full many a glorious morning have I seen, Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.' " 2 One number of the "Williams Quarterly " the number for September, 1855 affords a good illus- tration of Ingalls' dual nature, as it contains the sav- age "A Brace of College Characters" and also a poem of his subdued, pensive, almost spiritual "Thre- nodia ; A Tribute to the memory of Chester Butler' ' : "The God-beloved die young, but not in vain Their early fate, their incompleted years; For hope survives the grave, the loss, the pain, Though memory smite the Horeb heart to tears." James Abram Garfield, born November 19, 1831, came to Williamstown from the Eclectic Institute at 1 A Williams Anthology, 9-11. * G. R. Peck, in Ingalls' Writings, Addresses, and Orations, 17. In- galls was a man of "nervous, romantic, poetic, and artistic tempera- ment." (Senator J. W. Daniel, of Virginia, in Senate Docs., 58th Con- gress, 3d Session, xvi, 45.) 209 WILLIAMS COLLEGE Hiram, Ohio, just at the close of the college year 1 853-54. The son of a frontier farmer, he had encoun- tered abundant vicissitudes and hardships in pursuit of an education. Having decided to take the last two years of his undergraduate course at some Eastern institution, he wrote letters of inquiry to several col- lege presidents. A friendly, personal touch in the reply of Mark Hopkins brought him to Williamstown, where he attracted immediate attention. "What do you think of that Westerner? " one student is reported to have asked another soon after his arrival. "He is not a slave to fashions, I conclude/ 1 "No, . . . but he is none the worse for that. Put him into a tasty garb and he would be a splendid-looking fellow." l A new epoch had begun for Garfield. In the first place, the scenery of Northern Berkshire threw a spell over him which never grew less. Writing a friend in the summer of 1866 about a recent visit to the region, he said it had washed out the footprints of ten years and would be for him a fountain of perpetual youth. 2 Then his two college years there were a time of eager, inspiring work. He at once took high rank as debater, writer, and scholar. For the first time and with ab- sorbing interest he read some of the great master- pieces of literature. But, after all, the principal thing for him in Williams was the President. Nothing that he ever said or wrote has been more widely quoted than his epigrammatic declaration on the subject "A pine bench with Mark Hopkins at one end of it and me at the other is a good enough college." He 1 Thayer, From Log Cabin to the White House, 331. 2 Bundy, Life of Garfield, 44. 2IO HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR made this declaration at a Williams alumni dinner in New York January 18, 1872. 1 Garfield's undergraduate contemporaries did not forecast for him a distinguished political future, until near the close of his college course. They sup- posed he would be a teacher or clergyman. John James Ingalls retained a vivid impression of him when his life at Williamstown was half finished, re- calling "with photographic distinctness his personal appearance on the occasion of his delivery of an ora- tion ... at the close of Junior year, in the summer of 1855." 2 He noted every peculiarity of physiognomy and dress the bony, muscular frame, the florid complexion, the mirthful eyes, the sparse, blond beard, scarcely concealing the jaw and mouth, the yellow hair falling back from a brow of unusual height, and the ill-fitting, country-tailored clothes, but he did not detect in this unconventional Junior speaking on the platform of the old chapel in Griffin Hall the making of a great orator. No occasion had as yet arisen which afforded any unmistakable indication of the future. Such an occasion came in May, 1856, nearly a year 1 Gladden, Recollections, 72. Dr. Gladden was present at the dinner, heard Garfield's speech, and quotes "what he actually said." A con- temporary report of the speech appeared in the Williams Vidette, Jan- uary 27, 1872: " Offer him the finest college buildings, the largest library, and the most complete physical apparatus, and he would rather have Dr. Hopkins in a brick shanty than them all." "The last time I saw him alive," said Senator Ingalls, " it was in the early summer of 1881 he alluded to the pleasure with which he anticipated his visit to Williamstown and repeated in substance the declaration of 1872 1 A pine log with the student at one end and Doctor Hopkins at the other would be a liberal education. ' " (Ingalls' Writings, Addresses, and Orations, 405, condensed.) 2 Ingalls 1 Writings, Addresses, and Orations, 398. 211 WILLIAMS COLLEGE after Ingalls graduated, when news of the assault upon Charles Sumner reached Williamstown. An indignation meeting was called and Garfield's speech on that occasion made an extraordinary impression. Undergraduates who heard it revised their earlier impressions and began to predict for him a place among the masters of public speech. 1 This prophecy had a splendid fulfilment. A single illustration of it will answer all present purposes. October 28, 1878, the great hall at Ithaca was filled to its utmost ca- pacity the attendance of Cornell students is said to have been "enormous" to hear Garfield upon financial questions then agitating the country. " How did you like my speech? " he asked his host, President Andrew D. White, who replied "I have known you too long and think too highly of you to flatter you, but I will say what I would say under oath: it was the best speech I ever heard." 2 On an occasion like that at Ithaca, with a great audience, a congenial subject, and ample prepara- tion, no orator of the time could outdo Garfield in eloquence. He was less at home in the rough-and- tumble of congressional debate where Roscoe Conk- ling and James G. Elaine were past-masters. The first public demonstration of Williams students in honor of Garfield was in 1856, the second twenty- four years later. On the 8th of June, 1880, the Repub- lican National Convention at Chicago nominated him as candidate for the Presidency of the United States, and getting the news during the afternoon of that day, 1 Thayer, From Log Cabin to the White House, 344. 2 White, Autobiography, I, 188. 212 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR they speedily assembled en masse before the Presi- dent's house, called for a speech, which they did not fail to get, and which they received with tremendous applause. And the applause reached a grand cli- max when in conclusion Dr. Chadbourne announced an immediate holiday for further celebration of the event. Thereupon the enthusiastic young men pro- ceeded to Alumni Hall and organized a Garfield club. In the evening they marched to North Adams and stirred up that town. Returning at a late hour they brought the celebration to a close with a great bon- fire on the campus in front of West College. 1 The last scenes in Garfield's Williamstown history stand out in dark, tragic contrast to all the sunshine that had preceded them. Saturday morning, July 2, 1 88 1, a student, evidently agitated by some unusual excitement, was noticed running at full speed from the telegraph office toward the President's house, and on reaching it knocked violently at the front door which his daughter happened to open. He asked ex- citedly for Dr. Chadbourne, who was found at the rear of the house, talking with the old ex-slave, Abe Bunter. " Father," said the daughter, "there is a student in the library to see you. He looks as if some- thing dreadful had happened." The agitated student brought news of the assassination of President Gar- field. On that Saturday morning, accompanied by Secretary Elaine, Garfield left the White House and drove down Pennsylvania Avenue in his carriage to take the train for Williamstown, where he would re- vive the inspiring memories of his college days, with- 1 Williams Athenceum, July 2, 1880. 213 WILLIAMS COLLEGE out the faintest premonition of impending calamity. Mr. Elaine said that, in all the twenty years of their acquaintance, he had never seen him in such high spirits, in such exuberance of almost boyish happi- ness. 1 A disappointed office-seeker, by the name of Guiteau, shot and mortally wounded him at the rail- way station. It was inevitable that the tragedy should dominate the Commencement of 1 880-81, the twenty-fifth an- niversary of Garfield's graduation. "The shock... the grief, the disappointment and suspense," Mark Hopkins wrote, "were frightful." 2 Senator Ingalls, who delivered the oration before the Adelphic Union, prefaced it with an eloquent eulogy of his college contemporary, 3 and President Chadbourne began his baccalaureate sermon in a similar strain. 4 President Garfield died at Elberon, New Jersey, September 19, and John James Ingalls was designated as one of the Senate committee to receive the remains at the Capitol and attend the funeral at Cleveland. The afternoon scene in the Rotunda at Washington seemed to him "impressive beyond precedent. . . . By the catafalque sat the new President, chief bene- ficiary of Guiteau's bullet. . . . Near by were the cab- inet ministers, their dreams of power, their plans of aggrandizement, about to be entombed with their dead chieftain. Across the space was Grant, his im- passive, resolute, sphinx-like face bent forward, in- tensely pensive . . . Elbow to elbow with him was 1 Ingalls 1 Writings, Addresses, and Orations, 406. * Carter, Mark Hopkins, 341. 8 Springfield Republican, July 5, 1 88 1. 4 Ibid., July 4, 1 88 1. 214 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR his successor Hayes. . . . Farther on were Sherman the soldier and Sherman the Senator . . . and Sheri- dan, the victor of Winchester, and a great host of heroes and statesmen such as had seldom as- sembled around the unconscious dust of an American citizen." 1 Measured on the scale of numbers the administra- tion of President Hopkins, which came to an end at the Commencement of 1871-72, achieved no extraor- dinary success. His ambitions lay in other direc- tions. Fifty students a year, two hundred altogether, he once said, contented him. In only ten of the thirty- six years of his presidency did the numbers exceed these figures and then by a small margin. Beginning in 1836-37 with a registration of one hundred and nineteen, they slowly increased until 1849-50, when the maximum, two hundred and forty, was reached. From this point a gradual decline set in, which con- tinued to the close of the administration. The regis- tration of the final year repeated that of the first, one hundred and nineteen, a coincidence which might seem to illustrate in some curious fashion the subject discussed in the baccalaureate of 1871-72, "The Circular and the Onward Movement." 2 It is in his books, addresses, and classroom rather than in executive work that the chief sources of Dr. Hopkins' fame, past and present, must be sought. Here he stands out in obvious contrast to the great leaders of the new educational movement that began 1 Ingalls' Writings, Addresses, and Orations, 411-12. 2 The registration in the first year of President Chadbourne's admin- istration, 1872-73, was 119. 215 WILLIAMS COLLEGE during the last years of his administration Gilman at Johns Hopkins, White at Cornell, Angell at Ann Arbor, and Eliot at Harvard. Their larger work lay in the field of organization and development which had little attraction for the Williams President. 1 The bibliography of Mark Hopkins' publications contains ninety titles. 2 With few exceptions these publications were written to be spoken. Only five "The Evidences of Christianity, " "Moral Science," "The Law of Love and Love as a Law," "An Outline Study of Man," and "The Scriptural Idea of Man " are properly books, and they were originally delivered as courses of lectures all but the last in Boston before the Lowell Institute. 3 "The Evidences of Christianity" had a history which is worth recalling. As the lectures of which it is composed were not to begin until January, 1844, President Hopkins thought he could easily prepare them during the preceding college vacation. When it came he found that his mind was in a state of collapse. "I knew enough about myself and about medicine," he once said, "to understand that I must stop. I had been doing the work of three men. If my physical strength had not been great so that I was able to carry heavy burdens I do not see how the college could have lived at all. The vacation was short, and when the term opened in the autumn my duties would be exact- ing. But I dropped everything and went into the woods for three weeks. That saved me. I came back and wrote the lectures." 1 The Nation, April 6, 1916. * Carter, Mark Hopkins, 367-70. 8 Smith, History of the Lowell Institute. 216 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR Commencement Day in 1843, the year of the semi- centennial, was August 17. He could not have re- turned from "the woods " much before the middle of September, and he delivered the first of the lectures Tuesday evening, January 16. No abler defence of Christianity appeared in their day. The rise of the higher criticism, however, which had scarcely been heard of in 1844, made trouble in the orthodox camp of apologetics and antiquated a good deal of its offen- sive and defensive armament. Take the case of the once formidable "Analogy" of Joseph Butler. It "has the effect upon me, as I contemplate it," Mat- thew Arnold wrote, "of a stately and severe fortress, with thick and high walls, built of old to control the kingdom of evil ; but the gates are open and the guards gone." 1 In 1879 Dr. Hopkins made a resurvey of the fortress which he had built thirty-five years before for the same general purpose and thought it needed attention. "I am reading upon the evidences of Christianity," he wrote, "or rather on the changes in them since my book was published. ... I would like to add a few pages, if I can in that way bring the work down to the present time." 2 The new edition, with a supplement of fifteen pages, was published in 1 Arnold, Last Essays in Church and Religion, 140, quoted in Seth's English Philosophers, 207. 2 Carter, Mark Hopkins, 299. Lieutenant-Governor Bross, a Wil- liams graduate in the class of 1838, established at Lake Forest Uni- versity the "Bross Foundation" for the publication of Christian apolo- getics and similar works. It was his request that the "Evidences" of his "dear friend and teacher, Mark Hopkins," should be reprinted as volume I of the Bross Library. Accordingly the trustees of the Founda- tion purchased the copyright and issued a "Presentation Edition" of the book in 1909. 217 WILLIAMS COLLEGE 1880, but he did not wholly succeed in shutting the gates or bringing back the guards. The other four volumes contain President Hopkins' contributions to philosophy. Between the first and the last of these volumes twenty-one years elapsed. Yet they show little change or modification in sub- stance of doctrine. An interesting episode occurred toward the end of this period the newspaper con- troversy with President McCosh of Princeton. This controversy turned upon the question, " What is the foundation of obligation? " According to Dr. McCosh "an action is right because it is right" and that ends the matter. In 1830, when Mark Hopkins began to teach philosophy, he held the same opinion. The doc- trine of an ultimate right, however, proved to be only a provisional stage in the settlement of his ethical theories. He finally rejected it and concluded that a reason could always be given why an action is right - because it leads to "a good" or to. "the good." 1 Dr. Hopkins reached his conclusions independently and hence in a personal sense they are original. Yet con- sidered historically they had been substantially antici- pated by the utilitarian school of writers, Shaftes- bury, Hutcheson, Paley, Bentham, and the Mills, the most brilliant school of British thinkers and the only one that made any important contribution to philosophic speculation. It is true that Dr. Hopkins did not like the term "utilitarian," but his theories can hardly escape classification under it. The controversy in which a scholar educated in the schools pupil of Sir William Hamilton was 1 Carter, Mark Hopkins, 165. 2X8 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR matched against a man of ethical and philosophical genius, with no special equipment of erudition, at- tracted much attention. President McCosh had such advantages as a large knowledge of books affords. For Dr. Hopkins, whatever his inclinations and aptitudes may have been, the life of a scholar was impossible. During the first twenty years of his administration, in addition to the inevitable executive work, he "taught all the studies of the Senior class, corrected all their literary exercises, and preached every Sun- day " an exacting routine leaving little time or strength for scholastic investigation. The majority of teachers that get attention in the educational world secure it by research rather than by the inde- pendent action of their intellectual powers. Mark Hopkins belongs to the class of great men who are relatively independent of books and reading. During the first half of the last century questions of theology awakened quite as much public interest as debates upon philosophical problems. New Eng- land college presidents of the period could hardly neglect these questions and few of them were disposed to do it. Yet Dr. Hopkins was primarily and essen- tially a philosopher a philosopher of the cheerful, expectant, optimistic type. The dogmas of the older creeds, which dwell upon the wrath of God and the everlasting perdition of the impenitent, never ap- peared with any prominence in his sermons, books, or classroom. Commencement Sunday in 1864, when what might be called "The Battle of the Hymns" was fought, affords an interesting illustration of the tone and temper of his theological world. The key- 219 WILLIAMS COLLEGE note of the sermon preached at the morning service was given, with no uncertain sound, by the hymn that immediately preceded it: "Go preach my gospel, saith the Lord, Bid the whole earth my grace receive; He shall be sav'd that trusts my word, He shall be damrTd that won't believe." In the afternoon President Hopkins delivered the baccalaureate and the hymn which he read as his prelude to the discourse had quite another pitch: "My soul, repeat His praise Whose mercies are so great, Whose anger is so slow to rise, So ready to abate. "High as the heavens are rais'd Above the ground we tread; So far the riches of His grace Our highest thoughts exceed." * The sermons, which for a long series of years Dr. Hopkins preached Sunday mornings in the college chapel, were always extemporary. " I saw very soon after I took up the work here," he once said, " that I must learn to think and talk on my feet. ... To write a sermon every week was out of the question, so I was driven to speaking without notes." He acquired an ease and facility in this sort of discourse which served him well on a great variety of occasions for exam- ple, at the annual meetings of the American Board, of which he was president thirty years. These meet- 1 Springfield Weekly Republican, August 6, 1864. 220 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR ings, attended by delegates from every part of the country and from foreign lands as well, began Tues- day and closed Friday. On Thursday evening an address was expected from him; and this address, always unwritten, with its felicity of diction and in- tellectual force, its breadth of outlook and touches of local color, soon came to be recognized as one of the important events of the occasion. Yet at the outset he had doubts about his call to this particular field. "I am the more diffident," he wrote the sec- retary of the Board, who asked him to make an address in 1838, " as I have never spoken at one of the larger anniversaries and may find that they are not my place at all." 1 No such uncomfortable experience awaited him. Unlike the Thursday evening addresses at the annual meetings of the American Board and the Sun- day morning sermons at the college chapel, the bacca- laureates, which continued to be a capital feature of Williams Commencements from 1837 to 1872, were fully and carefully written out. So also were the nu- merous discourses delivered at ordinations, anniver- saries, and other public functions. All these occasional addresses moved in the higher ranges of thought which seemed to be President Hopkins' natural sphere. Then his style was quite as noticeable as his thinking. He belonged to the relatively small group of philosophers whose writings have claims to be re- garded as literature. The style of Paley, if we may accept the dictum of distinguished critics, was "as near perfection in its kind as any in'our language," and 1 MS. letter, April 12, 1838, in possession of the American Board. 221 WILLIAMS COLLEGE that of Berkeley is remarkable "for grace as well as lucidity of expression." 1 And in the style of Dr. Hopkins these luminous, eighteenth-century types reappear. John Bascom, hardly disposed to over- rate his merits, calls him "a rhetorician of the no- blest order." 2 Yet, after all has been said of his sermons and addresses and books, the present-day fame of Dr. Hopkins is mainly associated with the classroom. No doubt a plausible argument could be made to prove that the author builds upon surer foundations than the teacher that the latter has slender advantage over the actor who passes quickly into the haze of tradition when he is no longer seen and heard before the footlights. But it is also true that the author, dealing with high themes of ethics and philosophy, has an uncertain hold upon public interest. Litera- ture of that kind does not as a general rule improve by keeping, and later generations seldom read it with a " modern joy." Though Dr. Hopkins, unlike President Wayland, who fought against "the harmful tyranny of the [old] curriculum," was not distinctly an educational re- former, yet some important and significant innova- tions, relating to the order, method, and scope of his work, are apparent. Starting with the physical man he endeavored "to give an idea of every organ and tissue of the body." After these preliminary studies he proceeded to consider the intellectual, moral, and emotive nature. Then followed a survey "of constitu- 1 Seth, English Philosophers, 123, 222. . * Bascom, Things Learned by Living, 105. 222 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR tional history and of the rights and duties of American citizens," and the work of the year was concluded with a consideration of "natural theology and the analogy of the natural to the moral government of God." l The purpose of it all, the end in view, was not primarily to communicate knowledge, but to set his students "intellectually on fire." While he had re- markable success in this mission, there was in every class a remnant with which little could be done. This remnant he quickly recognized, allowed it to drift along, and get out of the course whatever might be possible. In Dr. Hopkins* classroom the scheme of study must be reckoned a subordinate matter, of small account compared with his personality. The enthu- siastic words of Theodore Parker in reference to Daniel Webster might be transferred to him, and those who knew the man will hardly bring charges of exaggeration "Since Charlemagne I think there has not been such a grand figure." He was large- framed, with a head of massive, strikingly intellectual mould. At times this personality seemed to have a sheer, downright, half-inarticulate power. "I rang the bell Senior year at the end of the hour," said a member of the class of 1862, "and sat near the door in the recitation room back of the new chapel and quite on the left of the President. One day he turned half about in his chair, looked inquiringly and ex- pectantly at me, and asked a question. I have no idea what that question was or what answer I gave, but the incident made an impression upon me which the 1 Hopkins, Miscellaneous Essays and Discourses, 279. 223 WILLIAMS COLLEGE intervening years there are fifty-three of them have not obliterated." l There was also the spell which waits upon brilliant and available intellectuality. Yet, however extraor- dinary and unmistakable this intellectuality might be, however frank and luminous in certain aspects, students were well aware that they knew Mark Hop- kins only in part. His ethical doctrine, the processes of his philosophical thinking, were in the clear day- light; but there was a world of reticence and reserve, the world of his inner and spiritual self, concerning which he seldom spoke. On one winter evening during the last year of his life the old habit of silence gave way for a moment. Referring to the poetry of Robert Browning, he said that it did not attract him; that he liked clearness and had little patience with obscure, clouded verse, in which one must beat about persist- ently and painfully to find the meaning. "But," he continued, and there came over his face a spiritual and illuminated expression, as if he actually saw "the light that never was on sea or land," "but I too am a mystic." This man, who to the casual observer might seem to view life from the cool, dispassionate standpoint of the intellect and to have little commerce with the countries of dream-land, claimed kindred with Thomas a Kempis and Bernard of Clairvaux. In order that his students might not be wholly un- prepared for the discussions of the classroom, Presi- dent Hopkins always used textbooks. Early in his work as Professor of Philosophy he introduced three new manuals Whateley's " Logic," Wayland's 1 Rev. E. E. Lewis (1862), MS. letter. 224 HIGH TIDES IN THE CALENDAR " Moral Science," and Butler's " Analogy." These manuals served as points of departure for the discus- sions furnished the students with some knowledge of the subjects that would be considered. He had the rare art of going directly to the heart of them, and his progress thither was accompanied by an illuminating play of thought. 1 This art was supplemented and made extraordinarily effective by a genius for asking keen, stimulating, instructive questions. Though a gladiator of the first order, he was not disposed to make any display of his power. "I hear that you cornered several Seniors in your recitation this morn- ing," some one once said to him. " I never do that I never corner men," was the almost indignant reply. A conceited student might occasionally get an ugly fall, but by his ever-present sense of humor the Presi- dent generally managed "to relieve the immediate embarrassment of the mishap." The most memorable occasions, however, in the history of his classroom were not those in which ques- tions and answers figured. Now and then Dr. Hop- kins, roused beyond his wont by some phase of the discussion, broke away from the usual routine, and entered upon an exposition of his own opinions. One of these remarkable hours belongs to the year 1852, when the subject of discussion was the first question in the Assembly's Catechism "What is the chief end of man?" Professor Perry, then a member of the Senior class, said he could never forget the President's astonishing "display of rhetorical and moral power" 2 1 Bascom, Things Learned by Living, 106. 2 Perry, Williamstown and Williams College, 515. 225 WILLIAMS COLLEGE on that occasion. A similar experience, which is on record, occurred ten years later. In 1862 the question under debate was Hamilton's definition of faith. " Dr. Hopkins/' wrote President Carter, "spoke in refuta- tion of it for nearly half an hour. ... It was the most impressive incident of my college life." 1 In his relations to members of the faculty Mark Hopkins was uniformly courteous, considerate, and liberal. He had no ambition for personal domination never dreamed of applying the methods of a ma- chine shop to an educational institution. Though he might have little sympathy with theories which some of his associates advocated with the intuitionalism of John Bascom or the free-trade propaganda of Arthur Latham Perry he never attempted to lay restrictions upon their intellectual freedom. The administration of President Woolsey one of the great eras in the history of Yale was chiefly distinguished by "the higher ideal of scholarship which it introduced." 2 In the Williams of Mark Hop- kins another goal appears not technical scholar- ship, but "intellectual power, refined taste, and moral excellence." 3 1 Carter, Mark Hopkins, 105. 2 Dwight, Memoirs of Yale Life and Men, 339. 1 Hopkins, Miscellaneous Essays and Discourses. CHAPTER VII A PERIOD OF TRANSITION PAUL ANSEL CHADBOURNE, fifth President of the col- lege, was born at North Berwick, Maine, October 25, 1823. The death of his mother in 1836 1 broke up the family, and he went to live with a neighbor, Josiah Frye, said to have been " a farmer, a maker of ploughs and a carpenter." 2 Here he remained three years, during the winter months of which he attended school. Removing to Great Falls, New Hampshire, he became a druggist's clerk and medical student. This period, also, like that in the household of the versatile Josiah Frye, lasted three years. Then, hav- ing prepared for college at Phillips Academy, Exeter, he entered Williams as a Sophomore and graduated in 1848 valedictorian of his class. A few weeks later he began to teach at Freehold, New Jersey, where his success was instant and unmistakable. " I can hardly go out of doors on pleasant evenings now," he wrote Albert Hopkins, " without being followed by boys to ask some question in regard to the stars." 3 The enthu- siasm of these boys and a growing passion for science led him to reconsider the question of his proper voca- tion. Heretofore he had taken it for granted that the pulpit was the proper place for him. But now a time 1 Chadbourne Genealogy, 36. 2 J. M. Barker, Mass. His. Society Proceedings, Second Series, XVIH, 449. 8 MS. letter, January 15, 1849. C27 WILLIAMS COLLEGE of doubt set in and he was greatly perplexed. "I found it impossible ... to decide myself and I wrote . . . President [Hopkins] and he advised me unquali- fiedly to enter the Seminary. . . . Consequently, unless something unexpected occurs, I shall enter Andover in the Spring." 1 But this advice, though direct and positive, did not exactly "carry a quietus with it." "Perhaps," he added in a postscript, - "perhaps my love of science was given me for a trial. I wish I could feel clear ... it was an indication I ought to pursue." Pulmonary troubles drove him from Freehold, and after a brief period of rest and recuperation he entered the Theological Seminary at East Windsor Hill, Connecticut. But presently his health broke again, and the disaster led to the aban- donment of his studies for the ministry. Rallying from the attack he became principal of the High School at Great Falls, New Hampshire, in the spring of 1850 and held the position until the Williams Trustees in August, 1851, elected him to a tutorship. The following winter a recurrence of pulmonary troubles broke up his work and compelled him to take refuge in the South, where he remained until the next spring, when he returned to East Windsor Hill and took charge of an academy recently established there. The Williams Trustees, however, had not lost sight of Principal Chadbourne, and in August, 1853, elected him to the chair of Chemistry and Botany. He gave up the chemistry at the close of the college year 1857- 58, and was transferred to the chair of Natural His- tory. This position he held until 1867, when the 1 MS. letter, January 15, 1849. 228 PAUL ANSEL CHADBOURNE I872-I88I A PERIOD OF TRANSITION Trustees " reluctantly accepted " his resignation "with grateful acknowledgments of his eminent service to the college." l Since the work at Williamstown occu- pied only half of the year he spent the remainder of it elsewhere at Bowdoin College, the Maine Medical School, Mount Holyoke College, Berkshire Medical Institution, or Western Reserve College. Professor Chadbourne went from Williams to the presidency of the new State Agricultural College at Amherst in the autumn of 1867. He was interested in the project and entered upon the consideration of ways and means with characteristic ardor. "It is most difficult," he said in a speech before the Massa- chusetts Board of Agriculture, December n, 1866, "to decide what is to be done. . . . However, the ground has been well mapped out. ... I shall feel it my duty to see the experiment fairly tried, if I never receive a cent for my services if I have to go abroad and lecture ... in order to make a living. . . . For the first class that comes here I expect to do a great deal of the teaching myself, and if necessary and I cannot get any one ... to help me, I will do it all." 2 But his work at Amherst came to a sudden close. Only seven months had passed when the persistent demon of ill-health intervened and sent him from New England to Wisconsin, where, as President of the State University, a position which he held two years, he found a large and inviting field. His push and versatility, his attractiveness and skill as a teacher, and his ready gifts of eloquent speech in 1 Records of the Trustees, July 30, 1867. 1 Mass. Board of Agriculture, Report, 1866-67, 32. 229 WILLIAMS COLLEGE public assemblies won general applause. The univer- sity entered upon a new and signal era of progress, " mainly due to his ability, energy, and incessant labors." l But the strain of the position and some chafing against Western conditions and tendencies brought his prosperous administration to an end in 1870. After leaving Wisconsin he spent nearly two years among the Rocky Mountains in the pursuit of health and the investigation of mines. Returning to Williamstown in 1872, he followed Mark Hopkins as President of the college. Though there were other candidates, he would probably have been elected in any event, but the fact that he was the choice of his predecessor made the succession inevitable. 2 No doubt the offer of the position gratified him, yet de- pressing reflections accompanied the acceptance of it. " Probably I shall undertake the work," he wrote to a friend. "I am sorry to do so. I prefer freedom - much prefer it to mix more freely with men than I can as president of a college. But if I take hold of the work I must do my best. The college needs hard work and I must be prepared to devote to it at least ten years of ... my life. I have already given it fifteen." The inauguration took place July 27, 1872. Ap- praised by the temper and quality of the exercises it was a notable occasion. The speakers were all Williams men the retiring President, representa- tives of the Trustees, the faculty, the alumni, and the undergraduates. In a certain sense the address of 1 Carpenter, Historical Sketch of the University of Wisconsin, 53. Regents' Report, 1870, 54. 2 Perry, Williamstown and Williams College, 654-56. 230 A PERIOD OF TRANSITION Mark Hopkins dominated the exercises. He was tak- ing leave of a position in which he had won great dis- tinction, and naturally on such an occasion he looked backward as well as roundabout. Glancing over the now completed history of his own administration and discussing briefly some present-day problems of edu- cation, he gave his successor a gracious and reassur- ing welcome. Scarcely less notable was the address of John Bascom in behalf of the faculty an address dealing with the theories and conditions of successful college work. James Abram Garfield spoke for the alumni and paid a tribute to Mark Hopkins so fer- vent and unlimited that it grated somewhat on the sensitive ears of his successor. The undergraduate representative, Robert Meech Chamberlain (1873), struck a different note, blending cheerful prophecies of what shall be with appreciation of what has been. "The past," he said, "is rich in legacies of inspiring memories. Its record is a grand one. . . . But, Sir, on the . . . scroll of the future there is yet to be inscribed a history more glorious. Into your hands we give the scroll with faith in the result." l In his inaugural a vigorous and telling address President Chadbourne discussed "the new educa- tion," which was then "in a transition state, ... to be tried and wrecked or pass to a higher life." 2 We are met, he said, by antagonistic demands. Some think the college has fallen behind the times and needs a radical reconstruction, while others are equally confi- dent in reaching opposite conclusions. As for himself he saw no occasion for sweeping and radical reforms. 1 The Inauguration of President Chadbourne, 20. * Ibid., 25. 231 WILLIAMS COLLEGE " In my judgment the instruction in Williams College has, upon the whole, afforded as true a type of high edu- cation as that of any college in our land." l The great need, he insisted, was enlargement, not revolution. When the old order changes, the era of transition is seldom found to be altogether pleasant. The difficul- ties at Williamstown were serious. Some annoyances of a personal sort could not be escaped. President Chadbourne succeeded an extraordinary man, and comparisons, whether odious or not, were inevitable. For a generation the sermons of Dr. Hopkins at Com- mencement had been famous. What impression would the sermons of his successor make? Could he sustain the traditions of the time and place? As President Chadbourne rose Sunday afternoon, June 29, 1873, a slender, alert figure, his face refined and intellec- tual, with keen, restless eyes gleaming through gold- bowed spectacles, and a grey, flowing beard, to begin his first baccalaureate, he confronted an audience friendly, perhaps, but questioning and half sceptical. Weighed in the balances of this ordeal he was not found wanting. "Those who had the pleasure of lis- tening to the sermon," wrote the editor of "Vidette," "regarded it as a clear, impressive, and vigorous ef- fort, worthy of President Chadbourne and the repu- tation of the college. If any anxiety was felt as to his ability to meet the occasion, this feeling was soon dissipated and all recognized that the college had at its head a man of power fully adequate to ... the exigencies of the position." 2 1 The Inauguration of President Chadbourne, 27. 2 Williams Vidette, September 20, 1873. 232 A PERIOD OF TRANSITION A far more serious matter than the exigencies of Baccalaureate Sunday was the fact that the last three or four years had been a period of depression and alarm. Ghosts of old controversies over removal, which were thought to have been effectually laid, showed signs of life. "Williams," said a writer in the "Review," "is not what she should be. ... She has scarcely more than half the students she once had. ... Is there any secret malady preying on her vitals? " 1 "Will it pay," asked a writer in the same magazine three days before President Chadbourne delivered his first baccalaureate, "will it pay to retain the college at Williamstown? Shall we not be more central, have more ad vantages . . . if we could receive an offer of beautiful grounds and assistance (and this is not impossible) in the flourishing town of Pitts- field?" 2 One member of the faculty, however, had little sympathy with the croakers. He was confident that they misunderstood the situation. "We take it upon ourselves to assert in the strongest terms," wrote Arthur Latham Perry, "that the college is not going down, but steadily coming up. . . . Now at length ... a first-rate education in all departments can be gained upon this ground." 3 Moreover, another matter had been disturbing the college. It was nothing less than a formidable effort to transform it into a coeducational institution. At their meeting in 1871 the alumni appointed a com- mittee on the subject. The next year two reports were made, one by a majority of the committee Francis 1 Williams Review, November 6, 1871. 8 Ibid., June 24, 1872. 8 Ibid., June 27, 1870. 233 WILLIAMS COLLEGE Henshaw Dewey ( 1 840) , Clement Hugh Hill ( 1 856), and Henry Hopkins (1858) against the proposed inno- vation, and a minority report favoring it by John Bas- com and David Dudley Field. A final decision was not reached until the Commencement of 1873, when the alumni adopted the majority report a disposition of the question satisfactory to President Chadbourne and to nine tenths of the friends of the college. In the plans and forecas tings of President Chad- bourne the faculty had the first place. "Professors," he said in his inaugural, "are sometimes spoken of as working for the college. They are the college." Of this doctrine he had long been a vigorous advocate. "An institution," he declared six years earlier in an address before the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture, "is made up of its president and faculty. Give us that and ... a barn to work in if you please." l And President Chadbourne had immediate occasion to put his theories into practice. The resignation of three prominent members of the faculty in 1 872 Arthur Williams Wright, William Reynolds Dimmock, and Franklin Carter necessitated its partial recon- struction. And he was fortunate in securing as their successors Ira Remsen (College of the City of New York, 1865) for the chair of Physics and Chemistry; Orlando Marcellus Fernald (Harvard, 1864) for that of Greek, and Edward Herrick Griffin (1862) for that of Latin. Nor did he fall below this high standard in subsequent appointments like those of George Lan- sing Raymond (1862); Truman Henry Safford (Har- vard, 1854), an( l Lewellyn Pratt (1852). 1 Reports, 1866-67, 4 6 - 234 A PERIOD OF TRANSITION While no radical changes disturbed the curriculum, it was considerably amplified and enriched. A wider range of work appears especially in the sciences, in the classics, and in modern languages. Requirements for admission were stiffened by the addition of four books of Caesar, one book of Homer, elementary Greek prose, and tests in English composition. On occasion, however, the earliest and mildest require- ments might suddenly displace the later and severer code. An illustration of this sort of renaissance oc- curred the day before the opening of the fall term in 1879, when a young man from Salem arrived in Williamstown to enter the Freshman class. His first business was to see Dr. Chadbourne, whom he found at the chapel superintending a gang of workmen and addressed as " Mr. President." "How did you know I was a President? " " I thought you looked like one," was the quick reply. Either the compliment or some- thing else put him in a good-natured mood, led him to forget all the rules printed in the catalogue, and to accept one of the briefest and most informal cer- tificates in the history of the institution. This certifi- cate was written on a half-sheet of small note-paper and contained one sentence of six words "Henry Lefavour is fitted for college. " Though the interests of the teaching staff held the first place, it was obvious enough that the treasury needed more money and the campus new buildings. President Chadbourne struggled to increase the en- dowment, but without much success. The financial depression, which began in 1872 and continued until 1880, frustrated all his plans. Yet much was done to 235 WILLIAMS COLLEGE improve the appearance of the town fences in front of the houses were removed, sidewalks built, and lights placed in the streets at night. Three small buildings the Field Memorial Observatory, a gym- nasium, and Clark Hall were added to the equip- ment of the campus. Of these buildings the observ- atory alone survives. The gymnasium, a slight, wooden, provisional affair, collapsed in a gale which swept through the region during the Commencement of 1883. Clark Hall, becoming unsafe through some structural defect, was taken down, and its name transferred in 1908 to another building on a different site. A popular instructor and professor, Dr. Chadbourne entered upon his duties as President with the good- will of the undergraduates. But this early harmony did not continue unbroken. He was in temperament and theory a disciplinarian. "I do not believe/* he once wrote, "in tolerating or ignoring the vices and follies of young men." l The preceding administration had been one of easy-going, paternal methods and the change to a more vigorous policy of supervision and control was sure to make at least temporary trouble. For a considerable period he took personal charge of the whole vexatious business of discipline, but at the beginning of the academic year 1877-78 he transferred a part of it to the faculty. " I desire to be relieved, " he said, "of a portion of that responsibility which I have found it necessary to exercise since I came here/' 2 A formal police system was put in operation and mem- 1 Williams Athenceum, February n, 1882. * Records of the Faculty, 1877-78. 236 A PERIOD OF TRANSITION bers of the faculty served as " officers of the day/' The system had a brief, troubled life, and the early abandonment of it must have been a welcome relief for all concerned, as one may readily perceive from an editorial paragraph in the "Athenaeum": "The faculty do not now . . . patrol the town, nor go out after dark and lose their hats and canes, nor have to be taken home by sub-freshmen. ... It seems per- fectly absurd . . . that the whole faculty should re- solve itself into a police force." l But the early irritations and disturbances gradually subsided and a happier, more appreciative era suc- ceeded. "Students have often complained," wrote the editor of the "Athenaeum" in 1880, "of President Chadbourne's severe i kindergarten ' policy, but on the whole it has turned out to be a good one." 2 The great and regrettable mischief of undergraduate criti- cism lay in its effect upon the victim of it. He did not succeed in hardening himself against this new experience and lost somewhat of that splendid, con- tagious enthusiasm which heretofore had character- ized his work. One heavy calamity befell President Chadbourne in the summer vacation of 1877 and darkened his sky, upon which, only a few weeks before, not a cloud, he said, could be seen the sudden death of Professor Sanborn Tenney, while on a scientific expedition in the Rocky Mountains. "I desire," he remarked in his touching memorial address, "here to express pub- licly . . . the sense I have of irreparable loss. ... He 1 Williams Athenceum, June 14, 1879. 1 Ibid., September 25, 1880. 237 WILLIAMS COLLEGE was a man to meet me cordially and give me his sym- pathy and support in all the trying days of my early administration . . . his very presence was a comfort ... a constant source of strength." l Undoubtedly this calamity tended to dishearten him, to abate his inter- est and hopefulness in the work at Williams town. During the Commencement of 1880 Dr. Chad- bourne announced that he should retire from the presi- dency at the close of the next academic year. "The news . . . came as a bolt out of a clear sky . . . and is quite universally deplored." 2 He made no definite statement of the reasons which led him to take this step. On the contrary, he intimated that such a state- ment would then be premature. A variety of elements doubtless entered into his decision the heavy and irritating burden of executive responsibility ; certain Williamstown friendships, once intimate, now cooled and strained ; perplexities in business enterprises ; dis- turbances of a native restlessness and passion for change, and the attractive call of what seemed to be an important and lucrative literary venture. A committee of the Trustees, to whom President Chadbourne's resignation was referred, reported that "every possible effort had been made to induce him to withdraw it." 3 "If you will remain," said one of the committee, "as the executive officer, being re- lieved of all teaching and preaching . . . this seems to me . . . the right thing for the college and for you." 4 And the chairman of this committee wrote in the 1 Chadbourne, In Memoriam, 17. 2 Springfield Republican, July 8, 1880. 8 New York Observer, February 17, 1881. 4 F. H. Dewey, MS. letter, December 24, 1880. 238 A PERIOD OF TRANSITION same strain " If you will stay there is no other man to be mentioned or thought of for a moment." l All the dissuasive efforts failed and President Chadbourne preached his final baccalaureate Sunday morning, July 3, 1881. He began his discourse with reflections upon the calamity at Washington and con- cluded it in a reminiscent, half -wistful, personal strain. "It comes to you and me," he said, addressing the graduating class, " to go forth from college at the same time and begin a new work in the world .... Thirty years ago I sat as you now sit to listen to last words of instruction. I go forth with devout thankfulness to God for the years he has permitted me to labor and with the hope of still more abundant labors in the years to come. But whether the time for me is to be measured only by days or by decades ... I wish to publicly record my thanksgiving to my heavenly father for the blessing of life itself and for the daily rewards that have come to me in all my work re- wards compared with which the trials, losses, disap- pointments of life are ... as nothing." 2 The time for him was not measured by decades he died Febru- ary 23, 1883, at the age of fifty-nine, "leaving a deep sense of an unfinished career." 3 In the formalities of parting there was one event of more than routine significance. At a meeting of the Trustees, the Rev. Dr. Prime, veteran editor of the "New York Observer," after reading the resolutions they had passed, turned to President Chadbourne 1 E. C. Benedict, MS. letter, September 9, 1880. 2 Springfield Republican, July 4, 1881. 3 Mass. His. Society, Proceedings, xx, 107. 239 WILLIAMS COLLEGE and said: " Among the illustrious names that will live in the history of the institution, yours will now take its place, and whatever may be the glory of the future no brighter record of prosperity will be found on any page than that made brilliant by your administra- tion." 1 This record was not one of new buildings or large endowments, but of revived faith and courage. The tide, which for years had been running against the institution, turned. Gratifying and conclusive evidence of changing conditions appeared in the reg- istration of students, since it rose from one hundred and nineteen in 1872 to two hundred and twenty- seven in 1 88 1 a relative growth surpassing that of any other New England college. Three hundred and fourteen men were graduated during these nine years, many of whom have done or are doing good service in the world's work. An unusual proportion of them became educators nearly eleven per cent occupy- ing professors' chairs in medical schools, theological seminaries, colleges and universities. One of the most distinguished of these educators died in 1909, Charles Gross (1878), Gurney Professor of History and Polit- ical Science at Harvard, and "the first authority in the English-speaking world upon a wide range of questions ... in constitutional history." 2 A more indefatigable and universal student never came to Williamstown. His roommate is said to have regu- larly left him at his desk when he retired at night and found him there in the morning. 3 He seems to have 1 Inauguration of President Franklin Carter, 6. 2 Emerton, Mass. His. Society, Proceedings, XLIII, 190. 8 Haskins, Ibid., XLIX, 161. 240 A PERIOD OF TRANSITION been on terms of intimacy with President Chadbourne, and wrote from Paris thanking him for the very "kind answer to my last letter. ... I regard your advice . . . as words of wisdom which the wise must unhesitat- ingly heed." 1 Paul Chadbourne was the most versatile and inces- santly active of Williams Presidents. It is quite pos- sible, as Mark Hopkins hinted at his inauguration, that a little more concentration would have been wise. He had considerable business interests at Williams- town and North Adams. In 1865 and again in 1866 he was a member of the Massachusetts Senate; in 1876 a delegate to the Republican National Conven- tion, and in 1880 a Presidential elector at large. His publications, mostly on scientific, ethical, agricul- tural, and educational topics, comprise more than fifty titles. He delivered one series of lectures before the Smithsonian Institution, and three before the Lowell Institute. A volume of his baccalaureates was pub- lished in 1878. While they may have lacked the philo- sophic depth and scope which characterized those of Mark Hopkins, they were direct, pungent, and effec- tive. Like his immediate predecessor, President Chad- bourne was at his best in the classroom. An incident related by Dr. Carter, though taking place elsewhere, shows what might be expected in it. ' ' Two or three years ago I went to him with ... a botanist who had found on these hills new appearances of plant life. They were not in flower, and there was no way of determining their belongings except by laying them 1 Gross, MS. letter to President Chadbourne. 241 WILLIAMS COLLEGE before one who knew them well. Dr. Chadbourne knew them all either by touch or by taste or by smell, and we saw how every one of his senses was trained to test the facts of the physical world, and as one after another fell into its right class, and his memory that had been stored with a multitude of other facts . . . brought out name after name and he said with a smile, ' It is a long time since I have analyzed these flowers,' we were deeply impressed with the native force of his mind and his ardent love of nature." l Here he was on familiar ground, but if an emergency arose, nobody could meet it with greater success. While lecturing on chemistry at Bowdoin College, a sudden vacancy occurred in the department of Phi- losophy and some one suggested that the work should be turned over to Dr. Chadbourne. "He has never made a study of that subject," it was objected. "Perhaps not," was the reply, "but he'll not teach it to the Seniors six weeks before half the class will think him the best instructor of the subject in the country." 2 And the prophecy was literally fulfilled. The classroom lectures of President Chadbourne were often of a high order. Clear and logical in method, seizing upon interesting and vital points of a subject, handling his material with apparent ease, he rose at times from the ordinary, didactic plane into regions of illuminated and impassioned speech. 1 Carter, MS. address at the funeral of President Chadbourne. * Raymond, Fiftieth Anniversary Report, Class of '62, 43. CHAPTER VIII THE NEW WILLIAMS IT is not always easy to fix upon exact dates in proc- esses of evolution, but the New Williams may be said, with sufficient accuracy, to have begun July 6, 1 88 1 , when Franklin Carter was inaugurated successor to President Chadbourne. To him belongs the honor of getting the latter-day college under way. Born at Waterbury, Connecticut, September 13, 1837, a grad- uate of Phillips Academy, Andover, entering Yale in the class of 1859 and its first scholar, failure of health compelled him to leave New Haven at the close of the Sophomore year and to abandon all college work until the autumn of 1860. He then entered the Junior class at Williams and graduated in 1862. Three years later and after a period of study abroad he returned to his Alma Mater as Professor of Latin and French, hold- ing the latter position until 1868 and the former until the close of President Hopkins' administration in 1872, when he resigned and accepted the chair of German at Yale. While the inauguration could not wholly escape from the heavy shadows of the tragedy at Washing- ton, yet it was an interesting and hopeful occasion. For the first time a representative of another college President Noah Porter of Yale took part in the 243 WILLIAMS COLLEGE induction of a Williams President. Paul Ansel Chad- bourne gave his successor a sobered but cordial wel- come. An unmistakable note of friendliness and ex- pectation pervaded the addresses that followed the addresses of Edward Herrick Griffin (1862), of Francis Lynde Stetson (1866), and of Thomas Sars- field Pagan (1882), who spoke for the faculty, the alumni, and the undergraduates respectively. In his inaugural a vigorous, penetrating, and scholarly address President Carter discyssed the relation of the college to the university and defended the old- fashioned doctrine that "the studies of the ancient languages and the mathematics . . . should constitute a large part of undergraduate work." 1 This conserv- ative inaugural was the unprophetic prelude to a revolutionary administration. If the college were to have any considerable future the endowment must be largely increased, and Presi- dent Carter entered at once upon a money-getting campaign. For this sort of thing he had as little liking as Mark Hopkins. " He told the writer . . . that after reaching the residence of the first man to whom he applied for a large donation, he walked round the square on which the house was situated three times before he could summon courage enough to enter it." 2 But notwithstanding his distaste for the busi- ness, he secured during the twenty years of his ad- ministration funds to the amount of $980,000 a sum which raised the endowment to $i,ioo,ooo. 3 Be- 1 Inauguration of President Carter, 25. 2 Raymond, Fiftieth Anniversary Report, Class of '62, 41. 8 Noble, Class of '62, 31. 244 FRANKLIN CARTER THE NEW WILLIAMS sides, $600,000 were spent upon the campus. The first building in the era of reconstruction "a mas- sive pile, solid and substantial, . . . beautiful and symmetrical ... a genuine product of our hills " was erected by one "who left this county fifty years ago a poor boy'* Edwin Denison Morgan, Governor of New York, and United States Senator, and bears his name. Other important buildings, six in num- ber, followed Lasell Gymnasium, Hopkins Hall, the three Thompson Laboratories, and Jesup Hall. While funds and buildings were to be provided, President Carter realized quite as clearly as his pred- ecessor that the most important matter in the fur- nishing of a college was the faculty, and he reinforced the teaching staff with four new professors Samuel Fessenden Clarke, Richard Austin Rice, Leverett Mears, and John Haskell Hewitt 1 who continued in service during the whole of his administration and were important factors in its successes. At the close of it the number of instructors had doubled and the registration of students showed an increase of sixty- eight per cent. Further, there was the question of the curriculum. With the exception of William and Mary, a rigid, in- elastic, "required" system prevailed in American colleges from colonial times to the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Harvard broke the old order by the introduction of elective studies in 1824. This new policy continued for twenty-five years, when it encountered the hostility of President 1 Professor Hewitt, who was in Europe when elected, did not take up his duties until the autumn of 1882. 245 WILLIAMS COLLEGE Sparks, and a reaction set in so strongly that the curriculum of 1849-50 permitted only six "hours" of optional work during the four years. Leadership in the movement for educational reform then fell to Brown University. President Wayland published in 1850 his "New System," which permitted the under- graduate to "study what he chooses, all he chooses, and nothing but what he chooses." 1 This proposition struck the great majority of educators as quite too radical and the reform continued somewhat in abey- ance until Charles William Eliot, elected President of Harvard in 1869, espoused the cause and finally se- cured the adoption of a curriculum in which English A was the only required subject. At Williams, with the exception of the eight years, 1864-72, the course of study had not been absolutely inelastic, at least since 1822-23, when instruction in Hebrew was given to "such as wish it." The next year, and until 1828-29, the elective studies included Hebrew, French, mineralogy, and botany, which were offered to "select classes." In 1828-29 another revi- sion took place and then Ty tier's Elements of His- tory or French might be taken "at the option of the student" the third term of the Sophomore year and Hebrew, fluxions, or French the third term of the Jun- ior year. The Sophomore elective studies continued until 1837-38, when they were abandoned. For those of the Junior year there was a longer lease of life, as they appear in every catalogue in the twenty-two 1 Wayland, Report on Changes in the System of Collegiate Education, 1850. * Bronson, History of Brown University, 258-67. 246 THE NEW WILLIAMS years from 1828-29 to 1860-61, and with only one important change the substitution of German for Hebrew in 1846-47. During the two years 1861 to 1863 all elective work was shifted to the first and second terms of the Senior year and restricted to French or German. Then followed a reversion to the old required curriculum a reactionary period which came to an end in 1873-74, when mathematics, Latin, or Greek were offered as Junior options and Greek or Latin might be substituted for analytical geometry the third term of the Sophomore year. But notwithstanding these possible variations the modern Williams curriculum began in 1881 when elective courses were offered to Seniors "from the first of November until June in astronomy, chemis- try, French, German, English literature, Latin, Greek, and calculus." Subsequently the system was extended, until at the close of the administration in 1901 the list of optional studies offered to Sophomores, Juniors, and Seniors all the work of the Freshman class was required amounted to thirty-six year and twenty-one half-year courses. A second and no less significant modification of the curriculum followed presently. " I should be willing/' President Carter remarked in his Report for 1882-83, "if our resources allowed it, to make some substitu- tion for Greek in the form of modern languages or sciences." In May, 1894, the faculty struck it from the list of subjects required for admission. Though the immediate consequences of the step seemed un- important only four candidates entered college the next autumn without it the new option was the 247 WILLIAMS COLLEGE beginning of a great educational change. The num- ber of non-Greek men, relatively negligible in 1894, included eighty-five per cent of the Freshman class in A third innovation the adoption of the honor system in examinations was brought about in 1896. On the whole it seems to have worked well during the twenty years it has been in force and there appears to be little inclination toward a revival of the old proctorial system of supervision. One long and troublesome controversy vexed the administration of President Carter. The petition of "John P. Jordan & 95 others " in 1837, asking per- mission to tax college property, was not the last enter- prise of the kind. In 1896 the assessors of Williams- town withdrew from the exempted list certain college lands and dwelling-houses. The trustees paid the assessments under protest, brought suit to recover, and lost their case. A general alarm in academic cir- cles followed upon this decision. If taxes could be levied on college property in Williamstown, they could also be levied elsewhere. Then followed a period of committee hearings and legislative bills. Advocates of taxation dwelt upon the " burdens " which the 1 Anti-Greek sentiment is not exactly a recent phenomenon in the educational world. Goldsmith's Philosophic Vagabond, hearing that there were not two men in the university at Louvain who understood Greek, resolved to travel thither " and live by teaching it." But his hopes proved illusory. " ' You see me, young man,' said the principal to whom he offered his services, 'I never learned Greek and don't find that I have ever missed it. I have had a doctor's cap without Greek; I have a thousand florins a year without Greek, and in short,' continued he, ' as I don't know Greek I don't believe there is any good in it.' " (Gold- smith's Works, Bohn's Edition, I, 164. 248 THE NEW WILLIAMS presence of a college or university in any community imposed upon it, burdens which the State ought to share, while their opponents contended that the pecuniary and other advantages of these institutions to the towns and cities in which they happened to be located greatly exceeded their cost. What would Williamstown have been without the college? Prob- ably what it was for a long time "a scraggy and struggling little hill town." 1 When the corner-stone of the Thompson Memorial Chapel was laid in 1902, Judge James Madison Barker, of the Board of Trus- tees, delivered an elaborate address in which he re- viewed the history of two Berkshire towns Lanes- boro and Williamstown both incorporated the same year. At the outset the prospects of the former seemed the brighter and more assured, but after the lapse of a hundred and thirty-seven years, it still remains an obscure hamlet, while the name of the latter is known far and wide as the seat of Williams College. January 4, 1900, the Supreme Court of Massachu- setts handed down a decision in the case of Har- vard University against the City of Cambridge which practically reversed the Williamstown decision. The outcome of the long and disquieting agitation was a compromise, by the terms of which the college agreed to make some annual contribution toward the ex- penses of the town and amicable relations continued until 1913, when the assessors of the fire district levied taxes upon college property. The coup did not succeed, as the Supreme Court held that they had 1 Boston Transcript, April 12, 1898. 249 WILLIAMS COLLEGE exceeded their authority and the interrupted compro- mise went into effect again. Another episode in the time of President Carter the commemoration of the centennial in 1892 stands out in pleasant contrast to the litigation over the question of taxation. It was, as by all the canons of fitness it should have been, the most elaborate and splendid celebration in the annals of the college. The buildings were effectively decorated with bunting the name and date of each being placed above the main entrance in letters of gold on a black background and at night the campus was brilliantly lighted. One scheme of illumination, dear to the heart of the late Horace E. Scudder, great beacon fires burning on conspicuous points of the surrounding moun- tains, was reluctantly abandoned as impracticable. The list of delegates and invited guests comprised Governor William E. Russell, Lieutenant-Governor Roger Wolcott, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Bishop William Lawrence, representatives of seven acade- mies, three theological seminaries, eighteen colleges and universities. Of the alumni not less than four hun- dred and fifty were present. And external conditions could hardly have been more fortunate the three days having been seldom surpassed even among the Berkshires in glory of sunshine and color. The formal exercises began October 8 with an in- spiring sermon in the Congregational Church by the Rev. Dr. Henry Hopkins on the "Connection of Religion and Education." Sunday afternoon "The Relation of Christianity to Applied Science" was con- sidered in addresses by Charles Cuthbert Hall (1872), 250 THE NEW WILLIAMS John Bascom (1849), Henry Martyn Field (1838), Charles Augustus Stoddard (1854), William Mercer Grosvenor (1855), and George Alfred Ford (1872). While all these addresses were worthy of the occasion, no one of them was more characteristic in temper of thought and quality of phrase than that of John Bascom. He lamented the absence of "the divine afflatus" in college life, comparing it to the ground hemlock "a fresh, clean, wide-leaved and inviting shrub, which flattens itself out over the earth, and never . . . carries a crown into the sky." * Monday morning was devoted to an " Educational Conference" a new departure in the programme of college centennial anniversaries 2 with papers by Henry Pratt Judson (1870), James Caruthers Greenough (1860), Edward Herrick Griffin (1862), Frank Hun tington Snow (1862), Charles Gross (1878), Truman Henry Safford (Harvard, 1864), and Gran- ville Stanley Hall (1867). On Tuesday, the last day of the anniversary, the exercises opened with an academic procession which formed in front of the library and began to move soon after ten o'clock. This procession was arranged in the following order the chief marshal and his aides, the chairman of the committees of the Trustees and the presiding officer, the orator and chaplain, the in- vited guests, the Selectmen of Williamstown, the Trustees, the faculty, the alumni, and the under- graduates. The line of march lay along Main Street past the gymnasium, Morgan Hall, Jesup Hall, the science buildings, and West College, to the park; 1 Centennial Anniversary, 74. * Ibid., 140. 251 WILLIAMS COLLEGE crossed Main Street and proceeded up the north side of it to the Congregational Church, halting a mo- ment at the President's house for Dr. Carter and the Governor of the State. James Hulme Canfield (1868) delivered the centen- nial oration, in which he set forth "the origin and the spirit and the life of the college." 1 This oration - direct and forcible in style, fortunate in illustration and historical reference, abounding in humorous turns and eloquent periods made a profound im- pression upon the great audience. It was observed that even the gentlemen of the Governor's staff, "veterans of many a long and monotonous hour of sermon and oration," listened "with smiling faces to the very end." 2 A luncheon, which concluded the programme, suc- ceeded the exercises in the Congregational Church. It was served in a temporary building erected on the lawn of the Sigma Phi Fraternity. President Carter presided at this function, introducing with grace and felicity the long list of speakers Gov- ernor Russell, Captain Ephraim Williams, President Dwight of Yale, Bishop Lawrence of Massachu- setts, President Tucker of Dartmouth, President Eliot of Harvard, Senator Lodge, President Andrews of Brown, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, President Taylor of Vassar, President Gilman of Johns Hopkins, and Professor Briggs of Union Theological Seminary. Captain Ephraim Williams, of the United States Army, grandnephew and namesake of the founder, 1 Centennial Anniversary, 240. 3 H. W. Mabie, in The Outlook, October 21, 1893. 252 THE NEW WILLIAMS sitting in full uniform among the distinguished guests upon the platform, imparted to the occasion an effec- tive touch of historical realism. In 1901 the health of President Carter became so much impaired that he felt compelled to resign. "I lay the work down with a sense of relief," he wrote, "and yet sorry that I could not have had the power to go on five years more." 1 But the term of service, which he would have been glad to extend, was long enough to permit the reorganization of the institution and the readjustment of it to the changed times. And the "list of his positions, activities, and doctorates" during this time shows that the world bestowed its honors upon him with a liberal hand. Nor was the number of his publications inconsiderable. Profes- sor Raymond's bibliography 2 contains forty-nine titles of books, addresses, magazine and newspaper articles. And, what certainly was a matter of no less importance, during his epoch-making administration he fully maintained in the classroom the greater tradi- tions of his predecessors. ii President Carter, in his letter of resignation, May 9, 1901, asked to be relieved from duty on the 1st of the following September. " I have fixed upon that date," he wrote, "in the belief that the intervening period may be sufficient time for the selection of my suc- cessor." It soon became evident that this interven- ing period would prove too short for the task in hand, 1 Noble, Class of '62, 29. * Raymond, Fiftieth Anniversary Report, Class of '62, 39. WILLIAMS COLLEGE and consequently the Trustees appointed an Acting- President Professor John Haskell Hewitt who had occupied a similar position at Olivet College and Lake Forest University. In this ad interim adminis- tration, which continued through the academic year 1901-02, the affairs of the college were ably and suc- cessfully managed. January 17, 1902, the interval of indecision came to an end with the election of the Rev. Henry Hop- kins, D.D., preacher at the Centennial Anniversary, successor to Dr. Carter. Graduating in the class of 1858, then studying theology at Union Seminary, he entered the army as chaplain in 1861. The office had not then been created, and he received a personal commission from President Lincoln. One of the most important Federal hospitals was at Alexandria, and managers of the Sanitary Commission, anxious to secure a competent chaplain for the post, asked Professor Henry B. Smith, of Union Theological Seminary, New York, to help them. "I hope I have found the man," he wrote. "Young H., son of Presi- dent Mark Hopkins, has just been in and will think of it. If he can and will accept it, he is as near being just the man as needs be." 1 He accepted the post and remained at Alexandria from May 31,1 862, to May 25, i864. 2 These two years were a period of sympathetic, unstinted, and efficient service, by no means limited to the ordinary routine. He conducted, for instance, an ambulance corps under a flag of truce to the battle- fields of Chantilly and Bull Run, and brought a large 1 Letters of a Family during the War, 1861-65, I, 163. 2 Mass. Commandery, Loyal Legion, Register, 1912. 254 JOHN HASKELL HEWITT I90I-I902 THE NEW WILLIAMS number of wounded soldiers to the hospital. " We cut their clothes from them . . . stiff with their own blood and Virginia clay," he wrote a friend, "and move them inch by inch into their rough straw beds. Some of these fellows I love like brothers and stand beside their graves for other reasons than that it is an official duty." l The last year of the war he was in the field as chaplain of the One Hundred and Twentieth New York Infantry. "I met your President for the first time," said General Horace Porter, speaking at the Williams Commencement of 1908, "in the trenches before Petersburg." After the conclusion of the war there followed thirty-six years of successful pastoral work fourteen of them at Westfield and twenty- two at Kansas City, Missouri. The new President, then sixty-four years old and without experience in academical affairs, naturally hesitated somewhat about entering upon the untried vocation. His father, Mark Hopkins, devoted him- self primarily to the business of teaching. For him that was the chief, the most important, factor in the presidency. But the scope and ideals of the office had changed were becoming essentially executive and the successful conduct of important parishes might be a not ineffective preparation for it. What- ever hesitations may have disturbed him while the question was under advisement, the enthusiastic reception he received in Williamstown inauguration day r Tuesday, June 24, 1902, ought to have quite reassured him. The registration of alumni surpassed that of any previous Commencement and delegates 1 Letters of a Family during the War, 1861-65, n 475- 255 WILLIAMS COLLEGE from twenty- three educational institutions were pres- ent. The addresses of welcome reflected the universal sentiment of friendliness and expectation Judge James Madison Barker speaking for the Trustees, Acting-President Hewitt for the faculty, George Frederick Kurd for the undergraduates, and Henry Loomis Nelson for the alumni. The inaugural dis- course a stirring appeal for scholarship and service "was greeted with . . . applause at its opening and throughout its delivery." 1 Though the new administration had a brief day its achievements were of large importance. First there was a substantial increase in the salaries of professors. 2 Then came a scheme of retirements and pensions the retirements possible at the age of sixty-five, com- pulsory three years later, and the pensions not to exceed fifteen hundred dollars. 3 A discussion and re- vision of the curriculum took place in 1902-03 and resulted in the adoption of a moderate group system. Further an active and persistent propaganda for small classroom divisions resulted in a growth of the teaching staff, which broke all the records a growth from twenty-six at the beginning of the period 1902- 08 to forty-nine at the close of it. The relative increase of students fell much below this ratio there were three hundred and eighty-one in 1902 and four hun- dred and seventy in 1908. Great activity also prevailed upon the campus. 1 Springfield Republican, June 25, 1902. 2 The maximum salaries during the period 1912-13 were for pro- fessors, $3000; for assistant professors, $2000; for instructors, $1500. (Garfield, Report, 1913, Appendix B.) 8 Williams pays its pensions irrespective of the Carnegie allowances. 256 HENRY HOPKINS 1902-1908 THE NEW WILLIAMS Goodrich Hall and Jackson Hall, the one being unsafe and the other obsolete, were pulled down. Griffin Hall and the chapel of 1859, the latter renamed Goodrich Hall, having outlived their original uses, became recitation and seminar buildings, and South College, enlarged and modernized, exchanged its first name for that of Fayerweather Hall. To this time also belong the central heating plant, Berkshire Hall, Currier Hall, the rebuilt Clark Hall, and considerable purchases of real estate. But from an architectural point of view the most important addition to the campus was the chapel, erected by Mrs. Frederick Ferris Thompson, "to the glory of God" and in memory of her late husband. The dedi- cation of this beautiful edifice with its tower, which adds a new glory to the landscape, took place June 21, 1905, and representatives of six religious denomina- tions participated in the elaborate and impressive exercises. When Dr. Hopkins accepted the presidency he seems to have set the term of six years, at the conclu- sion of which he would have reached the age of seventy, as the period of his service. On the completion of this period he resigned, and a college official has seldom retired amid more general or sincere demonstrations of affection. Though his health had suffered under the unaccustomed strain, it was thought that a sea voyage and a year of travel in Europe might restore it. But hopes were delusive and he died August 18, 1908, at Rotterdam, Holland. His remains were brought to Williamstown and funeral services held September 20 in the Thompson Memorial Chapel. Dean Edward H. 257 WILLIAMS COLLEGE Griffin, of Johns Hopkins University, and Professor John E. Russell, of the college, delivered appreciative and felicitous addresses the former dwelling upon the happy conditions in which President Hopkins had been placed so that his life was rounded out into a completeness rarely attained; the latter upon the openness and kindliness of his nature, the nobility of his ideals, and the sureness of his instinct in appraising educational values. ill Harry Augustus Garfield was elected successor to Henry Hopkins June 25, 1907, a year before the administration of the latter came to an end. The new President, eldest son of the late James Abram Gar- field, a graduate of Williams in the class of 1885, after professional studies in New York, London, and Oxford, entered upon the practice of law at Cleve- land, Ohio, which continued until 1903 when he accepted a call to the chair of Politics in Princeton University. The induction took place October 7, 1908 the one hundred and fifteenth anniversary of the found- ing of the college. On this occasion the attendance of invited guests and representatives of educational institutions exceeded that at any previous academic function in Williamstown. The events of the day began with prayers in Thompson Memorial Chapel, conducted by the Rev. Dr. Daniel Merriman, of Boston, and the Rev. Dr. Harry P. Dewey, of Minne- apolis, both members of the Board of Trustees. Then followed the exercises of the inauguration at the Con- 258 THE NEW WILLIAMS gregational Church the invocation by ex-President Carter; the induction by the Rev. William Wisner Adams, D.D., Chairman of the Board of Trustees; the acceptance by the President of the college; and congratulatory addresses by President Woodrow Wilson; the Rev. John Sheridan Zelie (1887); Pro- fessor John Haskell Hewitt, and Ernest Hosmer Wood (1909). In his inaugural address President Garfield dis- cussed with admirable clearness and point the ques- tion, "What is the chief end of the American college? " It must be an object, he urged, which does injustice neither to the past nor to the present; that appeals to students of every type and inspires them with new and higher conceptions of life. "Such an object," he continued, "is expressed by the word citizenship. America's great need is that the men and women of the United States comprehend all that citizenship imports. . . . Hence I venture to assert that the chief end of the American college is to train citizens for citizenship." l After the exercises of induction came the luncheon in Lasell Gymnasium, with Hamilton Wright Mabie as presiding officer and a distinguished array of speak- ers President Eliot, of Harvard University; Presi- dent Alderman, of the University of Virginia; Presi- dent Van Hise, of the University of Wisconsin; Ambassador Bryce, and Curtis Guild, Governor of Massachusetts. And to all the other happy fortunes of the occasion were added the charms of beautiful weather. "Over the rare day arched a Berkshire sky 1 Induction of President Garfield, 39, 40. 259 WILLIAMS COLLEGE of unflecked blue and every augury was propitious for the new departure at Williams." l To attempt any detailed survey of the administra- tion begun under such favorable conditions does not fall within the scope of the present volume. It is only necessary to say that the subsequent progress of the institution has not discredited the happy promise of this new departure. The registration of students rose from 487 in 1908-09 to 552 in 1915-16. Although so lately as 1903-04 the curriculum had been diligently revised, in 1908-10 it was pronounced obsolete and replaced by a radical group system with an elaborate scheme of prerequisites. A Student Council, estab- lished in 1914, took over the management of extra- curriculum affairs a decided step toward under- graduate self-government. Nor has the campus, now containing not less than two hundred and forty acres, been neglected. Among recent improvements Smed- ley Terrace, Stetson Road, the Thompson Infirmary, Williams Hall, and Grace Hall may be mentioned. To complete the immediate programme of reconstruc- tion only one other building an adequate library seems to be needed. That building, when provided, will be the fourth stage in its history. During the first stage, which lasted from 1793 to 1828, it was a West College room, so small that one standing in the centre of it could reach any book on the shelves. 2 Then it was removed to Griffin Hall, and the second makeshift continued until 1846, when Amos Lawrence built the quaint, octagonal hall which bears his name 1 Springfield Republican, October 8, 1908. 2 Durfee, Williams College, 345. 260 HARRY AUGUSTUS GARFIELD THE NEW WILLIAMS and for seventy years has been the college library. Though twice enlarged, the original capacity was thirty-four thousand volumes, it does not afford adequate facilities for the uses of a collection of books which in 1916 numbered 83,909. March 31, 1916, the real estate and equipment of the college were estimated by the Treasurer at a valu- ation of $1,837,193.51, and the securities and funds amounted to $2,185,206.65, making the total assets $4,022,400.16. The income for the year 1915-16, in- cluding that of the Corporation and of special funds and donations for current expenses, was $236,217.46. Since the academic year 1905-06 the expenses of administration have exceeded the income the deficits ranging from $15,534.72 to $37,302.85 annu- ally. To provide for these deficits, to increase the salaries of the teaching staff, and to establish such new professorships as may be advisable, the Trustees authorized, in May, 1913, the raising of two million dollars. July I, 1916, the subscriptions and legacies applicable to the proposed fund amounted to approxi- mately one half of that sum. The bicentenary of the birth of Ephraim Williams occurred March 7, 1915. In Williamstown there were two celebrations of the event, the first, February 20, by the local alumni association and the other, March 6 by the college. Professor John Haskell Hewitt was the principal speaker before the associa- tion and ex-President Carter before the college. We find in their admirable addresses some revision of earlier interpretations of the character and career of the founder. For example, Professor Hewitt took 261 WILLIAMS COLLEGE issue with the dictum of the centennial orator in 1893 that he was nothing more than "a fair exponent of the average life of his day," and made it pretty clear that the orator had " failed ... to portray the real Ephraim Williams. ' ' 1 Ex-President Carter was in sym- pathy with the protest, and happily characterized him as "a true gentleman, a lover of humanity, a patriot soldier, and an early martyr to human liberty." 2 IV Many of the graduates, who served on the Board of Trustees, and have died since the inauguration of President Carter in 1881, were well-known men: Henry Lyman Sabin (1821), for more than fifty years a prominent physician in Williamstown and the Northern Berkshires; James Denison Colt (1838), Justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts; Henry Martyn Hoyt (1849), Brevet Brigadier-General of United States Volunteers and Governor of Pennsyl- vania; Francis Henshaw Dewey (1840), Justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts; Robert Russell Booth (1849), Director of Union and of Princeton Theological Seminaries, Moderator of the Presby- terian General Assembly; William Wisner Adams ( J 855), pastor of the First Congregational Church in Fall River, a preacher notable for his prayers as well as for his sermons; Horace Elisha Scudder (1858), man of letters, editor of the "Atlantic Monthly," author of the "Life of James Russell Lowell," and 1 Alumni Review, April 15, 1915, n. * Address at the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Ephraim Williams, 6. 262 THE NEW WILLIAMS many other books; James Madison Barker (1860), Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Massachu- setts, author of a sketch of Paul Ansel Chadbourne, in the " Proceedings" of the Massachusetts Historical Society; William Rumsey (1861), Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of New York, writer of books on the Practice and the Codification of Law; Joseph Edward Simmons (1862), President of the Chamber of Commerce and of the Board of Education in New York; Daniel Merriman (1863), pastor of Broad- way Church, Norwich, Connecticut, and of Central Church, Worcester, an efficient administrator and executive, a vigorous, scholarly preacher, singularly happy in the liturgies of pulpit service; James Robert Dunbar (1871), Associate Justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts from 1888 to 1898, a man whom "nature fitted ... for a judge'*; Charles Cuth- bert Hall (1872), President of Union Theological Seminary, Barrows lecturer to India and the Far East, preacher at the dedication of the Thompson Memorial Chapel, a religious leader whose earnest, comprehending words touched the lives of young men to finer issues in many colleges and universities. The name of another Trustee, Frederick Ferris Thompson, a man of sunny disposition, quaint and original in speech, easily winning confidence, admira- tion, and affection, who died in 1899, will always be associated with the college. Five of the twenty- three buildings on the campus bear his name. He wrote a half -humorous account of himself for the fortieth anniversary of his class: " You want to know something about me. . . . Story? Lord bless you, I Ve 263 WILLIAMS COLLEGE none to tell. 1 I was only a quodam member of '56, of two years' presence in college and a thorn in the fac- ulty of that day. ... I served my time in the war without any distinction. I was captain in the 37th New York volunteers which never saw a battle. . . . I made some money in my banking business and promptly gave it away to the college to which I owe the best years of my life." If he had told his "story," a certain incident, related in Caroline Richards' charming "Diary of a School Girl," should certainly have been included in it: "April 26 [1865]. Mr. Fred. Thompson went down to New York last Saturday and while stopping for a few minutes at St. Johnsville, he heard a man crow- ing over the death of the President. Mr. Thompson marched up to him, collared him, and landed him nicely in the gutter. The bystanders were delighted and carried the champion to the platform and called for a speech, which was given. Quite a little episode. Every one who hears the story says: Three cheers for F. F. Thompson." Two "officers of administration" passed away in this period. Charles Henry Burr (1868), after suc- cessful pastorates in New York and elsewhere, ac- cepted the position of librarian in 1888 and held it until his death, November 28, 1910. Ex-President Carter delivered a pathetic address at his funeral. It was a lamentation over brilliant prospects blighted by illness that shattered "his superb physical health" and filled his later years with conflict and suffering. 2 1 Class of 1856, 33. 2 Carter, Williams Alumni Review, December, 1910, p. 26. 264 THE NEW WILLIAMS Eben Burt Parsons (1859), pastor of the Presby- terian Church at Baldwinsville, New York, for twenty-two years, became secretary of the faculty and Registrar of the college in 1888. He had been invited to Williamstown long before and declined the call. "Here is the sort of thing we used to call an 1 M. H.,'" he once remarked to the present writer and handed him an old, yellowed letter. The "M. H." proved to be the initials of Mark Hopkins and the letter one which he wrote to Dr. Parsons in the sixties of the last century offering him the chair of Mathe- matics. He discharged the exacting duties of his posi- tion with unflagging patience, courtesy, and industry. As necrologist from 1882 to 1909 he prepared obituary notices of more than eight hundred graduates. Shat- tered in health, he might often be seen in his last days - he died January 24, 1913 wandering half bewil- dered about the familiar campus as if in a world not realized. The most conspicuous name in the death-roll of members of the faculty was that of Mark Hopkins, whose long life of eighty-five years came to a close June 17, 1887. Funeral services, attended by a large number of alumni and by representatives of many institutions, religious and educational, were held in the Congregational Church at Williamstown, June 21. President Carter delivered an appreciative and elo- quent address which forms the concluding chapter of his "Mark Hopkins" published in 1892. A year later, at the Commencement of 1888, David Dudley Field pronounced an oration before the alumni upon his boyhood and lifelong friend, the late Presi- 265 WILLIAMS COLLEGE dent. He was then in his eighty-fourth year, but stood upon the platform with the poise and confidence of middle age a magnificent incarnation of physical and intellectual vigor and delivered, without man- uscript, never hesitating for a word, an impressive address. Mark Hopkins, he said, "was to me a brother. We started on the voyage of Life together. . . . Now from my bark still lingering on the sea, I wave my parting salutation to him safely landed on the shore." 1 In this time two former members of the faculty passed away Addison Ballard (1842) and Lewellyn Pratt (1852). Both of them retired from service many years ago and that of Addison Ballard was brief tutor, 1843-44, and Professor of Rhetoric, 1854-55. His academic career, however, in other institutions in Ohio University, Marietta College, Lafayette Col- lege, and New York University extended over a period of thirty-eight years. He was a crisp, vigorous, suggestive writer. Dying December 2, 1914, in the ninety-third year of his age, he retained to the last a surprising physical and intellectual vigor. Lewellyn Pratt had a longer and more recent official connection with the college, since he was Professor of Rhetoric from 1876 to 1881 and Trustee from 1884 to 1889. Then for thirteen years he taught in other institutions. But the greater part of his long workday he died in 1913 at the age of eighty- one was spent in the pastorate. A man of striking personality, ready to take any amount of trouble for 1 D. D. Field, Speeches, Arguments, and Miscellaneous Papers, in, 397. 398. 266 THE NEW WILLIAMS others, refined, cultured, undogmatic, with rare gifts of speech, it is not strange that he should win the hearts alike of students and parishioners. Charles Franklin Gilson (1853), Professor of Mod- ern Languages, came to the end a few weeks before the inauguration of President Carter. He fought chronic invalidism heroically for years, holding with Stevenson that "it is better to live and be done with it than to die daily in the sick-room." 1 At times al- most helpless, students carried him to the recitation room in their arms. Once there and seated in his chair all signs of weakness disappeared. The charm of his personality, the vigor of his intellectual processes, and the high standards of scholarship he insisted upon, compelled admiration as well as affection. Nor did his associates fall behind the young men in appre- ciation. " The world is sensibly less habitable for me," wrote John Bascom, " now that he has gone from it." 2 Cyrus Morris Dodd (1855), one of the truest, most genuine, and lovable of old-fashioned men, died in 1897. He taught Williams Freshmen and Sophomores mathematics for twenty-eight years and did his work well, though it was hardly congenial. The real enthu- siasm of his life lay in the field of literature and aesthetics. Fine editions of the old poets, English and classical, were a joy to him. Every year he re-read Scott's novels and the poetry of his friend William Cullen Bryant. And another trait quite as strong as the love of good literature was an enthusiasm for the scenery of Northern Berkshire, no less intense and 1 Stevenson, Travels and Essays, Scribner's Edition, xm, 105. 2 Bascom, Things Learned by Living, 129. 267 WILLIAMS COLLEGE unwearied than George Sorrow's for that of East Anglia. James Ingraham Peck (1887), Assistant Professor of Biology, who died in the autumn of 1898, was a young man of great promise. An associate, writing to a friend shortly after his funeral, said: "He loved his work and had unusual ability to interest others in it. ... I met him on the street a few days before the end came and talked with him about his health. He said that he felt spent; . . . that his heart had gone back on him in an alarming fashion. I encouraged him as well as I could, but he looked badly." 1 Luther Dana Woodbridge (1872) belonged to an ancient Massachusetts family one ancestor being a graduate in the first class at Harvard and another an early trustee of Yale. After a period of service as instructor in his Alma Mater and in Robert College, followed by medical studies in New York, London, and Vienna, he accepted the professorship of Anat- omy and Physiology at Williams and entered upon his duties in 1884. A man of immense vitality, a suc- cessful physician, a thorough and enthusiastic teacher, his sudden death in 1899 left a great void in the com- munity. 2 Truman Henry Safford, born in Royal ton, Ver- mont, a graduate of Harvard (1854), successor of Albert Hopkins as Professor of Astronomy at Wil- liams in 1876, belonged to the class of mathematical prodigies sometimes called "lightning calculators." At the age of six he could solve mentally the problem 1 MS. letter, December 4, 1898. 2 Carter, In Memoriam Luther Dana Woodbridge, 14. 268 THE NEW WILLIAMS How many barleycorns are there in 1040 rods? Before reaching his tenth year he had studied algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and astronomy, and pub- lished an almanac with original computations. 1 The extraordinary calculating powers of another Vermonter, Zerah Colburn, diminished as he grew older. No such decline appears in the case of Professor Safford. A classroom incident at Williams in 1891, when he was in his fifty-sixth year, would seem to make that point plain. "One of the students gave him this problem during a recitation ' Supposing I was born at a certain hour, minute, and second of a certain day, how old would I now be in seconds?' The professor put his head slightly on one side in a characteristic way, walked up and down before the blackboard once or twice, and then gave the an- swer. 'No,' said the student; 'that is not correct, for I have worked out the problem and the answer is different.' ' What was your answer? ' On being told, he resumed his walk before the blackboard and pres- ently exclaimed, 'Oh, you forgot the leap years.'" 2 Professor Safford must be included in the small class of lightning calculators who, like Ampere, Gauss, and the Bidders, were also men of great intellectual ability. Many of these prodigies appear to have been "reckoning machines" and nothing more. Professor Philip Fox, in an address at the celebration of the semi-centennial anniversary of the Chicago Astro- nomical Society, said that in an effort to make a bibli- ography of Professor Safford's work he had found "a 1 Bruce, McClure's Magazine, September, 1912, p. 592.] 1 Professor Milham, MS. letter. 269 WILLIAMS COLLEGE vast number of papers, many of general interest, but most of them concerned with star positions." 1 At Williamstown his best-known publications were "Mathematical Teaching and its Modern Methods," a discourse on "The development of Astronomy in the United States," and a " Catalogue of North Polar Stars." In the classroom Professor Safford's mental proc- esses were so rapid that the average student found it difficult to follow them. Though fairly patient with dull and stupid men, he whimsically lamented at times the scarcity of "fool-killers." It must be ad- mitted, however, in justice to the lower half of his classes, that with all his dazzling intellectual equip- ment he had little aptitude for oral exposition. In November, 1912, it was "the happy privilege" of the Chicago Astronomical Society to dedicate in his honor a bronze tablet. 2 Orlando Marcellus Fernald, Lawrence Professor of Greek, died in 1902. A graduate of Harvard, he was called from the Springfield High School to Williams- town in 1872, and thirty successive classes had the drill and discipline of his keen, thorough, insistent, sham-hating tuition. Nor was his work less ungrudg- ing or valuable in matters of administration, and his service did not fail to receive emphatic official recog- nition. In 1901 the Trustees conferred upon him the degree of LL.D. an honor which with a single ex- ception had never before been conferred upon a mem- ber of the teaching staff during the period of active service. 1 Popular Astronomy, October, 1913. * Ibid. 270 THE NEW WILLIAMS Henry Loomis Nelson (1868) entered upon his pro- fessorial career of six years in 1902 at the age of fifty-six. His success in this belated vocation affords a striking illustration of the fact that for undergradu- ate work the personality of the instructor may be of more importance than scholastic degrees. It is to be noted, however, that as Professor Nelson's depart- ment was Government, his long connection with the newspaper press in Boston, New York, and Washing- ton afforded a sort of graduate course in preparation for his new career. A large, breezy, intellectual sort of man, positive if not aggressive in his opinions, abun- dantly qualified for admission to Dr. Johnson's com- munity of good haters, skilful in the use of material which a wide acquaintance with the world had given him, his advent in Williamstown was a very consid- erable circumstance. Arthur Latham Perry, one of the most popular of Williams professors, retired in 1891. His final serv- ice was the conduct of prayers at the chapel the last Saturday morning of the second semester. " I will read for our Scripture lesson," he said, "the passage which I selected when thirty-eight years ago I con- ducted these exercises for the first time." Though Professor Perry taught German from 1854 to 1868, his principal work lay in the field of history and political economy. A sharp contrast of methods characterized his handling of these subjects. Follow- ing a custom then quite general among New England colleges, he made the recitation in history practically a memoriter exercise. Calling up some member of the class he asked him to begin a summary of the pages 271 WILLIAMS COLLEGE assigned in the textbook for the lesson. When he had finished, a second student was expected to take up the narrative, and so on to the end the recitation pro- ceeding in an automatic fashion. 1 This scheme cer- tainly meant serious work for conscientious students. So much at least may be said in its favor. It is also true and a matter of some importance that if by any chance the textbook happened to be literature, the scheme had a tendency to dull if not destroy their perception of this important fact. One of the text- books Green's "Short History of England" was literature, but apparently the Sophomores of 1879 never found it out. A member of that class, and prob- ably not a misleading representative of current opin- ion, denounced it in the college paper "as spun out by a verbose and flowing elaboration. . . . Let us have no more of Mr. Green!" 2 Professor Perry not only taught but wrote history. His "Origins in Williams town," published in 1894, belongs to the class of works sometimes called " monu- mental." It contains a detailed and authoritative account of Fort Massachusetts, of West Hoosac, and of Williamstown to the opening of the Revolutionary War. In this volume also he endeavored with notable though not absolute success to write a definitive biography of Ephraim Williams. His "Williamstown 1 President J. B. Angell, in his Reminiscences (p. 29), says that this method prevailed in Brown University when the subject permitted it. " 1 think that nearly one fourth of the men in my class in Senior Year (1849) used to learn in two hours and that after an indigestible din- ner in Commons fifteen pages of Smith's Lectures on History so that they could repeat them with little variation from the text." 2 "Diogenet," in the Williams Athen&um, March 29, 1879. 272 THE NEW WILLIAMS and Williams College/' published five years after the "Origins," from a literary point of view is the best of his books, but it abounds in criticisms of three suc- cessive Presidents of the institution Mark Hop- kins, Paul Ansel Chadbourne, and Franklin Carter which provoked sharp and general protest among the alumni. It was in the field of economics that Professor Perry won special distinction. His first treatise on that sub- ject " Introduction to Political Economy" ap- peared in 1865, passed through many editions, and gave him an international reputation. Certainly before the date of its publication no more important work had been done in the United States not at Yale by Woolsey, nor at Columbia by Lieber, nor at Harvard by Bowen. 1 A radical free-trader, who as- sailed the theories of protection in newspaper articles and public addresses as well as in his books and class- room, he could not fail to offend many alumni and friends of the college. In 1882 fourteen of them sent a communication to the Trustees denouncing his "Cobdenism" as "most inexpedient, unwise, and un- just." 2 The Trustees declined to interfere. In teaching political economy Professor Perry did not expect the textbook to be memorized. The class- room hour was devoted quite as much to discussion as to recitation. If any inquiring or belligerent student wanted a hearing he got it. Sometimes he risked a tilt with the professor an adventure in which he seldom achieved any success to speak of. Dr. Perry 1 Professor C. J. Bullock, MS. letter. * Perry, Williamstown and Williams College, 698. 273 WILLIAMS COLLEGE stated his own views with a positiveness that some- times verged upon dogmatism. While modest enough about matters beyond the scope of his special studies, and willing to be instructed by any one who under- took the task, his meekness and docility disappeared when on ground he had made his own. And as for practical results, the great majority of students, im- pressed by his sincerity, enthusiasm, and gifts of forceful speech, accepted at least provisionally his economic theories. John Bascom, who died at Williamstown, October 2, 1916, at the age of eighty-four, was a member of the faculty as tutor, lecturer on Sociology, Professor of Rhetoric or of Political Economy, thirty-seven years. These years, with the thirteen from 1874 to 1887, when he was President of the University of Wisconsin, made a total of half a century of active service in academic work. It was a curious irony of fate that none of the subjects which he taught during the long Williamstown period greatly interested him. They were all subordinate to his passion for phi- losophy, a subject which he never taught except dur- ing the relatively brief Wisconsin period. That was the golden era of his teaching when theme and occa- sion conspired to put him at his best. Yet we are not by any means to suppose that it was a mere affair of routine at Williams when he criti- cised undergraduate essays, or conducted classes in Campbell's Rhetoric and Spaulding's History of Eng- lish Literature, or expounded his theories of sociology and political economy. Many Williams students, like Washington Gladden, have felt that no other member 274 THE NEW WILLIAMS of the faculty contributed so largely to their intel- lectual life. 1 Dr. Bascom wrote more than a score of books and they deal with a variety of subjects, such as politi- cal economy, aesthetics, rhetoric, English literature, sociology, theology, and philosophy. These books, characterized by originality of thought and an excep- tional turn for phrase-making, ought to have had a more general recognition than was accorded to them. They failed to afford his theories, speculations, and ideals that wide " reflection in words we so often prize more highly than the thing itself." 2 In the " personal memorabilia" published after his death, he comments upon the fact that none of them sold to any consider- able extent. One class of critics, he said, thought that he had written too much, and his reply to them is characteristic "Life must be left to lift itself, to de- clare itself as it is and where it is." 3 Another class of critics, who complained that his style is obscure, might quote this reply in proof of the charge. However that may be, many readers have found "it hard to keep step with his discussions." This difficulty puzzled him the reasons for it, he said, are " not obvious to me." Possibly the fact that his style is compounded out of the language of poetry and philosophy, that it gravitates toward inverted and eccentric construc- tions, may be a partial explanation of the trouble. But these uncompromising books, with all their unique and striking qualities, did not so fully exhibit the man as the lectures and obiter dicta of the class- 1 Congregationalism October 21, 1911. * Bascom, Things Learned by Living, iv. ' Ibid., 180. 275 WILLIAMS COLLEGE room. It was a dull, out-of-place student who failed to feel the push and stimulus of his personality, the contagion of his unworldly idealism and the uplift of his pungent talk. CHAPTER IX LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER EBENEZER FITCH considered "the situation of the college . . . highly favorable to the improvement and morals of the youth " and hoped that the same "happy consequence" would continue "through every suc- cessive generation of students. " 1 Notwithstanding all the disagreeable things that were said about Williams- town in the hard-fought campaign for removal, disci- ples of the first President were to be found among the undergraduates long after the close of his administra- tion. The student historians, David Ames Wells and Samuel Henry Davis, who published the "Sketches of Williams College/* preferred the situation of the institution "in all respects to that of any other." Climate, scenery, and isolation in a secluded country town were wholly to their mind. 2 The spell of remoteness touched not only these student historians, but editors of the "Quarterly" as well. In 1854 rumors of the possible advent of a rail- road got abroad. Whatever the general sentiment of the community may have been, these editors bewailed the prospect of having the world too much with them. "The quiet rural character of our little village," they lamented, "is about to be changed. The stages, 1 Mass. Hist. Society, Collections, vm, 53. * Sketches of Williams College, 53-56. 277 WILLIAMS COLLEGE which now carry into town heaped loads of students at the beginning of every term, seeming to cut us off from the big, bustling world and to leave us alone among the solemn old hills will soon be remembered only by old graduates. . . . Already the road is sur- veyed. . . . Perhaps it is wise . . . (and) will benefit the college. But we ... doubt." l The depressed spokes- men for seclusion agreed with a prophet of evil who declared in a letter to the " Quarterly" that nothing in the fortunes of a country town could be more " de- testable" than the advent of a railroad. Whatever charms and fascinations the solitude of Williamstown may have had for dreamy and poetic undergraduates three quarters of a century ago, it could not continue indefinitely. The growth of the country in population and resources must inevitably modify the conditions and patronage of the college. Classified on the basis of the statistics of the first graduating class it was literally a neighborhood insti- tution. Then followed a gradual though fluctuating enlargement in the geographical area of its constitu- ency. From 1793 to 1815 sixty per cent of the gradu- ates came from Massachusetts and twenty-five per cent from Connecticut New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Virginia furnishing the remainder. In the troubled times of President Moore the percent- age of Massachusetts rose to seventy-five and that of Connecticut fell to fifteen. During the administra- tion of Dr. Griffin one half of the graduates were Bay State men, and New York succeeded Connecticut in the second place. Since the academic year 1851-52, 1 Editor's Table, Williams Quarterly, February, 1854. 2 7 8 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER New York has sent more students to Williamstown than any other Commonwealth the percentage in 1916 being thirty-five when the constituency em- braced twenty-nine States and one foreign country. 1 At the outset, and long after, Williams was em- phatically a poor man's college. The founders of it proposed to establish that sort of institution, In their petition to the Legislature for a charter which should transform the Free School into "a seminary of a more public and important nature/' they laid particular stress upon the fact that the small cost of living at Williamstown would bring "the means of a liberal education . . . within the powers of the middling and lower classes." And, as was proper in view of their avowed purpose "to lessen expenses," they put col- lege bills at the moderate figure of one hundred shil- lings or sixteen dollars and sixty-six cents a year. And they were careful to say in the prospectus announcing the opening that "the victualling of Academy boys had not exceeded eighty-three cents a week." 2 The 1 According to Professor Hewitt Alumni Review, February, 1911 about seven per cent of Williams graduates came from Williams- town. In 1914 fourteen per cent came from within a radius of fifty miles, twenty-three per cent from within that of one hundred miles. Ninety- four per cent lived east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio. (The General Education Board, 1902-1914, 130.) 2 Vermont Gazette, August 16, 1793. The following bill (Mass. Archives, xxxu, 705) throws some light on the cost of living in the Berkshires thirty-seven years earlier: Prov. of Massachusetts to Jonathan Edwards of Stockbridge Dr. To timber for building the Fort about the Minister's House at Stockbridge which cost me 205 L M 1-0-0 To 180 meals to Indians that wrought at the Fort at 4^ 3-0-0 4-0-0 Errors excepted. STOCKBRIDGE, JONATHAN EDWARDS. January 30, 1756. 279 WILLIAMS COLLEGE upshot of the whole matter was that until the nine- teenth century was more than half spent, "the mid- dling and lower classes'* and scarcely anybody else patronized the college. Annual catalogues previous to 1822 contain no estimates of student expenses, and information from other quarters is not abundant. Charles Frederick Sedgwick, a graduate in the class of 1813, wrote after the lapse of sixty-eight years "The common boarding-houses charged 9 shillings ($1.50) per week. ... I think the cash paid ... for (my college) edu- cation . . . was about $600. ... I kept a horse during the last two summers . . . which I could pasture for 34 cents a week." l Another member of the class of 1813, Charles Jenkins, tutor in 1816-19, boarded at President Moore's during the autumn term of 1818 a period of thirteen weeks and his bill was The catalogue of 1822 contains the first official statement in regard to expenses since the announce- ment of the opening of the college in 1793. Prices had advanced somewhat during the intervening twenty years. If the "victualling" of Free School boys cost eighty-three cents a week, that of students in 1822 ranged "from one dollar to one dollar and thirty-four cents." The lower rate could be secured "by walking a mile." And the term bills for the year amounted "to about thirty dollars." Attention is called to the fact that "the best wood is sold for one dollar a 1 Letter, March I, 1881, in Perry, Williamstown and Williams Col- lege, 350. 2 Jenkins' MS. Diary, Notices, etc., December 23, 1818. 280 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER cord" and that "from twelve to seventeen cents a week is paid for washing." 1 In the catalogue of 1828-29 there is a more formal tabulation of expenses. The minimum figures were then $79 for the college year. When Mark Hopkins became President in 1836-37, they had risen to $92, and during the next decade or two they increased rather slowly. Yet this modest scale of living over- taxed the resources of some students and drove them to heroic measures of economy. "I boarded myself five weeks," wrote one of them in 1832. "The first two weeks I lived entirely on bread and milk, I afterwards got a little butter and a few pounds of rice for variety and for 3 or 4 of the last days I lived ... on bread and cheese. My fur- niture, consisting of a pitcher, plate, bowl, spoon, knife and fork cost me 37^ cents. ... I have lived tolerable comfortable on my i^ pounds of bread and quart of milk a day but found at the end that the bones began to appear from my pale visage. My board cost me 2 or 3 cents over half a dollar per week." This intrepid young man was not discouraged at all by his lean five weeks of semi-starvation. "If I board myself again," he continued, "as I intend 1 Catalogue, November, 1822. There were eight men in college under the patronage of the American Education Society during the academic year 1822-23, and their expenses, including clothing and incidentals, averaged $161.71. The expenses of "Beneficiaries" of the Society in seven other institutions were in Middlebury, $106.22; in Amherst $112.92; in Dartmouth, $151.67; in Yale, $180.16; in Union, $200.06; and in Harvard, $251.55. Board at Williamstown cost $1.20 a week the cheapest in New England except at Amherst, where it was fifteen cents a week less. The eight Williams students earned $2.36 by teaching and $59 by manual labor. (Report of the American Education Society, 1822-23.) 281 WILLIAMS COLLEGE to do occasionally, I shall try to have a greater variety. " Martin Ingham Townshend, Member of Congress, Regent of the University of the State of New York, wrote an account of his college times --the years 1829-33 for the " Gulielmensian " of 1895: " My father resided three miles south of the college. He had an excellent farm, fairly stocked, clear of debt, but nothing more. Until the day of my graduation J never had an article of woolen clothing which was not spun and completed and made upon the farm from the wool of our own sheep, and I never wore a boot or shoe that was not made from the hides of our own herd, slaughtered on our own farm. Three years of the four of my college life I boarded at home; I occu- pied a dormitory at the college. We arose early, at the sound of the bell, attended prayers and morning recitations and then I walked three miles to my home, breakfasted, and returned with my dinner and supper in a basket upon my arm. I chopped my wood in our own groves, in vacation, into twelve feet lengths, and drew it to college and piled it upon the green and pre- pared it for the fireplace with saw and axe in the leisure hours of the term. The preparation of their own wood was largely practiced by students." 2 Samuel James Andrews, author of the "Life of Our Lord upon Earth,'* for many years a standard author- ity in theological circles, who graduated six years after Martin Ingham Townshend, sent a letter of reminis- cence to the Hartford Alumni Association in 1906:- 1 L. H. Pease (1835), MS. letter, November 22, 1832. 2 Gulielmensian, xxxix, 20, 21 (condensed). 282 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER "In my day . . . the village of Williamstown was small and straggling, the college edifices few and rude, the scenery alone was varied and grand; . . . The stu- dents were for the most part ... the sons of farmers. ... It was eminently a poor man's college one in which the student might receive a good education at the least cost. There was little of the social conven- tionalities or of the irritating inequalities which the display of wealth brings. My classmates were . . . obliged to live very economically , wearing homespun l and minimizing expenses in every way." 2 In 1911 a former President of the University of California, Horace Davis (1848), gave an address before the students of that institution, on " the condi- tions of Williams College in ... 1845-46": " Sixty-six years ago ... a boy fourteen years old stepped into the office of President Hopkins . . . and said he had come to present himself to pass the exam- ination to enter Sophomore. He was turned over to Professor Tatlock. ... As his diary kept at that date . . . said 'I read a passage in Livy ... a section in Herodotus and did two sums in Algebra and that was all.' . . . " I am going to begin with the morning and go through the day. . . . The warning bell . . . rang at half past five in the summer and at six in the winter. In the summer that was all right because the sun was up and it was reasonably warm ; but in winter it rang an hour before the sun came up, and when the ther- 1 William Hyde (1826) wore a coat in his Freshman year made out of his mother's wedding gown. (Springfield Republican, July 8, 1850.) 1 Andrews, MS. letter, December 25, 1906. 283 WILLIAMS COLLEGE mometer was down to fifteen below zero it was pretty tough. . . . Then we had to light the lamp and per- haps it would not burn because the oil was frozen; and then try to start a fire; and then perhaps have to draw water from the well before we could wash our- selves. One morning . . . the well itself was frozen. . . . The second bell tolled half an hour after the first. . . . signified that we had to be in Chapel at prayers. As soon as I got my clothes on ... I started out. Per- haps it had been snowing during the night and I had a quarter of a mile to beat my way through drifts before I reached the Chapel ... a room which had absolutely no fire, a room where the thermometer was down below zero again and again in the morning . . . no carpets on the floor, no cushions on the seats. . . . One of the professors would read a chapter in the Bible and then offer a prayer. ... I have seen the light go out while he was reading because the oil was frozen in the lamp. They always provided against that contingency by keeping one lighted candle on the reading desk. . . . When the lamp went out the professor would quietly shut his Bible and offer his prayer by the light of the candle. . . . "The recitation rooms of the lower classes were in the West College. We had about a quarter of a mile to run to get there and we were always sure to find a room well-lighted and well-warmed because a fellow slept in it and was allowed his rent in consideration of building the fire and keeping it in order. He had a kind of folding bed against the wall. . . . There we spent an hour at recitation. Then came breakfast. . . . From nine to eleven occurred what we called 284 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER study hours and it meant business. We had to be in our rooms and attending to the study end of it. . . . Then came the second recitation. . . . Dinner at twelve o'clock. . . . From two to four . . . more study hours. ... At four o'clock we went through our third recitation. . . . No lectures, these were all reci- tations. ... At six came supper and after supper our time was our own." 1 The Williams of 1793-1846 left little to be desired in the matter of a poor man's college. Yet, improbable as the transformation might seem, long before the end of the last century rumors began to be current that the institution was abandoning its original mission to "the middling and lower classes" and becoming a rich man's college. These rumors disturbed President Carter so much that he devoted considerable space in his "Report" for 1887-88 to a discussion of them. "I believe," he said, "that this college, in spite of the increasing elegance of its surroundings and society- buildings, is as democratic a college as exists in New England. ... It is not praise but a misrepresentation that 'the college has become a place for rich men's sons.' It is no more a place for rich men's sons than it was thirty years ago. ... If there is one purpose running through the entire management of the col- lege it is to secure to every student, whatever may be his belongings, all the privileges and inspirations that the college offers to her sons." 2 What President Carter said in 1888 may be said with no less emphasis in 1916. For students who must partly support them- 1 Davis, University of California Chronicle, xiv, no. I. 2 Carter, Report, June, 1888. 285 WILLIAMS COLLEGE selves a small country town has obvious disadvan- tages. Naturally they drift to the larger communities where opportunities to earn money are more abun- dant. But the principal thing is the spirit of the insti- tution not the architecture of the campus or the bank account of undergraduates. II College fraternities, which have developed from "an irresponsible group of boys" 1 into a great and firmly intrenched system, began at Williams during the academic year 1832-33. The first project of this sort an attempt to organize a chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society 2 failed, but in the autumn of 1833 the Kappa Alpha Fraternity and a few months later the Sigma Phi were established. Whatever the cause of it may have been jealousy, questionings in regard to the principle of secrecy, or recent anti- Masonic demonstrations the innovation awakened a hostility general and aggressive enough to cause the formation in November, 1834, of a society, called at first the Sociable and later the Equitable Fraternity, with the avowed "purpose of counteracting the evil tendency of secret organizations." 3 For twenty-nine years this fraternity fought them and then gave up the contest as a lost cause. Though the long cam- paign failed, it was marked by some signal successes. In 1838 two thirds of all the students in college be- longed to the anti-secret order and for the next decade 1 Cyclopedia of Education, n, 688. 2 The Williams Chapter was not established until 1864. (Williams Quarterly, vin, 275, 276.) 5 Records of the Equitable Fraternity. 286 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER the membership seldom fell below one half of them. Feeling between the factions often ran high, especially in the earlier years, and occasionally broke out into disorder. An instance of the ruder collisions occurred in 1839. Late at night a company of anti-secret men, angered by the defection of some of their number, "assaulted" the quarters of the Kappa Alpha Society on Water Street. 1 "One of our number," wrote a participant in the melee, "seized an old Queen Anne musket and another an ancient sabre and we all sal- lied forth and drove the gang to the top of Consump- tion Hill, where we suddenly found ourselves con- fronted by Albert Hopkins," 2 whose appearance upon the scene such was his prestige as an athlete with whom nobody should venture to meddle brought the noisy affray to an abrupt conclusion. That species of hostility soon died out, but the warfare of discussion, of controversial pamphlets, and personal appeals con- tinued. In November, 1855, two Greek-letter frater- nities the Kappa Alpha and Alpha Delta Phi challenged "the Oudens" 3 to a public debate on the question, "Resolved, that the Anti-Secret Society in college is uncalled for and inefficient." The Equi- table Fraternity promptly accepted the proposal and appointed James Abram Garfield, Andrew Parsons, and Charles Augustine Stork as its representatives. Formal articles of procedure were drawn up, but the affair never got beyond that point. The representa- tives of the Greek-letter fraternities finally withdrew 1 Kappa Alpha Record, 100. 1 James S. Knowlton (1842), MS. letter. 8 The anti-secret men were generally called "Oudens" at that time. 287 WILLIAMS COLLEGE from the contest which they had proposed, pleading in apology " want of time to do justice to the subject," and reluctance "to make an excitement in college." 1 Under the circumstances they probably decided wisely. Why should they take the risks of a public discussion when, with James Abram Garfield leading the opposition, the prospects of forensic success were not particularly bright? Besides, the drift of college sentiment had now become unmistakable and the end of all organized hostility was not far away. October 6, 1864, the handful of surviving members passed a vote " declaring the Anti-Secret Society of Williams Col- lege dissolved." 2 Some twenty years later it was revived as "a chapter of the Fraternity of Delta Upsilon" and now lives at peace with its foretime enemies. After the collapse of the Equitable Fraternity there seems to have been a period of truce, which continued until the summer of 1868, when George Field Lawton and other students sent a petition to the Trustees " asking for the abolition of secret societies in col- lege." 3 This petition, referred to a committee con- sisting of the Rev. Dr. John Todd, the Rev. Dr. Robert Russell Booth, and the Hon. Joseph White, was never heard of again. George Lawton's petition, however, must be rated a mild, negligible demonstra- tion compared with a sermon which John Bascom preached in the college chapel, one Sunday afternoon, six weeks later. " I have seen these societies," he said, "on the inside and on the outside, have enjoyed their 1 Records of the Equitable Fraternity, 1856. 2 Ibid., 1864. 1 Records of the Trustees, July 27, 1868. 288 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER advantages and marked their evils. ... A society in college can have no worthy, ostensible end to which secrecy is a fit, natural and necessary means. . . . You have nothing which you have the least occasion to keep secret excepting always mischief. ... If I could dissolve these fraternities back into their orig- inal atoms and leave them to rearrange themselves once more under the free elastic affinities of honest sentiments, open, manly purposes and an unbiassed sense of duty, I would no more hesitate to do it, than I would to break down a monopoly, overturn an aris- tocracy, subvert a superstition or dissolve any exclu- sive, tyrannical league." l After this brief revival the discussion again became quiescent until the Commencement of 1880. It then broke out with considerable violence at the meeting of the alumni. David Dudley Field declared that the secret societies ought to be " cut up by the roots," and that, if he were a Trustee, the thing should be done; Martin Ingham Townshend did not see his way to anything more radical than to "beg the boys to be considerate " ; while Erastus Cornelius Benedict (1821) said he had been assured by four of the most distin- guished educators in the country that, on the whole, the influence of fraternities was good. 2 Occasionally the Greek-letter societies have had troubles of their own which attracted attention troubles for which neither the Equitable Fraternity, nor the crusading sermon of John Bascom, nor the hostile talk of David Dudley Field was responsible. 1 Bascom, Sermon, Williams College Chapel, September 12, 1868. 1 Springfield Republican, July 7, 1880. 289 WILLIAMS COLLEGE Something of this sort happened in 1840. The event itself was nothing more than an ordinary case of dis- cipline, but so badly managed that it blew up a tremendous tempest in college: The Alpha of the Sigma Phi Society of Massachusetts, At a meeting held July 14, 1840, unanimously adopted the following resolution: Resolved, That SAMUEL G. WHEELER, JR., in wilfully violating the rules of our fraternity for- feits all claim to our fellowship and respect, and that all connection between us and him is wholly dissolved. A second and unofficial edition of the circular soon appeared. This edition was a reissue of the first with an addendum signed by seventeen of the twenty-five members of the class of 1840, four of whom belonged to the Kappa Alpha Society: The circulation of such an affair as that upon the other side of this leaf, without note or com- ment, where parties and circumstances are un- known, might bring an unpleasant, and perhaps injurious, notoriety to the individual whose name is thus made use of; therefore, we, the undersigned members of the Senior Class, actu- ated by a desire to prevent injury in the present case, entirely uninvited, subscribe to the follow- ing statement. From the time S. G. Wheeler, Jr., became a member of the Sigma Phi Society in this college, (a year since) he has derived neither pleasure nor profit, as he asserts, and as some of us have rea- 290 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER sons of our own to believe, from his connection with it. For about six months he has been indif- ferent to it, and its interests. This, and the fact that he refused to wear his badge at the Adel- phic Union Exhibition on the fifteenth of July, are the only alleged grounds for this burlesque expulsion. We say burlesque, for we who know him and the Society, regard it as an affair both creditable to his character and fortunate for his interests. The man, whom the Sigma Phi Society disfellow- shipped with such public and overdone emphasis, was valedictorian of the class of 1841, a successful lawyer in the City of New York, and a contributor to the funds of the college. The incident is of importance chiefly as an illustration of the fierce and sudden storms that sometimes swept over the college seventy years ago. The bill of indictment against Greek-letter societies drawn by the Equitable Fraternity and later oppo- nents revolves mainly about four points they are often conducted upon an unacademic scale of lux- ury; create mischievous jealousies; tend to lower the standard of scholarship, and to destroy the democracy which ought to prevail in a college community. What- ever may be said in support of this bill of indictment, it has been of little practical effect. The obvious advantages which the societies afford have pushed aside all arguments of dissent.. These advantages may be summarized as an attractive college home; the companionship, and, it may be, especially at the out- set, the watchful guardianship, of congenial friends; 291 WILLIAMS COLLEGE an entree into the exclusive circles of student life and the assurance of recognition and welcome whenever after graduation alumni members return to their Alma Mater. If one would fully realize the futility of all the warfare upon them at Williams, it is only necessary that he should make a tour of the college campus. When John Bascom delivered his philippic there were six fraternities, three of which the Sigma Phi, the Delta Psi, and the Alpha Delta Phi owned inex- pensive chapter houses. In 1915 the number of these organizations had increased to fourteen and accord- ing to Baird's " Manual" for that year the valuation of their chapter houses was $548,000 an average of in The domiciliary history of the faculty presents some parallels, but more contrasts to that of the fraterni- ties. At an early date October n, 1791, fifteen days before the opening of the Free School the Trustees voted to build a house for the Preceptor. Finished in 1794, standing originally on the site of Hopkins Hall and removed a little to the north of it in 1888, this house was occupied by President Fitch and his successors until 1858, when the Corporation, at the suggestion of Nathan Jackson, who accom- panied his advice with a gift of six thousand dollars toward the purchase, bought the " Sloan Place/' a beautiful colonial mansion, which ever since has been the President's house. Mark Hopkins occupied it 1 Baird, Manual of American College Fraternities, Eighth Edition, 871. 292 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER from 1858 until his resignation in 1872, when he removed to a house built for him by the late William E. Dodge, of New York, on the site of Grace Hall, from which it was removed in 1910 to become an annex of the Williams Inn. These houses and two others one of them a small, indifferent affair taken down to make room for the old Alumni Hall Chapel and the other built for Professor Lewellyn Pratt in the seventies of the last century comprised the resi- dential resources of the Corporation for almost a hundred years. In this long period the professors made what shift they could for homes some of them buying such houses as were in the market and others building new ones. Toward the close of it, when the teaching staff had outgrown the narrow tenan table resources of both town and campus, new- come professors were liable to depressing experiences. The wife of one of them, visiting Williamstown in the spring of 18 to look up quarters, wrote: "I have seldom been so homesick as I was last night. It rained hard when I stepped off the train and everything seemed forlorn. . . . The next morning I went to the Kellogg House Professor called and was thoroughly polite. I shall always think of him as a friend in need. He went all about with me. We looked at a place called, I think, College Hall, the first story of it being used as a student boarding-house and the second as a dormitory. I almost cried when I saw the rooms, they were so desolate and unhomelike. It did not help much to be told that one of the pro- fessors had lived in them for a time. Then we visited a tiny cottage on Street which distressed me 293 WILLIAMS COLLEGE close to barns, cheaply built, and surrounded by all sorts of debris. When that is cleared up the place may seem different. The prospect can never be quite so black again. . . . There is nothing here. The only homes are those which the professors have built or bought." 1 Times have changed for the better since the rainy and forlorn May evening of 18 . In 1916, the college owned fourteen dwelling-houses, and not less than thirteen professors and instructors whose names appear in the catalogue of that year had homes of their own. iv . Athletic sports at the present day presuppose a well-equipped gymnasium, which is a comparatively recent addition to the college campus. There was an effort both at Harvard and Yale to provide something of the sort in 1826. Williams followed their example the next year when President Griffin and Mr. Tutor Mark Hopkins were appointed a committee to man- age the business and authorized to expend one hun- dred and fifty dollars for apparatus. 2 The first Berkshire gymnasium was an out-of-doors affair and the making of it attracted the attention of a newspaper man who chanced to be in Williams- town. "Upon a portion of the college grounds," he wrote, "I perceived one day a large number of stu- dents at work, headed by their venerable president, 1 MS. letter. 2 Records of the Trustees, May 8 and September 5, 1827; Records of the Faculty, September 18, 1827. 294 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER and upon examination found they were preparing a gymnasium." l With what equipment this open-air institution of 1827 may have been furnished is uncertain, but it must have been meagre, since twenty years after- wards the inventory of gymnastic apparatus com- prised only a horizontal bar, a sliding-pole, a ladder for hand-climbing, and three swings. 2 For a long period it lasted more than half a century recreation at Williams was some random diversion, which could readily be taken up and readily discarded. The talk of the campus revolved about such academic, classroom questions as who was the best debater, or the first scholar, or the most promis- ing writer questions always discussed with interest and sometimes with passion. Inter-class football ap- pears to have been the first athletic sport to awaken any considerable interest, and that presently fell into such grievous disfavor with the faculty that they passed a vote prohibiting it. A recent game between the Junior and Sophomore classes, which degenerated into a rough-and-tumble fight, provoked this drastic measure. The old, accidental, miscellaneous athletic era came to a close in 1859, when Williams played its first inter- collegiate game a game of baseball at Pittsfield with Amherst and was defeated. John Bascom, who attended it, said that the Berkshire players showed the "alertness and skill" which may be acquired "under moderate practice," while the vic- 1 American Traveller, September 18, 1827. 1 Porter, Reunion of the Class of 1850, 20, 21. 295 WILLIAMS COLLEGE torious Amherst players "had made a beginning in those careful rules which have taken the game from the region of sport and carried it into the region of exact and laborious discipline." 1 The following year and on the 4th of July the teams of these colleges met at Westfield for a second contest, which resulted in another Amherst victory. One might naturally sup- pose that the Williams men would have been eager to avenge the defeat of the preceding season, but they neglected even "the moderate practice" that was in evidence at Pittsfield. "Not until eight days before the match," wrote a local chronicler, "were the play- ers selected, and not until the Saturday before the fourth did they all meet together . . . and not even then, for their captain was absent from college." 2 A period of apathy and inaction followed a period lasting until July 29, 1864, when Williams defeated Harvard at Worcester, the score being nine to twelve in favor of the Berkshire men. No formal discussion of questions which the con- quests of athletic sports in the college world have raised will be undertaken. It is only necessary to say that these sports are a modern phase of traits and tendencies as old as the human race. That great ad- vantages attend them is plain enough. They afford vent for the enthusiasms of youth, promote physical vigor, enforce rigorous discipline, stimulate college spirit and the sense of institutional unity. The evils 1 Bascom, Williams Alumni Review, October, 1910, p. 13. The game at Pittsfield seems to have been the first instance of inter-collegiate baseball. Perhaps it should be said that this game and the one at Westfield were the earlier "Massachusetts" type of it. 2 Williams Quarterly, July, 1860. 296 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER accompanying them arise partly from their limited scope, since for the great majority of students they make little provision beyond a series of spectacular exhibitions in which a few highly trained athletes compete, and partly from the easy liability of college communities to forget that all their "outside activi- ties" should be subordinated "to the use and mastery of mental power." To mitigate the first of these evils a somewhat elaborate scheme of intra-mural athletic sports has been undertaken at Williams and promises well. Already they occupy a prominent place in the life of the college and more students participate in them each year. 1 In regard to the second class of evils the menace of athletic sports to the intellectual work of the col- lege the administration has announced its attitude and policy in unmistakable terms. " If the trustees and faculty," said President Garfield in his " Report" for 1914, " . . . insist that the college must be first and always an educational institution and if on the other hand undergraduates place social and athletic inter- ests first . . . there is presented an issue which sooner or later must be fought out and for which there can be no compromise. . . . Now it is clearly perceived, and I am convinced that the undergraduates in large proportion believe, that Williams is and must con- tinue to be primarily an institution devoted to learn- ing." 2 One interesting event in the athletic history was the adoption of college colors. That event happened 1 Garfield, Report, June, 1915. * Ibid., 1914, p. 7. 297 WILLIAMS COLLEGE in 1865 when the team was leaving for Cambridge to play the last game in a series with Harvard. Two young ladies who were spending the summer in town, learning that Williams had no college colors, hastily purchased some purple ribbon, made small rosettes of it, pinned one of them on each member of the team, and said, "Let this royal purple be the Williams col- ors and may it bring you victory." 1 Harvard was defeated. Of extinct college customs there is a considerable and not uninteresting list Chip Day, Gravel Day, Chestnut Day, May Day, the Burial of Euclid, the Freshman Wake, the Shirt Tail Parade, and the Cane Contest. These customs, with the exception of the last three, which the faculty summarily suppressed, made unnoticed exits. Some of them rivalled the col- lege itself in antiquity Chip Day, for instance, de- voted to removing the debris that accumulated about the dormitories during the winter months, 2 and Gravel Day set apart for mending the "slimy" side- walks which offended the fastidious author of "Dis- criptio Gulielmensis." A lively description of the 1832 Chip Day appeared in the "Adelphi" and the conjecture that it may have been written by William Lowndes Yancey probably does not go astray: "At length it came, and a beautiful one it was. The laughing sun shone brightly and not a cloud darkened 1 E. M. Jerome (1866), Alumni Review, April, 1910. Williams Quarterly, August, 1865. * " May I4th [1796]. The scholars clean the ground around college thoroughly." (Thomas Robbins, Diary, I, 9.) 298 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER the azure concave. . . . 'Hurrah! hurrah!' echoed through the halls. 'We have the day, hurrah, hurrah!' The big, disfiguring piles of rubbish were quickly re- moved. A procession followed in which the late chip- men became a martial troop, brooms and brushes served as flagstaff's, and sheets and handkerchiefs as floating pennons. Our quiet, beautiful town of the vale has not seen so imposing a sight this many a day." 1 These practical, unromantic customs are quite in contrast with others, like the Burial of Euclid and the Freshmen Wake, which belong to a later time. In general they disappeared after a brief and often troubled existence. They were the occasion of spec- tacular parades and doggerel of high and low degree. For example, at their burial of Euclid the class of 1852 sang this unlamenting ode: "Euclid is dead, joyful are we. Come let us sing, be merry and free. He 's gone at last, his reign is o'er, Then a hy ! ha ! ha ! He '11 bore us no more. Euclid was borus, And he was dry, He used to floor us, He ought to die." The list of abandoned college functions, patriotic, social, or academic, which might not be classified, per- haps, as college customs, is a considerable one, em- bracing Fourth of July celebrations, Junior, Senior, and Adelphic Union Exhibitions, and anniversaries of temperance and anti-slavery societies. 1 Adelphi, April 26, 1832. 299 WILLIAMS COLLEGE In the earlier Fourth of July celebrations college and town united. Later the Sophomore class became responsible for a proper observance of the day, and their programme generally comprised the reading of the Declaration of Independence, an oration on some appropriate subject, and one or two original odes which were sung by the students. The first of the earlier celebrations seems to have been in 1795 and the following account of it appeared in the " Vermont Gazette" :- "At twelve o'clock a battalion of infantry and a company of cavalry, with a numerous body of citizens and members of college, walked in procession from the green of East College to the meeting-house. A well-adapted address to heaven was made by the Rev. President Fitch and an elegant and patriotic oration delivered by Mr. Tutor Dunbar, which was received with great applause by the audience." Then followed a dinner at which fifteen "benevolent and patriotic toasts" were drunk, the series concluding with the sentiment "Williams College, may it long continue to be the seat of the liberal arts and sciences, of religion and virtue." l The last and most elaborate of these joint celebra- tions, which had come to include anniversaries of local temperance and anti-slavery societies, was held in 1829. Not less than three committees participated in the preliminaries one composed of nine citizens, another of six Sophomores, and a third of six repre- sentatives of the college at large and they prepared an ample programme : 1 Vermont Gazette, July 10, 1795. 300 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER INDEPENDENCE The fifty-third anniversary of our National Independ- ence will be celebrated in an appropriate manner at the North Village in Williamstown on the 4th of July inst. The procession will form in front of Major Hickox's Hotel precisely at half past nine A.M. under the direc- tion of Major A. Hanson, Marshal, and Mr. S. Johnson, Assistant Marshal. The procession will move to the New Chapel [Griffin Hall] where the usual Fourth of July oration from the Sophomore class will be delivered by Mr. William Rankin, Jr. (1831). The procession will reform in front of the Chapel at half past ten and pro- ceed to the Meeting House where an Oration will be delivered by Daniel N. Dewey, Esq., after which an address will be delivered before The ["Old Constitution "] Temperance Society by Mr. Lowell Smith (1829) of Williams College. A dinner will be provided by Major Hickox. After the dinner the procession will reform in front of the hotel and proceed as before to the New Chapel where an Oration will be pronounced by Mr. Simeon H. Cal- houn [1829] which will be followed by an address by Mr. G. B. Kellogg [1829] to the Anti-Slavery Society of Williams College. The services of the day will close by an Address to The [New] Temperance Society in Williams College by Mr. S. B. Morley [1829]. The inhabitants of adjacent towns are respectfully invited to join in the celebration. Seats will be particu- larly reserved for the ladies and a full band of music will attend on the occasion. 1 Since three temperance organizations the col- lege furnishing two of them and the village one took part in the anniversary, the dinner committee allowed, and very properly, "no other liquor than 1 American Advocate, July I, 1829. 301 WILLIAMS COLLEGE cider and water ... on the table." The dinner com- mittee had reason to be gratified with the results of their prohibitory policy. "Only one man was seen intoxicated and he came from a distance to show that he was opposed to temperance societies. Some time before sunset the people repaired to their own homes and there was no more appearance of a celebration in our streets at 7 o'clock than there is on the Sabbath two hours after meeting/' l At their annual meeting in 1910 the alumni of the college sent the Sophomore orator of 1829, William Rankin, an illuminated scroll containing their con- gratulations on his one hundredth birthday. 2 He died in 1912 the oldest college graduate in the country. With the exception of Commencement none of the surviving academic functions have any considerable antiquity. The oldest of them the Jackson Festi- val, a birthday celebration in honor of the founder was established in i857, 3 by Nathan Jackson, donor of the hall which bore his name. In the early years this festival consisted of a supper at the village hotel, after which there were speeches by members of the faculty and representatives of the four college classes. Occasionally something happened that gave unex- pected variety to the programme. An event of this kind occurred at the Festival of 1858. The exercises proceeded smoothly and according to schedule until the spokesman for the Senior class was half through his address when he fell to the floor in a dead swoon. *. American Advocate, July 8, 1829. 2 Gulielmensian, 1914, p. 30. 3 Williams Quarterly, March, 1857, p. 287. 302 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER His sudden collapse naturally created a good deal of confusion. "With the presence of mind usually dis- played on such occasions a crowd was formed which made it almost impossible for a well man to breathe. One Sophomore fainted and a good many more would have made less trouble if they had fainted too. . . . Our friend recovered sufficiently to leave the room his temper unruffled ... by the novel proceedings " and the hot coffee " thrown in his face by some enthu- siastic person who had joined in the general effort to revive him." l While Class Day, established in 1861, continues to be very much what it was at first, great changes and transformations appear in the processes of Commence- ment. On the forenoon of the first Wednesday, September 2, 1795, a slender procession of academy boys, college students, instructors, Trustees, and vis- itors formed at West College and marched to the "scandalous" village meeting-house at the head of Main Street, where the graduating exercises were held. In 1798 a new meeting-house, built on the site of the old one, was finished and in it sixty-eight suc- cessive Commencements were held. From almost unnoticed beginnings they came to be a sort of Northern Berkshire gala occasion. In the third dec- ade of the last century it is said that farmers laid their plans " to finish haying " in time to attend them. 2 These farmers and their friends were out in force, for example, at the Commencement of 1837 the first in the administration of Mark Hopkins. Edward 1 Williams Quarterly, June, 1858. * Danforth, Boyhood Reminiscences, 42. 303 WILLIAMS COLLEGE Everett, Governor of Massachusetts, delivered an oration before the Adelphic Union on that occasion. A chief magistrate of the State had never been in attendance before and his presence naturally awak- ened general interest throughout the neighborhood. Entertained by President Hopkins at a social party the evening preceding Commencement, the Governor discovered that "half of the country had come in," and that the elaborate, scholastic oration prepared for the occasion would be out of place. Accordingly it was supplanted by, or at least transformed into, an address on the "' Relations of Frontier Towns to the History of the World/ ... As the assembly paraded out of the church Clifford [a member of the Governor's staff] met in the porch one of the fine old Berkshire sachems, a gentleman of position and cultivation. . . . Clifford said to him, 'And how do you like our Governor?' 'Like him? I am only thinking what a fool I am. I talked to him an hour at the President's party, and by Jove I was simply telling him things he knew better than I do.' The simple truth was that . . . the Governor had been pumping the Berkshire man for local detail which the next morning had been reflected on the Berkshire audience." l Nathaniel Hawthorne, happening to be in North Adams during the next anniversary, drove over to Williamstown and found the village thronged with people from the vicinity, who came thither in all 1 Hale, Memories of a Hundred Years, n, 14-16. Governor Everett closed his address with a tribute to Ephraim Williams that " drew tears from many eyes." (New York Observer, August 26, 1837.) The published oration seems to be the original version not the extemporized and crammed version which astonished the old Berkshire sachem. 304 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER kinds of vehicles buggies, barouches, and chaises. In the open spaces back of the big white meeting- house where the orthodox exercises of the day were proceeding with a programme of twenty-two orations, he found another and larger audience listening to the unconventional eloquence of pedlers, hucksters, hawkers, and venders of divers sorts. One of them, who sold his wares at auction, amused Hawthorne so much by his lively tongue and original elocution "a queer, humorous recitative" that he could have stood and listened to him all day. Another man in the crowd caught his attention "a round-shouldered, hulky, ill-hung devil" by the name of Randall, who was the better or worse for liquor and made no little disturbance. Indeed, the out-of-doors attractions were so great that apparently Hawthorne did not go inside the church. This old order has changed. Gone are the booths, the hucksters, the auctioneers, and the " ill-hung devils." If Nathaniel Hawthorne could have attended the Commencement of 1916, held in the splendid audience room of Grace Hall and with elaborate academic ceremonial, he would have found himself in a Williamstown world which had not been discovered in 1838. The miscellaneous crowd that attracted Hawthorne was mostly composed of relative strangers drawn to the campus for the day. But other singular folk there were, not less interesting, who had a more permanent connection with it and contributed a distinct touch of local color. These now extinct folk may properly be called "characters," though of a type unknown to Theophrastus or Sir Thomas Overbury. First in the 305 WILLIAMS COLLEGE brief list is Thomas Cox, "tall, lank, withered," 1 who entered upon his career as " professor of dust and ashes" in 1817 and continued it half a century. A simple, kindly, unpretending man, content and faith- ful in his humble duties, he appealed to the affections rather than to the laughter of Williams students. Another "character" was an old negro with a phenomenally thick skull. His specialty lay in bunt- ing boards, planks, or barrels for a small considera- tion. Hence he became known as "Abe Bunter," though his real name was something else. Probably no more formidable battering-ram of this species could be found anywhere. A queer, outre, barbaric figure, with his one tremendous "talent," he haunted the campus for a long series of years. The most distinguished member of this vanished community was "Bill" Pratt, "the saw-buck phi- losopher." His fame grew out of the singular oratory which on occasion lent variety to the prosaic routine of his customary vocation sawing wood and black- ing stoves. This oratory was a jargon of wild, reso- nant, elementary nonsense, streaked with occasional shrewdness of observation and accentuated here and there by a curious yell of his own invention. "Bill" won a place, not only in the ephemeral talk of the campus, but in the pages of the "Quarterly" and the "Proceedings" of Alumni Associations. What is more, two graduates John Sheridan Zelie (1887) and Carroll Perry (1890) wrote a book about him. 2 1 Benjamin, Life and Adventures of a Free Lance, 148. 2 " A new edition with new matter," edited by Talcott Miner Banks (1890), was published in 1915. See Appendix IX. 306 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER VI Williams undergraduate periodicals began with the "Adelphi," a semi-monthly "published by Ridley Bannister nearly opposite . . . West College," the first number appearing August 18, 1831, and the last July 9, 1832. It contained six pages of reading matter four of them devoted to original essays and selections from various authors, and the remainder to poetry and news items. Gibbon's " Decline and Fall of Rome/' the philosophy of novel-reading, "Alas, Poor Yorick," Bulwer's works, the poems of Whittier, Willis, Bryant, Henry Kirke White, and Sir Walter Scott are some of the topics discussed in the original essays. The young men who undertook this venture in college journalism William Lowndes Yancey is said to have been a leading spirit among them did their work surprisingly well, whether we consider it from the standpoint of style or substance. Twelve years passed before the "Adelphi" had a successor. In July, 1844, the publication of the "Williams Monthly Miscellany" was begun with an accompaniment of unnecessary apologies. "If our productions are crude," said the editors, "so the authors are in a measure (large or small)." x This ven- ture survived scarcely longer than its predecessor. It suspended publication after one number of the second volume had been issued. A third periodical, the "Williams Quarterly," con- ducted by an editorial board of five Seniors, and con- taining about a hundred pages of reading matter, 1 Williams Miscellany, i, 2. 307 WILLIAMS COLLEGE appeared in 1853, and came to an end in 1872. Digni- fied, serious, inclining perhaps to sacrifice form to substance, yet occasionally brilliant, the old " Quar- terly" was a worthy literary exponent of the last half of the Mark Hopkins era. 1 Also in 1853 the Sophomore class undertook the publication of an annual, the " Williams College Index." Besides reproducing the official catalogue it contained considerable miscellaneous information, such as the programmes of Adelphic Union Exhibi- tions and the names of students who belonged to the debating societies, the fraternities, and other organi- zations. In 1857 the name of the annual was changed to the "Gulielmensian," and the Junior class as- sumed the responsibilities of publication. Little change in its general character and make-up occurred until 1871 when illustrations began to appear. Then followed what is known in the slang of the campus as " grinds." While the editors might solemnly announce that it would be " supremely ridiculous to take offence at anything in these pages," 2 the professors and stu- dents who happened to have been " roasted " were apt to take a different view of the subject. In 1910 this feature of the annual was definitely abandoned, since, in the judgment of the editors, a recently established monthly, the "Purple Cow," had "proved itself well able to fill the place of the so-called Gull humor. . . . We yield our copyright on laughter." The list of subsequent papers and magazines com- prises the " Vidette," 1867-75, published every other 1 McClure, American College Journalism, 40. - 2 Gulielmensian, xxi, 5. 308 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER week and devoted mainly to college news; the "Wil- liams Review," 1870-74, which appeared once in three weeks and gave considerable space to essays and discussions ; the "Athenaeum," 1874-85, a monthly ; the "Argo," 1882-85, a fortnightly; and the "Weekly/ 1 1887-1904. Current publications in 1916 were the "Literary Monthly," 1885-; the "Record," 1904-, a semi- weekly which became a tri- weekly in 1912; the "Purple Cow," 1907-, a monthly; and the "Williams Alumni Review," 1909-, issued five times a year. It is not proposed "to pick and choose for com- mendation" among these undergraduate publica- tions. They are, and in the nature of the case must be, essentially tentative and ephemeral. Some of the verse, however, is distinctly above the average. The editors of "A Williams Anthology," published in 1910, rated it for the last six years "as second to none ... in the inter-collegiate press." An earlier observer, "a well-known historian and critic of literature," did not hesitate to say that Williams and Dartmouth were then writing better verse than Oxford and Cambridge. 1 VII Renan thought it was the scenic grandeur of Mount Sinai that converted "the Jewish people from Egyp- tian idolaters to reverent monotheists." 2 In the pres- 1 Gulielmensian, xxxix, 24 (1895). Alfred Noyes made a similar claim twenty years later for undergraduate verse at Princeton. (The Nation, New York, April 13, 1916.) Possibly Gilbert Murray may be right in saying that a spirit of satiety has made the English univer- sities "an evil seed-ground for poetry." (Oxford Poetry, 1910-13, xx.) 2 G. Stanley Hall (1867), Gulielmensian, XLI, 7. 309 WILLIAMS COLLEGE ent era, when the drift of educational theories seems to be against the country and in favor of the town as the seat of a college, the question is at least pertinent What has the landscape of Northern Berkshire done for Williams students? It should be remembered in considering this question that there was no general recognition of the "physical charm" of the region until a comparatively recent period. The limitations, struggles, and hardships of pioneer life put the aesthetic sensibilities out of tune. Did the founder appreciate the glories of mountain and valley in West Township? We cannot tell, but we know that he pos- sessed a copy of La Pluche's "Nature Displayed," in seven volumes. These volumes are a series of dia- logues on natural history, on forests, meadows, pastures, mountains, rivers, and a great variety of kindred subjects, and the fact that he had them is significant. So far as we can learn from the scanty remains of their prose and verse from "The Fatal Error" of Aaron Leland and the "Descriptio Gulielmopolis " of William Cullen Bryant the earlier generations of students took little note of the aesthetic features of their environment. Nor does any trace of them ap- pear in the controversy over the question of removing the institution to Northampton. And the enthusiasm awakened by the lectures of Amos Eaton expended itself upon the botany and geology of the region, and without touching the canons of landscape beauty. The Rev. Dr. Samuel Hanson Cox, in a letter to the " New York Evangelist," attributed the aesthetic awakening, at least so far as college circles were con- 310 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER cerned, to the influence of President Griffin. "His mind," said the former, "had much of native poetry as well as eloquence," and he it was who discovered for the people of Williamstown "the picturesque and classic glories of their gorgeous valley, with its mighty mountains . . . and all their young family of little hills, that inspire the scholar, wake the poet and al- most educate the Freshman and the Sophomore half way to his diploma. . . . Griffin set that orb of senti- ment in motion." 1 To him the Williamstown land- scape was a constant and intense delight. A favor- ite horseback trip of his lay up Main Street, past the Congregational Meeting-House, across Hemlock Brook, and half a mile westward. "Well do I remem- ber," Judge Keyes Danforth relates in his "Reminis- cences," "his black horse with a white stripe in the face. He used to ride up to the home of my boyhood and say, ' Sonny, please open that gate so that I can ride to the top of the hill and get the view.' " 2 And this view from the top of the hill, which embraced the mountain ranges from Greylock to the Dome and the picturesque valley they enclose, with the village of Williamstown in the foreground and glimpses of "the peaceful river ' ' and shadowy towns beyond, he thought the most beautiful in the world. This nature cult of the third administration had two definite, tangible consequences. One of them was Mountain Day, the only existing college custom of any considerable antiquity. When the new holiday began is uncertain, but it must have been previous to 1 The Evangelist, August 14, 1856. 1 Danforth, Boyhood Reminiscences, 168. WILLIAMS COLLEGE 1827, since in President Griffin's manuscript ''Journal Containing the Code of Common Law" for that year the following memorandum appears: "About the 24th of June a day to go upon the mountain." Another consequence was the construction, on the 1 2th of May, 1830, of a bridle path to the top of Greylock. A correspondent sent an account of the expedition to the "American Advocate": "About 5 o'clock in the morning there was a gen- eral mustering of all who felt a disposition to assist in the accomplishment of what some were pleased to call 'a visionary scheme.' The students of the college, by leave of the faculty, equipped themselves with . . . axes, bush-hooks, crow-bars, hoes and dinner bas- kets. . . . The company, to the number at least of a hundred, the students forming a majority, arrived at 9 o'clock at Mr. Bacon's, a short distance south of what is called the 'Hopper.' ... All hands [then] set about the work with determined vigor. Some plied the axe, felling the larger timber such as could not be well avoided without changing too much the direc- tion of the route others assisted in grubbing up the underbrush &c and at about 1 1 o'clock the whole company arrived at ... the pinnacle of Saddle Moun- tain [Greylock], having cut a road through the woods three miles in length and passable for travellers on horseback. ... By the way 't was not a little pleasing to witness the labors of the students, as they sweat and tugged at the huge trunks of trees, some com- plaining of blistered hands, others of torn pantaloons and scratched shins ... as they clambered along through the thicket, over the scraggy hemlocks blown 312 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER down by the wind perhaps half a century ago. . . . The party commenced building an observatory on the pinnacle with the base about twenty-five feet square, and before leaving they had raised it twelve feet. It is contemplated to carry it forty or fifty feet higher." l The observatory was completed and dedicated May 26, when "about one hundred citizens of this town visited the summit of Saddle Mountain*' and Dr. Henry Lyman Sabin delivered "a spirited and eloquent address.'* 2 - - ra *- Traces of the new landscape gospel also began to appear in publications which had no official connec- tion with the college. During the summer of 1829 " A History of the County of Berkshire by Gentlemen of the County Clergymen and Laymen," was published under the editorial supervision of the Rev. Dr. David Dudley Field, of Stockbridge. Among these "Gentle- men," twenty-four in number, were two members of the faculty. Ebenezer Kellogg wrote the sketch of Williamstown, painstaking and valuable, but unre- sponsive to the beauty of its situation. Chester Dewey contributed "A General View of the County," which comprises one hundred and ninety-seven of the four hundred and sixty-eight pages in the book. As one might expect, special attention is paid to natural his- tory in his " View," - forty- two pages of it being de- voted to a catalogue of plants, but the attractions of the landscape are not wholly neglected. Three other contributors the editor, the Rev. Edwin Dwight, of Richmond, and the Rev. Dr. Shepard, of Lenox had something pleasant to say about the scenery. 1 American Advocate, May 19, 1830. * Ibid., June 2, 1830. 313 WILLIAMS COLLEGE It is not to be supposed that Edward Dorr Griffin, whose residence at Williamstown began in 1821, had no predecessors in appreciation of Berkshire scenery. One of the earliest among them was a young lady Miss Eliza S. Morton, afterwards Mrs. Josiah Quincy who visited Madam Dwight 1 at Stockbridge in 1786. "When, on the morning after our arrival," she wrote, "the window-shutters were opened, the Val- ley of the Housatonic . . . seemed to my enchanted vision like a fairy-land. I exclaimed, 'O Madam Dwight ! it looks like the Happy Valley of Abyssinia. There is the river and there are the mountains on every side. Why did you never tell me of this beauti- ful view/ My friend seemed surprised at my enthu- siasm/' 2 The itinerary of President Timothy Dwight's famous vacation " Travels " included Williamstown. Accompanied by Ebenezer Fitch and Israel Jones, a Trustee of the college, he made the ascent of Grey- lock "Tuesday October fifteenth/' 1799. "When I proposed this ride ... I was astonished to learn that the only person here who had been known to ascend this mountain was Mr. [Daniel] Nfoble] . . . and that even he had ascended it to accompany a stranger . . . whose curiosity had led him to undertake the enter- 1 Madam Dwight, nee Abigail Williams, married Joseph Dwight after the death of her first husband, Rev. John Sergeant. In 1 786 she was ' ' up- wards of sixty years of age, tall and erect, dignified, precise in manner, yet benevolent and pleasing. Her dress of rich silk, a high-crowned cap with plaited border and a watch ... all marked the gentlewoman and inspired respect. She was a new study to me and realized my ideas of Mrs. Shirley in Sir Charles Grandison." (Quoted in Life and Letters of Catharine M. Sedgwick, 16.) 2 Memoir of Eliza S. M. Quincy, 47. LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER prise. " The trip was accomplished without much difficulty. On the summit the excursionists found a growth of trees so thick and tall that it completely shut out the prospect. If they were to get a view of the landscape, nothing remained for them "but to climb to their tops" -a feat which the two college Presidents and the college Trustee successfully ac- complished. "The view," in the words of President Dwight, "is immense and of amazing grandeur. . . . The village of Williamstown shrunk to the size of a farm ; and its houses, churches and colleges appeared like the habitations of martins and wrens." l Three years afterward another traveller, the Rev. John Taylor, set out from Deerfield on a horseback trip to Central New York. "When I came to ye west side of ye [Hoosac] mountain," he tells us in his diary, " I found before I began to descend the most sublime prospect I had ever seen. The high mountains . . . the scattered fields upon those mountains the blooming appearance of vegetation and the valleys below filled with houses ... sunk so low as to be almost invisible . . . led me into a train of elevated and agreeable reflections." 2 Among the undergraduates of his time President Griffin had two enthusiastic disciples. One of them was Albert Hopkins. A touching illustration of his sympathy and communion with the changeful moods of earth and sky is found in a letter which he wrote January 2, 1866, giving an account of the interment at Williamstown of the remains of his son killed in the 1 Dwight, Travels, m, 241, 242, 244, 245. 2 Documentary History of the State of New York, in, 684. 315 WILLIAMS COLLEGE Civil War. "The night before there was every appear- ance of a heavy . . . storm. But Sabbath morning it was calm. As I went to church I noticed that the sun rested on the Vermont mountains . . . though with a mellowed light as though a veil had been thrown over them. In the after part of the day the open sky had spread southward so that the interment took place when the air was as mild and serene as spring, just as the last sun of the year was sinking toward the mountains." l The other disciple, David Dudley Field, was scarcely less sensitive to the moods and messages of the Berkshire Hills. " I shall never cease to congratu- late myself," he said in an oration before the Adelphic Union on the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation, "that my sense of beauty was trained within the circle of these mountains; that the evening light gilded for my eyes the sides of Greylock; that I saw at noon the sun standing over this endless variety of wood, meadow and stream; that the evening twilight heightened while it softened the beauty of the noon; and that, when I looked from my window into the moonlight it lay like a transparent, celestial robe upon the sleeping valley and the waking hills." 2 During the fourth and fifth decades of the last cen- tury began what may be called the second period of nature-worship at Williams. Among the disciples of the cult in that period were Paul Ansel Chadbourne, John Bascom, David Coit Scudder, James Abram Garfield, Cyrus Morris Dodd, Washington Gladden, 1 Prentiss, Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss, 229. 8 Field, Speeches, Arguments, and Miscellaneous Papers, II, 302. 316 LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER and George Lansing Raymond. We can reproduce in these pages the words of only two or three of these enthusiasts. "When I went to college/ 1 said John Bascom, "I met for the first time with mountain scenery and it has yielded to me ... the most skil- fully concocted cup of physical and spiritual pleasures that I have anywhere found in life." 1 Washington Gladden wrote for the " Williams Weekly" in 1893 an account of the beginning of his acquaintance with the Berkshire landscape: "I shall never forget that evening when I first entered Williamstown, riding on the top of the North Adams stage. The September rains had been abun- dant and the meadows and slopes were at their green- est; the atmosphere was as nearly transparent as we are apt to see it; the sun was just making behind the Taconics, and the shadows were creeping up the slopes of Williams and Prospect; as we paused on the little hill beyond Blackinton the outlines of the Saddle were defined against a sky as rich and deep as ever looked down on Naples or Palermo. ... To a boy who had seen few mountains that hour was a revelation." 2 This revelation was at the beginning of Washington Gladden's college course. Near the close of it another flashed upon him. "One winter morning walking down Bee Hill," he said, " the lilt of the chorus of 'The Mountains' came to me. I had a little music paper in my room in the village and on my arrival I wrote down the notes and cast about for words to fit them 1 Things Learned by Living, 44, 45. * Williams Weekly, Centennial Number, 1893. 317 WILLIAMS COLLEGE and the refrain 'The Mountains, the Mountains' sug- gested itself. I wrote the melody of the stanza next and fitted the words to it: 1 "The mountains, the mountains! we greet them with a song! Whose echoes, rebounding their woodland heights along, Shall mingle with anthems that winds and fountains sing, Till hill and valley gaily, gaily ring." VIII Though Williams, unlike the pre-Revolutionary colleges of New England, had a secular origin, it is not to be supposed that the first President and the first Trustees were out of sympathy with current the- ories about the place of theology in any properly con- stituted scheme of collegiate education. On the con- trary, they looked upon it as a matter of the gravest importance. A controversy which broke out in the Board at the meeting, September 7, 1796, over the retention of the Rev. Dr. Samuel Hopkins' " System of Doctrine" as a textbook, would seem to leave no doubt on the point. This textbook a " new school " treatise of remarkable intellectual vigor and independ- ence, published in 1793 the Trustees, by a vote of nine to six, "expunged," and put in its place the more conservative and orthodox "Lectures" of Philip Doddridge. The nine opponents of the "System" were all laymen and the six defenders all clergymen. Two years later the latter renewed the fight and failed again. "The corporation had a hard struggle," wrote Thomas Robbins in his diary September 7, 1798, "to reintroduce Dr. Hopkins' system as 2, 1 Gladden, Recollections, 81. 318 [Facsimile] 1 / r >**^L^ *+S f^4 tnutt^ ' A T jte ^Lfc jfS* V S/t/arv&rt o Rc-CrETLC ( ^ PCT11197258 MAY 9 1963 * Due end of f subject to r LD 21-100m-9,'48(B399slf - SEP 6-72 M' !R STACK'S" >3:% JAffig1973 4