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MAKING MEN, COLLEGES AND THE MIDWEST: THE BUILDING
AND WRITING OF INDIANA COLLEGES,1802-‘I860

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MAKING MEN, COLLEGES AND THE MIDWEST: THE BUILDING AND WRITING OF
INDIANA COLLEGES, 1802-1860

By

David Randall Gabrielse

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of History

2002

ABSTRACT

MAKING MEN, INSTITUTIONS, AND THE MIDWEST:
THE BUILDING AND WRITING OF INDIANA COLLEGES, 1824-1860

By
D. Randall Gabrielse

Historians have treated the half-century of conflicts that followed the creation of
the Northwest Territory. But until recently, historians have oversimplified the
development of colleges. But few studies have treated the colleges as active protagonists
of social contests in the western Great Lakes and as active creators of the regional and
national identities that Americans forged out of the frontier areas of Indiana, Michigan and
Illinois between 1811 and 1860.

This study fills this gap in scholarship. It uses the history of festivals and texts and
the new frontier and regional history to examine a wide variety of the texts that colleges
produced. It treats the colleges as institutions that were self-consciously involved in the
formation of regional, national, and other identities along axes of education, religion, race,
social class and gender, both in their day-to-day operation as educational institutions and
in their periodic festive production of speeches and programs which were published for
wider circulation and reading, both in the land they called the West and in other regions of
the nation.

This work treats the contests between regional and often nationalist and
centralizing goals of particular college founders and the particular views of local and
regional opposition groups. The core of this work is a study of three colleges established

between 1824 and 1840 and the texts they produced first to proclaim their purposes and

goals and then to defend them. Indiana College (later Indiana University), Wabash
College, and Indiana Asbury University (later Depauw University), are located in an arc to
the South and West of Indianapolis. They arose during an early period of institutional
development of the region and during the nineteenth-century publishing explosion. The
college leaders sought to educate young men to become part of an educated class of
ministers, politicians, professionals and teachers who could provide public and
professional leadership and education in an emerging region of the American republic.
Neither narrowly sectarian institutions nor merely extensions of a Presbyterian-
Congregationalist-Yale axis, they were located in particular towns, but were frequently
regionally oriented institutions led by men with regional or national, relationships and
visions of society. College presidents spoke of providing a “civilizing” function in a region
with a population they called “heterogenous.” But in the towns of Indiana, Illinois and
Michigan, their re-creation of classically oriented institutions united an educated class of
white men across the region and nation while excluding women, Afiican Americans,
Native Americans, immigrants and the majority of the native-bom population that lacked
classical education from both their institutions and from their narratives of the West.
The colleges published narratives that presented the colleges in the context of a
new and growing western region of the American republic and distributed them
throughout the region and in the Eastern states. But the colleges also produced
subversive voices. They excluded women, but some faculty served in female seminaries.
Faculty denounced sentimental literature while students and faculty composed historical
fiction. Colleges promoted the classics, but students chose courses they found more

useful.

Copyright by
D. Randall Gabrielse
2002

This dissertation is dedicated to David E. Gabrielse and Judy Gabrielse, who for
thirty-two years have encouraged me and helped me to be all I can be, and to Karen K.
Gabrielse, who saw me through the last two years.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work would not have been possible without the constant assistance of Professor
David T. Bailey, who directed it throughout too many years. Susan Sleeper Smith provided me
invaluable help in understanding the complex interaction of peoples in area that became the West
and then the Midwest in the first half of the nineteenth century. I never would have gotten to
write this work without the assistance of Gordon T. Stewart, who provided valuable advice on
surviving graduate school. Finally, the late David W. Walker set standards that improved this

work and provided encouragement that got me through the most difficult of times.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Chapter 1
The Indiana Frontier in the 183 Os ................................................................. 8
Chapter 2
Collegiate Institutions ................................................................................. 33
Chapter 3
Indiana Asbury and Methodist Higher Education in the Middle West .......... 68
Chapter 4
The Classical Curriculum and the Western Colleges .................................. 106
Chapter 5
Moral Philosophy and Afl‘ectionate Marriage in the Men’s Colleges .......... 134
Chapter 6
The Colleges’ Denunciation of and Production of Romance ...................... 152
Conclusions .............................................................................................. l 8 1
Bibliography ............................................................................................. 184

vii

INTRODUCTION

The colleges that were established in the Western Great Lakes between 1800 and
1860 were participants and sometimes protagonists in the contests that shaped the region.
Collegiate institutions engaged and often relied on many segments of society. Colleges
relied on towns where they located for land, money and students. Churches with
denominational or theological ties, throughout the region or even the nation, provided
money and students. State legislatures that granted the individual charters that authorized
colleges to incorporatet to grant degrees. These multiple, often complexly intertwined
relationships involved the colleges in the political, social and religious conflicts of the
region and the nation, and in turn made them significant institutions in the region’s
development.

But the colleges were particular kinds of agents in the contests that shaped the
region. Formally educated men sought to educate young men in moral philosophy and
with classical literature to equip them to be teachers, preachers, lawyers, businessmen, and
legislators to provide education and leadership in places where there were few
institutional authorities. In doing so, the colleges employed and created more published
texts than any of the other institutions in the region. They used published textbooks.
They published addresses first delivered on ritual occasions such as inaugurals and
commencements. They also published promotional articles in religious and other
periodicals and published student and faculty essays and poems in college newspapers.

These activities placed the colleges of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Illinois at the

center of both the creation of new regions out of the millions of acres of land acquired
from Native Americans through conquest, negotiation, and sale and an explosion in mass
publishing that transformed the region and nation by allowing institutions to communicate
across vast distances. The colleges produced men and texts. But the processes of
education and of oral address and publication of them for distant readers engaged the
colleges in the ongoing processes of land-taking, market-making, boundary-setting, state
forming and gendered self-making that the creation of the region out of a frontier and the
integration of it into the nation involved.

This work conceives of frontiers as particular places in time characterized by
particular modes of economic and cultural production and exchange. It relies on
conceptions of frontiers and regions that emphasize the agency of multiple social actors
rather than vague social forces and emphasize the openness and under-determinedness of
narratives of the development and transformation of particular places and identities.1 The

colleges of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Illinois arose precisely during this period when

 

1The transition of frontier areas to regions is presented in William Cronon, George Miles, and
Jay Gitlin, “Becoming West: Toward a New Understanding of Western History,” in Cronon, Miles, and
Gitlin, eds, Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America ’s Western Past (New York: Norton, 1992), 3-27.
Examples of frontier transformation include Andrew R L. Cayton, and Fredrika J. Teute, “On the
Connection of Frontiers,” in Cayton and Teute, eds. Contact Points: American Frontiers fiom the
Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1 75 0-1 830 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of
Early American History and Cultures by the University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 1-15; Daniel H.
Usner, Jr. Indians, Settlers & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley
Before 1 783 ( Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Cultures
by the University of North Carolina Press, 1991); and much of Richard White, The Middle Ground:
Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991). Susan Sleeper Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the
Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001) is the best example of the
under-determinedness of narratives of frontier development. Her portrayal of the ambiguousness of the
area between the St Wabash and St. Joseph rivers in the 18305 and 18405 is a notable improvement over
the closing chapters of White, The Middle Ground, which present an unresistable American advance afier
1815.

the area was changing from one where neither Native Americans nor Europeans nor
Americans held suflicient power to enforce their will and so had to relate to each other on
a middle ground of compromise and common understanding to one where Americans
gained sufficient power that the major disputes were between different groups of
European Americans.2

Colleges in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Illinois were established between 1802
and 1855, within living memory of battles at Fallen Timbers and Tippacanoe Creek, and
during or within years after President Andrew Jacksons’ military removal of Native
Americans from the Southwestern and Northwestern states. Their buildings and cultural
activity rested on land that European Americans acquired from Native Americans by
conquest, treaty and purchase between 1785 and 1850. Miami and Potawatomi peoples
controlled much of the land in Indiana until the New Purchase Treaty of 1818. Susan
Sleeper Smith has shown that significant numbers of Miamis and Potawatomis remained in
Indiana and Southern Michigan, using Catholicism, creation of new identities, or land
granted or purchased by clan leaders to remain among people who sought and constructed

binary categories of Whites and Indians.3

 

2Andrew R. L. Cayton’s Frontier Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996),
provides and overview of these developments, emphasizing the transfer of millions of acres of land from
Native Americans through the federal government to private title of European Americans; while Susan
Sleeper Smith’s Indian Women and French Men reminds that Miami and Potawatomi people remained in
the region, skillfully adjusting to its demands, long after the Americans secured political dominance.

3Robert F. Berkhofi‘er, J r., “American versus Indian: The Northwest Ordinance, Territory
Making and Native Americans,” Indiana Magazine of History 84, 2 (June, 1987). Sleeper-Smith argues
that in Michigan, only 651 Native Americans out of a recorded population between 7,600 and 8,300 were
actually removed. See also Sleeper-Smith’s contrast of the strategies of Marie Bailly and her daughters
Rose Howe and Eleanor. Sleeper Smith, Indian Women and French Men, 155-160.

3

Several recent works have addressed the previously neglected Midwestem
antebellum colleges as part of a development from non-sectarianism to secularism in
American higher education, as subjects of political debate in Michigan, as peculiarly part
of the Northwest, and as central to the Methodists’ move from insurgency to
respectability. George M. Marsden addressed the small colleges but focused on major
universities in his magisterial The Soul of the American University: From Protestant
Establishment to Established Nonbelief . Gayle Ann Williams traces this development
from non-sectarianism to secular education at Indiana University. Mary Janice Session
uses public records to trace the controversies over college charters in Michigan, which
focused on the University of Michigan’s efforts to prohibit chartering of other colleges
until the legislature passed the 1855 Act to Incorporate Institutions of Learning. Kenneth
H. Wheeler discusses how Midwestern colleges differed from those in other regions.
Douglas Steven Montagna examines Indiana Asbury University (later Depauw University)
and places college-building at the center of Methodists’ move from insurgency to
respectability. 4

Instead of focusing on a particular issue of religious or institutional development,

this work places the colleges in the Western Great Lakes as active participants in the

 

‘George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to
Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Gayle Ann Williams,
“Nonsectarianism and the Secularization of Indiana University, 1820-1891,” (Ph. D. dissertation, Indiana
University, 2001). Mary Janice Sessions, “Denominational Colleges of Michigan and the 1855 Act for
Incorporation of Institutions of Learning,” (Ph. D. dissertation, Wayne State University, 1989), Kenneth
H. Wheeler, “The Antebellum College in the Old Northwest: Higher Education and the Defining of the
Midwest (Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Land Ordinance of 1785, Northwest
Ordinance),”(Ph. D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1999). Douglas Steven Montagna, “A Faith for
Changing Seasons: Education and the Refinement of Methodism in Indiana, 1800-1872,” (Ph. D.
dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 2000).

contests that not only shaped the colleges but shaped education more broadly, the
construction of ethnic and gendered identities, and the relations of local and broadly
regional or national visions of the region. It relies on the work of David Waldstreicher to
examine the publication of these occasional and ritual addresses and essays for distribution
beyond the colleges’ own communities to regional and even national audiences.’ It
considers the colleges as producers of educated men and of published texts and larger
narratives. College founders established educational institutions to produce educated men
whom they hoped would lead the development of a thriving region from positions in
ministry, professions, political leadership, and teaching. The colleges also consumed and
produced a variety of published texts in the midst of the publishing explosion of the early
nineteenth century. As producers of educated men, and of narratives created through
repeated festive occasions and publication the colleges were intimately involved in
definitions of ethnicity, education, status, and gender in a geographic area where the
transfer of millions of acres of land and the relative absence of governmental and other
institutions left the course of development particularly underdeterrnined. The main
narratives that the colleges’ faculty promoted the education of young men for public
leadership teaching and the professions in a region where educated Protestant men would
educate and civilize the resident and immigrant populations they labeled “heterogeneous”
and so make “the West” a prosperous Protestant region of the American republic. The

almost total absence of women and Afiican Americans from these published narratives,

 

5David M Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism,
1 776-1820 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture,
Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

5

and the reduction of Native Americans, who remained in Indiana, Illinois and Michigan to
the end of the period, to long-gone noble savages concealed these groups from view as
effectively as the colleges excluded them from admission.

But like the peOple of the Midwest, members of the college communities acted in
ways that challenged these exclusions and produced alternative narratives that subverted
the founders’ narratives. Founders and faculty warned of the dangers of untamed
wilderness while students and other faculty wrote romantic pieces on the wonders of
nature. Student magazines offer glimpses of female writing and of particpation by
collegiate faculty in the education of women in female seminaries. College faculties thus
shaped gender identities in the region by sharply distinguishing between the education and
firture of women, and those of men who were portrayed entering public and professional
careers from which women were legally or institutionally barred. Professors responded to
calls to put common-school education ahead of colleges by promoting the classical
curriculum as essential to the creation of professionals, leaders and common-school
teachers in what they termed “a new land.” But large majorities of students enrolled in
preparatory classes or “English” curricula that allowed students to skip classical languages
and literature. The minister-professors in the colleges joined their colleagues in
promoting male and female discipline and self-control and denouncing novels and romantic
literature while students and faculty wrote romantic fiction in student magazines and
romanced women attending local female seminaries.

By placing the colleges within both local and regional contexts and by treating

both the founders’ narratives of education in male virtue and leadership and alternative

collegiate narratives this work seeks to move the historical consideration of colleges in the
Western Great Lakes beyond consideration of missionary work, the classical curriculum,
and roles in the development of denominations and non-sectarianism or secularism. It
points a way toward treating colleges as local and regional institutions that were subject
to and responded to local and regional developments and conflicts through the education

of young men and the publication of narratives that in turn shaped the region itself.

Chapter 1

The Colleges and the Indiana Frontier

In 1820, Governor Jonathan Jennings secured fi'om the Indiana Assembly a series of
bills that created a new college and located it in Perry Township of Monroe County. The
legislation completed Jennings’ shift of state collegiate education, a base of state political
power, away from William Henry Harrison’s base of political power in the south of the
state the center and north of the state, where Jennings and his colleagues held power. The
University of Vincennes had relied on a federal land grant in the 1802 legislation that
created the Indiana Territory. As Territorial Governor, William Henry Harrison had
headed the board of trustees, of which Jennings became clerk pro tem in 1807. The new
college would be on land granted by the federal government in the Enabling Act that
created the State of Indiana in 1816, with Jennings as its governor. In 1827, the legislature
authorized the trustees of the new Indiana Seminary at Bloomington to sell the land held by
Vincennes University and use its proceeds.‘

In 1833, a group of Presbyterian ministers employed in part by the American Home

Missionary Society sought to establish an educational institution. They originally stated

 

lThe territorial legislature created Vincennes University in 1806, with most of the territorial
authorities on the board of trustees. There is no evidence that the institution ofi‘ered any education,
particularly of collegiate grade, before 1820. On Jennings’ govemorship and his antipathy towards
Harrison, see Andrew R L. Cayton, Frontier Indiana, A History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier, eds.
Walter Nugent and Malcom Rohrbough (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 226-260. On
Vincennes University, see Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 243-244; and Matthew E. Welsh, “An Old Wound
Finally Healed: Vincennes University’s Struggle for Survival,” Indiana Magazine of History 84, 3
(September, 1988): 217-236.

that the institution should “be at first a classical and English high school, rising into a
college as soon as the wants of the country demand.” When they sought a charter in 1833,
they labeled the institution Wabash Teachers’ Seminary and Manual Labor College. Many
local residents, including many Presbyterians, lobbied and petitioned against the institution.
When it became clear that the state legislature’s vote on their charter would be close, the
trustees acceded to demands that they delete all references to the Presbyterian churches
from their proposed charter. The Assembly narrowly approved the charter.2

In 183 7, the Indiana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church secured a
charter for Indiana Asbury University from the Indiana Assembly. Indiana’s Methodist
leaders had been attempting to establish a Methodist influence in collegiate education since
1828. They first sought to establish a Methodist college in cooperation with the Illinois
Conference (which included all of Illinois and Indiana until 1832). They began seeking
their own college when the General Conference created a new Indiana Conference in 1832.
When they found little support among the laity, the Indiana Conference petitioned the state
legislature for additional faculty and influence in the Indiana College at Bloornington.

Finally, the Indiana Conference sought their own collegiate institution, including the power

 

2James Insley Osborne and Theodore Gregory Gronert, Wabash College: The First Hundred
Years (Crawfordsville: Wabash College, 1932), l-lO, 26-27, 32. Minutes of the Board of Trustees,
November 21, 1832, (Trustee Records of Wabash College, 1832-1845, College Records Book I), 2;
(hereafter MBTWC). MBTWC, November 22, 1832, 7; Januaryl7, 1833, 11; October 1, 1833, 15;
November 19, 1833, 17; January 30, 1834, 22. The opposition was from Old School Presbyterians who
objected to missionary, temperance and other activities related that the New School Presbyterians and
their Congregationalist allies pursued through the American Home Missionary Society and other
organizations that sought to spread New England ideas throughout the Northwest. The opponents may
have been particularly upset at the temperance campaign that James Thompson, a preacher in the county
and a member of the institution’s organizing committee, had organized in 1830. Osborne and Gronert,
Wabash College, 12, 24-25.

to elect trustees.3

State authorities, Presbyterian missionaries and leaders of the Methodist Episcopal
Church in Indiana established these colleges as engagements in particular local and regional
contests that contributed to the formation of states and a region whose residents considered
themselves part of the West of the American Republic out of an area that had been a
frontier within living memory.4 Like other Anglo American residents, these people saw
Indiana as place to be made over into a region that expressed their hopes and allayed their
fears. Like the founders of the colonial and early national colleges, these college founders
sought to create a classically educated group of young men who would become leaders in
schools and governments, and for some in churches. They consequently sought both to
create young men and to create the social and institutional spaces where they could
exercise authority and effect policy in the emerging West. Presbyterian and Methodist and
other college founders differed significantly, based on their particular fears and hopes for
the region, which became a significant part of the contests over the colleges in Indiana and

the other states that emerged from the Northwest Territory in the twenty-five years after

 

3George B. Manhart, Depauw Through the Years. Vol. 1, Indiana Asbury Univeristy, I83 7-
1884; Depauw University, 1884-1919 (Greencastle, Indiana: Depauw University, 1962), 9-10.

4Both the suggestion that there has been or could be more than one “ est” in the history of the
United States and the use of the term “frontier” are to take particular historiographical positions that will
be discussed in detail below. I follow the work of Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar, William Usner
and William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin in suggesting that areas particular areas moved from
being “frontiers” to being “regions, in particular periods, and that multiple Wests existed where people
considered their region to be “the West.” Thompson and Lamar, “Comparative Frontier History,”;
William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, “Becoming West,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking
America's Western Past, editors, William Cronon, George Miles, Jay Gitlin (New York : WW. Norton,
1992); Daniel H. Usner, Jr. Indians, Settlers, & Slaves in A Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower
Mississippi Valley Before I 783. (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of early American History and
Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

10

William Henry Harrison’s victories over Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh in 1811-1812.
Although residents, commentators, and even later historians spoke of Indiana’s rich
river valleys and plains as “open land,” that is, as land to be occupied, purchased,
cultivated, extracted, and otherwise developed; Indiana was peculiarly not open land in the
18205 and 18305. The United States government had not secured title to the majority of
the land within Indiana’s legislated boundaries until the New Purchase Treaty of 1818, and
would continue to seek to extinguish significant Native American land claims well into the
18405. Also, once Potawatonri, Miami, and Delaware peoples surrendered their claims, the
federal government claimed the land and sold it by their regulations. These regulations
themselves were the products of continuous contests between diverse aspirants to develop
the land according to their own visions of how the West ought to be developed. Finally,
European American residents were heavily occupying parts of Indian by the 183 05. The
recorded population of the state increased from 24,520 in the 1810 census, to 343,031 in
1830, 685,866 in 1840, and 988,416 by 1850. In fact, some time in the 18405, Indiana’s
out-rrrigration outpaced in-migration, making Indiana a point of departure for new
“Wests”. When placed in this context of multiple contested processes that moved the area
from frontier to region, the antebellum colleges of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Illinois
appear as institutions that educated young men in an effort to construct and reconstruct

identities around binary categories of ethnicity, gender, property-holding and other

 

5Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 267. On federal land regulations, see Malcom J. Rohrbough, The
Land Oflice Business: The Settlement and A dministration of American Public Lands, 1 789-1837 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1968). On Indiana’s population, see Gregory Rose, “Hoosier Origins: The
Nativity of Indiana’s United States-Born Population in 1850,” Indiana Magazine of History 81 (1985),
201-232; Rose, “The Distribution of Indiana’s Ethnic and Racial Minorities in 1850,” Indiana Magazine
of History 87, (September, 1991), 224-260.

11

economic activity, Protestant Christianity, and “civilization.”6 These efforts followed
closely the transformation of Indiana from a frontier where Potawatomi, Miami, Delware
and Anglo Americans closely contested each others’ authority to a region where the
significant contests over the future of the land and authority were among Anglo Americans.
The colleges produced and reproduced these identities and processes orally through
classroom lectures and recitations, literary society and commencement exhibitions, faculty
inaugural and baccalaureate addresses, and their advertising for students and raising of
funds. College catalogues, baccalaureate addresses, programs for exhibitions, student
magazines, and appeals for colleges and their curricula in religious periodicals reproduced
and distributed these identities and institutions in published form.7 When Wabash College’s
founders accepted land donated by Williamson Dunn, a lieutenant in William Henry
Harrison’s campaign against the Shawnee in 1811 and federal land officer after 1820, they

participated in the frontier process of land-taking.8 When Indiana College, Wabash

 

6On fragmentation see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Villages, Empires, and Republics in
the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
particularly the last three chapters. The history of the upper Ohio Valley gave no reason at the time to
assume that the United States’ defeat of the Native Americans was final and complete. The territory
making up Ohio and parts of South-East Indiana had been ceded several times to different European
parties in the ongoing battles between French, British, and then United States governments between 1755
and 1815. Only in hindsight can the beginning of an end be seen. See Richard White, The Middle
Ground, and David R Edmunds, Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Unity. See also Andrew R L.
Cayton, Frontier Indiana, (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1996), 20.

7This work relies heavily on David M. Waldstreicher’s discussion of the contested production of
multiple cultural identities through festive occasions and oral addresses and through their publication and
republication for multiple audiences. David M. Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The
Making of American Nationalism, 1 776-1820 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the
Omohundro of Early American History and Culture, 1997).

8Williamson Dunn was appointed Justice of the Peace and Judge of the Court of Common Pleas

for Jefferson County, Indiana in 1809. In 1813, he was commissioned as a Captain of militia to provide
mrity for settlers. He was also appointed register of deeds of the land office at Terre Haute and moved

12

College, and Indiana University all limited admission to men, and taught the virtues of male
public and political life as the core of their curricula, they engaged in deeply gendered
boundary-setting and self-making. When Wabash College founders and faculty warned that
Catholics would seek to educate American youth in the West, they drew boundaries on the
bases of religion and ethnicity, arguing that American citizens must make themselves in
particularly Protestant ways. When college faculties and students portrayed the land as
empty of Native Americans, and Native Americans as alternately romantic and violent
people, they engaged in new rounds of self-making, boundary-setting and legitirnations of
land-taking. When the colleges taught that commerce and contracts were central duties
and obligations of young men, they participated in the market-making that was
transforming land and property relations across the Ohio and Mississippi valleys.9

William Henry Harrison broke substantial Native American military resistance when
he defeated Tenskwatawa’s and Tecumseh’s alliance in 1811. Indiana gained statehood in

1816. The federal and Indiana governments secured title to most of the land in the new

 

to Crawfordsville with that ofi'ice in 1823. In 1829, Dunn donated fifiy acres of his farm at Hanover, and
$100 cash as an endowment of Hanover Academy (later Hanover College). Dunn also donated the land
for the Presbyterian Church at Crawfordsville and the land for the original campus of Wabash College.
Ruth B. Sutherland, “The James Dunn Family in Indiana Education,” Indiana Magazine of History n.d.

( 147-51); Osborne and Gronert, Wabash College, 12-14; Gronert, ed., Sugar Creek Saga, 4-6; Minutes of
the Wabash College Board of Trustees, November 21-22, 1832, December 19, 1832, October 1, 1833, in
Wabash College Trustee Records, 1832-1845, College Records 1, pages 2-6, 8, 15.

”On the ways that Americans portrayed Native Americans in dual terms as noble and violent,
both in literature and in science, see Robert F. Berkhofier, Jr., The White Man ’s Indian: Images of the
American Indian fiom Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); and Berkhoffer,
“American versus Indian: The Northwest Ordinance, Territory Making and Native Americans,” Indiana
Magazine of History 84, 2 (June, 1987).

13

state in 1818.10 But within a year of defeating Tenskwatawa, Harrison resigned the
territorial govemorship of Indiana alter the legislature and the United States Congress had
effectively stripped him of most governing powers.ll Though parts of Indiana may have
passed fi'om being a frontier before 1812, Harrison’s place as the victorious leader of the
United States Army against the Native Americans while he was steadily losing authority vis
a vis other Anglo American settlers of Indiana demonstrated that conflicts over whether
Native Americans, French, British or United States authorities would govern Indiana were
being replaced by conflicts over which Anglo Americans would govern Indiana and how
they would construct economic, political and social relations.

But the period between 1812 and 1850 was not one of an instant or easy transition
from a frontier or middle ground, where two groups had to find ways to interact,
understand and peacefully misunderstand each other, to a region of the United States which
could dictate terms to Native Americans. By 1850, the Miami, Potawatomi and other
Native Americans who remained in the Wabash Valley did so by purchasing property and
living within other the social, economic relations of the United States, by special action of
the United States government, or by seeking to be invisible to that government. But
between Harrison’s victories over Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh in Indiana Territory and

Francis Lafontaine’s death on the return to The State of Indiana, men like the two Francis

 

10In the New Purchase Treaties of 1818, Lewis Cass, Jonathan Jennings and Benjamin Parke
negotiated with Potawatomi, Wea, Delaware and Miami leaders for cession of claims to much of the
northern halfof Indiana, in addition to other lands. Charles J. Kappler, ed., Indian A jfairs, Laws and
Treaties, vol. 2. Washington, D.C., 1904), 168-174.

11Andrew R. L. Cayton, Frontier Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 220-
225; 250-252.

14

Lafontaines, Jean-Baptiste Richardville, and Francis Godfroy and women like Maconoqua
created worlds between those of the Miami community and the reductions of ethnic and
gender identity, land-holding, political relations and economic activity that the United
States sought to impose on them.12

To say that Indiana had been a frontier and was becoming a region is not to return
to the abstractions of Frederick Jackson Turner, but to take seriously the changes in social
relations in particular places that became part of the United States.13 After nearly ninety
years of involuted criticisms, expansions, contractions and other salvage efforts of
Frederick Jackson Tumer’s frontier thesis, Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar’s 1981
“Comparative Frontier History” turned a truly new corner in the history of American
frontiers.“ They suggested that frontiers have existed in many places where two or more

distinct peoples have encountered each other in particular landed places and times where

 

”The new required work on Native American confrontation, integration and invisability is Susan
Sleeper Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great
Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Amherst Press, 2001). On the Lafontaines, Richardvilles
and Godfroys, see Bert Anson, “Chief Francis Lafontaine and the Miami Emigration from Indiana,”
Indiana Magazine of History (n.d.), 241-268; Juanita Hunter, “The Indians and the Michigan Road,”
Indiana Magazine of History 83, 3 (September, 1987), 244-66; Paul Wallace Gates, “Introduction,” in
Nellie Armstrong and Robertson Dorothy Riker, eds., The John Tipton Papers, 1809-1 839 (3 vols.,
Indiana Historical Collections, Vols., 24-26; (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1942). 1-60;
Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 53-54, 145-53, 263; Robert A. Trennert, Indiana Traders on the Middle
Border: The House of Ewing, 1827-1854 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981); Leon M. Gordon
II, “Effects of the Michigan Road on Northern Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History 46, 1 (March,
1950), 377-402; R David Edmunds, “The Praire Potawatomi Removal of 1833,” Indiana Magazine of
History 68, 3 (September, 1972), 240-253.

l3Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History in Frederick
Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (Toronto: Dover, 1996). Tuner first presented his
essay to the American Historical Association meetings at Chicago, July 12, 1893, and it first appeared in
print in the Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (Madison, December, 1893).

1‘Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar, “Comparative Frontier History,” in Lamar and

Thompson, eds., The Frontier in History: North America and Southern A fiica Compared (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1981).

15

 

people negotiated and develop new relations with each other while neither had the
resources or authority to dominate the other. Thompson and Lamar thereby open the
possibility of examining such encounters without foreclosing their outcomes with a
generalized, unified narrative. Their minimal conceptual apparatus includes land, the
encounter of two or more peoples, and the beginning and development of their working out
of their relations in inter-cultural understandings and misunderstandings.

In the 19905, two major developments in scholarship addressed American frontiers,
back-countries and Wests. In the New Western History, Donald Worster, Patricia
Limerick and Richard White’s It ’5 Your Misfortune and None of My Own defined a New
Western History, as the history of arid North America west of 100 degrees latitude.” They
thereby walled off their subject not only from the problematic concept of the frontier, but
from the complexity of dealing with many regions which historical subjects described as
“the West” at difi’erent times and places in American history. The New Western History
couched social history concepts of race, class, gender and status in a narrative of conquest
by European Americans and decline of Native Americans and complex social groups that
made these processes appear immutable and inevitable.

In contrast to the New Western History’s focus on one narrowly defined and
unified American West, Daniel H. Usner, James H. Merrell, William Cronon et. al., and

Richard White’s path-breaking The Middle Ground, embrace a plurality of fi'ontiers as

 

1sPatricia Nelson Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New
York: Norton, 1987); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity and the Growth of the American
West (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Richard White, “It 's Your Misfortune and None of My Own A
History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

16

particular places in a loosely-defined state of cultural exchange among several peoples.
They describe complex and under-determined encounters between peoples in places where
a lack of power and institutions on any side prevented total domination, producing new
cultural matrices and adaptations through multiple and on-going inter-cultural
understandings and nus-understandings. Whereas the New Western Historians employ
social history categories of race and ethnicity, class and status, and gender in a narrative of
conquest-and-decline, the new frontier historians use the same concepts to consider
differences not only within particular frontier regions, but among particular peoples
involved in frontier encounters. They thereby produce much more subtle, flexible and
under-determined fiameworks for examining multiple American Wests and frontiers. They
also provide insightful links between the contests among peoples in these encounters with
larger political entities such as states, nations and empires.16 Finally, these more flexible
narratives provide space to include the Potawatomi and Miami peoples who remained, and

still remain, in the Kalamazoo, St. Mary’s and Wabash valleys and the region known to

 

16Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes
Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Richard White’s concept
of a “middle ground” on which Native Americans and European people and authorities interacted, both
understanding and misunderstanding each other, has set a standard for examining the cultural interaction
that is at the heart of new understandings of frontiers. But in his own work, White abandons that model
for the conquest and decline narrative alter the British withdrawal from the United States’ western edges
after 1815. Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers, & Slaves inA Frontier Exchange Economy: The
Lower Mississippi Valley Before I 783. (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of early Ameriean History
and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 5-9; James H.
Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas, and Their Neighbors from European Contact Through The
Era of Removal (New York: Norton, 1989); William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin “Becoming
West: Toward A New Understanding of Western History,” in William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay
Gitlin .eds. Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America ’5 Western Past (New York: Norton, 1992), 7.

17

locals as Michiana at the beginning of the twenty-first century.17

William Henry Harrison’s victories and the ensuing New Purchase Treaties of 1818
culminated the United States’ thirty-three year campaign to wrest control of the Miami and
Wabash valleys from the Miami, Potawatomi and other Native Americans. They also
launched a new phase in their campaign to control the St. Mary, St. Joseph and
Kalamazoo valleys of the northern Indiana and southern Michigan area now known as
Michiana. Native Americans did not stop resisting, as conflicts over the Michigan Road,
Deer Lick and the Potawatomi Removal of 1833 demonstrated." But by 1818, the
combination of United States power, large numbers of European irnnrigrants, and the
consequent decline of fur-bearing animals in the region and the consequent dependence of
Native Americans on government annuities gave the United States and European American
immigrants powerfirl advantages in land-taking, boundary-making, state-making, market-
making and self-shaping. From that point on, the contests over who would occupy, own
and work the land of Indiana, Illinois and southern Michigan were increasingly between
groups of European Americans more-or-less loyal to the United States, and decreasingly
between these people and Native Americans.

In 183 9, George Winter traveled from Logansport to Deaf Man’s Village on the

 

1.,On the persistence of native peoples in these areas, see Stewart Rafert, The Miami Indians of
Indiana: A Persistant People, 1654-1994. (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996); James A.
Clifion, The Pokagons, 1683-1983: Catholic Potawatomi Indians of the St. Joseph River Valley,
(Lanham: University Press of America, 1984); Trennert, Robert A. Indian Traders on the Middle Border:
The House of Ewing, 182 7-54, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981).

18Bryan M. Doerr ,” The Massacre at Deer Lick Creek, Madison County, Indiana Magazine of
History 93, no. 1 (1997): 19-47; Juanita Hunter, “The Indians and the Michigan Road” Indiana Magazine
of History 83, 3 (September, 1987), 244-246. See also Sleeper-Smith, Rethinking Cultural Encounters in
the Western Great Lakes.

18

Great Miami Reservation, to paint a portrait of a woman known locally as Maconoqua.
Winter traveled on commission of Joseph Slocum, of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to paint
the woman whom Slocum claimed was his sister, who, as a child, had been abducted during
an attack by Native Americans from the family home in the Wyoming Valley of
Pennsylvania. Winter made the short journey across central Indiana via an occasional canal
boat (there was no regular service on the Wabash and Erie Canal), and then on “nothing
but ‘blind roads’ and Indian trails” to sketch her at Deaf Man’s Village, which the Miami
had named for her deceased Miami husband." On his journey, Winter encountered several
people whose backgrounds and activities blurred and confused the binary categories of
ethnicity, gender, and status that the United States government and Anglo American
settlers, including college leaders, were trying building in the Midwest by the 18305.20
Winter met Pa-Lonz-Wa, or Francis Godfroy, a wealthy Miami leader and firr trader, and
his law-school educated son Jim; a single white woman and son who lived on the Miami
reservation because they feared white men more than they did nearby Indians; a squatter

who spoke some Miami; “Tom Smith, a ‘Wea , a white man, nephew of Francis Godfroy

and acting in the capacity of a clerk” in Godfioy’s trading post; and a Miami man who

 

l9George Winter, Journal of a Visit to Deaf Man ’s Village, (Lafi‘ayette, Indiana, 1879), 160.

20In “Americans versus Indians: The Northwest Ordinance, Territory Making, and Native
Americans,” Robert Berkhofl‘er Jr. describes how Americans at one and the same time claimed that
American republicanism was good for all peoples and excluded certain peoples, including African
Americans and Native Americans, on racial and ethnic grounds. In the Northwest, such exclusion of
Native Americans was an important consideration in the alienation of land from peoples whom the
government gathered under the term “Indian,” and giving it those it gathered under the term “white.”
Robert F. Berkhofi‘er, Jr., “Americans versus Indians: The Northwest Ordinance, Territory Making, and
Native Americans,” Indiana Magazine of History, Special Issue on the Northwest Ordinance 84, 2

(March, 1988), 90-93.
I 9

greeted him with “Bojour, sir.” On the Indian trail, Winter met Maconoqua’s son-in—law,
Captain Brouillette, whom Winter had previously met at the 1837 annuity payment to the
Potawatomis, “at Demoss’ Tavern on the Michigan Road jsut north of Logansport.”
Brouillette was carrying a bloody hog’s head to the American territorial magistrate at Peru,
to complain that nearby European American settlers had stolen and killed his hogs.21

Then there was Maconoqua’s family and home. When Winter arrived at
Maconoqua’s home, he found a “double log” with two or three lesser cabins attached to it;
also nearby he found a log stable and a “tall comcrib.” Once there, Winter found “It was to
a Negro,” who spoke fluent Miami and was building a lathe and plaster chimney on
Maconoqua’s house, “that I was under obligation to express my purposes of the visit...”22
Winter’s meal in Maconoqua’s home “consisted of fiied chicken, a good cup of coffee, and
tolerable bread, and very good butter,” all prepared by Kick-kesqua, Maconoqua’s
daughter and Brouillette’s wife.23 Inside the home, Winter found a fireplace large enough
for a four-foot log, “three bunks, substitutes for bedsteads, such as are commonly used by
frontier people in their rude accommodations,” and a boarded bed for Maconoqua.24 He
also found beads, several woman’s necklaces, leggings with fancy ribbons, and “a showy

”25

silk shawl hung here and there. Winter’s bed was posted and covered with “a fine

 

21Winter, Journal. 167, 180, 172 n. 20.
22Winter, Journal. 168.
23Winter, Journal. 169.
24Winter, Journal. 173.
2S'Winter, Journal. 173.

20

figured shawl of dusty color, as a substitute for a sheet; [and] nice clean blankets folded
upon the boards of the bunk.

Maconqua, or Frances Slocum, apparently was a woman who was captured from
her home in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania in the 17805. She revealed her past only
when forced removal seemed imminent.26 She became something of a folk-hero in Indiana.
But her celebrity appears to derive fiom popular fascination with the exotic aspects of her
life, and the binary stereotype of Native Americans as either dangerous savages in need of
removal or assirrrilation, or as savages nobly disappeared (or disappearing) from the land.
But it is at once Maconoqua’s specificity and her commonness that illuminates the late
Indiana fiontier and raises doubts about American settlers’ claims of the inevitability of its
demise. Maconoqua was one of many persons living on or near the large Miami
Reservation who confounded Anglo American ofiicials’ and settlers’ binary categories not
only of race, ethnicity, and gender and land-holding. She and like Francis Godfroy,
Francis Lafontaine and Joseph Richardville complicated the boundary-making, market-
making, self-shaping and other transfonnative activities on the late Indiana fiontier of the

18305.27

 

26Sleeper-Smith shows that Maconqua or Frances Slocum apparently saved her entire village
from removal by listing them as family in a special petition to Congress which presented her as an elderly
white woman who wished to live out her final years in her home, and so secured title to a full section of
land and payment of her annuity share at Fort Wayne rather than Kansas. Sleeper Smith, Reconsidering
Cultural Encounters in the Western Great Lakes, 135-137.

2”This section relies on Susan Sleeper Smith’s discussion in her chapter “Hiding in Plain View,”
in Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes, 123-140. Sleeper-Smith discusses in detail
how Maconoqua and others like her not only persisted and resisted removal, but at times remained
“invisible” because they did not live or appear as the “Indians,” that settlers and authorities expected to
encounter. She concludes her chapter by showing how these strategies and the stereotypes they sought to
counter worked against these same groups of Miami in the 18905, as the federal government de-listed the
Indiana Miami based on their education and adoption of practices deemed white and civilized. Ibid., 140-

21

The location, ownership and construction of Maconoqua’s home included several
layers of claims that reveal the ongoing process of the United States’ land-taking and the
resistance of some of the Miami people to it. These were one part of the area’s
transformation from fi'ontier to state and region. Maconoqua’s home was on or near the
Great Miami Reserve, which was created by the New Purchase Treaty of 1818. The
Potawatomi, Miami, Wea and Delaware surrendered their claims to most of the land they
had retained South of the Wabash River after 1809, and so surrendered most of the
southern half of the state.28 The treaty demonstrated the dominant power of the United
States that enabled it to secure the surrender of a large swath of land fiom Native
Americans. But the Miami also demonstrated the strength of their resolve to resist both
material and political pressures for emigration. Their persistence stood in the face of not
only the United States’ political pressures, but also in the face of rapid declines in the
populations of animals that had supported their diet and the fur trade.”

The Miami and Potawatomi who remained in Indiana between 1818 and 1845 did
so by several means. The Great Miami Reservation along the Wabash River from the Eel
to the Salamanie, which Winter traversed in his journey, and the four other Miami
reservations, ranging from two miles square to ten miles square, provided a relatively large
remaining home for some. Additionally, Jean B. Richardville purchased nine sections of

land in fee simple. Another forty sections of land were granted to Richardville’s sons,

 

141 .
28Winter“, Cayton, 263-264.

29“Treaty with the Potawatomi,” 1818”; “Treaty With the Wea, 1818"; “Treaty with the
Delawares, 1818"; “Treaty with he Miami, 1818"; Kappler, 11, 168-174.

22

Francis and Louis Godfrey, and other people, including several “half-blooded Miami.”
These personal grants were the most ambiguous of the claims that the Miami secured in the
treaty, as the holders were restricted from selling or disposing of them without “the
approbation of the President of the United States.” These grants also were notorious for
being the means for traders to secure choice land as payment for debts owed by Native
Americans engaged in treaty negotiations.30

But even before Winter’s 1839 visit to Maconoqua’s home, the Miami had agreed
to cede some of the reservations created by the 1818 treatyf’l As part of the 1838 treaty,
Maconoqua’s daughters, Kick-ke-se-qua and O-zah-shin quah, received “as tenants in

common, one section of land on the Mississinewa river to include his improvements.”2

petitions by interested parties.”33
The standing and activities of Maconqua, her wealth as evident in the size of her

house, her silk shawls, the com-crib, the stable and the plaster chimney indicate that she

and her household acquired significant wealth. Maconoqua was one of a number of Native

American women who accumulated significant wealth from continuing and consolidating

the trading activities of their fathers, husbands, or children. She and her household not

 

30Kappler, II, “Treaty with the Miami,” 172-174. Paul Wallace Gates, “Introduction to the John
S. Tipton Papers.”

31“Treaty with the Miami, 1838,” in Charles J. Kappler, Indian A flairs, Laws and Treaties. v.
2, Treaties, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 519-524.

32Kappler, “Treaty with the Miami, 1838,” 523.

3'3Winter’s Journal cites Martha Bennet Phelps, Frances Slocum: The Lost Sister of Wyoming,
Compiled and Written by her Grandniece Martha Bennett Phelps (W ilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania: Published
by the Author, 1906), 107-113.

23

only challenged the easy reductions of white and Indian that settlers imposed on the land
and people, they also challenged Anglo American expectations that European American
men would do the market-making on the Indiana fi'ontier. Until its reduction in 1845, the
Great Miami Reserve similarly challenged simple categories of ethnicity and activities.
Captain Bygosh’s French background and federal government commission, the legal
education of Francis Godfi'oy’s son Jim, the “white” nephew of Godfroy, the young
woman’s decision to live on the reserve, and the squatter who spoke Miami along with the
Miami who greeted Winter “Bonjour, sir,” similarly provided complex combinations of
ethnicity, education, occupation and language in central Indiana.

The last forced removal and mass migration of the Miami fiom Indiana was
completed by 1847, but by that time, Indiana was transformed. 3’ The recorded population
of the state increased fi'om 24,520 persons in 1810, to 343,031 persons in 1830, 685,866
persons in 1840, and 988,416 persons by 1850, mostly by natural increase.35 Indiana
moved fi'om being a destination of European American immigration to a point of departure
for emigrants to Illinois, Michigan and the states west of the Mississippi River."6 No longer

could Miami, Potowatomi and other Native Americans organize spiritual or military

 

34 Anson, “Lafontaine and the Miami Emigration,” 265-268.
3sCayton, Frontier Indiana, 267.

36On the transience, instability and emigration of local populations in the Ohio Valley and Great
Lakes region, see Susan E. Grey, The Yankee West: Community Life on the Michigan Frontier (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 87-88, 144, 154-156, 172; John Mack Faragher, Sugar
Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 50-60; Cayton, Frontier
Indiana, 267 . Gregory Rose uses the 1850 census to argue that natural increase overtook immigration as
the primary source of population increase by the middle 18305, and that by 1850, more people were
emigrating fiom Indiana than were arriving there. Gregory Rose, “Hoosier Origins: The Nativity of
Indiana’s United States-Bom Population in 1850,” Indiana Magazine of History. 212.

24

resistance to removal or emigration. Instead, individual men, women and clans secured
rights to remain through specific congressional actions, outright purchase of land, or
tenancy on personal reserves.37 The Miami did not disappear fiom Indiana. But those
who remained either adopted to the European American domestic and commercial
economies and political order or cultivated invisibility to the American governments by
shedding characteristics that officials considered “Indian.”38
The Colleges and the Indiana Frontier

William Henry Harrison’s involvement in the pivotal battle for Anglo American
control of Indiana ultimately involved him in the establishment of the political and labor
relations under which Anglo Americans would govern Indiana and work the rich soil of the
Indiana and Illinois prairies and river valleys. Harrison was a son of a declining Virginia
planter. As both a planter and territorial governor, Harrison promoted of slave labor and
the circumvention of the prohibitions in Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance. His defeat
by free labor residents of Indiana reflected the tensions in a state rapidly filling with settlers

after 1800, and the determinative role that the sectional politics of slave labor would play in

the nation between 1800 and 1864. 39 Indiana and the rest of the Northwest Territory had

 

37Anson, “Lafontaine and the Miami Emigration,” focuses on this issue. Maconoqua and her
daughters were one group out of several women who were able to build on fur-trading activities to
establish significant households and thereby resist removal and emigration.

3“See Berkhoffer, “American versus Indian,” and Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French
Men, on characteristics that oflicials considered “Indian” and Native Americans’ ways of shedding them.

39The following discussion relies heavily on the work of Paul Finkleman and Andrew R L.
Cayton. Paul F inkleman, “Evading the Ordinance: The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois,”
Journal of the Early Republic 9 (Spring, 1989): 21-51; Paul Finkleman, “Slavery and the Northwest
Ordinance: A Study in Ambiguity,” Journal of the Early Republic 6 (1986): 343-370; Andrew R L.
Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 250-252; Cayton, “‘Separate Interests’ and the Nation-State: The Washington
Administration and the Origins of Regionalism in the Trans-Appalachian West,” Journal of American

25

been created by Congress in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. In 1800, Harrison became
the territorial governor of Indiana Territory, the Western half of the remaining Northwest
Territory. Article VI of the Ordinance prohibited slavery in the Territory. But as the son
of a prominent James River family, Harrison saw slavery as not only as reasonable, but as
necessary to the orderly development of the region. Governor Hanison lead fellow
planters in petitioning Congress to amend or suspend the prohibition on slavery. He also
established territorial legislation to evade the law. In 1802, Harrison led a campaign to
send another petition to the Senate. He and the other petitioners argued, like those before
them, that the lack of laborers made slavery necessary to settle and develop the region, that
without slavery those with slaves would move to Spanish Missouri, and that their proposal
was ultimately humanitarian because it would disperse Afiican slaves and would eventually
lead to emancipation. Three different congressional committees considered the petition
between 1803 and 1806, but the Congress took no action. Congress did not act on several
more petitions in 1806-1807. But pro-slavery men in the Northwest stopped petitioning
Congress in 1807, because anti-slavery petitions, from upland Southerners who sought to
protect fiee labor and free soil were beginning to compete with them, and because

indenture laws were providing a means to evade Article VI.40

 

History 79, 1 (June, 1992): 39-67; Andrew R L. Cayton and Peter S. Onuf, The Midwest and the Nation:
Rethinking the History of an American Region. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). On the
larger context and struggles over Article IV and the rest of the Northwest Ordinance, see Peter S. Onuf,
Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1987).

”When Harrison became governor in 1800, Congress had already disregarded or dismissed three
petitions to allow slavery in the territory. The Senate also tabled an 1801 petition that proposed to allow
importation of slaves, with their children serving as indentured servants until adulthood. F inkleman,
“Evading the Ordinance,” 33-38; Cayton, Frontier Indiana. 187-189.

26

As Governor of Indiana Territory, Harrison enacted “A Law Concerning Servants”
in 1803.’1 The law recognized the “contracts” of persons who came into Indiana with
“servants,” provided physical punishments for refiisal to work, provided for additions to
indenture for many infractions, allowed sale and inheritance of contracts, and prohibited
third parties from “entertaining” or “harboring” servants. Two days prior to enacting the
servant law, Harrison stripped Afiican “servants” of the fictional legal protections of that
law with a law that prohibited blacks from testifying in court against whites. In 1806, the
territorial legislature passed a law that both spoke of “slave and servant” and provided
whipping of “servants or slaves” found without passes.42 It solidified the presumption that
all Afiican Americans in Indiana were servants and slaves.

Opposition arose to Harrison’s patronage practices, his support of slavery in the
state, and his actual ownership of slaves. Opponents, who saw slavery as a threat to free
labor, and opposed both the political power of Vincennes and Harrison’s stranglehold on
public ofiices, called him a haughty aristocrat and decried the effects of slavery on fi'ee

labor."3 Jonathan Jennings, elected as Indiana’s territorial congressional delegate in 1809,

 

41F inkleman, “Evading the Ordinance,” 34-35; “A Law Concerning Servants, Adopted from the
Virginia code, and published at Vincennes, the twenty-second day of September one thousand eight
hundred and three ....,” in Francis S. Philbrick, ed., Laws of the Indiana Territory, 1801-1809
(Springfield, 111., 1930), 42. The texts of the laws which Finkleman reports the territorial legislature
passed after 1805 “to protect bondage in that region,” make up “Appendix G: Laws of the Indiana
Territory Concerning Slaves and Negroes or Mulatto Servants,” of James B. Dillon, A History of Indiana
From Its Earliest Exploration by Europeans to the Close of Territorial Government in 1816
(Indianapolis: Bingham & Doughty, 1859; reprint, New York: Arno Press and New York Times, 1971),
617-619, 619-622, 622-623.

47This act is “An Act Concerning Servants,” in Appendix G of Dillon, History of Indiana, 619-
621.

43'Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 242-248.

27

1811, 1812, and 1814, promoted congressional action that ordered popular election of the
nine-man territorial legislature, thus removing some of Harrison’s theretofore considerable
patronage power. At the same time that Jennings undercut Harrison’s federal authority,
the Indiana legislature expanded the franchise, reducing requirements to a fifty-cent poll-tax
and imposed ballot voting by township in place of viva voce voting by county. By the time
Harrison resigned in late 1812, he had lost much of his authority in the territory.“ But
much more had changed. Jennings and his supporters opposed and deposed the hero of
Tippacanoe because they opposed his vision of who would own, govern, and work the land
of Indiana. And Indiana became the first of many states where the extension of Afiican
slave labor to the West divided state, and increasingly divided the state along sectional
lines.

The contest that William Henry Harrison and Jonathan Jennings waged for control
of Indiana extended to the nascent state university." Harrison, Jennings, and most of
Indiana’s political elite sat on the board of Vincennes University, which the territorial
legislature had created in November of 1806 and granted authority to sell 4,000 of the
23,040 acres of land granted by Congress to support education in 1802.“5 Conflict on the
board began soon after Jennings was elected clerk pro tem in 1807 . The board evidently

did not meet after 1812, and there is no record that any education occurred there in the

 

“Ibid., 251.

’5 The following discussion is based on Matthew E. Welsh, “An Old Wound Finally Healed:
Vincennes University’s Struggle for Survival,” Indiana Magazine of History 84, 3 (September, 1988):
217-236.

4"Welsh, “Vincennes University,” 218.

28

antebellum period. But in 1820, Jennings, as Governor, signed legislation that established a
board of trustees for a new Indiana Seminary at Bloomington, in Perry Township of
Monroe County. This was the township that Congress had provided as an additional
township to support education in the Indiana Enabling Act of 1816.‘7 The legislation and
charter were clearly intended to remove any remaining legitimacy fiom the dormant
Vincennes institution and Harrison’s base of political support. In 1827, the Indiana
Assembly authorized the Bloomington institution to sell the 4,000 acres of land that the
Vincennes institution had been granted.48
Conclusions

The story of Indiana’s movement fiom frontier to part of a region between 1800
and 1850 is not Frederick Jackson Tumer’s story of a series of frontiers peopled first by
Native Americans and then by traders, ranchers, miners and farmers in succession. Instead
it is a rich and complex web of stories of how Miami and Potawatomi peoples and Anglo
American soldiers, traders, planters, farmers, government oficials, teachers, preachers and
laborers, sought, often at the same time, to shape Indiana and the surrounding area in their
image. In the contests that arose between them, they shifted the physical and biotic
environment, occupied and claimed land, created new avenues of exchange and markets,

and created new boundaries on the land and between identities based in ethnicity, class and

 

4"Annals of Congress, 12, Cong, l 5e55, pp. 1841-1844, cited in Welsh, “Vincennes University,”
225

4”This act resulted in a lawsuit, whereby the trustees of Vincennes University accused the State of
Indiana and Indiana University of wrongfully seizing and selling land. The suit and arguments over
whether the State of Indiana or Indiana University would pay the damages dragged out into the twentieth
century. Welsh, “Vincennes University,” 230-235.

29

gender. But these contests occurred much more concurrently than historians have
sometimes considered. That Frances Slocum, or Maconoqua, and her family were
petitioning Congress to keep their land in 183 9, when the colleges at Hanover,
Bloomington, Crawfordsville and Greencastle were in full operation is one small suggestion
of how contested and incomplete the dominance of the builders of an American West
remained in the 18305 and 18405.

The struggles of these peoples and institutions have continued into new centuries.
In 1897, Gabriel Godfroy, struggled to remain a Miami afier the federal government ruled
that he had “voluntarily placed himself within the definition of a citizen” rather than a tribal
Miarrri.49 In 1996, Stewart Rafter published The Miami Indians of Indiana: A Persistent
People, 1654-1994, reminding that some Miami have remained in Indiana throughout the
development of the state and region. In 2000, the federal government recognized the Gun
Lake Tribe of Potawatomi as a federally listed Native American group. In September,
2002, The United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals turned down a request by the Gun
Lake tribe of Pottawatomi Indians to force the state of Michigan to negotiate a casino
compact with the tribe so they could build an 180,000 square foot casino in Bradley in
Allegan County. The court ruled that the band did not own any land in trust with the
federal government in Michigan. By that time, the conflict had divided much of that rural

county’s population for nearly three years.50 The dispute between Vincennes University

 

49Rafert, The Miami Indians of Indiana, 175; Sleeper-Smith, Rethinking Cultural Encounter in
the Western Great Lakes, 140.

so“Michigan Facing Another Casino Compact Dilemma,” The Detroit News (December 25.

2000); http://wwwdctncws.com/ZOOO/metro/OO1225/mctro-l67269.1rgn_; “Appeals Court Denies Tribe’s
Casino Plan,” The Grand Rapids Press (September 21, 2002), A1, A6.

30

and the University of Indiana, with the State of Indiana in the middle, dragged out until
1895, when the State of Indiana paid the Vincennes Institution for the land sold in the
18205. The University of Vincennes gained support from a property tax levied on Gibson
County land.51

This work necessarily focuses on one set of these stories. It explores how several
groups of ministers sought to build colleges in the emerging region in order to educate
young men who might serve as leaders in businesses, churches and governments. The
colleges stood on land wrested from Native Americans within living memory. They
reproduced and reinforced binary definitions of masculinity and femininity by excluding
women from the colleges and by consciously shaping the colleges to prepare men for
careers from which women were legally or institutionally excluded. They contributed to
new markets for printed materials, not only by using textbooks and publishing catalogs and
magazines and addresses; but by creating a class of classically educated men to purchase,
read and produce such materials. The men who established Wabash College at
Crawfordsville adjusted the charter and election of trustees to local resistance to their
vision of polite society and reproduction of it through a college. The leaders of the Indiana
Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church built their college after Indiana College
rejected their bid for influence, and despite lay claims that their college would produce a
separate class of Methodist ministers. In 2002, one hundred and seventy years after the
first steps in its founding, Wabash College continued the campaign it began its existence

with. As of 2002, the college supported the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in

 

51Welsh, “Vincennes University, 225-228.

31

Theology and Religion and planned to open a new building for the Center of Inquiry in the

Liberal Arts.52

 

52Htt ://www/wabaslicenter.wabaslr.edu' http://www.liberalarts.wabash.edu.

32

Chapter 2

Collegiate Institutions and Collegiate Faculty

In July, 183 8, Rev. Andrew Wylie, President of Indiana College, traveled the
seventy-f ive miles northwest from Bloomington to Crawfordsville. There, he defended
the classical segment of the liberal arts curriculum in a speech before the Philomathean
Society of Wabash College. Wylie insisted that the health of the American republic
required that young men who aspired to public roles in the West, the nation, or Christian
churches must exercise and discipline their minds and expose them to the thoughts and
virtue of classical authors in order to learn to reason precisely and express themselves
clearly, so that they might “discern truth and unmask error.” Wylie, like the leaders of
other colleges in Indiana and the Midwest, told students that a college education would
make them virtuous men and would equip them to lead a society of virtuous republican
men and women.1

The Philomathean Society was one of at least five literary societies formed by
students at Wabash College in the nineteenth century. L. R. Lind notes the Euphroean,
Atlantian Liberati, Calliopean, Lyceum, Philomathean, Columbian Institute, and Western
Literary Society. Students at Indiana College (later Indiana University), established the
Athenian Society in 1830, and its rival Philomathean Society in 1831. The Platonean and

Philologian Societies of Indiana Asbury University began publishing their productions in

 

’ Andrew Wylie, An Address Delivered Before the Philomathean Society of the Wabash College,
ByA. Wylie, D. 0., July 10, 1838 (Bloomington Indiana: Printed at the Franklin Office for the Society,
1838).

33

1847, but an Athenean Society produced a manuscript magazine as early as 1841. The
Edgeworthian Society was a female literary society apparently associated with the Indiana
Female Seminary at Bloomington, operating from 1840-1844.2

But Wylie’s was a peculiar position and project in antebellum Indiana. As
President of Indiana College, Wylie was the chief educator and administrator of a state-
chartered corporation that combined public and religious functions in its educational
mission. The trustees of Indiana College hired Wylie, both for his classical education and
for his standing as a Presbyterian minister (and later as an Episcopal priest).3 They
looked to him to instruct students in collegiate subjects and to preach in chapel, model
Christian and public virtue, and act in loco parentis to men as young as twelve. Wylie’s
trip to Wabash College was part of his participation in a trans-local community of
minister-educators and students who considered collegiate education essential to their
standing as public men. His gathered audience were Wabash College students who were
also pledged members of the Philomathean Society, one of Wabash College’s classically-

oriented literary societies. They sought a collegiate education and they took additional

 

2 L. R Lind, “Early Literary Societies at Wabash College” Indiana Magazine of History 42, 2
(June, 1946): 172-176; Holman Hamilton, ed., “An Indiana College Boy in 1836: The Diary of Richard
Henry Holman,” Indiana Magazine of History 49, 3 (September, 1953): 281-306, 284; The Athanean l
(1841); The Platonean and Philologian, Published by the Two Literary Societies of Indiana Asbury
University 1 (1847-1848). Both magazines of Indiana Asbury University are located in the Archives of
Depauw University and Indiana Methodism, Roy 0. West Library, Depauw University. Lawrence
Wheeler, ed., “The Minutes of the Edgeworthian Society, 1840-1844" Indiana Magazine of History 48, 2
(June, 1950): 179-202.

3 Andrew Wylie was born to a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian family. He graduated fi'om Jefi'erson
College in 1810, and was licensed as a Presbyterian minister in 1812. He was ordained as an Episcopal
minister in 1841. He was elected president of his Alma Mater in 1812, president of Washington College
in 1817, and in 1829, was elected to the presidency of Indiana University at Bloomington. “Family
Letters of Andrew Wylie, President of Indiana University,” edited by Donald F. Carmony, Indiana
Magazine of History 64, 4 (Decmeber, 1968), 292.

34

steps to refine their classical, oratorical and debating skills, and to establish reputations in
the society of collegiately educated men. They participated fully in the antebellum
movement of self-culture, whereby young men and women sought to improve themselves
through elective education in colleges, lyceums, and various literary and debating
societies.‘

In his address, Wylie specifically promoted the Greek and Latin-language elements
of collegiate education. He did not suggest that a collegiate education would improve
young men’s abilities to plant or harvest corn; calculate figures, whether as customer clerk
or manager; dig, navigate, or manage a canal; or build a road or a home. Wylie offered his
audience of white men no particular instruction for dealing with the women, Afiican
Americans or Native Americans in Indiana. He mentioned European and American

immigrants to Indiana only as a heterogenous mass of people whom college-educated men

 

"The Timothy H. Ball Papers at the Indiana Historical Society include the constitution of the
Cedar Lake Lyceum and correspondence between Timothy H. Ball, Edwin Farwell and Darius G. Farwell,
all members of the Lyceum. Edwin Farwell went on to attend LaPorte University and then Wabash
College. Ball attended the Baptist-associated Franklin College. All three compare the Lyceum favorably
to their colleges. Letter of Edwin Farwell at LaPorte University to Timothy H. Ball, May 29, 1847; Letter
of Edwin Farwell at Wabash College to Timothy H. Ball at Cedar Lake Lyceum, December 24, 1847?;
Letter, Edwin Farwell at Wabash College to Timothy H. Ball at Cedar Lake Lyceum, May 24, 1848,
Timothy H. Ball Papers at Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, Indiana. Secondary sources on self-
culture and college literary societies include Lind, “Early Literary Societies at Wabash College”; Donald
M. Scott, “The Popular Lecture and the Creation of a Public in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,”
Journal of American History 66 (1980): 791-819; Carl Bode, The American Lyceum: Town Meeting of the
Mind (New York, 1956); David Mead, Yankee Eloquence in the Middle West: The Ohio Lyceum, 185 0-
1 8 70 (East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1951); John Neufield, “The Associated
Western Literary Societies in the Midwest,” Michigan History 51 (1967): 154-161; Rita S. Saslaw,
“Student Societies in Nineteenth-Century Ohio: Misconceptions and Realities,” Ohio History 88 (1979):
198-210. The Cedar Lake Lycemn in Indiana conducted regular debates and essay readings, with great
emphasis on the classics. Several of its members went on to attend Indiana colleges, including Franklin
and Wabash colleges.

35

would be equipped to educate and lead.5 He did promise that a collegiate education
would equip young men to be public men, part of an educated elite who were fit to lead, in
their communities, the West and the nation.6

University educated Catholics and Protestants had historically based their claims to
knowledge on the standards of learning established by the classics and by the Renaissance,
as well as by the Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformation. The curriculum that
Andrew Wylie and other Indiana college faculty and students taught and defended in
Indiana was derived from the classical curriculum of the medieval Catholic universities,
refined by the renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and Calvinist educational practices,
the English universities at Oxford and Cambridge, and the American universities, including
Harvard, Yale and the College of New Jersey. Much as their predecessors had, the
antebellum colleges made classical secular texts, read in their original languages, a pillar of
the collegiate curriculum. Drawing on both Aristotelian claims and the Calvinist doctrine
of common grace, the colleges sought to sanctify such secular teaching with Christian

instructors, subjects, and church practices.’ The college leaders and their supporters in the

 

5The term “heterogenous” appears repeatedly in the colleges’ statements of purpose and both
faculty and student addresses where they speak of the inhabitants of the West, particularly those who were
not likely to attend college because of their ethnic, class, or religious identity. Elihu W. Baldwin, An
Address Delivered in Crawfordsville, Indiana, July 13th, 1836...On Occasion of His Inauguration as
President of Wabash College (Cincinnati: James and Galazy, 1836), 12; In his baccalaureate address of
1848, Charles White, another president of Wabash College, spoke of an issue 0 “special importance in
the formation of society at the West. I mean homogeneity.” His address emphasized how the colleges
would build and spread civilization throughout the West. Charles White, Western Colleges: A
Baccalaureate Address Delivered July 22, 184 7... (New York: C. W. Benedict, 1848), 25.

6Wylie, An Address Delivered before the Philomathean Society, 3-10.
7George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to

Established Unbelief, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 33-44. The degree to which collegiate
instruction in the United States was and has been secular, Christian or theistic is a main topic of

36

educated clergy emphasized that Protestant colleges in America were both Protestant and
literary in character, by which they indicated both an emphasis on classical literature and
on what they deemed valuable in modern English literature.8

Wylie, other collegiate faculty, and students in the antebellum Middle West not
only taught and learned this classical curriculum. They also defended it in oral addresses
like Wylie’s and in baccaluareate and inauguration addresses, public lectures and speeches
to church and benevolent organizations. They published these addresses as pamphlets and
in collegiate magazine and religious and educational periodicals. They responded both to
educational refonners’ complaints that the liberal arts courses were impractical and to
widespread popular complaints that they created an aristocracy and class divisions. Their
defenses of a curriculum that emphasized moral philosophy and Greek and Latin grammar
and literature insisted that the liberal arts would judiciously exercise students’ faculties,
develop self-discipline, and expose them to the best of classical ideas and virtues, thereby
creating responsible and educated citizens.9

Both the day-to-day teaching of the classical curriculum and articulated defenses

 

Marsden’s book. Some of these issues will be addressed below.

8Elihu W. Baldwin, An Address Delivered in Crawfordsville, on Occasion of His Inauguration,
1 l.

9Elihu W. Baldwin, An Address Delivered in Crawfordsville, Indiana, July 13th, 1836; Charles
White, The Duties of Educated Young Men at the West: An Address Delivered to the Candidates for the
Baccaluareate, July 20, 1842, By Rev. Charles White, D. 0., President of Wabash College (Indianapolis:
Cutler & Chamberlain, Printers, 1842); Albert Barnes, An Address Before the Society for Promoting
Collegiate and Theological Education at the West, In the First Presbyterian Church, Newark New Jersey,
October 28, 1845, And in the First Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, February 22, 1846, byAlbert
Barnes. (Philadelphia: William Slonaker; New York, William H. Graham; Cincinnati: Robinson and
Jones; St Louis, E. K. Woodward, 1846) David Enoch Beem, “Some Bitterness Mixed With the Sweet,”
Manuscript Essay, February 21, 1857,” David Enoch Beem Papers, Box 2, File 11, William H. Smith
Memorial Library, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, Indiana.

37

of it equipped students and other readers with categories to interpret the land, people and
events in Indiana and the Northwest. In their teaching, public speaking and publishing,
college students and faculty promoted particular sorts of markets, particular selves, and
boundaries of ethnicity, gender religion and class; and the formation of regional and
national identities in a region that residents referred to as the “West”‘° Collegiate faculty
promoted personal industriousness, govemment-supported internal improvements, and
contract relations as demonstrative of virtuous personal character and government
policy.11 They presented Native Americans as alternately savage and noble, but always

vanishing.12 They presented African Americans as degraded by slavery and always in need

 

l“This conceptual framework of frontier transformation comes from William Cronon, George
Miles, and Jay Gitlin, “Becoming West,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past,
editors, William Cronon, George Miles, Jay Gitlin (New York : W.W. Norton, 1992). It proposes that
multiple competing and sometimes self-contradictory processes have marked the transformation of
multiple frontiers in American history. By emphasizing multiple processes in multiple places over time,
they maintain Frederick Jackson Tumer’s important emphasis on multiple frontiers or wests - something
much of the New Western History has rejected - but also maintains the historic specificity and
contestedness of each transformed region.

llCharles White, Political Rectitude: A Baccalaureate Address Delivered July 23, 1846, by Rev.
Charles White, D. D., President of Wabash College (New York: Leavitt, Trow & Co, Printers, 1846), 6.

12Americans’ tendency to dichotonrize as Native Americans as either romantically savage or
romantically noble is the subject of Robert F. Berkhoffer, The White Man ’5 Indian: Images of the
Ameican Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1979). The employment of such
images in the alienation of land from Native Americans, and the selling of it to European Americans is
the subject of Robert F. Berkhofl’er, Jr., “Americans versus Indians: The Northwest Ordinance, Territory
Making, and Native Americans,” Indiana Magazine of History, Special Issue on the Northwest Ordinance
84, 2 (March, 1988), 90-93. Susan Sleeper Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural
Encounter in the Western Great Lakes, (Amherst: University of Massacusetts at Amherst Press, 2001)
discusses how some Native Americans manipulated these stereotypes to either be invisible ficm
government oflicials or to prevent their removal from Indiana. Elihu W. Baldwin, the first president of
Wabash College as a collegiate institution, referred to “the North American savages,” noting that the
physical trials they required of their young men produced strong, able men. Elihu W. Baldwin, An
Address Delivered in Crawfordsville, Indiana, July 13th, 1836...On Occasion of His Inauguration As
President of Wabash College (Cincinnati: Printed by James & Galazay, 1836), 4. Charles White, of
Wabash College, denounwd called for weeping “over the wrongs, which the Indians, a nobler race than
the Poles, have received at the hand of the American nation. Charles White, Political Rectitude: A
Baccalaureate Address Delivered on July 23, 1848 by Rev. Charles White, D. D.... (New York: Leavitt,

38

of aid. And in the developing Middle West, where increasingly the characterizations of
residents focused on differences between European Americans, college faculty and
students structured ethnic characterizations around religion, education and virtues like
personal industriousness. Protestant college leaders consistently invoked the
heterogeneity of the immigrant population, wild nature, and Catholicism as dangers to
individual residents and Western society. Only education, conversion to bourgeois
Protestantism, formal education and industrious productive activity would make residents
virtuous (male) republican citizens. College leaders spoke of the Old Northwest as the
West. They added to the promotion and creation of the West as a new region where
Protestant religion, formal education, personal virtue and support for markets could”t
produce unprecedented abundance and republican virute.l3

Also like their colonial predecessors, the antebellum colleges combined religious
and civil, public and private authority and concerns in their formation and operation. In a
period when few public schools, let alone colleges, operated with public funding and all

colleges required individual charters of incorporation in order to grant the Bachelor’s of

 

Trow & Co., Printers, 1846), 11. T. S. Hitt, agent for Rock River Seminary, described the land in Ogle
County, Illinois as land “...where the Indian war-hoop has hardly ceased to echo and the council-fire has
but just gone out...” T. S. Hitt, “Rock River Seminary,” Western Christian Advocate 7, 43 (February 12,
1841).

13'Charles White, The Duties of Educated Young Men at the West: An Address Delivered to the
Candidates for the Baccaluareate, July 20, 1842, By Rev. Charles White, D. 0., President of Wabash
College (Indianapolis: Cutler & Chamberlain, Printers, 1842); Harvey D. Scott, Duties of the Western
Scholar: First Quinquennial Oration, Delivered to the Members of the Philological Society of Indiana
Asbury University, August 10, 1845 White, Charles, by Harvey D. Scott, of Terre Haute, Late a Student
of the University and Member of the Society White, Charles (Greencastle, Indiana: Published for the
Society by Early & Reed, Printers, 1846); Lucien W. Berry, The Obligations of Young Men to Redeem
Their Time: A Discourse to the Graduating Class of Indiana Asbury University, July, 1852. By Lucien
W. Berry, D. D. (Indianapolis: Indiana State Journal Steam Press Print, 1852).

39

Arts (A. B.) degree there was little institutional difference between public colleges, private
colleges created by individuals and church-operated colleges owned by churches. Both
public and church-associated college relied on classically educated Christian ministers and
priests for teachers. Public, church-associated, and other private colleges generally
required daily chapel and Sunday church attendance, exercised in loco parentis authority
including curfews and limits on contact with women, and disciplined students for moral
ofi’enses. While both public colleges and church-associated colleges made claims on
public fiinds, neither received much financial or other support apart from land grants.
Early historians of American colleges denounced the narrow sectarian character of
antebellum colleges. But for a variety of reasons, very few of the colleges in the
antebellum Midwest were formally extensions of churches." One reason is that
missionaries established some colleges beyond any significant ecclesial authority.
Presbyterian and Congregational missionaries who were in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and
Illinois under the auspices of the American Home Missionary Society, a joint operation of
Presbyterian and Congregational churches to establish churches in the West, sought to

establish colleges as part of a campaign to educate, Protestantize, and civilize the West,

 

l’By formally and institutionally tied to a church or other ecclesial organization, I mean that the
board of trustees was elected by an ecclesial body. In the antebellum Midwest, only Methodist colleges
generally attained charters under such arrangements. A few colleges founded by immigrant
denominations began to establish such colleges under general college laws beginning in 1855, but mostly
after 1865. On this shifi see Timoth L. Smith, Uncommon Schools: Christian Colleges and Social
Idealism in Midwestern America, 1 820-1 95 0. in Timothy L. Smith, Donald E. Pitzer, Indiana Historical
Society Lectures, 1976-1977: The History of Education in the Middle West (Indianapolis: Indiana
Historical Society, 1978); David B. Potts, “American Colleges in the Nineteenth Century: From Localism
to Denominationalism,” History of Education Quarterly 11, 4 (Winter, 1971): 363-380.

40

along lines laid out by Lyman Beecher and other New England ministers.15 John M. Ellis
was present at the founding of Wabash College and helped its leaders raise funds in New
England, and was a correspondent of the principals of the abortive college at Marshall
Michigan. But he was stripped of his AHMS sanction when he used his office to launch
Illinois College. When Charles G. Finney, Asa Mahan and Theodore Dwight Weld
launched Oberlin Collegiate institute, and then faced heresy charges for their preaching
and the radical activism of the college, they established a new Congregational association
to buttress their authority.“

Generally, only the colleges associated with the conferences of the Methodist
Episcopal Church had their trustees appointed by an ecclesial organization. Even in these
cases, the regional or state conference, rather than the national body organized the college
and appointed the trustees. So even church administration of those few colleges that

might be considered “denominational” in any formal sense was done by local and regional

 

”Lyman Beecher’s A Plea for the West, (Cincinnati: Truman and Smith, 1335), andA Plea for
Colleges (Cincinnati, 1836) were only the most developed of his publications promoting Presbyterian-
Congregationalist college-planting in the West. Similarly, Moses Stuart of Andover Theological
Seminary charged Edmund O. Hovey, Caleb Mills, and several other graduates to establish a college in
the West; they were several of the principal founders and faculty of Wabash College. John M. Ellis was
present at the founding meeting for Wabash College, was a regular correspondent of the principals who
sought to establish Marshall College, and exceeded his AHMS authority in launching Illinois College.
The “Yale Band” who formed the faculty of Illinois College had made a pact while at Yale College that
they would be collegiate missionaries to the West. Osborne and Gronert, Wabash College, 38-3 9, 2; Don
Harrison Doyle, The Social Order of a Frontier Community, Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825-1870 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1983 [1978]), 21-25; Natalie A. Naylor, “Raising a Learned Ministry: The
American Education Society, 1815-1860,” (Ed (1. Dissertation, Teacher’s College of Columbia University,
1971), 257-285.

16The ease with which the Oberlinites were able to establish a Congregational association that
could operate virtually autonomously of any greater authority was one of the issues that was leading
Presbyterians to dissasociate from the Plan of Union by the middle of the 18305. Naylor, “Raising a
Learned Ministry, 273-283; Robert Samuel Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College fi'om its Founding
through the Civil War 2 vols. (Oberlin, 1943), 1., 265-280. D. Randall Gabrielse, “Diversity in Church-
Associated Colleges in Michigan and Ohio,” (MA. Thesis, Michigan State University, 1993), 93-97.

41

church officials, rather than by national church leaders. By far the greatest number of
collegiate charters created self-sustaining boards. Outside of the University of Virginia,
the University of North Carolina, Ohio University, Miami Univeristy (Ohio), Indiana
University (1824), and The University of Michigan (183 7), these church-associated
colleges provided what collegiate education was available before the 18505.

When the magistrates of Massachusetts Bay chartered Harvard College in 1636,
they set a pattern that would continue well into the nineteenth century. They chartered
Harvard College to cultivate and perpetuate the authority of an educated male elite in civil,
political and religious life. Civil magistrates had an equal representation with clergy on its
board of overseers. The colony recognized the civil role of the college by making the the
President and other officers, as well as fellows, exempt from “personal, civil ofices,
military exercises, or services, watchings, and wardings...” and by making had their estates
to a limit of one hundred pounds exempt from taxes.17 But the religious role of the college
was also clear in the second of its college laws: “Every one shall consider the main End of
his life and studies, to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life?“ Even in
Harvard’s early decades, the relationship between secular and Christian learning was a
constantly troubled and contested one. By 1655, Charles Chauncy, the incoming president

had to defend the synthesis of Christian and classical subjects. He argued that the Bible

 

17The Harvard Charter of 1650, reprinted in Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard College in the
Seventeenth Century, I, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1936), 5-8.

1”The Laws, Liberties and Orders of Harvard College Confirmed by the Overseers and President
of the College in the Years 1642, 1643, 1644, 1645, and 1646. And Published to the Scholars ’ for the
Perpetual Preservation of their Welfare and Government, reprinted in Samuel Eliot Morison, The
Founding of Harvard College, pp. 333-337.

42

taught secular subjects such as ethics, economics, and astronomy; and that the classics
taught valuable “divine moral truths.”" The Massachusetts Bay colony’s removal of Anne
Hutchinson in 163 6, the same year that the college was chartered, reamrmed that
admission to and participation in the institutions of collegiate education and the religious
and civil authority that it was intended to establish, would be limited to men.20

The classical curriculum was brought to Indiana by the men who established
colleges at Hanover, Bloomington, Crawfordsville, Greencastle, and Franklin. That it
remained the sine qua non of public, church-associated, and church colleges in the
antebellum Midwest resulted from the educational traditions and goals of Presbyterian and
Congregational clergy, the Yale Report of 1828, the American Education Society’s
authority and use of the Yale Report, and the state charters that colleges required. The
founders of Western Reserve, Wabash, Illinois and Marshall colleges all established their
institutions in part to educate young men in the classics in order to equip them for the
classical theological training that was the hallmark of Presbyterian and Congregational
churches in the United States. They believed such education and production of ministers
in the West for the West was firndamental to creating orderly Protestant, and republican
citizens in the West and the nation. These college founders had received such collegiate
and theological education and they sought to produce institutions like theirs and men like

them as one pillar of a society like theirs in the West.

 

19Marsden, The Soul of the American University, 43; Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at
Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1981), 15-20.

20Marsden draws this parallel and conclusion.

43

In 1828, the faculty of Yale College published the most authoritative defense of
the constantly criticized classical curriculum. The Yale faculty recognized many kinds of
educational institutions existed. But they insisted theirs was and would remain a college,
recognizable by its classical curriculum. That curriculum, they claimed, would provide
“the discipline and furniture of the mind” that were necessary to a “balanced character”
and to “intellectual culture.” The agency of the report’s authority was the American
Education Society. Formed in 1815, the Society was one of the many agencies of the
Presbyterian Congregational Plan of Union. It solicited funds to support college students
who expressed an intention to enter the ministry. Using the Yale Report as a benchmark
of collegiate curricula, the society exercised a virtual accrediting authority over institutions
that sought its funds.21

Andrew Wylie and other collegiate faculty in Indiana operated institutions and
taught curricula that were derived from those of medieval European universities and faced
some of the same issues as their European predecessors. In the twelfth century, the Pope
separated universities from cathedral schools and granted them licenses as self-goverrring,
degree-granting guilds. Although masters had to take holy orders and the church could
condemn masters’ teaching, the universities became fimdamental institutions in the
church’s relation of Christian learning to the classical knowledge of antiquity. By their

degree-granting authority, the universities certified teachers and professors, and so

 

21“The Yale Report of 1828,” reprinted in American Higher Education: A Documentary History,
1, Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 279-289;
Naylor, “Raising a Learned Ministry,” 263-267.

44

 

certified both who was educated and who could teach.22

Disputes over the utility of the classics for salvation and Christian teaching were a
part of the continuing development of the universities. University faculties generally
agreed that the authority of Christian revelation and the church must be maintained. They
also agreed that classical knowledge, including Greek and Latin, the trivium (grammar,
rhetoric and logic), the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy) and
Aristotle’s works in logic, metaphysics and natural philosophy should be maintained.
They difi’ered over whether Christians could know and understand the natural world in
some way superior to others, as Anselm argued from Augustine; or whether, as Thomas
Aquinas claimed, nature and classical learning could be known equally well by all. They
also debated whether classical learning could point the way towards Christian salvation or
Christian virtue. The church and clerical faculty protected revelation and church authority
by surrounding education with worship, which began and ended the university day. They
also provided clerical commentary on classical authors. The universities required an arts
degree as a prerequisite to study of theology, making the arts degree a kind of defacto
undergraduate degree. But the traditional division of university faculties into arts,

theology, medicine and law (civil and canon) kept theology itself separate from or

 

22George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to
Established Unbelief, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 33-44; Harris Harbison, The Christian
Scholar in the Age of the Reformation (New York: Scribners, 1958); John Van Engen, “Christianity and
the University: The Medieval and Reformation Legacies,” in Making Higher Education Christian: The
History and Mission of Evangelical Colleges in America, Joel A. Carpenter and Kenneth W. Shipps, eds,
(Grand Rapids, Michigan: Christian University Press, 1987).

45

 

tangential to the arts curriculum.23

Both the Protestant Reformation and renaissance humanism accentuated old
conflicts and raised new ones. Martin Luther, a university master, complained that the
Bible was little taught in the universities and that they encouraged “loose living.” He also
criticized the classics for emphasizing “Greek glory” and suggested that Aristotle should
be removed from the curriculum altogether. But Luther, Melancthon, Calvin and Zwingli
all turned to the universities’ authority to buttress their claims of thorough knowledge and
accurate reading of scripture. Melancthon revived Aristotle and re-emphasized Greek,
Latin and Hebrew as sacred languages. Calvin, Zwingli and Melancthon also expanded
the scope of the humanities, using classical texts to teach virtue and rhetoric for use in this
life. Calvin used texts by Cicero, Virgil, Livy and Xenophon to teach grammar, rhetoric,
logic and history to aspiring ministers at his academy in Geneva. Calvin’s emphasis on the
non-religious vocations also expanded religious acceptance of classical learning.“
Catholic and Protestant authorities closely circumscribed these humanist tendencies with
the militant confessionalism that dominated the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Calvinist and Lutheran emphases on the accurate interpretation of texts as the source of
ecclesiastical authority created a formally educated and professional ministry. The

Protestants who looked to universities to educate and certify preacher-scholars made these

 

7’j'IVIar’sden, The Soul of the American University, 35; Van Engen, “The Medieval and
Reformation Legacies”; Samuel Elliot Morrison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1935), 18-39.

2"Marsden The Soul of the American University, 35; Van Eugen, “The Medieval and
Reformation Legacies,” 27; William J. Bouwsma, “Models of the Educated Man,” in a Usable Past:
Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley, 1990), 37; Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century
Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 14 ff.

46

 

 

men not only the religious authorities of their communities, but also the most educated
men in most of their communities.25
In the nineteenth century, the number of colleges increased dramatically as the population
of the nation grew dramatically and spread into new regions, territories and states.
Donald G. Tewksbury’s survey includes 516 institutions chartered as colleges between
1800 and 1861, and finds that only 104 survived until 1861. The ratio of charters to
surviving colleges was similar in Ohio, the first state of the Middle West where colleges
and similar institutions appeared. In Ohio, only seventeen of the forty-three colleges
chartered survived the period. In Michigan, five colleges survived, while at least three
were stillborn or closed before 1861.26

At least six groups established colleges in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Illinois
between 1800 and 1860. Presbyterians and Congregationalist ministers working through
the Plan of Union, and often through the American Home Missionary Society, established
Western Reserve College at Hudson, Ohio; Illinois College at Jacksonville, Illinois;
Wabash College at Crawfordsville, Indiana. They also established Lane Theological

Seminary at Cincinnati, and attempted to establish a college at Marshall, Michigan. The

 

2’Marsden particularly emphasizes the importance of a classical training for Protestant ministers.
Expertise in interpreting texts, particularly scripture, in Hebrew, Greek and Latin was necessary in order
to counter the scholarly and social authority of the Catholic Church. Marsden, The Soul of the American
University, 38. On the authority of pastor-scholars in New England, see Harry S. Stout, The New England
Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986), particularly 13-31.

2”Donald G. Tewksbury, The Founding of American Colleges and Universities Before the Civil
War, With Particular References to the Religions Influences Bearing Upon the College Movement
(Hamdon, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1965 [19320]), 28. In Michigan, Raisin Institute in Lenawee
County closed, whereas Benzie College in Benzie County, Marshall College in Calhoun County, and
Grand River Theological Institute existed only on paper; William C. Ringenberg, “The Protesant College
on the Michigan Frontier” (Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University, 1970).

47

 

second group were found by a group of radical reformers from the Presbyterian-
Congregational group. Theodore Dwight Weld, Asa Mahan, and other exiles of Lyman
Beecher’s Lane Seminary secured financial support from the Lewis Tappan and the
prestige of Charles G. Finney to establish Oberlin Collegiate Institute as a viable college.
Men with significant roles in the F inneyite and Oberlin movements established or led
Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan; Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan; Michigan Central
College at Spring Arbor, Michigan; which later became Hillsdale College at Hillsdale,
Michigan; Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois; and Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin.
Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which established colleges to
provide a means to positions of education and respect, established established Ohio
Wesleyan College, at Delaware, Ohio; Indiana Asbury University (later Depauw
University)at Greencastle, Indiana; Albion College in Albion, Michigan; and McKendree
College in Illinois. Baptist Conferences and individual Baptist clergy established
Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan; Granville College (later Denison University)
in Ohio; Shurtleff College in Illinois; and Franklin College in Franklin, Indiana. The
Freewill Baptists established Michigan Central College, which later became Hillsdale
College. Scottish immigrant denominations of the very sectarian Seceder-Covenant
tradition established established Franklin College at New Athens, Ohio; and Muskingum
College at New Concord, Ohio. German immigrants also established a number of colleges
in Ohio, in most of which, German was the language of instruction. German Lutherans
founded Wittenberg College. The German Reformed Church established Heidelberg

College. German Methodists (United Bretheren) established Otterbein University in Ohio.

48

 

 

 

Catholic colleges in the antebellum Midwest included Notre Dame University in South
Bend, Indiana; and Capitol University in Cincinnati. Other colleges included the Society
of Friends’ Earlham College in western Indiana, the Old School Presbyterians’ Hanover
College at Hanover, Indiana, and the Disciples of Christ, or “Christians’” Butler University
in Indianapolis, Indiana.27

The antebellum colleges required land and buildings, books and “apparatus,” as
equipment was then known, faculty and students, and legal recognition as a corporation
that allowed them to elect a board of trustees, own property and grant the Bachelors’ of
Arts Degree, the only legally recognized undergraduate degree of the day. These
requirements made the colleges multi-faceted institutions that depended on community
support, financial assistance, and acknowledgment by respective state legislatures.

Because standard incorporation laws did not yet exist, colleges in Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois and in Michigan before 1855, had to secure a corporate charter from their
respective state legislatures so that they could hold land and money, appoint or elect
trustees and faculty, and grant diplomas for the Bachelor’s of Arts degree. Because each
charter involved an individual piece of legislation, the colleges had to campaign to secure
legislative approval of individual charters. Some college charters grandly proclaimed their
founders’ visions and goals. But because the chartering process was often fiercely
contested, many founders trimmed visionary language or explicit association with religious

denominations from the charters in order to secure passage. Assurances that the college

 

27These are collected in D. Randall Gabrielse, “Diversity in Church-Associated Colleges in
Michigan and Ohio,” (MA. Thesis, Michigan State University, 1993), especially 1-13.

49

 

 

would not require tests of religious doctrine and would admit all students, regardless of
religious orientation were necessary in practice, and often by charter requirement. When
Crawfordsville residents Wabash College raised resistance to Wabash College’s charter,
the college’s Presbyterian supporters were forced to delete any reference to its ties to that
denomination from its charter. Indiana Asbury University, the college supervised by the
Indiana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church included the statement that “‘The
Indiana Asbury University,’ which shall be founded and maintained forever, upon a plan
the most suitable, for the benefit of the youth of every class of citizens, and of every
denomination, who shall be fi'eely admitted to equal advantages and privileges of
education”.28
These charter provisions and other arrangements show that even the Methodist
colleges, which were some of the few whose trustees were elected by ecclesiastical
organizations, served broadly public educational concerns. Indiana Asbury University and
Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware Ohio both provided academy education as a
concession for local support of their collegiate institutions. In a period when many of the
schools in the United States operated on a subscription basis, having students pay for

schooling in a county building and sponsored by a religiously controlled institution was

not an unusually religious undertaking.” Thus many of the charters and proclamations of

 

28In the Wabash College ease, the resistance came from Old School Presbyterians who opposed
Wabash College’s New School national and missionary orientation. James Insley Osborne and Theodore
Gregory Gronert, Wabash College: The First Hundred Years (Crawfordsville, Indiana: R E. Banta,
1932), 11. George B. Manhart, Depauw Through the Years. Vol. 1, Indiana Asbury Univeristy, 183 7-
1884; Depauw University, 1884-1919(Greenca5t1e, Indiana: Depauw University, 1962), 9-10.

29Manhart, Indiana Asbury University, 183 7-1884, 15-17; Henry Clyde Hubbart, Ohio
Wesleyan '5 First Hundred Years (Delaware, Ohio: Ohio Wesleyan University, 1943), 12-13. On public

50

founders and opponents demonstrated that even putatively private colleges fulfilled very
public purposes and functions in the absence of firlly developed public schools, colleges,
and other institutions in the late frontier region that was Indiana and much of the old
Northwest Territory in the antebellum period. The ambiguity of such denominational
bonds and religious ties contrasts starkly with claims by Richard Hofstadter and other
broad histories of higher education that denounced the antebellum colleges as narrowly
sectarian.3o
Michigan Colleges

In Michigan, the early colleges faced opposition from the state university and state
Superintendent of Public Instruction as well. Although the institutions that would become
Kalamazoo College, Albion College, Adrian College, and Olivet College conducted
classes before 1850, only Michigan Central College (later Hillsdale College) secured a

college charter before 1855. In that year, the supporters of the institutions that became

 

education and subscription schools in the Midwest see Carl F. Kaestle, “Public Education in the Old
Northwest: ‘Necessary to Good Govemment and the Happiness of Mankind,” Indiana Magazine of
History 84, 3 (March, 1988), 61-65. Kaestle focuses on the gap between legislative commitments such as
those provided in the Northwest ordinances of 1785 and 1787, and state laws on one side, and practice,
wherein there was little actual provision for tax-suppo rted schools before the middle of the nineteenth
century. In this gap between law and practice, both individuals and religious institutions that today might
be considered “private” filled many gaps in the provision of education.

30in a section of his 1955 book, Richard Hofstadter dismissed the antebellum period as “The
Great Retrogression,” and denounced the colleges that arose in the period as institutions in which
“doctrinal and sectarian considerations were rated above educational accomplishment.” Frederick
Rudolph afterward announced similar judgements. Both Hofstadter and Rudolph were consensus
historians who looked at the nineteenth-century colleges from the pillars of twentieth-cenmry research
universities, which they considered the epitome of American liberalism. The chapter on curriculum in this
work will address how non-sectarian the colleges actually were in regards to curricula. Richard
Hofstadter, Academic Freedom in the Age of the College (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955),
208-210; Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1957). 50-60.

51

Adrian, Albion, Hillsdale, Kalamazoo, and Olivet colleges united to push a general college
law through the state legislature.31 The earliest attempt to open a collegiate institution
was the Baptist Rev. Thomas W. Merrill’s successive attempts to secure a charter for a
“Michigan and Huron Institute,” with academic and theological departments under Baptist
control at Ann Arbor in 1829. When the territorial legislature refiised to move on the
motion, but instead granted a charter for an “academy” under “undenominational
control,” Merrill abandoned the effort.

By 1832, Merrill had secured the support of Caleb Eldred, a local Baptist minister
and township patriarch, and endorsements of Michigan, Maine and New York Baptist
Conventions, and a commission from the American Baptist Missionary Society and its
founder Jonathan Going, for a Baptist institution in Bronson (later Kalamazoo).32
Merrill’s proposed charter for the Bronson institution deleted all religious language and
named Menill, Eldred, and local minister Jeremiah Hall to a self-perpetuating board
composed of half ministers and half laymen, rather than one controlled by the Michigan
Baptist Convention. The territorial legislature passed the charter in 1832, but Governor

Porter vetoed it.33 In contrast to the struggle of the Michigan colleges to gain

 

31Mary Janice Session, Denominational Colleges of Michigan and the 1855 Act for Incorporation
of the Institutions of Learning,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Wayne State University, 1989); William C.
Ringenberg, “The Protestant College on the Michigan Frontier,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State
University, 1970), 232.

32William Wolcott Williams, “Two Early Efforts to Found Colleges in Michigan, at Delta and at
Marshall,” Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections 30 (187?), 53 8; Wolcott B. Williams, A History
of Olivet College, 1844-1900 (Detroit, 1901), 152; Charles T. Goodsell and Willis F. Dunbar, Centennial
History of Kalamazoo College (Kalamazoo, 1933), 14.

33Thomas Merrill was the son of Rev. Daniel Merrill, of Sedgewick Maine. The elder Merill had

converted his congregation from Congregational to Baptist association, helped establish Waterville
College (later Colby College) and Newton Theological Institute, established Maine’s Society for

52

denominational support, several church-associated colleges in Illinois united to claim a
title to the state’s Morrill Grant funds in the 1860s. The University of Illinois gained solid
financial footing only after it won the funding.”

The major struggle over college charters in Michigan demonstrated the closely
inter-related character of national and local religious movements, differences over public
and private institutions, and the effects of the economic depression of 1837 on the West.
The struggle was apparently between the church-associated institutions that sought
college status and the emerging University of Michigan and its supporters in the new state
government. John D. Pierce, a Congregationalist minister, turned from support of a
private Congregationalist college to support of the University of Michigan as the state’s
only viable college in 183 7. But the conflicts that underlaid his shifi revealed the links
between local politics, religion and college-founding. Rev. Pierce was in Michigan under
appointment of the American Home Missionary Society, with Rev. John Cleaveland, as his
district supervisor. Both ministers worked between 1830 and 1835 to establish a college,
which would be associated with Presbyterians and Congregationalists, at Marshall in

Calhoun County. But Pierce turned against the institution in 183 7, following his

 

Promoting Education of Religious Young Men for the Ministry,” and became the first president of the
Maine Baptist Convention. Thomas W. Merrill had first come to Michigan as an itinerant missionary.
Caleb Eldred was a native of Pownal, Vermont who moved to Michigan as a local land-speculator. He
eventually became patriarch of Climax Township in Kalamazoo County. Goodsell and Dunbar,
Kalamazoo College, 15-21; Coe Hayne, Baptist Trail-Makers of ll/Iichigan (Philadelphia: Judson Press for
the Centennial Committee of the Michigan Baptist Convention, 1936). On Caleb Eldred and his family’s
role in church and political developments, see Susan E. Grey, The Yankee West: Community Life on the
Michigan Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

34Winton U. Solberg, “The Conflict Between Religion and Secularism at the University of
Illinois,” American Quarterly 18 ( 1966), 180-214; John Francis McKenna, “Disputed Destiny: The
Political and Intellectual Origins of Public-Supported Education in Illinois” (Ph. D. dissertation,
University of Illinois, 1973).

53

 

——m

appointment as Michigan’s first State Superintendent of Public Instruction and his reading
of a Victor Cousins pamphlet on collegiate education. In his first “Report of the
Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Michigan,” Pierce raised a prohibitive
barrier to chartering of public colleges by recommending that no college be granted a
charter unless its supporters could show $100,000 in cash funds and $200,000 in pledges
of support.35 Pierce’s turn of mind may have arisen from his new position as
Superintendent, from his reading of the Cousins piece, or from growing tension between
Congregationalists and Presbyterians within the Plan of Union and American Home
Missionary Society in Michigan. As a Congregationalist minister in the employ of the
AHMS, Pierce actively promoted Congregationalist churches in Michigan, where the Plan-
of-Union called for Presbyterian churches. As the disputes between Presbyterians and
Congregationalists grew, Pierce’s personal relations with John P. Cleaveland, his superior
in the American Home Missionary Society and partner in the Marshall College endeavor,
grew strained.36 When the self-elected trustees of the college sought a charter fiom the
legislature in February of 1839, Pierce, as State Superintendent for Public Instruction,

opposed the charter. On March, 5, 183 9, he delivered a petition against the charter signed

 

35 John D. Pierce, “Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Michigan,”
Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Michigan; 183 7 (Detroit: John S. Bagg, State
Printer, 1837): 559. Michigan was the first state in the nation to constitutionally require a state
superintendent of education.

3”William Wolcott Williams, “Two Early Efforts to Found Colleges in Michigan, at Delta and at
Marshall,” Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections 30 (187?), 538; Wolcott B. Williams, A History
of Olivet College, 1844-1900 (Detroit, 1901), 152; William C. Ringenberg, “The Protestant College on
the Michigan Frontier,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University, 1970), 174-180. Frederick I.
Kuhns, “The Operation of the American Home Missionary Society in the Old Northwest, 1826-1861,”
(Ph.d. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1947); Frederick Irving Kuhns, “The Breakup of the Plan of
Union in Michigan,” Michigan History 32, 2 (June, 1948): 157-180, 158, 161.

54

 

 

 

by himself and 204 Marshall residents. Pierce and the signatories argued that private
institutions should not be granted charters. On March 16, John P. Cleaveland submitted a
petition in favor of the charter signed by 110 Marshall residents. Further petitions in favor
of the college, signed by 194 Marshall residents and 190 residents of Calhoun County
argued that the preparatory department of the institution was already in operation, the
trustees had raised sufiicient firnds for operation, and that education of young men must
not be left to the state university.

The legislature granted a charter on April 16, 183 9, but stipulated that the
institution not operate until the trustees could guarantee $20,000 in funds after all donors
who wished to withdraw their funds had done so. John M. Ellis of the Missionary Society
secured the patronage of most of the influential Congregational clergy in New England
and New York. But illness and the depression that began in 1837 limited his fund-raising
to $1,616.67 in money and another $1,000 in goods, falling far short of the required
$20,000. At the same time, the college’s inability to sell land in which it had speculated
prevented the raising of expected funds. The college never operated and was insolvent by

1844.37

 

37Wolcott B. Williams, “Two Efforts to Found Colleges in Michigan, at Delta and at Marshall,”
538-539. Letter of John M. Ellis to John P. Cleaveland, 3 June, 1841. Folder 3, 1841, John Payne
Cleaveland Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan; Letter of Isaac M. Diamond to
John P. Cleaveland, 30 March, 1841, Folder 3, John Payne Cleaveland Papers, Bentley Historical Library,
University of Michigan; Letter of Isaac M. Diamond to John P. Cleaveland, 21 July, 1842, Folder 4, 1842,
in John Payne Cleaveland Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

55

Wabash College

Throughout the nineteenth century, on the occasion of Founders’ Day Chapel, the
faculty and students of Wabash College recalled the “kneeling in the snow,” at the home
of James Thompson, pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Crawfordsville, on November
22, 1832. There, nine men of New School Presbyterian persuasion met and determined to
build “a classical and English high school, rising into a college as soon as the wants of the
country demand.”38 The founders secured a state charter in the winter of 1833-1834.
Caleb Mills, the first president, taught the first class in December of 1833. The first class
of college grade began in the autumn of 1835. Even in 1835-1836, the great majority of
the students were preparatory, rather than collegiate, students.39

In the November 21 meeting, the Wabash College men stated their objectives in
language that demonstrated how they viewed their neighbors, their confidence in the
power of education, and their view of the social order:

1". The low state of common school education in the Country is
such as to excite alarm, as upon the most liberal calculation, there is not

 

38Minute Book of the Wabash College Trustees, November 21, 183 2, Trustee Records, 1832-
1874, Wabash College Archives, Eli Lilly Library, Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana (hereafter,
Wabash College Trustee Records); Edumund Otis Hovey, “The History of Wabash College,” The Wabash
Magazine 1, 7 (July, 1857): 92-235. (Hovey’s article comprises the entire number of the magazine.)
James Insley Osborne and Theodore Gregory Gronert, Wabash College: The First Hundred Years
(Crawfordsville, Indiana: R E. Banta, 193 2), l. (Osborne and Gronert point out that the “kneeling in the
snow” actually occurred on November 22, 183 2, the morning after the evening meeting where the
decision was made.)

39Like many institutions, Wabash College went through a number of titles as it developed its
curricula and dropped the manual labor component. The title “Teacher’s Seminary and Manual Labor
College” appeared in the Crawfordsville Record in June, 1832. In December, 1833, when the first classes
were ofl'ered, a paid advertisement appeared for “Crawfordsville High School.” Record (Decmeber, 18,
183 3), 2. Insley and Gronert also speak of “Crawfordsville English and Classical High School” beginning
its first classes on December 3, 1833; Insley and Gronert, 27, 25-26, 32, 37. The implications of colleges’
reliance on preparatory students for most of their enrollment will be discussed in detail below.

56

 

 

more than one in ten of the children of this new and rapidly increasing
community regularly at school. The only probable means of improving our
State in this respect is the establishment of institutions of this kind from
which a sufficient number of competent teachers can be firrnished.

2"". The necessity of educating young men who have the Ministry
in view in the region of the country where their labors are needed and
where, as here, they might be brought out in greater numbers if an
institution was within their reach...

3". Such a measure adopted here would enable the churches of this
region to appropriate its own resources.

4'“. A large section of the most fertile country, decidedly the most
desirable part of Indiana, and inferior, perhaps, in resources to no section
of equal extent in the West, 150 miles long and 80 or 100 broad, and
containing a population of from 75,000 to 100,000 where ten years ago
there were not probably 100 white families, and this population still
increasing yearly with a rapidity seldom, if ever, equaled: — This is the
country to be benefitted by such an institution, as the other institutions of
the State do not afl‘ord a prospect of supplying its wants."0

The Wabash College men presented the charter for their college in language

unmistakably similar to that of Lyman Beecher. Beecher was one of the leading men in

the 1801 Plan of Union, whereby Congregationalists and Presbyterians had agreed to

work togther to form churches in the new settlements of the nation. Since 1816, Beecher

had vigorously promoted the building of collegiate institutions in the West that would

educate ministers for the West in the West.“1 In 183 2, the same year that the Wabash

founders met, Beecher moved to Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati in order to

place himself in the forefront of the movement he had long advocated. By 1836, he had

 

40Wabash College Trustee Records, November 21, 183 2, p. 4-5; Osborne and Gronert, Wabash

College, 23.

41See Marsden, The Soul of the American University, particularly chapter 4, “A Righteous

Consensus, Whig Style.”

57

 

 

published two treatises pleading for such instutions: A Plea for the West, and A Plea for
Colleges. There New England Congregationalism’s most well-known advocate of the
spread of an educated ministry faced a heresy trial when he tried to join the Cincinnati
Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church.‘2

Even before launching their enterprise, the would-be builders of Wabash College
must have known that the college would face local opposition. In August, 1832, at a
presbytery meeting, seven of the nine Presbyterian churches in the area voted to support
“Old School Theology.” Though support of Old School Presbyterian Theology implied
opposition to all national societies advocating temperance, Sunday Schools, tracts, and
domestic missionary work, the seven churches also voted to explicitly oppose each of
these enterprises. The meeting may have been in response to a temperance campaign led
by Presbyterian pastor James Thompson in the preceding months. But the inclusion of
domestic missionary work in the list of prohibitions aimed squarely at an institution like
Wabash College, which included education of future ministers in its charter.43 Local
residents then actively opposed the chartering of the institution by the state legislature.

The most significant founders of the college were employed in Indiana by the

American Home Missionary Society, and had close links with the first three presidents,
who were definitely of Yankee heritage. In fact Caleb Mills, the second Wabash College

President, would become the first Superintendent of Education for Indiana. Edmund Otis

 

42On the chher trial, see George M. Marsden, The Evanglical Mind and the New School
Presbyterian Experience: A Case Study of Thought and Theology in Nineteenth-Century America, (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).

43Osborne and Gronert. Wabash College, 25.

58

 

Hovey, the patriarch of the institution as both trustee and professor, had graduated fiom
Dartmouth College and Andover Theological Seminary. Upon graduation from Andover,
Elias Cornelius, a sometime Corresponding Secretary of the American Education Society,
ordained Hovey and five other graduates, and extolled them to “build a college in the
Mississippi Valley.” Hovey served as a trustee fiom 1832 until 1877, and as a professor
fi'om 1834 until 1877. But he also served as the college’s treasurer and as its financial
agent in New England and New York, where the college secured most of its funding.‘4
He also hired his friend and Andover classmate, Caleb Mills, as the school’s first
professor, and hired Elihu W. Baldwin, brother of Illinois College professor Theron
Baldwin and Charles White, Hovey’s brother-in-law, as the college’s first two presidents.
Like Hovey, both Mills and White graduated from Dartmouth College, and Mills, White
and Baldwin all graduated from Andover Theological Seminary.‘5 John M. Ellis was
present at the initial meeting of November, 183 2, and later encouraged Hovey, but never
served the college in an official capacity. He did, however, connect the college to both the
American Education Society the Presbyterian-Congregationalist Illinois College, in

Jacksonville, Illinois."6

 

44James Findlay, “Agency, Denominations, and the Western Colleges, 1830-1860: Some
Connections Between Evangelicalism and Higher Education,” Church History 50, 1 (March, 1981), 73-
75. Findlay examined the account books of Wabash College and Hovey’s correspondence with
Congregational ministers in Connecticut.

‘5 Osborne and Gronert, Wabash College, 17-21.

“Ellis attracted a group of Yale graduates, including Edward chher, son of evangelist and
Western apologist Lyman Beecher, and Julian M. Sturteveant. This college and the publications of its
supporters, most notably Sturtevant, are probably responsible for the myth of Yale as “the mother of
colleges, which appears in Hofstadter, Tewksbury, and others. Yale provided less than two percent of
identifiable faculty in Michigan and Ohio antebellum colleges. Osborne and Gronert, Wabash College,
16; Don Harrison Doyle, The Social Order of a Frontier Community, Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825-1870

59

 

But the New School-AMHS orientation of the school was not limited to men who
came to the college from New England and Andover Theological Seminary. James
Thompson and his brother John Steele Thompson, were both born near Springdale, Ohio
in 1801, and graduated from the first operational college in the Old Northwest, Miami
University at Oxford, before reading theology and entering the Presbyterian ministry. But
both were in Indiana under the sponsorship of the AHMS. John Thompson was the pastor
who had led the temperance campaign that probably stoked local resistance to the college
and been the immediate occasion of the area churches’ decision to oppose support Old
School Theology and oppose domestic missionary efl‘orts.47

They forced the college’s supporters to omit all mention of association with the
Presbyterian church. They also forced them to allow all financial supporters to vote for
trustees, rather than to create a self-perpetuating board of trustees. The college’s
supporters feared that the voting provision would give local citizens control of the
institution. But over the next two years, local residents provided only $600, while college
officials worked to secure the proxy votes of all New England and New York

contributors. Consequently, the voting provision, highlighted and probably increased the

 

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983 [1978]), 21-25. D. Randall Gabrielse, “Diversity in Church
Associated Colleges in Michigan and Ohio, 1825-1867,” (M. A. Thesis, Michigan State University,
1993)

"James Thompson had come to Crawfordsville as pastor of the local Presbyterian church under
AHMS sponsorship in 1827. John had preached at Newton, in Founatin County, before moving to
Waveland, in Montgomery County, in 1831. James served as pastor of the New School Presbyterian
church in Crawfordsville until 1842, and as a college trustee until 1853. John Steele Thompson became
the third professor in the college, and served until incapacitated by tuberculosis in 1842, and died in 1843.
Osborne and Gronert, Wabash College, 11-15.

60

 

 

college’s dependence on supporters in New England and New York."8 Whether or not
because of their reliance on Eastern donors, the public addresses of college’s leaders
indicate that they remained highly conscious of their missionary origins and goals.

The colleges acquired land and resources through diverse means, but most either
engaged in land speculation or took advantage of the boosting of towns that was common
in the Midwest in the 1830s and 1840s. Much of Don Harrison Doyle’s account of
Jacksonville, Illinois is at heart an account of the boosting of the community by its most
wealthy members. The educational institution of Illinois College, established by John M.
Ellis, a Home Missionary who attended the founding meeting of Wabash College, was one
of many institutions, including a home for the disabled, that Jacksonville acquired through
skillful promotion."9

Wabash College may have originally taken advantage of the generosity or boosting
of Williamson Dunn, but their reliance on him increased local hostility as residents raised
accusations that the college was one of many foreign “Yankee” institutions speculating in
local real-estate. That the college engaged in land acquistion and sales throughout the
18305 and 1840s gives some credence to critics’ claims, as does the trustees’ authorization
for Edmund O. Hovehy to write Julian M. Sturtevant at Illinois College about how to

acquire Illinois land for the college. That correspondence suggests that both colleges were

 

“Osbome and Gronert, Wabash College, 26-27.

”Don Harrison Doyle, The Social Order of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825-
18 70.

61

 

 

Ff —! .- -

actively engaged in land speculation.” The Presbyterian-Congregationalist enterprise that
failed at Marshall Michigan also had hints of land speculation about it. Letters in the John
P. Cleaveland Papers suggest that a Jonas Melville, who had purchased land on the Grand
River, believed the college supporters would purchase the land, and he would pocket a
handsome profit. They did not, and Mellville apparently defaulted on the financing for the
land, at which point his partner, Isaac Dimond, sought again to gain their interest in the
land, but also failed. Both men were apparently supporters of the college who sought to
simultaneously provide land for the college and gain a sure profit for themselves.’1

The Indiana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church shopped Indiana
Asbury University around to several communities in order to get the most out of local
boosters. Greencastle won the college away from Indianapolis, Rockville, Putnamville,
Lafayette, and Madison. Lafayette ofi’ered its position on the Jeffersonville Turnpike.
Rockville’s boosters promised $20,000 in cash support. But Greencastle, in Putnam
County ofl‘ered $25,000. According to local stories, Greencastle also offered a reputation
for good health.52

Indiana Methodists’ campaign against what they called Presbyterian control of

 

soPrudential Committee Records, December 1, 1835 (Pmdential and Trustee Records, Book 1,
1334-1371), 6.

51Isaac M. Dimond to John P. Cleaveland, 2 October 1841, Folder 2, John Payne

Cleaveland Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan; Jonas Mellville to
Marshall College Board of Trustees, 10 December 1841. In John Payne Cleaveland Papers, folder 4.
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

52Manhart, Indiana Asbury University, 183 7-1884, 6-7; October 29, 1836, Minutes of the Fiflh
Session of the Indiana Conference, October, 29, 1836 in Sweet, Circuit-Rider Days in Indiana, 158.

62

 

Indiana College (later Indiana University) is well known and chronicled.53 Less well-
known is Indiana University’s conflict with Vincennes University, which claimed to be the
legitimate recipient of state funding for university education. In 1802, a territorial
convention called on the United States Congress to appropriate firnds or grant land to
support university education in Indiana. In response, Congress designated land at Detroit,
Vincennes, and Kaskaskia to be sold to provide support for collegiate education. The
Indiana grant was 23,040 acres in Township 2 South, Range 11 West, the present-dy
Patoka Township of Gibson County." Indiana’s territorial legislature incorporated “the
Vincennes University” on 29, November, 1806, and granted it authority to sell 4,000 acres
of the Congressional grant to raise funds. But no grant or deed of ownership of the land
was conveyed. The institution’s trustees included much of Indiana’s political elite: Henry
Vanderburgh, John Gibson, Toussaint Dubois, and William Henry Harrison, who was
elected President of the Board of Trustees. In 1807, Jonathan Jennings was elected a
clerk pro tem.

Beginning in April, 1808, conflict between Harrison and Jennings created conflict

on the board of trustees and eventually a rivalry between two institutions that would last

 

”Robert D. Clark, "Matthew Simpson, the Methodists and the Defeat of Governor Samuel
Bigger, 1843,." Indiana Magazine of History 50, no. 1 (1954): 23-33; Timothy L. Smith, Uncommon
Schools: Christian Colleges and Social Idealism in Midwestern America, I 820-] 95 0. Indiana Historical
Society Lectures, I 976-197 7: The History of Education in the Middle West. Timothy L. Smith, and
Donald E. Pitzer Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana Historical Society, 1978; Matthew E. Welsh, An Old
Wound Finally Healed: Vincennes University’s Struggle for Survival,” Indiana Magazine of History 84, 3
(September, 1988): 217-236. The following account is based heavily on Welsh.

“Welsh, 218.

63

 

 

almost a hundred years.55 In the 1809 election for Indiana’s territorial delegate to
Congress, Jennings stood as an anti-slavery candidate against Harrison’s Democratic client
Thomas Randolph. Randolph contested the election, and both appeared at Washington to
be seated in Congress. The firll Congress refused to accept a report of the Committee on
Elections which declared the election illegal. They seated Jennings."

In 1816, two important events occurred as Indiana became a state. Jennings
defeated Harrison’s choice for Governor, and the Congressional enabling act granted a
township of land to firnd a “seminary of learning.”57 This time, the township was located
near the center of the state, in present-day Monroe County. In January, 1820, Jennings
singed legislation establishing a board of trustees for a state seminary at Bloonrington in
Perry Township of Monroe County. Two days later, the legislature authorized the
trustees to rent the township’s land to raise money for the seminary. Then, in 1827, the
Indiana Assembly authorized the trustees of the Bloonrington institution to sell the Gibson
County land that had been designated to support the Vincennes institution. The land was
sold to individual purchasers, with the firnds put in trust for the Indiana University at
Bloomington. Samuel Scott, the first permanent Presbyterian preacher in Indiana strove

to keep the Vinceness institution operating, serving as organizer, principal and teacher

 

SSWelsh, 21-22; Dorothy Riker, “Jonathan Jennings,” Indiana Magazine of History 28, 4
(December, 1932): 226-27.

”Welsh, 224.

”Annals ofCongress, 12, Cong, 1 sess., pp. 1841-1844, cited in Welsh, 225.

64

 

from 1810 to 1824.58 The Vincennes institution showed signs of life in 183 8, only because
its failure to act had led to legal challenge to its existence. In 1846, the Indiana Assembly
agreed to allow the trustees to sue in chancery court for compensation from the state. The
case reached the United States Supreme Court as Board of Trustees of Vincennes
University v. The State of Indiana. On the grounds of the Dartmouth College Case, the
court ruled that the state never had the power to sell the Gibson County land, and owed
the trustees compensation. The attempt to get compensation dragged out through 1895, as
the state ordered Indiana University to pay the compensation out of the fund of money
from the sale of the Gibson County land; Indiana University convinced the state to pay
because a fire had left the university it a desperate position, and the Indiana Assembly
delayed authorizing the payment. Beginning in 1931, Vincennes University enjoyed
support from a property tax levy on Gibson County land.’9

Wabash College’s struggles with the residents of Crawfordsville and surrounding
communities highlights the significance of colleges’ relations with their communities.
Perhaps the most bizarre story of such conflict involved Michigan Central (later Hillsdale)
College’s decision to move out of Spring Arbor, the town that initially ofi‘ered support to
the college. After conducting the 1853 commencement at Spring Arbor, and appointing a
faculty and laying a cornerstone in Hillsdale, the trustees sought to obtain the college

record book. But a Spring Arbor group who hoped to contest the legality of the relocated

 

58L. C. Rudolph reports that the institution closed soon alter Scott’s retirement in 1824. L. C.
Rudolph, Hoosier Zion: The Presbyterians in Indiana (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 177-
178.

”Welsh, “Vincennes University,” 225-228.

65

 

 

 

institution sought to withhold it and maintain the institution in the village. According to
Hillsdale College historian Arlan K. Gilbert:

The Spring Arbor faction persuaded the constable to deliver a search

warrant to L. J. Thompson, Michign Central secretary, who was loyal to

the Hillsdale location. Laurens B. Potter, however, already had obtained

the record book and concealed it under straw in a fiiend’s barn at Spring

Arbor. When the Constable failed to locate the book, Potter carried it to

an old store in Jackson and finally to Hillsdale.60
In later 1853, the Spring Arbor residents secured an injunction against removal of any
college property. But a circuit court removed the injunction, ruling there were no parties
at Spring Arbor to be harmed.61
Conclusion

The colleges in Michigan and Indiana relied on diverse sources of support. They
also faced resistance from local resentment to political resistance by other collegiate
institutions, and even political resistance in the chartering process. Chartering language
emphasizing that colleges were non-sectarian was only one demonstration of their reliance
on state and local support and the way they combined operation as private, and sometimes
ecclesiastical, corporations with public functions and objectives for education. As the
Marshall College and Wabash College cases show, this resistance could turn on personal

political decisions and on already-existent conflicts over religion, institutional vision, and

politics. The case of Michigan Central College (Hillsdale College) shows how colleges

 

mArlan K. Gilbert, Historic Hillsdale College: Pioneer in Higher Education, 1844-1900
(Hillsdale, Michigan: Hillsdale College Press, 1991), 32-33.

“Gilbert, Hillsdale College, 35.

66

relied on local support and faced significant consequences when they lost such support.
These considerations in turn significantly shaped colleges’ attempts to construct a West
and people as they saw appropriate.

But the development of Kalamazoo, Marshall, Wabash, Indiana Asbury and
Indiana colleges also show that understanding the antebellum colleges as a group requires
examination of their many individual stories. Like many institutions in early Nineteenth-
Century America, the colleges were shaped by social and political conflicts along multiple
axis. Reducing histories of these institutions to sectarianism, missionary work, or any
other generalization misses the complexity and instability that was not only part of the

colleges’ milieu, but shaped the lives of most nineteenth-century Americans.

67

 

Chapter 3

Indiana Asbury University and Indiana Methodists’ Search for Respectability

In 1820, the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church advised its
annual conferences to establish colleges under their auspices:
1. Resolved, by the delegates of the annual conferences in General
Conferences assembled, That it be and is hereby recommended to
all the annual conferences to establish, as soon as practicable,
literary institutions under their own control, in such way and
manner as they may think proper.
2. Resolved, etc., That it be the special duty of the episcopacy to use
their inlfluence to carry the above resolution into efi‘ect, by
recommending the subject to each annual conference.
3. Resolved, etc., That the following amendment to the second
answer of the third qustion of the fouth section of the first chapter
of the Discipline, be adopted, viz.: after word preachers, that there
be added, “and the presidents, principles, or teachers of the
serrrinaries of learning which are under our superitnedence.l
The General Conference’s action indicated a firndamental change in the position of
the Methodist Episcopal Church on collegiate education after Francis Asbury’s death in
1816. Asbury had opposed Methodist colleges on the grounds that they would erode the
itinerancy that was a key aspect of the early Methodist preaching and ecclesiastical

organization, and would decisively erode the insurgent aspect of Methodist theology and

organization. By 1820, many Methodists and Methodist institutions were gaining wealth

 

lWilliam Warren Sweet, Circuit-Rider Days in Indiana: The Indiana Conference
of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1832-1844 (Indianapolis: W. K. Stewart), 75.

68

and status that did erode itinerancy and insurgency.2 They feared that their neighbors and
children regarded Methodism as backwards. Consequently, they feared that their
neighbors would not accept them into public and political society and that their children
would leave the Methodist Church to gain education and status. But other Methodists
suspected that collegiate institutions combined with moves to stationary preaching and
elaborate churches and rented pews would create a separate class of formally educated
clergy who would be far removed fi'om the sensiblities of Methodist laity steeped in the
itinerant, enthusiastic and insurgent sensibilites of early American Methodism. The 1820
General Conference’s resolutions were a decisive move in this contest between Methodists
who accepted colleges and large stationary churches as necessary institutions for gaining
access to the respectable commercial middle class and educated professional class, and
those who saw such institutional centralization as a danger to the heart and soul of
Methodism.3

The rapid increase of Methodist-associated colleges in the 18305 and 18405 turned
on several factors related to the Methodist Church and to the places where its conferences,
and subsequently college-founding, were expanding. The fundamentals struggle were

over the power and authority of centralized institutions and their link to social class.

 

2See the case of Joseph Tarkington, who was licensed to preach in 1824, while attending Indiana
Seminary at Bloonrington. He sought, unsuccessfully, to delay circuit preaching until he had completed
his degree. David L. Kimbrough, Reverend Joseph Tarkington, Methodist Circuit-Rider: From Frontier
Evanglelism to Refined Religion (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 45-50; and William
Warren Sweet, Circuite-Rider Days in Indiana: The Indiana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal
Church, 1832-1844, on the growth of stationary preaching in Indiana in the 18205 as discussed below.

3Between 1816 and 1830, the Methodists established twelve colleges, although not all of them

survived into the 1830s. John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven By Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular
Christianity in America. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 175-176.

69

 

These in turn involved gender, issues of public and religious space, and church practice.
The General Conference’s commitment to having state and regionally based annual
conferences establish colleges appeared to demonstrate a commitment to decentralized
institutions on the national level. But within each annual conference, or on the state or
regional level, the establishment of colleges could appear very much as efforts to build
centralized institutions intended to separate the common Methodist laity from a rising
clerical and professional class who saw collegiate education as a key to their status and
professions. The Methodist colleges, like other colleges, produced and reproduced a male
realm of action by excluding women from collegiate institutions while providing for their
education elsewhere. Meanwhile, the colleges’ dependence on public buildings in their
early years became an important part of their public and private roles as they included
women in their early years as community academies, but removed them as the academies
became private collegiate institutions.
The Indiana Conference Moves to Establish a College

When the Illinois and Indiana Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church
determined to establish colleges, they were acting on the General Conference’s 1820
resolutions. They sought to establish such colleges in a region where educational
institutions were scattered, and they were very aware of the tensions and conflicts
enveloping the church. When the Illinois Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church
convened at Madison, Indiana, in 1828, the delegates affirmed the General Conference’s
1820 resolution by moving to consider establishing a college-grade literary institution

under the auspices of the Conference. But they divided over whether the institution

7O

 

should be located in Indiana or Illinois.‘ At the 1829 Conference at Edwardsville, Illinois,
the Indiana and Illinois delegates again split over whether to locate the institution at Mt.
Carmel, Illinois, or Lebanon Illinois, respectively. Despite the appointment of a committee
to propose a location during the 1830 Conference at Vincennes, Indiana, the Illinois
Conference did not act before the quadrennial General Conference of 1832 created a new
Indiana Conference.’

At its initial meeting in October, 1832, the Indiana Annual Conference appointed a
committee of Calvin W. Ruter, Allen Wiley and James Armstrong to consider establishing
a college under the conference’s auspices.‘ The committee’s recommendation that the
Conference establish a literary institution emphasized that science and Christianity were
were both important means of improving human conditions; that superior schools and a
college would nourish and strengthen the common schools that served every community;
and that other colleges in the state, including the state college at Bloonrington, were in the
hands of other denonrinations.7 In passing the resolution of the committee, the conference

called on the presiding elders of each district to gather information regarding a favorable

 

‘Between 1824 and 183 2, the Illinois Conference included the states of Illinois and Indiana. The
calendar of Conference dates and locations indicates that they alternated annually between sites in Illinois
and Indiana. William Warren Sweet, Circuite-Rider Days in Indiana: The Indiana Conference of the
Methodist Episcopal Church, 1832-1844.

1’George B. Manhart, Depauw Through the Years: Indiana Asbury University, 1837-1884,
Depauw University, 1884-1919. 2 vols. (Greencastle, Indiana: Depauw University, 1962), Vol 1, 3-5.

6Sweet, Circuit-Rider Days in Indiana, 90.
7William Warren Sweet addresses the Indiana Conference’s attempts to convince the Indiana
Assembly to alter arrangements at the Indiana College at Bloomington. Sweet emphasizes the

Methodists’ concern that their beliefs were not respected and that the college was widely considered to be
a Presbyterian institution. William Warren Sweet, Circuit-Rider Days in Indiana, 127 f. n. 16.

71

location for the college.

In their explanation of the need for a Methodist college, the committee combined
appeals to the power of religion and science to improve humanity with the need to provide
teachers and schools for the communities of a late frontier region where there were few
schools.

Next to the religion of the Son of God your committee consider the
light of science calculated to lessen the sum of human woe and to inease
the sum of human happiness. Therefore we are of the opinion that the
means of education ought to be placed within the reach of every
community in general so that all have an opportunity of obtaining an
ordinary and necessary education. From observation and information your
servants are well convicned that where superior schools are neglected,
ordinary schools are almost universally in a languished state. And many
persons are reared, live and die without any education. We therefore think
that Senrinaries and Colleges under good literary and moral regulations are
of incalcualable benefit to our country, and that a good Conference
Seminary would be of great and growing utility to our people. We are
aware that when a Conference Seminary is named, some of our preachers
and many of our people suppose we are to establish a manufactory in
which preachers are to be made.8

The delegates looked to science and religion to provide benefits through a state-wide
educational process that would be hierarchical in structure. Seminaries and colleges
would dispense their wisdom by providing educated teachers for, and otherwise
strengthening local schools that would “languish” without such resources.9 The report, as
adopted, suggests two criteria for the collegiate institution. It would be a place “under

good literary and moral regulations,” and they would not be a “manufactory” for

 

8Minutes of the Indiana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1832-1844. First
Session of the Indiana Conference, NewAlbany, October, 1832, in William Warren Sweet, Circuit-Rider
Days in Indiana, 101-103.

9Minutes of the Indiana Conference, 1832, 101.

72

preachers. That is, it would exercise the same Christian in loco parentis supervision as
other colleges, and it would be a literary, rather than a theological, institution.

In 1833 and 1834, the Indiana Conference took steady steps towards gaining some
role in providing a collegiate education. The 1833 Indiana Conference appointed a
committee of Allen Wiley, James Armstrong, James Havens, James L. Thompson, and
William Shanks to study the possibility of establishing a college. The 1834 conference
turned to gaining influence in the state college at Bloomington, rather than establishing a
separate institution. They appointed Calvin W. Ruter and William Shanks to compose a
petition to the legislature requesting that all major denominations receive equal
representation in the state college at Bloonrington, and that the legislature appoint the
college’s trustees at regular intervals, instead of for life. The assigned legislative
committee never reported on the conference’s original petition or five others filed on their
behalf. The 1834 conference also resolved to support “any seminary of learning” in the
area if it could appoint one teacher.10

These petition drives were part of a well-chronicled dispute between Indiana
Methodists and Presbyterians over the public roles of putatively private or church-

associated educational institutions and the culture of the Midwest.11 Presbyterian and

 

10Minutes of the Indiana Conference, 1834, 127; Manhart, Depauw Through the Years, vol. 1, 3-

11Timothy L Smith, Uncommon Schools: Christian Colleges and Social Idealism in Midwestern
America, 1 820-195 0, in Timothy L. Smith and Donald E. Ptizer, Indiana Historical Society Lectures,
1976-1 97 7: The History of Education in the Middle West (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1978);
Robert D. Clark, “Matthew Simpson, The Methodists, and the Defeat of Governor Samuel Bigger, 1843”
Indiana Magazine of History 50, 1 (March, 1954), 23-33; David L. Kimbrough, Reverend Joseph
Tarkington, Methodist Circuit-Rider: From Frontier Evanglelism to Refined Religion (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 86-87;Robert D. Clark, The Life of Matthew Simpson (New York:

73

Congregationalists, who had been the pre-enrinent authorities of institutional culture in
New England and the Middle-Atlantic states expected to dominate colleges in the rising
West. Thus they saw no denominational interests in their dominance of many of the new
state universities, including the Indiana College, that opened at Bloomington in 1828.
They portrayed the Methodists as ignorant, backward, and emotional. But they also
labeled them as sectarian, by which the Presbyterians meant roughly that the Methodists
were particularistic, and opposed to Yankee-Presbyterian dominance.12 However, the
Methodists, also declared the Presbyterians to be sectarian. By sectarian, the Methodists
meant that the Presbyterians themselves were a particularistic denomination, and not a
non-sectarian or non-denonrinational presence in the Midwest.13

One way that the Indiana Methodists contested Presbygational dominance in
collegiate institutions was to claim a right to equal representation on the faculty of Indiana
and board of the state college. The Indiana College Trustees, the state legislature and
Presbyterian leaders responded that the board of trustees represented all religious groups.

It included four Presbyterians, four Episcopalians, three Baptists, two Methodists and two

 

MacMillan, 1956), 76-96.

12On Presbyterian views of Methodists as sectarian, see Howard Miller, The Revolutionary
College: American Presbyterian Higher Education, 1 707-1837 (New York: New York University Press,
1976), 242-246, 257-258; Philip Lindsley, “Baccalaureate Address, 1829,” in Richard Hofstadter and
Wilson Smith, eds, American Higher Education: A Documentary History, 1, (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1961), 234; Julian M Sturtevant: An Autobiography, ed. J. M. Sturtevant, Jr. (New York,
1896).

13Minutes of the Indiana Conference... 1834, 132-135; Robert D. Clark, “Matthew Simpson, The
Methodists, and the Defeat of Governor Samuel Bigger, 1843" Indiana Magazine of History 50, 1 (March,
1954), 23-33; David L. Kimbrough, Reverend Joseph Tarkington, Methodist Circuit-Rider: From
Frontier Evangelism to Refined Religion (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 86-87; Robert
D. Clark, The Life of Matthew Simpson (New York: MacMillan, 1956), 76.

74

 

men from smaller Protestant groups. The Methodists’ petitions of 1834 may have secured
a response in that the Bloomington institution named Augustus W. Ruter, of Methodist-
afliliated Allegheny College, as a professor. But by that time, the conflict with the
Presbyterians had turned bitter and the Indiana Conference had determined to establish its
own college.”

Meeting at Lafayette in 183 5, the Indiana Conference established a financial
plan, appointed ministers of the conference as agents, and appointed comrrrittees to
investigate likely sites for the institution. According to the plan, the college would sell
shares (often referred to a scholarships) that granted the purchasers the right to send a
child to the college for a given number of years. One hundred dollars would purchase four
years and two-hundred-and-fifty dollars would purchase twenty years of education. They
also offered the naming rights to an endowed chair for a contribution of ten thousand
dollars. Finally, they publicized the financial plan in an address that they sent to
Methodists and “fiiends of the Methodist Church in Indiana.”"

The 1836 Conference established a location for the institution and composed a
charter to present to the legislature. They called on Augustus W. Ruter to assist in its
writing. The conference appointed the Presiding Elder of the Indianapolis District to
present the charter, and hired Calvin Fletcher, Esq. of Indianapolis to guide the charter

through the legislature. Fletcher initially led an effort to locate the college in Indianapolis,

 

1“Minutes of the Indiana Conference, 1834, 132-135; Manhart, Depauw Through the Years, vol.
1, 5-6.

15Minutes of the Indiana Conference, 1835, 145-148.

75

 

but relented when he decided that the city would not be conducive to the moral conduct of
young men. The site committee selected Greencastle, in Putnam County over Indianpolis,
Madison, New Albany, and Terre Haute.

The charter, which received final approval on January 10, 183 7, opened:

Whereas the Indiana Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal
Church have determined upon establishing an extensive University or
College Institution in this State... forever to be conducted on the most
liberal principles, accessible to all religious denominations, and designed for
the benefit of our citizens in general... and Whereas, such a University in
the State of Indiana, if conducted upon free and enlightened principles,
would be of immense benefit to our citizens generally, by disseminating
knowledge and usefirl literature; Therefore, it be enacted...That a Seminary
of learning shall be, and the same is hereby established in the town or
vicinity of Greencastle, in Putnam County, and State of Indiana, to be
known by the name and style of ‘The Indiana Asbury University,’ which
shall be founded and maintained forever, upon a plan the most suitable, for
the benefit of the youth of every class of citizens, and of every
denomination, who shall be freely admitted to equal advantages and
privileges of education.16

The charter gave the Indiana Conference authority to name up to twenty-five trustees and
nine visitors would form a Board of Trustees, a Board of Visitors to report to the Indiana
Conference, and together a Joint Board. It authorized the trustees to hold property as an
institution provided its real estate did not exceed $50,000, and empowered the visitors to
hire and fire faculty and a president. The faculty were charged to conduct public

examinations at the end of each term and to grant degrees to those who satisfactorily

completed the examinations.

 

16Minutes of the Indiana Conference, 1836, 148-150; Manhart, Depauw Through the Years, vol.
1, 7.

76

The Pre-Collegiate Years

Having received a charter in January of 183 7, the institution began its existence
with the first trustees meeting on the first Wedensday of March. For lack of their own
building, the trustees leased “the county seminary building,” paying a two-hundred dollar
deposit. As a further requirement for using the public building, the county required that
the institution provide an “A B C Spelling, reading writing and arithmetic school open to
all interested students in the county and state. Pay records indicate the school ran from 20
March to mid-June in 1837 and in 183 8, employing a Rev. John Newell and a James
McCararachan in 1837.17

In leasing the county seminary building to operate a primary school open to “all
interested students,” the trustees did more than admit that their institution would not be
strictly denominational or sectarian. They combined the operation of a “private” church-
associated institution with public goals and institutions, which extended Protestant
practices in America, where churches met in public buildings, rival congregations shared
church buildings, and church and college leaders spoke of shaping public culture such that
Christianity, or Protestantism, and Christianity sometimes appeared as one. The operation
of such institutions and use of such rhetoric were just one way that churches and colleges
in Indiana and the rest of the Midwest met multiple institutional goals and concerns.

From 1837 to 183 9, the trustees also operated a preparatory or secondary
academy; it is unclear whether any students studied at the college level during these years.

Rev. Cyrus McNutt was the sole instructor for preparatory and any collegiate students.

 

17Manhart, Depauw Through the Years, 15-16.

77

The trustees listed five students at the June 5 beginning of the preparatory department
term, fifteen at its end, and forty students in the winter term which began in November,
1837. Although the 1839 catalogue listed “English Grammar, Geography, Bookkeeping,
Arithmetic, Introduction to Algebra, and the rudiments of Latin and Greek Language” as
the course offerings, it is unclear how many of these Rev. Mc Nutt taught.18

The Indiana Asbury University achieved clear college status in Februaruy of 183 9,
with the appointment of Rev. Matthew Simpson as President, Rev. McNutt as Professor
of Languages, Rev. John W. Weakley as Principal of the Preparatory Department, and
John Wheeler, a member of the senior class, as a Tutor in Languages. The university also
published its first catalogue for the 1839-1840 school year, listing three seniors, four
sophomores, ten fieshmen, forty-three irregular, and fifty-eight preparatory students.19
Indiana Asbury University held its first commencement on September 16, 1840. Rev.
Henry Ward Beecher, minister of the Second Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis
addressed the college’s literary societies, and three seniors were graduated.

Once Indiana Asbury University began operation as a hilly collegiate institution,
the Indiana Conference presented a plan for raising funds for it throughout the state. The
conference appointed each presiding elder to “preach a special sermon...annually in each
station and circuit in his District” and to direct that the preacher take a collection for the

university. The conference also directed all preachers to discuss support of the university

 

l“Manhart, Depauw Through the Years, l8-l9.

l9Manhart, Depauw Through the Years, vol. I, 19-21; Catalague of the Indiana Asbury
University for the Year 1840.

78

in their pastoral meetings with individual church members. Conference leaders believed
that by such efforts they could raise $20,000 per year and that “the entire strength of the
church may be concentrated upon the great object we desire to accomplish, viz: the
religious and intellectual improvement of the whole community.”20

The intent and hopes of the 1841 campaign demonstrated the importance that
conference leaders placed on the college. But it also projected the effort to build and
maintain a conference college into every district and congregation in the state conference.
This penetration could not help but raise significant opposition as laypersons and even
clergy objected to supporting such centralized and hierarchical institutions.
Female Education in Greencastle Before 1860

Education of women was conspicuously absent from Indiana Asbury University
until 1866. Until that date, the college did not admit women in any of its programs,
including the Preparatory Department. Although the college as an institution excluded
women from any form of equal education, wives of the college faculty, and several college
faculty and trustees were involved in separate female seminaries in Greencastle. Although
the college did not recognize any official connection with any of these female seminaries,
three of the four known seminaries were directed by -- or otherwise employed -- Indiana

Asbury faculty or their wives and the same three used the Indiana Asbury chapel or other

facilities for some activities.

 

20James Findlay, “Agency, Denominations, and the Western Colleges, 1830-1860: Some
Connections Between Evangelicalism and Higher Education.” Church History 50, 1 (March, 1981), 68,
69; “Journal of the Indiana Conference,” 28 October, 1840. “Minutes of the Board of Trustees, Depauw
University, 1 March - 18 October, 1837.

79

Mrs. Harriet Dunn Larabee, wife of Indiana Asbury professor William C. Larabee,
opened Heman’s Seminary in her home in 1844. By 1848, the seminary secured a state
charter to grant degrees, hold commencements, and appoint trustees. Both William C.
Larabee and Governor Joseph A. Wright served as trustees. The curriculum closely
followed that of Indiana Asbury University.21 Most of the instructors were members of
the Larabee family, including both Harriet and William, Harriet’s brother and three sisters,
and the Larabees’ son William H. Larabee. Mrs. Caroline Springer taught music. Most
other instructors were (male) advanced Indiana Asbury students. The women used the
Indiana Asbury chapel for their oral and musical exercises and productions, and they
received space in a “Female Department” of the Asbury Notes.22 Mrs. Larabee retired in
1852, and Jeremiah Tingley, an Indiana Asbury graduate of 1850, took over supervision of
the school. In 1853, the Indiana Methodist Conference took over some supervision of the
school. But their patronage of another academy in 1855 suggests that the Heman’s
Seminary had ceased operation by that time.

In 1855, the Indiana Methodist Conference and the Northwest Indiana Methodist
Conference were supporting the Asbury Female Institute at Greencastle. The Rev.
George Chase was its director. The seminary met in the “Old County” building of Indiana

Asbury University. Manhart says little more, except that Rev. John B. DeMotte, later on

 

21Kimbrough reports that the female senrinary’s curriculum followed that of the college. It was
likely the English, rather than the classical, curricula, because the texts included included McGufi’ey’s
Reader, vols, l, 2, and 3; Parley’s Geography, Wilson’s Juvenille History, Ray’s Arithemetic, and
Parley’s Universal History. Kimbrough, 107-108.

22The Asbury Notes was a student and faculty magazine that was published in the 18505.
Depauw University Archives, Roy 0. West Memorial Library, Depauw Unviersity, Greencastle, Indiana.

80

the IAU faculty, was directing the institute in 1859, and that it was praised in the Putnam
Republican Banner in 1856. Rev. James P. Rous, head of the Indiana Asbury
Preparatory Department, opened Asbury Female Seminary in Greencastle in 1861, and in
1866, when Indiana Asbury University decided to admit women, a Miss. Grigsby was
operating a female seminary in Greencastle.23
Indiana Asbury University’s Path to Coeducation

As early as 1855, the trustees appointed a committee to consider establishing a
“female department” in the college. They deemed such action imprudent. A similar 1857
committee recommended admitting women on an equal basis with men, but advised not
doing so immediately. Between 1860 and 1864, several proposals were made for opening
a Female Department when firnds became available. But no action was ever taken.“ In
1866, the trustees voted to open the college to women. Six women entered the freshman
class in 1867. Four entered and completed the scientific course; one, the daughter of a
professor, completed the classical course; and a sixth dropped out before completing the
first year.25 Clearly, some of the college faculty and their wives supported the education
of women, as long as they remained in a formally separate institution and the female
institution was not of college grade. But the college remained an institution for the
creation of young men and a male world for twenty-two years after the opening of the first

female institution in the town.

 

23Manhart, Depauw Through the Years, 1: 65-66.

2"It is easy to be cynical about concern with finances. But two considerations are important:
Most colleges barely avoided financial crises; and this was the period of the Civil War.

25Manhart, Depauw Through the Years, 66-67.

81

The outlines of the creation of institutions like Indiana Asbury University can be
read in the celebratory histories that every college seems to have produced. Many times
over, a group of men, whether representing a church or loosely associated, gathered and
determined to establish a college because none existed nearby or because they desired that
their views be represented in a college. They went to the state legislature to secure a
corporate charter so they could elect or appoint a board of trustees, hold property and
grant degrees. Finally, they solicited communities for donations and support of their
institutions, generally locating in the most generous community. The centennial and
sesquicentennial histories of colleges are generally just that — celebrations of the
accomplishments of the founders and those who built on their efforts to the glory of the
present institution.

But read against the grain, these histories provide a rich guide to contests and
controversies that shaped the individual institutions, their communities, their
constituencies, and the development of the upper Ohio Valley and lower Great Lakes. As
educational institutions, the colleges were consciously built to create re-create culture, in
ways that few institutions before them did.26 As institutions that educated young men in
classical and English curricula, convened regular public events to exhibit their goals and
accomplishments, and used and produced published texts the colleges thereby became the
foci of contests over local issues, such as they would be located and whether men and

women would both have access to advanced education, over the relationships of theology,

 

2"Few such institutions prewded the colleges in the West, but in the 18305 and 18405, when the
Indiana colleges were established, the New Harmony colony and lyceums and other institutions were also
established.

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institutions and religious practice, such as whether the college would provide professional
theological training for a new class of Methodist ministers who might replace the itinerant
ministry with parish preaching. The decision of the Indiana Conference of the Methodist
Episcopal Church to address the building of a college in their inaugural meeting points to
both a sea change in the institutional life of the Methodist Episcopal Church after 1820
and a decision to discontinue attempts to work jointly with the Illinois Conference. The
Indiana Methodists’ 1835 decision to establish their own college only after the Indiana
Legislature rejected their petition to grant Methodists an equal role with their
Presbyterian rivals in the public state university at Bloomington points to both the
ambiguous lines between public and private educational institutions in a late frontier area
and to the bitter religious and political rivalry between Presbyterians and Methodists in
Indiana between 1830 and 1850. Their decision to establish the college at Greencastle
points to the importance of both boosting and health concerns to the development of the
region. Both the Conference’s and the college trustees’ exclusion of women, and Harriet
Dunn Larrabee’s establishment of Heman’s Academy by 1844 point to the contested and
developing place of female education in the antebellum period. The arrangement whereby
the Indiana Conference used the county building for their classes under condition of
maintaining an open A B C school was one more place where the church-owned and
supervised institution used the communities’ public resources in return to providing some

public benefit.

83

Methodists’ Rise in Wealth and Institutional Status

Several chroniclers and historians have identified a rise in status among Methodists
between 1820 and 1860. A significant rise in wealth, status and political power among
Methodist laity and clergy was visible in transformations in church buildings, a drive for
annual conferences to establish and supervise colleges, and changes in ministerial
education, including controversy over a theological seminary. These accompanied a
transformation of preaching and worship, and increasing use of the moral philosophy that
more genteel denominations and colleges had long employed.27

John H. Wigger presents Methodists’ rise to respectability in terms of their
personal and corporate wealth. Early on Methodism tended to attract people “on the
make.” Because the Methodists readily adopted to American popular culture, the
movement grew in both numbers and economic status, and so provided an insurgent
movement in both American religion and social status. Wigger notes that “while few
Methodists of this period (1790-1860) were among the truly rich, as a group they steadily
advanced during ambiguous economic times.” As numbers, wealth, and status increased,

Methodism’s leaders and influential laymen increasingly sought to solidify and protect

 

27Nathan 0. Hatch The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1989); Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform, (New York, 1965); John H. Wigger,
Taking Heaven By Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998); William Warren Sweet, Circuit-Rider Days in Indiana, including the
Minutes of the Indiana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, edited by William Warren Sweet,
(Indianapolis, W. K. Stewart, Co., 1916); Kimbrough, Joseph Tarkington; Allen Wiley, “Introduction and
Progress of Methodism in Southeastern Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History 23, 3 (Sept. 1927): 239-
332; Wiley, “Introduction and Progress of Methodism in Southeastern Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of
History 23, 4 (Dec, 1927): 393-466; Wiley, “Methodism in Southeastern Indiana, Indiana Magazine of
History 23, 1 (March, 1927): 3-64; Wiley, “Methodism in Southeastern Indiana,”1ndiana Magazine of
History 23, 2 (June, 1927): 130-216.

84

their personal wealth and status. By 1850, Methodist meetings and conferences owned
almost 20,000 buildings worth almost $33 million, which was 38 percent of American
church buildings and nearly 20 percent of American church wealth.” In 1820, the General
Conference directed annual conferences to establish and maintain control over colleges in
their bounds.29 Between 1816 and 1830, Methodist conferences established 12 colleges,
including McKendree in Illinois and Augusta in Kentucky. By 1840, they had established
40 more schools and colleges, including Wesleyan University in Connecticut and Indiana
Asbury University in Indiana.30 The Methodists’ turn towards college founding after
1820 appeared to confirm Francis Asbury’s concern that colleges would inexorably draw
Methodists in the cultural mainstream and away from their insurgent orientation.31
William Warren Sweet identifies the 18205 as the period when the Illinois and
Indiana Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church began to replace circuit-riding
with parish preachers at assigned “preaching stations.” In 1825, Madison and Salem
became the first stations in Indiana. By 1831, Lawrenceburg, Indianapolis, Bloomington,

and New Albany had also become stations.32 In 1834, Jeffersonville, Vincennes, and

 

28John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven By Storm, 174-175.

29Sylvanus M. Duvall, The Methodist Episcopal Church and Education up to I 869. Teachers’
College, Columbia University Contributions to Education No. 284 (New York: AMS Press, 1972), 63-64.

30John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven By Storm, 175-176.

31Francis Asbury Journal 2: 75, (January 4, 1796). Fear of the impact of colleges had nrade
Francis Asbury anxious and ambivalent about the Methodists’ first venture in higher education,
Cokesbury College in Baltimore, which burned twice, for the last time in 1796.

32William Warren Sweet, Circuit Rider Days in Indiana, 46-47. The Indiana Conference became
a separate annual conference when the Illinois Conference was divided in 1832.

85

Crawfordsville were also assigned stationary preachers.33 The turn to stationary preaching
was connected to firndamental transformations in Methodist worship in urban areas. First,
stationary preaching replaced the practice of local, part-time, preachers leading Sunday
worship and full-time itinerants preaching and performing baptisms and communion
whenever they arrived in a community, with preaching and sacraments performed by a
settled or stationary preacher on Sunday. Stationary preaching was also related to
preachers’ increasing use of refined sermons that were written and read, as opposed to
more extemporaneous preaching. Just as stationary preaching transformed preaching, it
also transformed the spaces Methodists used for worship. By combining congregations in
urban centers, stationary preachers could replace worship in homes, fields, and log
churches with substantial frame and brick churches." The building of substantial buildings
with fixed pews in turn raised controversy over pew rents, which other denominations had
long employed, but were first adopted by Methodists in Providence, Rhode Island;
perhaps not coincidentally the year of Francis Asbury’s death. But these transformation of
worship apparently produced resistance. Sweet finds that before 1832, some meetings
resisted combining their resources to build substantial centralized buildings for worship.”

Methodists’ status was also rising in the political realm. After 1820, they no

 

33“Indiana Annual Conference, October 31, 1834,” Western Christian Advocate l, 28 (November
7, 1834), 111.

34The church built at Greensburg, in 1849, two years before Joseph Tarkington’s family settled
there, is an example. Kimbrough, Joseph Tarkington, 97.

35William Warren Sweet, Circuit Rider Days in Indiana, 47-48. Wigger, Taking Heaven by
Storm, 175, 181, 182-184. Pew rentals will be discussed in detail below. An efl’ort to install an organ and
choir in the Greensburg Methodist Church caused a split in 1861, with the dissidents forming the
Centennial Methodist Episcopal Church. Kimbrough, Joseph Tarkington, 99.

86

longer could be considered political outsiders. Methodists comprised an influential
Federalist group in Delaware and a dominant Democratic movement in Ohiof"S
Methodists and Presbyterians had long contested control of the Indiana Legislature by
1852, when eleven of thirteen United States Representatives and one United States
Senator, along with Indiana’s Governor were Methodists.37 Their rising power in Indiana
would play a key role in their establishment of Indiana Asbury University after they failed
to secure satisfactory influence in the state college at Bloomington.38

Joseph Tarkington probably excelled most Methodist preachers in his assent to
respectability. But his rise from fi'ontier settler to refined minister with college-educated
children was not entirely exceptional either. Like many other Methodist preachers in
antebellum Indiana, he was born into a family that moved there to escape the slave society
of the deep South. His father moved from North Carolina to Franklin, Tennessee, where
he purchased a farm that had been secured by Revolutionary War grants. Joseph was born
there in 1800. Like many settlers in Indiana, the Tarkington family moved to Indiana after
finding their land title in Tennessee deficient. After two years of leasing the land, the
family moved to Indiana in 1815. There they cleared a “school section” of land that had
not yet been posted for sale. In 1816, after an epidemic, the family purchased a quarter

section of land near Stanford for two dollars per acre at the Vincennes land sale. They

 

3‘SWigger, Taking Heaven By Storm, 177-178.

37Timothy L. Snrith, Revivalism and Social Reform, (New York, 1965), 24.

38Robert D. Clark, “Matthew Simpson, the Methodists, and the Defeat of Governor Samuel
Bigger, 1843" Indiana Magazine of History, “Cyrus Nutt Becomes a Hoosier,” edited by Eleanore A.
Cammock, Indiana Magazine of History 53, 3 (March, 1957), 29-68.

87

paid for the land by selling fence rails, which they made at twenty-five cents a hundred.
The journey to their land required travel over the White River in a pirouge, and a thirty-
mile hike overland on a self-made trail.39

Joseph converted to Methodism in 1820, two years after Methodist preachers first
arrived in Monroe County. Joseph soon began exhorting fiiends. To improve his
preaching, he began studying grammar with his Methodist class leader, Daniel Rollins.
Tarkington excelled in the male world of evangelical preachers. Methodism quickly
became for him a means to recognition and status, as Joseph became a class leader in
1821, an exhorter in 1822, and a licensed preacher in 1824. When he received his
preaching license in 1824, he was studying at Indiana Seminary (later Indiana University),
and strongly -- but unsuccessfully -- resisted his assignment to itinerant preaching.

Joseph Tarkington completed his initial four years of ministry without any hint of
entanglement or scandal with women."0 In 1831, he married Maria Slawson, a daughter of
a prosperous Methodist family. The Slawson family had managed to purchase two firll
sections of land, and were beginning a new brick house at the time of the engagement.
Joseph and Maria married at her parents’ home. They visited his parents as part of a

wedding tour, but there is no evidence that in their fifty years of marriage Joseph ever

 

39David L. Kimbrough, Reverend Joseph Tarkington, Methodist Circuit Rider: From Frontier
Evangelism to Refined Religion (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1997), 20-43. The following
paragraphs on Joseph Tarkington’s life and work rely heavily on Kimbrough.

”The Methodist Episcopal Church required that preachers abstain from relations with women for
the first four years of their ministry. After that, the Presiding Elder or Bishop had a great deal of
authority over their decisions regarding marriage. These rules were not specifically because of concern
with sexual relations per se, but were intended to keep pastors from being distracted by romantic relations
in their early years of ministry and to keep them from seeking marriage as a way out of the ministry at the
earliest stages of their careers. Kimbrough, Joseph Tarkington, 66-75.

88

 

brought Maria back to his family’s home. He only visited his parents’s simple farm when
his work took him to the area.

By 183 8, Tarkington’s rising status in the Indiana Conference was evident. Afier
fourteen years of serving on various circuits, he was appointed as the first stationary
preacher at Lawrenceburg. The stationary assignment allowed him to move his family into
a substantial house on High Street. In the next year he was appointed to another
stationary position, this time in Richmond. In 1841, he returned to circuit preaching, first
on the Liberty Circuit near Terre Haute, then around Brookville.

In 1847, Tarkington was assigned to the Vincennes District. The district was
large, stretching fiom “the corporation line of Greencastle to the neck between White
River and the Wabash, in sight of Mt. Carmel, Illinois.” It required five weeks to complete
on horseback. According to Kimbrough, Joseph accepted the assignment because it
allowed the family to move to Greencastle, where his son John could attend Indiana
Asbury University and daughters Mary and Martha could attend Mrs. Larrabee’s women’s
academy while they lived at home. Joseph enjoyed warm relations with the faculty of
Indiana Asbury. Lucian W. Berry, one of the early faculty, was his Presiding Elder on the
Brookville Circuit in 1846. In 1848, Matthew Simpson baptized Tarkington’s youngest
son, Matthew Simpson Tarkington, on commencement day of his last year as president of
the college.

In 1851, the family moved to Greensburg, where Joseph Tarkington served as
Presiding Elder of the Shelbyville Station. At Greensburg, the Tarkingtons built a home

that demonstrated their genteel aspirations and status in both the Methodist Church and

89

Indiana. They received a one-hundred-sixty-two acre farm fi'om Maria’s parents, and
hired a carpenter to build their home. The residence had five bedrooms, a grand stairway
and a servant’s stairway, a sewing room, parlors, gaslights, hardwood floors and ornate
wood trim. Outside the house, Tarkington had built a fifty-by-one hundred foot barn, a
large com-crib, and several other buildings. Finally, he planted apple and peach trees in a
new orchard. These stood in stark contrast to his parents’ small farm at Stanford, and the
necessity of early Methodist clergy to farm in order to supplement their meager and
seldom-paid salary.

Education, marrying up, and wealth demonstrated the Tarkington family’s
aspirations and accomplishments. After struggling at Indiana Asbury University, Joseph
Asbury Tarkington, the oldest son, graduated from both Columbia and Georgetown
medical institutes. As a prominent physician in Washington D. C., he married Elva
Meredith Yeatman, a concert pianist and harpist who frequently performed at the White
House. John graduated from Indiana Asbury at the head of his class, and married
Elizabeth Booth of Terre Haute, whose brother later became Governor of California.
Their son, Booth Tarkington, became an accomplished author and playwright. Mary an
Martha both graduated fiom Mrs. Larrabee’s Academy at Greencastle. Like their male
siblings, they married up. Martha apparently left a Kentucky farmer to marry Daniel
Stewart, whose family became one of the wealthiest in Indiana. Mary Tarkington married
a Dr. John Alexander. Matthew Simpson Tarkington married Clare Williams Baker,
daughter of a large land-owner. William Simon Reaves married the daughter of his

father’s brother at his grandfather’s home near Stanford. His father-in-law was a

90

businessman and state legislator.

The family’s politics demonstrated both their achievement and their interest in
holding onto what they had acquired. Maria’s family, which provided the initial wealth in
the Tarkington estate, actively supported De Witt Clinton against Andrew Jackson. They
consistently voted with the Whig party thereafter and later joined the new Republican
Party.

The settledness of preachers and laypersons’ expectations of their preachers, the
dress of preachers, and the places where preachers and laity gathered for worship all
marked the increasing status and settledness of many Indiana Methodists by the 18505. By
the 18505, communities that were increasing in size and settledness demanded firll-time
pastors to deal with personal and community concerns. More and more Methodist
preachers became settled stationary preachers like Tarkington did in the late 18405. In
such situations, preachers like Joseph Tarkington increasingly sought recognition as
clergymen who stood apart from the laity who were increasingly becoming their
congregations.

Methodist preachers and laypersons began dressing more formally and less
modestly by the 18405. T. A. Goodwin noted an incident at the 1839 annual conference
which demonstrated increasing affluence and concern with status. A certain Rev. John S.
Bayless had married a wealthy young woman.

With no fear of tradition before his eyes, he had had his wedding suit made

by a tailor in the height of fashion. The fact that it was made of store-

goods was not of itself to be censured; for Edward R. Ames, William H.
Goode, and a dozen or more others, wore store-goods; but the style of the

91

clothes gave offense. The pants were ‘tights,’ with narrow falls; the coat
was ‘pigeon-tailed’; and the hat of a stovepipe variety, giving the wearer a
unique appearance in a body of Methodist preachers in regulation uniform.
This was too much of a departure from traditional Methodism to go
unrebuked; hence, Samuel C. Cooper offered a resolution that every
member of the Conference be required to wear to Conference straight-
breasted or shad-bellied coats, and breeches with broad falls. It passed
without a dissenting vote; but more and more, from that point on,
preachers dressed as they pleased, so that the cut of the coat or pants is no
longer a distinguishing badge of a Methodist preacher.‘l

By the 18505, Methodists in some Indiana communities had built elaborate brick
churches that included steeples and bells. At Greensburg, the Methodists built a brick
building in 1849. In the 18605’ the church split over the introduction of an organ and a
choir into the church.

Despite the opening of Augusta College in 1822, and several other Methodist
colleges in the early 18305, Methodists continued to express concern that their youth who
desired education would not only receive that education outside the Methodist Church,
but would leave the Methodist Church after completing their education. John Durbin, one
of the original instructors at Augusta College, wrote in the Quarterly Register that:

These young men, generally the most promising of our best

families, will be educated somewhere. Ifthere be not properly elevated

institutions under our own patronage, they will be sent to others. What is

the consequence? Many of them return with prejudice against the religious

opinions and practices of their parents; not only injured themselves, as we

think, but prove a great mortification to their parents. They frequently
forsake our assemblies, and become able and efficient supporters of other

 

"Tarkington, Autobiography, 17. T. A. Goodwin, who appears often in Josephy Tarkington,
Autobiography of Rev. Joseph Tarkington, One of the Pioneer Methodist Preachers of Indiana
(Cincimrati: Curts and Jennings, 1899), was the first graduate of Indiana Asbury University’s collegiate
course.

92

people."2
An 1839 article in the Methodist Magazine made the same argument.” “The ranks of our
ministry were often impoverished by young men of piety and promise going out among
others to seek literary advantages which we could not give them and finally connecting
themselves with other ecclesiastical bodies.”‘“

John Durbin and the author of the Methodist Magazine article expressed concerns
that bore some similarity to those of Presbyterian educators but also highlighted the
conflicts and contrasting goals and fears of Methodist and Presbyterian collegiate
programs. First, Durbin and the Methodist Magazine author claimed that if they did not
provide institutions to educate their youth, young men would leave the Methodist
churches in order to seek literary education elsewhere. The Presbyterians also claimed
that if they did not provide such institutions, others would educate them. But whereas
Durbin claimed “the most promising [men] of the best Methodist families would be
educated elsewhere, and the Methodist Magazine author claimed that the youth would “go

out among others to seek literary advantages which we cannot give them”; Charles White,

 

”The citation of John Durbin in the Quarterly Register of August, 1831 appears in The History
of American Methodism, vol. 1, Gen. Ed. Bucke, (New York: Abingdon), 555. The Quarterly Register
was the periodical of the American Education Society, a Congregationalist-Presbyterian society that
provided funds to college for young men pursuing a collegiate degree as a step towards ministry in the
Congregationalist or Presbyterian churches.

”The Ohio and Kentucky conferences obtained a charter for in 1822 and elected Martin Ruter as
President in 1827. The Virginia Conference chartered Randolph-Macon College in 1830 and opened it
under President Stephen Olin in 1832. The New England and New York Conferences chartered and
opened Wesleyan University in 1831. The Baltimore Conference purchased Dickinson College in 1833.
The Pittsburgh Conference purchased Allegheny College in 1833. The Indiana Conference chartered
Indiana Asbury University in 1837, which offered its first classes in 1839 and first collegiate classes in
1841. Cummins, History of American Methodism, 550-559.

44Cited in The History of American Methodism, Bucke, et. al., eds. 556.

93

President of Wabash College, warned his collegiate audience that Catholics and “nature”
would educate Presbyterian youth if the Presbyterians did not. Whereas the Methodists
feared losing their most educable men to Presbyterians and others who claimed to provide
a superior literary education, Presbyterians feared losing their uneducated youth to
Catholicism, which they considered superstitious and idolatrous, or to nature, which they
considered irrational and passionate." Thus the Presbyterians and Methodists both
expressed fears that others would educate their youth if they did not, but they differed
both in what segments of their youth they might lose and who they might lose them to.
But the Methodist and Presbyterian college leaders also differed dramatically in the
emphasis they placed on moral philosophy, which was at the center of the collegiate
curriculum, and experiential religion, which had long been the beating heart of American
Methodism. The Western Christian Advocate published J. P. Durbin’s inaugural address
as Principal of Dickinson College, which was supervised by the Baltimore and Philadelphia
conferences,“ and Stephen Ruter’s baccalaureate address at Allegheny College.47 Both of
these addresses demonstrated how Methodist college leaders were adopting the language
and concerns of moral philosophy selectively. They spoke the language of personal self-

discipline, sacrifice of self-interest for the public interest, and the importance of these

 

45Charles White, The Duties of Young Men Educated at the West.

“Dickinson College had been a Presbyterian-associated institution, but had recently been
purchased by the Baltimore and Philadelphia conferences and apparently re-opened after having been
closed down.

"J. P. Durbin, “Inaugural Address of the Rev. Mr. J. P. Durbin, Principal of Dickinson College,
Delivered in Carlisle Pennsylvania, August 10, 1834,” Western Christian Advocate l, 25 (October 17,
1834), 97-99. Stephen Ruter, “President Ruter’s Baccalaureate Address to the Graduates and Students of
Allegheny College,” Western Christian Advocate l, 25 (October 24, 1834), 101-102.

94

moral qualities for the republic, without reducing their discussion of salvation and holy
living to the categories of moral philosophy.48 Both addresses are neatly divisible into first
sections that promoted collegiate education and discipline of body, mind, and morals; and
second sections which used much more exclusively religious language. In Durbin’s
address this second section described Dickinson College’s offerings, faculty, in loco
parentis supervision and discipline, and relation to the community. In Ruter’s second
section, he described education’s role in maintaining republican institutions, and told how
the college would provide needed quality teachers for the common schools, and then use
them to promote republican institutions. But Ruter closed with an appeal to revelation
and piety as both motivation and comfort in language that sets his address apart fi'om any
of the inaugural or baccalaureate addresses at Wabash College. While these collegiate
Methodist preachers were building respectable collegiate institutions that dramatically
moved them away from the itinerancy of early American Methodism, they remained, at
least in the 183 Os, much more engaged in the discourses of revelation and piety than did
their Presbyterian counterparts, who employed the language of moral philosophy to
synthesize revelation, reason, and republicanism into a single discourse.
Methodist Publications

Methodist publications provide another index of Methodists’ rising aspirations and
status. Nathan Hatch shows that Nathan Bangs was able to remain in New York City,
despite the regular redistribution of preaching assignments, and built the Methodist Book

Concern into a religious publishing machine that became the largest publisher in the world

 

“J. P. Durbin, “Inaugural Address of the Rev. Mr. J. P. Durbin,” 9s.

95

by 1860, and produced the Christian Advocate and Journal, with a circulation of 25,000,
thus rivaling the publications of the Presbyterian-Congregationalist benevolent empire. In
1830, Bangs refined the monthly Methodist Magazine into a literary and theological
Methodist Quarterly Review. Bangs failed in attempts to establish a Methodist Episcopal
theological seminary in New York City and to establish a central Methodist University."

Bangs’ attempts to refine Methodist worship and publication did not go
uncontested. The antebellum period saw numerous religious conflicts along lines of
centralization, authority, and educational and social status. 5° This re-orientation of
insurgent religious groups was one of the transformational developments of American
Protestantism between 1830 and 1850. The Western Christian Advocate, launched from
Cincinnati in 1834, shows that the Book Concern and several annual conferences
increasingly supported education at all levels, but particularly the collegiate level. But it
also showed that new efforts to centralize fund-raising to build colleges intensified other
Methodists’ concerns that the colleges would become theological institutions.

In its first year, the Western Christian Advocate promoted collegiate education,
primarily by publishing the inaugural and commencement speeches, and the board
decisions and requests for filnds by the colleges supervised by Methodist annual

associations. The magazine also published a proposal for an Illinois Education Society

 

49After a rather typical career as a circuit-rider, Bangs became supervisor of five preachers in
New York City in 1810. In 1820, he was placed in charge of the Methodist Book Concern. Hatch,
Democratization of American Christianity, 204-205. Hatch draws heavily on Abel Stevens, The Life of
Nathan Bangs, D. D. (New York, 1863), for both his sketch of Bangs and his data on the Methodist Book
Concern.

”Nathan 0. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, 205.

96

and the Pittsburgh Conference’s new formal education requirements for Methodist clergy.
Stephen Olin’s inaugural address as President of Randolph-Macon College, supervised by
the Virginia Conference, appeared in full.51 Concern about or resistance to a seminary that
would professionalize the clergy was not limited to the laity. In an address before the
Tennessee Annual Conference, Bishop William McKendree defended the appointment of
uneducated, even illiterate ministers as better than appointing learned men of questionable
calling. McKendree compared illiterate ministers with divine calling to Jesus’ disciples
who performed miracles, in comparison to Paul, who used his learning to argue with
people and experienced much fr'ustration.’2

When the Illinois Methodist Conference sought to secure conference-wide
financial support for their developing college, they sparked fierce criticism of their
apparent decision to emphasize support of a college over direct support of common
schools. The Western Christian Advocate of 1834-1836 published a series of exchanges
that began with the Illinois Conference’ resolution to create local education societies to
raise money and funnel it to the conference’s Lebanon Seminary (later McKendree
Seminary and then McKendree College). In an article of 6 June, 1834, the Conference
called for a set of education societies such that the conference, assembled as an education
society, would be the superior society, with local branches operating as subordinate or

auxiliary societies. The authors appealed to community concerns in promoting the

 

5 1Stephen Olin, “President Olin’s Inaugural Address [at Randolph-Macon College],” Western
Christian Advocate, l, 6 (June 6, 1834), 21-22.

”Tennessee Annual Conference,” Western Christian Advocate 1, 31 (November 28, 1834), 122.

97

proposal:
Let me ask you, my dear brethren, will you not, in view of such a prospect; in view
of the wants of our people and citizens generally; and in view of such a prospect;
in view of the inestimable advantages of a liberal education, employ all you
influnence and energies, in the most eflicient manner, to enlist the feelings and
contributions of the people of your charge, in a cause at once so philanthropic and
beneficial to mankind?53
But in the same appeal, the authors also called Illinois Methodists to look beyond their
own local concerns. They claimed that: “Philanthropy, true philanthropy, is not confined
to the immediate spot where the philanthropist lives — but looks abroad: And from the
elevated abode of a good man’s bosom, surveys (painfully) the wants and miseries of all
men; and with anxious delight seeks to supply and relieve them.”"
Whether local contributors resented contributing money to the seminary and secondary
schools, or the supporters of the seminary did not make clear that filnds contributed would
go to the central organization and then to the seminary and secondary schools, the
proposal aroused a storm of protest. In an article in July, 1834, James Mitchell, a
financial agent of the seminary, protested against accusations that he supported a
Methodist theological seminary. He labeled conclusions that support of the college
included support of a theological seminary “ungenerous.” That an agent of Augusta

College, supported by the Ohio and Kentucy Conferences, had to defend himself fiom

similar charges suggests that the furor over the Illinois Conference’s program extended

 

53“Education: All Address to the Members and Preachers of the Illinois Annual Conference in
Behalf of Education,” Western Christian Advocate l, 6 (June, 6, 1834), 22.

54“Education: All Address to the Members and Preachers of the Illinois Annual Conference,”
Western Christian Advocate 1, 19 (September 5, 1834), 33.

98

well beyond its borders.55 In a September article, Peter Akers, the seminary principal,
adopted an outraged tone while defending the education societies. He clarified that
money would not stay in the local areas where it w as given, but would go to the central
society to be appropriated to the seminary and secondary schools. He also criticized those
who refilsed to give because the money does not go to common schools. Akers went so
far as to claim that every resident of Illinois is obligated to contribute to secondary and
seminary education:
I will say, every person in the state, is under obligation to

contribute something annually for the promotion of education, beyond

what is afforded in common schools, because every person in the state is

benefitted annually, by the prevalence of a degree of education which is not

furnished in the common schools."6
Akers then provided a list of benefits which every resident of Illinois enjoys. He scarcely
hid his condescension for those who lacked advanced education. He spoke of “the
enactment and execution of wholesome laws” and “the prevalence of good and wise
judges, lawyers, and statesmen indispensable to good government,” with “skillfill
physicians,” and “good and learned ministers of the word of life.” He looked forward to
“the preservation and improvement of the arts and sciences” and “the company and

conversation of the better instructed, with which every on one is favored more or less.”

Finally, he included “the multiplication of intelligent citizens, who know and appreciate

 

”James Mitchell, “A Call in Behalf of the McKendreean College,” Western Christian Advocate
l, 31(November 28, 1834), 122-124; “Augusta College,” Western Christian Advocate l, 11 (July 11,
1834), 43.

56Peter Akers, “Education,” Western Christian Advocate 1, 19 (September 5, 1834), 75.

99

their own interests.”57

Clearly Akers and the supporters of the seminary had very different goals for
education than did those who sought to support local common schools. The dissenters’
anger over the conference’s privileging of secondary and collegiate education over
common schools and over the use of local societies to raise the money closely resembled
other complaints in the region. The Indiana and Illinois Conferences had both considered
the Presbyterians irnperialistic and sectarian for their dominance of the region’s public and
private colleges and for their use of missionary and other associations. Old School
Presbyterians were opposing Wabash College on similar grounds. Midwestem Baptists
were divided by a growing anti-mission movement that opposed the Baptists’ own efforts
to use missionaries to evangelize frontier settlers and Native Americans.

Decisions of the Pittsburgh Conference appear regularly in the Western Christian
Advocate of 1834. Two articles fi'om that conference show a real formalization of
ministerial education, in both process and curricula. The conference presented a
preparatory program and a strict four-year program of reading and examinations that
reads like the English curricula of the colleges of the day. After “thoroughly and
critically” studying Kirham’s English Grammar, a good geography, “all the other common
branches of education, the Bible, and Wesley’s sermons, probationary licensees faced an
exam by their presiding elder, after which they could begin the four-year course. In each
year, “...the candidates and deacons will be required to undergo a strict examination, not

merely on their having read, but having carefillly studied ” a list of required texts, and “no

 

57Peter Akers, “Education,” 75.

100

excuse is to be received for not pursuing the studies assigned.”58 In the next week’s
number of the Advocate, the composition topics assigned to individual candidates and
deacons were listed.59

In the same year, two articles which revealed much about the relationship of
gender and class in contests over changing worship in the Methodist Episcopal Church
appeared in the Western Christian Advocate, published at Cincinnati. The magazine was a
regional edition of the Christian Advocate and Journal, which Nathan Bangs, head of the
Methodist Book Concern since 1826, had started in 1826. It became an official periodical
of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1828. John H. Wigger reports that “by 1831, the
Christian Advocate and Journal had the largest circulation of any weekly paper in the
nation. By 1840, circulation of the Western Christian Advocate, published in Cincinnati,
reached 14,000.”60 The article, “Free Grace and Free Seats Ought to Go Together,” was
signed by “Didymus.” The author protested against the way that some urban Methodist
congregations had adopted the practice of renting pews to members of their
congregations. The Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Congregationalist churches that had
enjoyed various levels of establishment fi'om colonial times into the early years of the

United States, had generally engaged in this practice. But the Methodist Episcopal

 

58“From the Pittsburgh Conference, A Course on Divinity,” Western Christian Advocate 1. 19
(September 5, 1834), 73.

59“Exercises in Composition [F rom the Pittsburgh Conference Journal]” Western Christian
Advocate l, 20 (September 12, 1834), 70.

60Nathan 0. Hatch, The Democratization of A merican Christianity (New Haven: Yale University,
1989): 203 -207; John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular
Christianity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 180.

101

Church had historically strongly discouraged the practice, and no Methodist church
rented pews until the Providence, Rhode Island society did in 1816.61 The author
addresses the article to “the preachers, members, and fiiends of the M. E. Church” calling
their attention “to the following reasons in support of our preference for free seats in our
houses of worship.” But the anonymous author opened his discussion of seating
arrangements with a discussion of Wesley’s rule that men and women should sit apart, and
he closed it by ridiculing the rich, who opposed sitting near the poor in church, asking
“And will it not be still worse, if they, after having to sit and worship together on earth,
should meet in heaven and have to sit together forever?”62
The divisiveness of this article is demonstrated by the editorial comments of Didymus
and of the editors of the Christian Advocate and Journal that precede a second article by
Didymus, two months later. Didymus writes:
Mr. Editor: — Some time since you published my article

under this head, written for general edification without any desire

of stirring up controversy. The Christian Advocate and Journal

copied it, and has since admitted a reply to my arguments, which

calls forth this review. I would be very glad if I had leave to

present it to the readers of the same journal in which the reply was

made, but I am denied this privilege, as will appear from the

following notice, taken fiom the Christian Advocate and Journal of
June 6th:

Didymus quotes the Advocate and Journal’s editorial policy:

 

“John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm, 175. Perhaps not coincidentally, Francis Asbury,
American Methodism’s patriarch, died the same year that the first Methodist Episcopal pews were rented.

62“Free Seats Ought to Go Together With Free Grace,” Western Christian Advocate, L 1 (May 29
1834): l.

102

“‘Free Seats and Rented Seats.” — Our readers will find on the first page an article in reply
to a piece published in our paper of the 16'“ ult. on fi'ee grace and free seats. This journal
has all along declined publishing anything on this subject, on either side, though often
requested; but as, contrary to the custom heretofore observed, the article appeared on one
side; we think it but justice to admit the replication; and here the controversy must end for
the present, so far as those who now control the Advocate are concerned, believing as we
do that its continuance, on either side, under the present circumstances, would be
productive of no good.63 Apparently those who controlled the Christian Advocate and
Journal, which ultimately would have been Nathan Bangs, head of the Methodist Book
Concern, considered the issue of free seats too controversial to air in a national publication
of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

It may seem strange that separate seating became an issue in arguments over pew
rentals in the Methodist Episcopal Church. But the 18305 were a time of profound change
in gender relations in and out of the church. In the Methodist Church, the moves from
exhortation, itinerancy, and camp meetings to prepared sermons and station preaching
eroded the significant if unoflicial role that women had played in building the Methodist
connexion and Church. These changes affected Methodist female education as well. In
1834, Peter Akers announced that the Illinois Seminary would exclude women during the
regular winter term so that more young men could be served.“ When an academy

operated by the Ohio, Northern Ohio, and Kentucky conferences since 1841 became Ohio

 

63“Free Grace and Free Seats, Again” Western Christian Advocate 1, 8 (June 20, 1334): 31.

6‘Peter Akers, “Education,” Western Christian Advocate l, 19 (September 5, 1834): 74-75.

103

Wesleyan University in 1844, women who had attended on an equal basis with men, were
excluded. This change was particularly harsh on the residents of the surrounding area,
who had demanded that the Methodist Conferences provide some education until the
college opened. The academy had absorbed the only other secondary school in the area,
such that the removal of the women left them with no alternative place of education."
The Michigan Conference’s Albion College was coeducational at its collegiate opening
because it had previously been the conference’s female academy."6
Conclusion

Nathan 0. Hatch suggests that by 1830, “lines of class education, and social
status” may have been more stark between persons within particular denominations than
they were between the denominations. In the Methodist Episcopal Church, one clear line
of division was between those who sought to establish the status of Methodists by ofi‘ering
them a collegiate education, and those who suspected such education as not only a move
towards formal theological education but also as a retreat from support for common
schools and other primary and secondary education. The Western Christian Advocate,
initially a periodical publication launched by Nathan Bangs and others concerned with
drawing Methodists across the region together, at least in part communicated and
emphasized resistance to collegiate and especially theological education, and the divisions

over the issue within the laity. The particular contests of class, gender, religion, region,

 

65Clyde Henry Hubbart, Ohio Wesleyan ’5 First Hundred Years (Delaware, Ohio: Ohio Wesleyan
University, 1943): 12-13.

“Gildart, Albion College, One Hundred Years.

104

and institutions within the Indiana and Illinois conferences of the Methodist Episcopal
Church resembled the contests between Old School and New School Presbyterians,
between old-line Baptists and the Anti-nrission movement, and even between Methodists
and Baptists on one side and Presbyterian-Congregationalists on the other. The concerns
and conflicts in the Indiana and Illinois Conferences show how the establishment of
colleges was a fundamental part of such conflicts. Thus they reveal the complexity and

over-lapped nature of these contests in an the emerging Midwest.

105

Chapter 4

The Classical Curriculum and the Western Colleges

When Andrew Wylie addressed the Philomathean Society of Wabash College, he
specifically promoted the Greek and Latin language and literature elements of the
collegiate curriculum. These defenses of the classical curriculum comprised the most-
ofien reproduced discourse by which college presidents and faculties defended and
promoted their colleges. They emphasized how the classics would develop young men,
and commonly connected these defenses to the development of the West. Almost every
published inaugural and commencement address, as well as many student essays and
articles included defenses of the classics against claims that they promoted aristocracy,
that they were impractical in the new republic of America or at least in the place they were
making into “the West,” or that they subverted more widespread common-school
education.1 In textbooks, lectures, recitiations, and in addresses delivered orally and then

published for distribution college faculty and presidents appealed to Greek and Latin

 

IIn his inaugural address as President of Wabash College, Elihu W. Baldwin made the
importance of classical collegiate education, first in general and then specifically for the development of
the West, his main theme. Elihu Baldwin, Arr Address Delivered in Crawfordsville, Indiana, July 13“,
1836, By Rev. Elihu W. Baldwin, A. M. On Occasion of His Inauguration as President of Wabash
College (Cincinnati: Printed by James & Galazy, 1836). In his 1847 commencement address, his
successor, Charles White, laid out the advantages of classical collegiate education for producing common-
school teachers and for economic development. Charles White, Western Colleges: A Baccalaureate
Address, Delivered July 22, 1 84 7, By Rev. Charles lWrite, D. D., President of Wabash College (New
York: C. W. Benedict, ll Spruce Street, 1848). John P. Durbin, first Principal of Dickinson College, a
Methodist school in Carlisle Pennsylvania, emphasized that the school would not deviate from “the
common agreement on what makes up a college course,” and would include “ancient languages, J. P.
Durbin, “Inaugural Address of J. P. Durbin, Principal of Dickinson College, Delivered in Carlisle,
Pennsylvania, August 10, 1834,” Western Christian Advocate l, 25 (October 25, 1834), 97-98. In an
1847, essay, Matthew Simpson, President of Indiana Asbury University, emphasized the value of the
classics even for common laborers in the West. Matthew Simpson, “Labor and Learning,” The
Philological Department of the Platonean and Philologian 1, 2 (July, 1847), 2.

106

language and literature to develop and define virtues, disciplines, liberal education and
political activity. They thereby warned of the dangers of nature, deviance and the
heterogenous population that they faced in the West.2

That classical literature concealed and excluded women, Afiican Americans and
Native Americans is a tautology. But the Indiana college leaders also taught and defended
Greek and Latin literature and the rest of the classical curriculum in such a way as to
reproduce that concealment and exclusion in their discursive construction of Indiana and
the Western Great Lakes as the West. Women, Afiican Americans, Native Americans,
and most of the people whom George Winter encountered on his journey to Deaf Man’s
Village in 183 9, remain invisible in college leaders’ arguments that the collegiate education
by the classical curriculum was essential to the new region. The universalization of “man,”
“virtue” and other subjects of classical literature came to have a significant role in the
college leaders’ portrayal and construction of this particular place.

This classical curricula, derived fiom medieval Catholicism and refined through
renaissance, reformation, and revolution, was brought to Indiana by the men who
established colleges at Hanover, Bloomington, Crawfordsville, Greencastle, and Franklin.
That it remained the sine qua non of colleges in the antebellum Midwest was probably due
to the 1828 report of the Yale faculty, which fiercely defended the role of the classics in
distinguishing a college from other types of schools. Civil authorities also maintained the

traditions by requiring colleges, unlike other educational institutions, to have a state

 

2’l‘lle “heterogenous population” of the West was of particular concern to the Wabash College
faculty. Baldwin raises the point in his inaugural, and White raised it as a danger regularly. Baldwin,
Address on the Occasion of His Inaugural, 12.

107

charter, and in turn allowing them to issue Bachelors’ of Arts degrees. Both the Yale
faculty’s report and Andrew Wylie’s presentation of the President of Indiana College to a
literary society at Wabash College revealed that popular and elite criticism was significant
enough that they felt a need to respond.3 When the Illinois and Indiana Conferences of the
Methodist Episcopal Church sought to establish colleges, they faced fierce criticism from
laity who feared that the colleges would divert money from local primary schools, that the
colleges would create class divisions, or worried that they would become training
institutes for scholarly preachers who would erode the role of lay preachers, district elders,
and itinerant preachers.

In the 18305 and 18405, Francis Wayland, President of Brown University, wrote
what have become the best-known critique of the hegemony of the classics in American
colleges. In Thoughts on the Present Collegiate System in the United States, in 1842,
Wayland called for less classical courses and more professional courses.4 Regardless of
the accuracy or utility of Wayland’s critique in the 18305 and 18405, many modern
historians have too easily accepted Wayland’s critique by taking the classical curriculum
to be the entirety of the colleges’ curricula. Because the content and pedagogy of the
classical curriculum has been so often and well described elsewhere, this work will not

address the content in detail. Instead, it fills a gap in scholarship by showing how college

 

3Faculty of Yale College, “Report of the Faculty,” in “Original Papers in Relation to a Course of
Liberal Education,” American Journal of Science and the Arts 15 (1829): 297-315, excerpted in The
American Curriculum: A Documentary History ed. George Willis, et. al., (Westport, Connecticut:
Greenwood Press, 1993), 25-27.

4Francis Wayland, Report to the Corporation of Brown University on Changes in the System of

Collegiate Education; Read March 28, 1850 (Providence, RI., 1850); Wayland, Thoughts on the
Present Collegiate System in the United States (Boston, 1842).

108

oflicials defended and promoted the classical curriculum, and in turn used it to construct
Indiana and the Western Great Lakes as a region, “the West,” and presented social conflict
there as pitting the educated, disciplined and virtuous white men against an uneducated
“heterogenous” mass of immigrants and settlers. These constructions simultaneously
explained social conflict in the area and discursively unified the region by concealing the
women, Afiican Americans, Native Americans and persons who did not fit these
categories of race and ethnicity.’

Speeches and essays by the faculty and students of the Indiana colleges presented
the classical curriculum and their colleges’ missions as fundamental to the development of
Indiana and the West as a region. Presbyterians at Wabash College portrayed their
institution as struggling against ignorance and opponents of education in order to educate
the burgeoning population in the West. The Presbyterian-dominated institution at
Crawfordsville cultivated a New England derived vision of colleges that would “save” the

West from Catholics, ignorance, enthusiastic sectarian religion, and “savagery”, and that

 

5Hofstadter, Schmidt, Rudolph, and others described the colleges primarily as institutions that
taught the classical collegiate course. The work of David B. Potts, James Findlay, and other “new
educational historians” in the 19705 investigated the colleges’ relations with their communities and
associated religious bodies. But little work has yet been done on the alternative curricula, including
preparatory and teachers’ departments that many of the college maintained. One reason is that the
colleges seem to have kept minimal records of operations that they may have considered auxiliary to their
main objectives. Richard Hofstadter, Academic Freedom in the Age of the College (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1955); George P. Schmidt, The Old Time College President (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1930); Schmidt, The Liberal Arts College A Chapter in American Cultural
History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1957); Frederick Rudolph, The American College and
University: A History (New York, Alfred P. Knopf, 1962). David B. Potts, “American Colleges in the
Nineteenth Century: From Localism to Denominationalism,” History of Education Quarterly 11, 4
(Winter, 1971): 363-380; Potts, “Baptist Colleges in the Development of American Society, 1812-1861,”
Ph.D. diss, Harvard University, 1967).

109

equated Catholicism not only with tyranny, but with ignorance.‘5 At their very first
meeting, the founders stated that the area needed a college to produce common-school
teachers to educate the youth, and to produce locally trained ministers for churches.7 This
vision was widely publicized by Lyman Beecher, a Congregationalist minister fi'om New
England, who moved to the Lane Seminary at Cincinnati, and influenced leaders at
Wabash College, Western Reserve College (Ohio), and Illinois College, particularly in his
1836 works A Plea for the West and A Plea for Colleges.8 Beecher called colleges to

educate young men who would be educated and civilized preachers in the West. Andrew

 

6The quotes are from Charles White, Western Colleges: A Baccalaureate Address, Delivered
July 22, I 84 7, By Rev. Charles White, D. D., President of Wabash College (New York: C. W. Benedict,
ll Spruce Street, 1848), 3-11. On the Wabash College faculty and audiences, see also, Charles White, A
Pure and Sound Literature: A Baccalaureate Address, Delivered July 22, 1845 (Indianapolis: Morrison &
Spann, 1845), 4, 7; Charles White, Contributions of Intellect to Religion: A Baccalaureate Address
Delivered July 27, 1848 by Rev. Charles White, D. D. President of Wabash College (New York: 8. W.
Bendict). In Western Colleges, White equated Protestantism with learning and Catholicism with
ignorance “of a Jesuitical mint.” Elihu Baldwin, An Address Delivered in Crawfordsville, Indiana, July
13“, 1836, By Rev. Elihu W. Baldwin, A. M. On Occasion of His Inauguration as President of Wabash
College (Cincinnati: Printed by James & Galazy, 1836), 4-5. On the New England drive to establish
colleges and other institutions, see John F. Schermerhorn, A Correct View of That Part of the United
States which lies West of the Allegany [sic] Mountains: With Regard to Religion and Morals (Hartford,
Conn.: P. B. Gleason, 1814); Schermerhom, Report Respecting the Indians Inhabiting the Western Parts
of the United States, Communicated by John F. Scherrnerhorn to the Secretary of the Society for
Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and Others in North America (Boston, 1814); Lyman Beecher,
An Address of the Charitable Society for the Education of Indigent Pious Young Men for the Ministry of
the Gospel (New Haven, 1814); Beecher, On the Importance of Assisting Young Men of Piety and Talents
in Obtaining an Education for the Gospel Ministry (Andover, Mass: Flagg and Gould, 1816); Beecher, A
Plea for the West (Cincinnait, Truman & Smith, 183 5); chher, A Plea for Colleges 2"d ed., (Cincinnati:
Truman and Smith, 1836); Constitution of the American Home Missionary Society/"Presented by the
Executive Committee at the Anniversary Meeting, May 12, 1826 (New York: D. Fanshaw, 1826); Colin B.
Goodykoontz, Home Missions on the American Frontier, with Particular Reference to the American
Home Missionary Society (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1939); Frederick Irving Kuhns, The
American Home Missionary Society in Relation to the Antislavery Controversy in the Old Northwest
(Billings, Montana, 1959).

7Wabash College Trustee Records, November 21, 1832, p. 4-5; Osborne and Gronert, Wabash
College, 23.

8Lyman Beecher, A Plea for Colleges (Cincinnati, 1836); Beecher, A Plea for the West 2"(1 ed.
(Cincinnati, 1836).

110

Wylie, President of Indiana College at Bloomington, defended the classical curriculum as a
source of virtue and stability in the midst of deeply partisan political unrest. Faculty at the
Indiana Methodist Conference’s Indiana Asbury University at Greencastle announced
similar goals, despite their very diflerent background in the Upper South, in insurgent
religion, and in opposition to Presbyterian religious and civil authority.9 But the
Methodists notably combined these concerns with emphases on experiential religion and
less condescension toward the residents of Indiana and the region.10 The defenses and
promotions of the liberal arts curriculum emphasized that the liberal arts would discipline
and exercise the faculties, and expose students to the best minds and virtues of Greek and
Latin classical literature, thereby cultivating open minds guided by disciplined and virtuous
rationality. But the classical curriculum, with its focus on Latin and Greek literature and
moral philosophy emphasized the importance of cultivating formal education, Protestant
religion, self discipline and classical virtue, while it ignored real social conflict that was
reconstructing gender, ethnic and class-relations in the still-emerging Eastern Ohio Valley.
Not only the college curricula, but also the speeches and essays are virtually silent on the

Indian Removal that was still proceeding in Indiana throughout the 1830s and into the

 

9On Methodists’move from insurgency to respectability, see John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven By
Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America. (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998); and Nathan 0. Hatch The Democratization of A merican Christianity (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1989).

”Stephen 01m “President Olin’s Inaugural Address [at Randolph-Macon College],” Western
Christian Advocate, 1, 6 (June 6, 1834), 21-22; J. P. Durbin, “Inaugural Address of the Rev. Mr. J. P.
Durbin, Principal of Dickinson College, Delivered in Carlisle Pennsylvania, August 10, 1834,” Western
Christian Advocate l, 25 (October 17, 1834), 97-99. Stephen Ruter, “President Ruter’s Baccalaureate
Address to the Graduates and Students of Allegheny College,” Western Christian Advocate l, 25 (October
24, 1834), 101-102.

111

 

1840s.11 The abolitionism that rocked colleges in Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois, scarcely
appears in the Indiana colleges. Although female academies or seminaries operated in
Crawfordsville, Greencastle and Bloomington in the 18403, the struggles for women’s
education that some of the collegiate faculty and their spouses were themselves involved
in do not appear at all.

But the classical curriculum was only one part of the collegiate enterprise. The
overwhelming majority of students at all the colleges attended the secondary or
preparatory departments, and many more attended “English, or “Scientific” courses, which
replaced Greek and Latin with modern history, additional science courses, or other
subjects. Some of the colleges in the region also experimented with brief “teachers”
courses, and at least one experimented with an “agricultural course.” These courses did
not address regional social conflict any more than the classical courses did. But they do
indicate that many more students attended colleges than pursued the classical courses, and

consequently, that the colleges were much more than the classical curricula. Wylie

 

llMalcom J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of
American Public Lands, 1 789-183 7, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 175; Miami and
Potawatomi resistance and persistance in the face of removal and Anglo American population increase in
Northern Indiana and Southern Michigan, is one topic of Susan Sleeper Smith, Indian Women and
French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2001). See also Bert Anson, “The Fur Traders in Northern Indiana, 1796-1850,”
(Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1953), 89-90; Juanita Hunter, “The Indians and the Michigan
Road,” Indiana Magazine of History 83, 3 (September, 1987): 244-246; Paul C. Phillips, “The Fur Trade
in the Maumee-Wabash Country,” in Studies in American History (Indiana University Studies, nos. 66-68,
Bloomington, 1926), 91-118. Kappler, Indian treaties, 1 778-1883, Compiled and edited by Charles J.
Kappler (New York, Interland Pub., 1972), H, 273-281 on the 1826 Mississinewa treaties; and 531-534 on
the Miami treaties of 1840. On the 1840 treaty, see Kappler, II, 531-534; Robert A. Trennert, Indian
Traders on the Middle Border: The House of Ewing, [827-1854, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1981); R David Edmunds, “The Praire Potawatomi Removal of 1833,” Indiana Magazine of History 68, 3
(1972), 240-253; R David Edrnunds, “Justice on a Changing Frontier: Deer Lick Creek, 1824-1825,”
Indiana Magazine of History 93, 1 (1997), 48-52; R David Edmunds, “‘Designing Men Seeking a
Fortune,’ Indian Traders and the Potawatomi Claims Payment of 1836,” Indiana Magazine of History 77,
2 (1981), 109-122.

112

acknowledged that the collegiate curriculum, based heavily on knowledge of Greek and
Latin grammar and literature faced increasing criticism in American colleges, not only
from educational reformers like Francis Wayland, but from residents of Indiana and the
West who disdained such education.l2

Wylie argued that although all citizens should be educated, not all young men had
the capacity for the classical collegiate course. He positively defended the classical liberal
arts as providing a unique and essential exercise of the faculties, and producing open
minds. Study of the classical languages, he argued, would sharpen young men’s reasoning
and expressions, thereby stabilizing society and the nation in the midst of massive
immigration and mobility, ethnic and sectional division and partisan divisiveness.” He
opposed such educated leadership to what he called the “ridiculously absur ” ideas of

“knaves and demagogues [who] are always opposed to education, especially liberal

 

12Collegiate Addresses are full of references to criticism of the classical curriculum. See
particularly, Charles White, Western Colleges: A Baccalaureate Address, Delivered July 22, 184 7, By
Rev. Charles White, D. 0., President of Wabash College (New York: C. W. Benedict, ll Spruce Street,
1848), 3-11; Charles White, The Duties of Educated Young Men at the West: Baccaluareate Delivered to
the Senior Class of Wabash College, 1842 (Indianpolis: Cutler and Chamberlain, 1842), 3-20. Both
Charles White and Harvey D. Scott, president of Indiana Asbury University, closely linked concern for the
collegiate curriculum with their presence in the West and the need to elevate the culture of the West
Harvey D. Scott, Duties of the Western Scholar: First Quinquennial Oration Delivered to the Members of
the Philological Society of Indiana Asbury University August 19, 1845, by Harvey D. Scott, of Terre
Haute; Late a Student of the University and Member of the Society. (Published by the Society,
Greencastle: Early & Reed, Printers, 1846), 5. Francis Wayland, President of Dartmouth College from
1827 to 1855, published the most noted critique of the classical curriculum, Thoughts on the Present
Collegiate System in the United States, in 1842, only four years after Wylie’s speech. More popular
suspiciou and criticism of the collegiate curriculum in the Methodist Church appeared repeatedly in the
Western Christian Advocate, and will be discussed below. The most influential defense of the classical
curriculum was the Faculty of Yale College’s “Report of the Faculty,” published in “Original Papers in
Relation to a Course of Liberal Education,” American Journal of Science and Arts 15 (1829).

13An Address Delivered Before the Philomathean Society, 12-18. The comment about stabilizing
society is from Wylie. On divisions, see Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men; Holt, The Political
Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Norton, 1978); Henry Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of
Jacksonian America, The American Century Series, Eric Foner, Consulting Editor, (New York: The
Noonday Press, 1990).

113

education.””

Wylie and the Defense of Liberal Education

Wylie defined a liberal, or collegiate education as an education which would
makes the mind liberal by setting it “flee fi'om all those prejudices and modes of thinking
which tend to continue its views and cramp its energies.” He continued:

Experience teaches two ways of affecting this. First, giving to the

mind such employment as will exercise each of its faculties in a manner

suited to its nature and place in the mental system, and all of them in their

proper proportion; so that the whole mind, in all its functions, may be

properly developed. For, when this is the case it will be free in its

operations. Second, by enlarging the sphere of our knowledge, especially

in regard to those great principles and analogies on which all science rests;

and as to matters of opinion and feeling, bringing the mind in contact as it

were with as many other minds as possible, especially those of the first

order.15

Wylie’s first method described the common theory of the antebellum period.
Educators described human minds as created by a divine Creator with particular abilities

or faculties that enabled them to comprehend the natural world, and through it the

Creator, human obligations to the Creator, and obligations to persons and society.16

 

l4Wylie, An Address Delivered Before the Philomathean Society, 6. Faculty complaints about
students’ and teachers’ efl‘orts to abbreviate liberal education were very wmmon. In “‘Esto Brevis,” The
Platonean Department of the Platonean and Philologian 1, 9 (September, 1847), 57-58, Professor
Wheeler, of Indiana Asbury University, compared attempts to learn “the whole circle of sciences” in a
year, “history, ancient and modern, civil, literary and religious” in two weeks and “a foreign language in
‘six lessons without a master’” to desires for ever-faster rail transportation. In his 1836 inaugural address
as President of Wabash College, Elihu. W. Baldwin denounced those who would abbreviate the collegiate
curriculum. Charles White refuted claims that the West required new types of colleges throughout his
1848 baccalaureate address. Elihu W. Baldwin, An Address Delivered... On Occasion of His Inaguration,
12-14; Charles White, Western Colleges, 3-20.

'5 Andrew Wylie, An Address Delivered Before the Philomathean Society of the Wabash College,
By. Wylie, D. D., July 10, 1838 (Bloomington, Indiana: Franklin Office, 1838), 5.

1“Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997), 6. George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American
University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Unbelief (New York: Oxford University Press,

114

These faculties included intellect, conscience and afl’ections or passions.” One of the
great tensions in this psychology and moral philosophy, was in how the faculties were at
once innate, or part of the “human constitution,” and yet had to be developed by use.18
Educators focused on providing mental exercise to develop the faculties, just as physical
exercise developed the body. The metaphor of exercise included educators’ concern that
mental exercise must exercise each faculty in correct proportion to the others.
Strengthening of one faculty while the others were neglected would create mental
imbalance, particularly in over-development of affections (sometimes called passions or
appetites) at the expense of the restraining faculties of intellect and conscience.19 Wylie
himself explained that

The first of these methods may be illustrated by the effect of exercise upon
the body. If you exercise any particular organ or limb you increase its

 

1993), 81-82. In Francis Wayland’s Elements of Moral Science, which Wylie’s Wabash College audience
would have used in their moral philosophy course, Wayland argued that person’s obligations to other
persons are doubly binding because they arise both out of one’s relation to another in created nature, and
out of one’s obligations to the Creator. Francis Wayland, Elements of Moral Science (New York: 1837
[1835]), 38.

17Some moral philosophers included more abilities under the title “faculties,” but intellect,
conscience, and affections were the most fundamental and common. Wylie, An Address Delivered Before
the Philomathean Society, 5; Faculty of Yale College, “Report of the Faculty,” in “Original Papers in
Relation to a Course of Liberal Education,” American Journal of Science and Arts 15 (1829): 297-315,
excerpted in The American Curriculum: A Documentary History ed. George Willis, et. a1. (Westport,
Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993), 25-37. Other references to exercise of the faculties in proper
proportions include Charles White, A Pure and Sound Literature: A Baccalaureate Address, Delivered
July 22, 1845 (Indianapolis: Morrison & Spann, 1845), 4, 7; Charles White, Contributions of Intellect to
Religion: A Baccalaureate Address Delivered July 27, 1848 by Rev. Charles White, D. D. President of
Wabash College (New York: S. W. Bendict), 19. On the connection of this schema with psychology
beyond the colleges, see Daniel Walker Howe, Making The American Self

l“Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science: Antebellum Science and the
Baconian Ideal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); Daniel Walker Howe, The
Making of the American Self, Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic.

19The classics were the essential part of maintaining this balance. Marsden, The Soul of the
American University, 82.

115

 

vitality and activity. And, to preserve the parts of the body in their due

proportion, they must be exercised in proportion. If not, the movements of

the body will not be fiee and easy but constrained and awkward.20
College faculty and officials were particularly concerned that exercise of intellect or
afi‘ections out of proportion to conscience might endanger morality. College faculty
emphasized this developing and “disciplining” of students’ minds more than they did the
“filrnishing” of students’ minds with knowledge.21 Many Western colleges completed the
metaphor by establishing “manual labor” programs under which colleges not only would

get work done and allow students to pay tuition in labor, but would also prevent students

fi'om letting their bodies wither while they developed their minds.22

 

20Ibid., 5.

21The Yale faculty used the language of “furnishing” and “disciplining” in the Yale Report of
1828, which defended the classical curriculum and sought to set a standard for collegiate institutions.
Faculty of Yale College, “Report of the Faculty,” in “Original Papers in Relation to a Course of Liberal
Education,” American Journal of Science and Arts 15 (1829): 297-315, excerpted in The American
Curriculum: A Documentary History ed. George Willis, et. a1. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
1993), 25-37. The report and its authority will be discussed below. By the 18305 and 18405 the language
of the report was common in collegiate discourse. Timothy H. Ball, “Synopsis of Mental Philosophy,
October, 1849,” Vol. 1, p. 9, Timothy H. Ball Papers, M 309, F2, William H. Smith Memorial Library,
Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, Indiana; Roscoe, “The Pleasure of Learning,” The Platonean
Department of the Platonean and Philologian 1,9 (September, 1847), 54-55; Eudemus, “The True
Scholar,” The Platonean Department of the Platonean and Philologian 1,9 (September, 1847), 60. Elihu
Baldwin, An Address Delivered in Crawfordsville, Indiana, July 13'”, 1836, By Rev. Elihu W. Baldwin, A.
M On Occasion of His Inauguration as President of Wabash College (Cincinnati: Printed by James &
Galazy, 1836), 4-5.

22Manual Labor served multiple purposes. It promoters suggested that it would allow poor
students to attend college, paying off their tuition in labor. They also claimed that Manual Labor would
prevent students from wasting away from over-development of mind and under-development of body. At
times, they also promoted it as a democratizing practice, where all young men would both work and gain
an education, regardless of social standing. Wabash College maintained a manual labor program for at
least the first two and probably five years of the institution’s operation. But Wabash College leaders, like
others, found it ineffective at either getting needed tasks accomplished or providing students either regular
exercise or the or wages to pay their tuition and costs. Wabash College Trustee Records, Wabash College
Archives, Eli Lilly Library, Crawfordsville, Indiana. The best scholarship on manual labor is Paul
Goodman, “The Manual Labor Movement and the Origins of Abolitionism,” Journal of the Early
Republic 13, 3 (Fall, 1993), 355-388. But Goodman associates manual labor entirely with Theodore Weld
and abolitionist colleges of Presbyterian-Congregationalist bent, such as Bangor, Oberlin, Knox, and
Olivet colleges. However, Methodist institutions also used manual labor and claimed to have invented it.

116

Wylie addressed the importance of the classics to students’ public lives by
emphasizing how they enlarged “the sphere of knowledge” along with the “principles and
analogies of science”23 Wylie called young men to expand their “circle of moral and
intellectual influences” beyond their own “sects in philosophy, parties in politics, nations,
classes of men as distinguished, by their position or rank in society, their business and
active pursuits, and whatever tends to confine the thoughts of men within a particular
sphere.”2" But Wylie’s argument for enlarging spheres of knowledge and reading beyond
“one’s own sect” still called students only to read the classics.

The universalism of Wylie’s and others’ defenses of the classics was clear in the
absence of any sense of place or particular residents of Indiana in their arguments. Even
when Wylie referred to an “unlettered Hoosier,” it was ultimately to promote reading of
the classics. Wylie illustrated his meaning with a story that at once drew on and reinforced
the state and regional identity of the both Wylie’s own Indiana College and his Wabash

College audience. A man who had only ever focused on one idea meets “the most

 

“Allegheny College [From the Pittsburgh Conference Journal], Western Christian Advocate l, 16 (August
15, 1834); “Manual Labor College, South Hanover, Ia.” Western Christian Advocate 1, 8 (June 20, 1834),
31.

23Faculty psychology and collegiate moral philosophy and science emphasized that the Creator
had created human minds as fit to comprehend nature and natural laws and society and human or moral
laws. This will be discussed below. On the role of analogical reasoning in antebellum science, see James
Ward Smith, “Religion and Science in American Philosophy,” in The Shaping of American Religion, ed.
James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 402-442;
Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphey, A History of Philosophy in America (New York, 1977);
Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in An Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum
American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); George M.
Marsden, “The Collapse of Evangelical Academia,” in Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God,
ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorfi‘ (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press,
1983), 219-264. 228-230.

2“Wylie, Address Delivered Before the Philomathean Society, 7.

117

unlettered, uncouth stripling you can find in the woods of Indiana,” as both face peril in
the woods of Indiana. The single-minded man is confounded. “But the Hoosier, who has
rambled over mountain and forest every day of his life, with some new object to awaken
his attention, or a new adventure to sharpen his wit,... gathers up his thoughts in a
moment, and concentrating them upon the dificulty before him, by a ready adjustment of
the means within his reach to the exigencies of the case, extricates both himself and his
astounded companion.”25
Wylie’s story of an unlettered Hoosier saving a single-minded intellectual
introduced a regional reference into an address that otherwise presented virtue as
universal, or without particular place. While Wylie’s illustration first appeared to subvert
collegiate education by emphasizing the capabilities of the unlettered Hoosier, Wylie
himself quickly subordinated the value of unrefined experiential knowledge to his larger
purpose by emphasizing that his story was simply an illustration of the importance of
widening one’s “circle of moral and intellectual influences.” He emphasized that the
thoughts of one who did not so expand his experience and mind through exposure to the
classics would not be “free,” “individual,” “original,” or “manly.”26 But these would be

achieved through study of the classics, not through experiential knowledge of Indiana or

the West. It was the mental exercise necessary to learn the classics that would develop

 

25Wylie, Address Delivered Before the Philomathean Society, 6-7.

26See Andrew Burstein, Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America ’s Romantic Self-
Image (New York, Hill and Wang, 1999); and Thomas Gustafson, Representative Words: Politics,
Literature and the American Language, 1776-1865 (Cambridge, 1992), 253-257. On the gendering
republicanism and virtue in early America, see Jan Lewis, “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in
the Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 44, 3 (October, 1987), 689-721; Ruth Bloch, “The
Gendered Meaning of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs 13 (1987), 37-58.

118

“precision ” in thought that “can never be gained by one who is acquainted with his
mother tongue only.”27 Such precision would produce wise statesmen. “From what
arises a bad taste in writing?” Wylie inquired. “From a bad mode of thinking undoubtedly.
And will not a bad mode of thinking lead also to a bad mode of acting? Will not an absurd
reasoner make a blundering statesman? And a bombastic speaker a preposterous
advisor?”28

Wylie then presented the classics as both enlarging students’ minds and offering
examples of virtue in circumstances directly relevant to the concerns of American students
in the nineteenth century. Wylie dismissed a common criticism, that the classical authors

“6

were heathen authors and that their virtues were but splendid sins.”’ He reduced their
criticisms to the beliefs of “party” and of “prejudice,” which should be cast aside so men
could “find something to refine, to enlarge and to exalt their minds.” Baldwin made a
similar argument against claims that the classics were immoral and of less use than sacred
scriptures.29

Wylie, White and other collegiate faculty restricted their social critiques to

universalistic categories of politics and masculine virtue, rather than to categories of

ethnicity, social class and gender.30 By appealing to classical literature produced centuries

 

27“Wylie, Address Delivered Before the Philomathean Society, 7-8.
28Wylie, Address Delivered Before the Philmoathean Society, 14.

29Wylie, Address Delivered Before the Philomathean Society, 21; Baldwin, An Address upon his
Inauguration, l9.

30Presbyterians and Whigs often criticized used “interest” and “party” to denote special or
particular interests, which they distinguished from “public” or “common interest,” which they identified
with Americans. Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs.

119

earlier as the primary source of ideas, virtues and liberal education, they equipped
themselves and their students to criticize the activities of other European American men in
the political arena and civil society, but concealed the women, Native Americans, African
Americans and other people who were in their own state and region and made real claims
to education, rights and freedom from discussion within the curricula of the colleges.
Indiana college leaders’ silence and concealment in the Indiana colleges is all the more
conspicuous because female education, Jacksonian Indian Removal, and anti-slavery were
real and controversial issues in the 1830s Midwest. Women’s seminaries operated in
Bloomington, Crawfordsville and Greencastle in the antebellum period. Wabash College,
Indiana Asbury University both faced decisions on admission of women by the 1840s.31
Removal of Native Americans had passed Congress by a single vote, was largely opposed
by evangelical Protestants with views in line with college formation, and continued in
Indiana until the final removal of Miami pe0ples from the Great Miami Reservation near

Logansport in 1845 and other, smaller reservations.” Between 1843 and 1848, Indiana

 

3‘The Wabash College trustees appointed a committee of John s. Thompson, A. Ingram, and R
G. Gregory to consider the admission of women to the college. The committee reported the next day that
“it is inexpedient at present for the board to make any arrangements on that subject.” Wabash College
Trustee Records, Wabash College Archives, Eli Lilly Library, Crawfordsville, Indiana, Book 1, page 63
(September 29, 1835); Book 1, page 63 (September 30, 1835); George B. Manhart, Depauw Through the
Years, vol 1., 75-77.

32On Miami and Potawatomi resistance, persistence and immigration in the Western Great
Lakes, see Susan Sleeper Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the
Western Great Lakes (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 2. Mary Hershberger, “Mobilizing
Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle Against Indian Removal in The 18305,” Journal of
American History 86, l (1999): 15-40. Other useful works include Leon M. Gordon, 11, “Effects of the
Michigan Road on Northern Indiana, 1830-1860,” Indiana Magazine of History 46, 1 (March, 1950),
377-402; R. David Edmunds, “The Prairie Potawatomi Removal of 1833,” Indiana Magazine of History
93, 1 (March, 1997); Bert Anson, “Chief Lafontaine and the Miami Emigration fiom Indiana,” Indiana
Magazine of History (n.d.); Irving McKee, “The Centennial of ‘The Trail of Death,’” Indiana Magazine
of History 35, 1 (March. 1939);

120

Asbury University inquired with the Indian Department about educating several Choctaw
youths, according to a provision in the 1830 removal treaty of the Choctaws.33 Abolition
had led to the dismissal of New School abolitionist faculty at Hudson College (later
Western Reserve College), the wholesale dismissal of students from the New School-
Congregationalist Lane Seminary at Cincinnati in 1833, and abolitionist stances by faculty
at the New School-associated Illinois College, and the creation of the wholly abolitionist
Oberlin College in 1834, the same year that Wabash College started collegiate classes.34
Wylie’s and others’ appeals to Greek and Latin literature as the primary means
of liberating students’ minds from partisan and sectarian positions, and his stated
opposition to contemporary parties and challengers exposes college leaders’ restriction of
public political rights to Euro-American males. Wylie and other collegiate educators
sought to expose young men to a variety of ideas, but within a restricted canon of works
by authors and about events distant enough in the past to avoid raising questions of ethnic,

gender or religious identity. College professors who sought to construct a unified society

 

33It appears that no Choctaw youth ever did attend Indiana Asbury University, but the records are
incomplete and nearly illegible. What is conspicuous is that whereas Indiana Asbury presented the
Indians as disappearing when they were still present in Indiana until 1845, they later considered bringing
Choctaw youth back to Indiana for collegiate education. Records of the Bureau of Indian Aflairs: Record
Group 75: Selected Documents From Among the Records of the Bureau of Indian Afl’airs Relating o the
Proposed Education of Choctaw Boys at the University of Inidana (Depauw); The National Archives and
Records Service; General Services Administration, Washington, 1958. Record Group 75: Letters
Received, Choctaw Agency - 1848. Photocopies in Depauw University Archives.

“On antislavery in the Midwestern colleges, see Frederick Irving Kulms, The American Home
Missionary Society in relation to the Antislavery Controversy in the Old Northwest (Billings, Montana,
1959). On Western Reserve College, see C. H.Cramer, Case Western Reserve: A History of the
University, 1826-1976 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976): 15-20. On Illinois College, see Don Harrison
Doyle, The Social Development of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois... On Oberlin, see Robert
Samuel Fletcher, 1976), 15-20. On Illinois College, which aided Elijah Lovejoy, see Don Harrison Doyle,
The Social Development of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825- 18 70 (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1983). On Obean College, see Robert F. Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College From
its Founding Through the Civil War 2 vols. (Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College, 1943).

121

 

habitually worried about the heterogenity of the Western population and believed that by
instilling Christian and civilizing education they were providing the means of building a
stable and homogenous society in the West, did not encourage their students to delve into
the instability of racial, ethnic, gender, and political identities in the West.35 They
consequently stabilized their view of society around fixed and universal claims about
persons and nature which they reinforced both in moral and mental philosophy classes and
a classical canon presented as the standard of liberal education.

But the college faculties’ restrictive categories went beyond the concealing of
cultural conflict to the way that it restricted access to education. In a tradition that
extended back to Harvard College in 163 6, and then back to medieval Europe, only young
men who met prerequisites in Greek and Latin grammar and literature could enter the
collegiate course. Andrew Wylie frankly admitted that he believed not all young men, and
not even all college students should study the classics, because not all had the capacity. In
its 1828 defense of the collegiate curriculum, the Yale College faculty simply noted that a
college could not also be a gymnasium and an academy, and that Yale would remain a
college. College leaders in Indiana, Illinois and Ohio denounced residents who demanded

common schools instead of colleges, claimed colleges created idleness, or accused

 

3 5 Charles White, Western Colleges: A Baccalureate Address, Delivered July 22, 184 7, by Rev.
Charles White, D. D., President of Wabash College (New York: C & W Benedict, ll Spruce Street,
1848), 25-26; Harvey D. Scott, Duties of the Western Scholar. First Quinquennial Oration, Delivered to
the Members of the Philological Society, of Indiana Asbury University, Augtus 19, 1845, by Harvey D.
Scott, of Terre Haute, Late a Student of the University, and a Member of the Society (Greencastle,
Indiana: Farley & Rwd, Printers, Published by the Society, 1846) 5-13; Edwin Green Bryant, “The
Superiority of Modern Patriotism,” Wabash Magazine 1, 3 (March, 1857): 79-86. John Louis French,
“The Blending of Races in America,” The Wabash Magazine 1, 4 (April, 1857): 115-120.

122

colleges of creating an aristocratic class.36 But the exclusiveness of the collegiate course
was evident in enrollment figures in the Western colleges. The preparatory enrollment
was generally a large majority of the total enrollment, and the classical course enrollment a
small minority of total enrollment. Students in a non-classical collegiate course, usually
labeled “English” or “Scientific” made up the majority of the students of collegiate grade.37
Although Wylie’s address and other speeches and essays defending classical instruction
express a general desire that all men be classically educated, Wylie and others promoted

classical education as indispensable to ministers, doctors and lawyers, the recognized

professionals of the period." In the West, college faculty expected graduates who held

 

36“Report of the Faculty,” published in “Original Papers in Relation to a Course of Liberal
Education,” American Journal of Science and Arts 15 (1829), 33-34. Both Baldwin and White at Wabash
College argued that colleges would improve the quality of teachers, increase the availability of education,
and so stimulate development throghout the West. Charles White, Western Colleges, 3-6; Baldwin, An
Address upon His Inauguration, 18. See the discussion of Methodist education associations and
McKendree Seminary (later McKendree College) below in the chapter on Methodist instutions.

37Catalogue of Indiana Asbury University, 1837-1857, (Depauw University Archives, Roy 0.
West Memorial Library, Depauw University, Greencastle, Indiana); On Heidelberg College at Tiffin,
Ohio, see E. 1. F. Williams, Heidelberg Democratic Christian College, 1850-1950, (Menasha, Wisconsin:
George Banta Publishing Company, 1952), 83-84. On Western Reserve College’s attempts to jettison
preparatory education and community insistence that they maintain it, see Frederick Clayton Waite,
Western Reserve University: The Hudson Era, A History of Western Reserve University andAcademy at
Hudson, Ohio, fi-om 1826-1882, (Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1943), 398-405. On the
overwhelmingly numbers of preparatory and English students at Kalamazoo and Michigan Central
College (later Hillsdale College) in Michigan, see William C. Ringenberg, “The Protestant College on the
Michigan Frontier,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University, 1970) 97, figure 3. On the majority
of students at Ohio Wesleyan University in Yellow Springs Ohio, being in the school’s “Scientific
Course,” see Henry Clyde Hubbart, Ohio Wesleyan ’s First Hundred Years, (Delaware, Ohio: Ohio
Wesleyan University, 1943), 28.

38Wylie claimed “the study of the classics is indispensable to the Divine,” and that physicians and
lawyers ought to devote as much time the classics as language and literatures to they do particular terms
of their professions. Wylie, Address Before the Philomathean Society, 17-18. Elihu W. Baldwin,
President of Wabash College, argued that the classics were essential to all mllegiate students so they
would understand history and ethics. Elihu W. Baldwin, An Address Delivered in Crawfordsville,
Indiana, July 13’”, 1836, By Rev. Elihu W. Baldwin, A. M. On Occasion of this Inauguration as President
of Wabash College (Cincinnati: James & Galazy, 1836), 17-19.

123

the Bachelors of Arts would become the leaders of a “natural aristocracy.” That is, they
would command more respect than others and be looked to as leaders"9
The Classics in the Indiana Colleges

The classical course distinguished the Indiana colleges, like colleges before them,
from other institutions. Indiana University, Wabash College and Indiana Asbury
University, colleges in a state scarcely twenty years old, emphasized the Greek and Latin
classics above philosophy and applied Mathematics at the core of their curriculum, as they
were of almost all other colleges in the nation. College leaders like Wabash’s Baldwin
explicitly hoped that the colleges would be able to shed their preparatory and English
departments.40 Indiana University’s curriculum as of 1846, listed twenty-three courses or
books in the classical languages.“ The Indiana Asbury University catalog for 1841-1842,
listed sixteen classical texts and classes, eight courses in philosophy, thirteen in
mathematics and the sciences, and four others; including Rhetoric, Ancient and Modern
History, Political Grammar, and Law of Nations. The Wabash College Catalogue for

1847-1848 lists nineteen classical texts and courses, ten philosophy courses, eleven

 

39Gilman M Ostrander quotes Melancthon Smith fi'om the New York Constitutional Ratijying
Convention on “natural aristocracy. ” Protesting that with few representatives, only men from an elite
would be chosen to represent the people, Smith explained a “natural aristocracy” as those upon whom “the
Author of nature has bestowed... greater capacities than others; birth, education, talents, and wealth, create
distinctions among men as visible and as of as much influence as titles, stars, and garters. In every
society, men of this class will command a superior degree of respect; and if the government be so
constituted as to admit but a few to exercise the powers of it, it will, according to the natural course of
things, be in their hands.” Jonathan Elliot, ed. Debates in the Several Conventions on the Adoption of the
Federal Constitution 5 vols, (1861) 2: 244-245; Gilman M. Ostrander, Republic of Letters: The
American Intellectual Community, 1 776-1865 (Madison: Madison House Publishers, 1999), 3.

40Baldwin, An Address upon His Inauguration, 14.
4‘ Across colleges, the catalogs uniformly list the books to be studied that are in the classical

languages as discrete classes. Even if the lists are of books and not discrete full-term classes, they still
show that reading in the classics was an essential part of a regular collegiate education.

124

mathematics and science courses, and nine other courses. These last included three
courses in Rhetoric, Ancient and Modern History, English Prose and Poetry, Prometheus
Bound, French, and the Constitution of the United States. That courses in the classics
outnumbered all other subject areas in all three colleges demonstrates the importance that
the colleges placed on knowledge of classical literature in their original Greek and Latin.
Congregationalist-Presbyterian faculty self-consciously committed to producing
Presbyterian clergy in Indiana fundamentally shaped Wabash College and had significant
influence at Indiana College. Since at least the middle of the eighteenth century,
Presbyterians, had made classical training essential to clerical and professional training,
which largely accounts for their wholesale adoption of the classical curriculum on the Yale
model. But when annual conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which had
traditionally opposed classical education of clergy, began establishing colleges after 1820,
they also adopted the classical curriculum as their standard college course.42 One reason
for Methodist leaders’ adoption of the classical curriculum in their colleges lay in their
desire in establish their social and intellectual status and provide such status for their

youth. Another reason was particular local conflicts with Presbyterians.43 The extent of

 

42Dickinson College, a Methodist college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, emphasized Moral and
Mental Philosophy, Ancient Languages, Modern Languages, Natural Sciences, Mathematics, Astronomy,
Mechanics, and Belles Lettres and English Literature as part of its curriculum. J. P. Durbin, “Inaugural
Address of the Rev. J. P. Durbin, Principal of Dickinson College, Delivered in Carlisle, Pennsylvania,
August 10, 1834,” Western Christian Advocate 1, 25 (October, 1834), 97. Allegheny College, which the
Pittsburgh Conference acquired from Presbyterian trustees in 1817, also maintained a classical
curriculum. Ernest Ashton Smith, Allegheny — A Century of Education, [815-1915 (Meadville,
Pennsylvania: The Allegheny College History Company, 1916), 84.

”See Wigger, Storming Heaven; David L. Kimbrough, Reverend Joseph Tarkington,
Methodist C ircuit-Rider: From Frontier Evanglelism to Refined Religion (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 86-87;Robert D. Clark, The Life of Matthew

125

the Yale Report’s influence was evident in that the Methodists established the classical
curriculum in their colleges in order to prove their bonafides as collegiate institutions. In
Indiana, Wabash College faculty exhorted their students in the study of the classical
curriculum in public addresses at inaugurations, graduations, and literary society meetings.
They connected its carefill study to the cultivation of a virtuous and responsible leadership
class, education and salvation of the people of the West, law and order in the West, and a
prosperous society. In his 1842 baccalaureate address The Duties of Educated Young
Men at the West, President Charles White insisted first that young men at the West “study,
study, study,” and not believe those who reported that Western people would not hear a
learned man or a sermon based on carefill study of the Bible and theology.“ In the same
speech, White encouraged the college graduates to “not rest, until they are heard and felt
in those places of power on the subject of popular instruction; until, under wise legislation,
enlightened popular sentiment, and noble liberality, Indiana, in point of education, shall
rank with the most advanced of states.” White feared that the Roman Catholic Church, or

nature itself, would educate the youth of the West if the Protestant-educated college

 

Simpson (New York: MacMillan, 1956), 76-96.

“Charles White, The Duties of Educated Young Men at the West: An Address Delivered to the
Candidates for the Baccalaureate, July 20, 1842. By Rev. Charles White, D. D. President of Wabash
College (Indianapolis: Cutler & Chamberlain, Printers, 1842), 2-5. In The Role of Intellect in Religion,
White argued that knowledge of the classical languages, which were also the languages of the earliest
New Testament documents, was essential to men who would have to determine the meaning of biblical
passages. Charles White, The Role Of Intellect in Religion: A Baccalaureate Address: Delivered, July 2 7,
1848. By Rev. Charles White, President of Wabash College (New York: S. W. Benedict, l6 Spruce
Street, 1849), 6-10; In his inaugural address, Elihu W. Baldwin argued for the importance of the classics,
even above biblical literature, in the collegiate curriculum. Baldwin, An Address Delivered on the
Occasion of His Inauguration, 1 7-19.

126

graduates did not."5 But like many Presbyterian Whigs of the day, White also warned the
graduates to not become ensnared in partisan politics. In politics, he warned, parties
demanded that men give to the party the virtue and effort that they owed to God and to
the entire community.“5

In their use of the classical curriculum, the leaders of Wabash College, Indiana
University, and Indiana Asbury University sought to educate young Anglo American men
in the classics. But they also sought much more. They intended to instruct teachers who
would educate the people in common schools. They also intended to develop a natural
elite, men who by their abilities, training, and opportunities would be prepared to lead in
churches and the state, region and nation. And the college leaders sought to shape both
the culture of their particular religious communities and the public culture of Indiana, the
trans-Appalachian West, and the American Republic. Charles White, in his 1847
commencement address titled Western Colleges, promised that collegiate education would
provide the stimulus to education at every level, economic and technological develompent,
the fine arts, Western literature, prosperity and leisure, and Christian religion to redeem
them all from mere moral corruption.47 Caleb Mills, the first President of Wabash College
and one of several Yankee leaders in public education in the antebellum Midwest, spent

more years as Indiana’s Superintendent of Public Instruction than as college president.

 

“5 White, Duties of Educated Young Men, 8. For other expressions of Yankee Presbyterians’ fears
of Catholic dominance, see Lyman Beecher, A Plea for the West, (Cincinnati, 1836); Beecher, A Plea for
Colleges, (Cincinnati, 1836, 2“d ed.)

“White, The Duties of Educated Young Men at the West, 7-12.

47White, Western Colleges, 19-23.

127

President Wylie of Indiana University and the presidents of Wabash College
repeated the Yale faculty’s defenses of the classical curriculum as a regular part of public
addresses. The classics, by Wylie’s and Wabash College accounts, provided for mental
discipline and balanced character, and provided important, even “civilized” knowledge that
would unite the “heterogeneous peoples” of the West.48 But the Methodist colleges,
including Indiana Asbury University, presented a more complex picture. In their “First
Annual Report to the Indiana Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church,” the
trustees and visitors of Indiana Asbury University used the familiar phrases of faculty
psychology and the classical curriculum when they emphasized that their students acquired
both knowledge and “the discipline of the mind” which they considered to be “an object of
first importance.”49 But even as they instilled such mental discipline in study of the
classical languages and moral philosophy, the Methodists challenged their place in
religious life. Whereas the Presbyterians promoted liberal arts education as the foundation
for a theological education based on reading the Christian Bible in Latin and Greek, the
Methodist college leaders repeatedly responded to laity’s suspicions of declension among

an educated clergy by consistently asserting that the college was not meant to educate

 

48Elihu W. Baldwin, An Address Delivered in Crawfordsville, Indiana, July 25, 1836 by Rev.
Elihu W. Baldwin, A. M. 0n Occasion of His Inauguration as President of Wabash College (Cincinnati:
James & Galazy, 1836), 508; Charles White, Contributions of Intellect to Religion: A Baccalaureate
Address: Delivered July 2 7, 1848. By Rev. Charles White, President of Wabash College (New York: S.
W. Bendict, 1849), 3-10; White, The Duties of Educated Young Men at the West: An Address Delivered to
the Candidates for the Baccalauareate, July 20, 1842, by Rev. Charles White, President of Wabash
College (Indianapolis: Cutler and Chamberlain, 1842), 7-10; White, A Pure and Sound Literature: A
Baccalaureate Address, Delivered July 22, 1845 (Indianapolis: Morison & Spann, 3-5, 12-15.

49“The First Annual Report Of the Joint Board of Trustees and Visitors of Indiana Asbury
University” Western Christian Advocate 7, 30 (November 13, 1840): 117.

128

ministers.so Also, as much as the Presbyterians insisted on the centrality of the classical
languages, the Methodist inaugural and baccalaureate addresses insisted on the centrality
of experiential religion and piety, thus providing a direct challenge to the hegemony of the
classical curriculum in institutions where it was taught.51

But the greatest challenge to the classical curriculum came fi'om curricular
innovation and students’ decisions about which classes and courses they took. Much of
the historical work on the antebellum colleges has emphasized the standardized curriculum
and lack of “elective” courses and student choice. But students found other ways to
choose their courses. Even as they defended the classical course as “a thorough course of
education,” almost all of the colleges in the Midwest opened preparatory departments and
established alternative curricula that replaced the classical languages with history, more
natural science, and modern languages.52 Significantly, although students received only a
certificate of a Bachelor’s of Science, rather than the legally recognized diploma of a
Bachelor’s of Arts, many more enrolled in these preparatory, “English,” “Scientific,” and
“Teachers’” curricula than in the regular classical programs. Indiana Asbury University
maintained in their Catalogue a category of “Irregular Students,” denoting those who

passed beyond the Preparatory Department and were taking courses without seeking either

 

”Minutes of the 1832 Indiana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 101-103; “August
College,” Western Christian Advocate l, 11 (July 11, 1834), 43; James Mitchell, “A Call in Behalf of the
McKendreean College,” Western Christian Advocate l, 31 (November 28, 1834), 122-124.

51Stephen Olin, “President Olin’s Inaugural Address” Western Christian Advocate l, 6 (June 6,
1834), 21. Stephen Olin, “President Olin’s Inaugural Address Concluded” Western Christian Advocate l,
7 (June 13, 1834), 28; Stephen Ruter, “President Ruter’s Bacealaureate Address” Western Christian
Advocate l, 26 (October 24, 1834), 101-102.

5”The Wabash College leaders tried to insist that such programs would remain temporary.
Baldwin, An Address upon His Inauguration, 14.

129

 

 

a certificate or degree. Both the existence of these courses and students’ preferences for
them demonstrate that the colleges adapted to student and community demands.53

The college catalogs show that the colleges faced the greatest challenge to the
classical curriculum in the choices of students who voted with their feet. In Michigan
colleges for which catalogs are available, large majorities of students enrolled in alternative
courses. Between 1857 and 1862, only 264 Kalamazoo College students enrolled in the
classical course. They comprised only 8.66 percent of all students in the college.
Meanwhile, 2,381, or 78.19 percent of students were enrolled in the preparatory course,
and 400, or 13.13 percent enrolled in the scientific course for the same years. At Hillsdale
College, which had a large female department after 1850, only 356 students, or 5.9 percent
of all students, enrolled in the classical course from 1850 to 1860. In the same years, 851
students, or 4.2 percent of all students were females enrolled in the female course; while
321 students, or 5.3 percent of all students enrolled in the scientific course. The vast
majority, 4,480 students, or 74.6 percent of the total were preparatory students.“ When

Ohio Wesleyan University upgraded its scientific course in 1854, enrollment in that course

 

”Catalogue ofIndiana Asbury University, 1837-1857, (Depauw University Archives, Roy 0.
West Memorial Library, Depauw University, Greencastle, Indiana); On Heidelberg College at Tiffin,
Ohio, see E. I. F. Williams, Heidelberg Democratic Christian College, 1850-1950, (Menasha, Wisconsin:
George Banta Publishing Company, 1952), 83-84. On Western Reserve College’s attempts to jettison
preparatory education and community insistence that they maintain it, see Frederick Clayton Waite,
Western Reserve University: The Hudson Era, A History of Western Reserve University and Academy at
Hudson, Ohio, from 1826-1882, (Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1943), 398-405. On the
overwhelmingly numbers of preparatory and English students at Kalamazoo and Michigan Central
College (later Hillsdale College) in Michigan, see William C. Ringenberg, “The Protestant College on the
Michigan Frontier,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University, 1970) 97, figure 3. On the majority
of students at Ohio Wesleyan University in Yellow Springs Ohio, being in the school’s “Scientific
Course,” see Henry Clyde Hubbart, Ohio Wesleyan ’s First Hundred Years, (Delaware, Ohio: Ohio
Wesleyan University, 1943), 28.

5"The review of college catalogs comes from William C. Ringenberg, “The Protestant College on
the Michigan Frontier,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Michigan State University, 1970), 95-98.

130

increased fiom 48.4 percent of all students to 62.0 percent, while enrollment in the
classical course decreased from 15 percent to 9.8 percent of total enrollment. Perhaps most
interestingly, preparatory enrollment decreased in the same period from 33.0 percent to
21.0 percent, suggesting that some students moved from preparation for the classical
course to the college’s scientific course.55 William C. Ringenberg suggests that by 1850,
all of the Michigan Colleges offered abbreviated teachers’ courses during their fall terms.
But the records of such courses is sketchy.”

Indiana Asbury University offered four different programs between its opening as a
college in 1839, and 1849, when the faculty reorganized the entire curriculum. The
Preparatory Department included those seeking either primary or secondary education.
Unlike most colleges, Indiana Asbury had a formal category of “Irregular Collegiate
Students,” which combined those students who were beyond preparatory standing but had
not met the prerequisites for the classical course with students who selected some of the
college courses but did not seek a degree. The regular collegiate program included the
classical languages, while the scientific course did not. For the ten years from 1839 to
1849, the Indiana Asbury Catalogue lists 1656 student years of enrollment.57 But 488 of
those student years, or nearly 49 students per year and a mean of 30.4 percent of all
students were listed in the “Irregular” category. The Preparatory Department enrolled an

average of 71.6 students per year, or 43.0 percent of all students. The Preparatory,

 

55Gabrielse, “Diversity in Church-Associated Colleges,” 116; William C. Hubbart, Ohio
Wesleyan University, the First Hundred Years, 28.

56Ringenberg, “The Protestant College,” 88.

57Student years simply calculates the number of students enrolled in each program each year,
without considering how many of those student years count the same person or different persons.

13]

Scientific, and Irregular categories accounted, on average, for more than 76.0 percent of
total enrollment at Indiana Asbury University between 1839 and 1849, leaving the classical
course enrollment over that period at a mere 23.0 percent of the total enrollment.

Clearly the majority of the students in the Western colleges were preparatory
students and others who were not pursuing a classical degree. The criticisms of the
classical curriculum have missed this fundamental issue in examining the function of these
institutions. Whether by design or in response to student demands, the colleges adapted
and provided courses that attracted far more students, and students from a wider range of
backgrounds, than the classical curriculum ever could. In addition to the various English,
Scientific, Irregular, Women’s, and Teachers’ courses that many colleges offered, some
offered other alternatives as well. The German ReformedChurch’s Heidelberg College
offered an agricultural course, but could not attract enough students to maintain its
operation.58 Indiana Asbury University, by contrast, attempted to establish a “complete
university” that would offer young men education beyond the A B. in the three professions
of Law, Medicine, and Theology. The medical school lasted from 1849 till 1851. The law
school, established in 1853, collapsed from a decline of enrollment during the Civil War.59
Oberlin Collegiate Institute attempted to provide business, theological and agricultural

curricula, but none of these lasted more than five years.“0

 

58E. I. F. Williams, Heidelberg Democratic Christian College, 1850-1950 (Menasha, Wisconsin:
George Banta Publishing Company, 1952), 80-87.

59George B. Manhart, Depauw Through the Years. Vol 1, Indiana Asbury University, 183 7-1884,
and Depauw University, I884-19I9 (Greencastle, Indiana: Depauw University), 23-30.

60Fletcher, History of Oberlin College I, 355, 360-363.

132

Conclusion

The American colleges’ emphasis on the classical curriculum, with its centuries-
old canon and emphasis on moral philosophy, created a European American curriculum
that sought to universalize virtuous public behavior and action in the education of
European men. In doing so, they concealed and removed the ethnicity, class, gender and
religion that characterized Indiana and the Western Great Lakes from the collegiate
curriculum. But the promotion of that curriculum in Indiana and the Midwest, where there
were few other educational institutions, itself rested on and created conflicts over gender,
class, religion and race. Many faculty supported education of women on principle, and
tried to maintain a separation of men’s and women’s education. The promotions and
defense of the classical curriculum raised accusations that elite educators were neglecting
common schools to educate an elite class. Presbyterians lauded collegiate education as
the only alternative to education by nature or by Catholics. But such education rested on
the concealing and forgetting of nearby African Americans and Native Americans.
Western educators did denounce slavery, more often in Ohio, Michigan and Illinois, than
in Indiana; and they did speak of “departed Indians.” But the slaves were always distant, in
the South, and the Indians always departed, far to the West or to no place in particular.
Neither had any place in the colleges or in the colleges’ vision of Indiana and the

American West.

133

Chapter 5

Moral Philosophy and Afl‘ectionate Marriage in the Men’s Colleges

Francis Wayland’s Elements of Moral Science was one of the most commonly
used textbooks in antebellum colleges’ Moral Philosophy course. Wabash College used
Wayland’s text throughout the antebellum period. Indiana Asbury University used a text
by Thomas Upham. Indiana College used works by Thomas Reid and Duglad Stewart,
supplemented with lectures by the president.‘ Wayland’s work, like other moral
philosophy textbooks, was devoted to teaching young men their moral obligations toward
God, themselves and the people around them. But Wayland also addressed affectionate
marriage as both an obligation and the source of further obligations.2 By treating marital
obligations in addition to men’s public and professional obligations, Wayland produced
commentaries on men’s public and professional obligations and on men’s and women’s

obligations within affectionate marriage. Wayland structured his discussion with the trope

 

1Catalogue of Wabash College (Indianapolis and Crawfordsville, (1833-1849); Catalogue of the
Officers and Students of Indiana Asbury University (Indianapolis and Greencastle, 1839-1849); Lewis
Clinton Carson, “Development of the Course of Instruction,” in Indiana University, 1820-1904:
Historical Sketch, Development of the Course of Instruction, Bibliography, Edited by Samuel Barmister
Harding, (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1904), 35-55. Francis Wayland, Elements of Moral Science;
Mark Hopkins, Lectures in Moral Philosophy; Thomas Cogswell Upham, Elements of Mental Philosophy
2 vols.; Upham, Elements of Moral Philosophy Abridged and Designed as a Textbook forAcademies and
High Schools. Upham’s books were largely updated revisions of Dugald Stewart’s and Thomas Reid’s
works. The textbooks were Francis Wayland, Elements of Moral Science; Thomas Cogswell Upham,
Elements of Mental Philosophy 2 vols.; Upham, Elements of Moral Philosophy Abridged and Designed as
a Textbook for Academies and High Schools. Upham’s books were largely updated revisions of Dugald
Stewart’s and Thomas Reid’s works. The Indiana Asbury catalogs are not clear whether the two-volume
or abridged work was used.

2Francis Wayland, Elements of Moral Science; Mark Hopkins, Lectures in Moral Philosophy,
Thomas Cogswell Upham, Elements of Mental Philosophy 2 vols; Upham, Elements of Moral Philosophy
Abridged and Designed as a Textbook for Academies and High Schools. Upham’s books were largely
updated revisions of Dugald Stewart’s and Thomas Reid’s works.

134

of separate spheres, using the New Testament and moral philosophy as Christian and
rational authorities respectively. But the obligations he ascribed to men in public and
professional life and in affectionate maniage destabilized the very spheres he used to
engender and structure these obligations. Wayland concluded by amrming separate,
gendered duties for men and women within affectionate marriage and in other
relationships.

Here, a word about the concept of separate spheres is necessary. Scholars have
appropriately demonstrated that separate spheres is a vexed concept in the way it appears
both in the language of historical subjects and has been used as an analytical concept in
history and literary studies.’ Cathy N. Davidson and other opponents of separate spheres
discourses argue that the metaphor of separate spheres is too sloppy a metaphor to be
useful as an analytical concept, and that separate spheres discourse is dangerous because it
easily becomes an ideology that imposes limits on women .and boundaries on their social
activity.‘ Amy Kaplan, by contrast, argues that historians cannot analyze antebellum

social thought without engaging the antebellum discourses of separate spheres.s Kaplan

 

3The literature on separate spheres is extensive, including three major discussions in journals
since 1980. Ellen DuBois, Mari Jo Buhle, Temma Kaplan, Gerda lemer and Carroll Smith-Rosemberg,
“Politics and Culture in Women’s History: A Symposium,” Feminist Studies, 6 (Spring, 1980): 26-64;
Linda K. Kerber, Nancy F. Cott, Robert Gross, Lynn Hunt, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and Catherine M.
Stansell, “Beyond Roles, Beyond Spheres: Thinking about Gender in the Early Republic,” William and
Mary Quarterly 46 (July, 1989: 565-85; A special issue of American Literature devoted to the topic
includes Cathy N. Davidson, “Preface: No More Separate Spheres!” American Literature 70, 3
(September, 1998): 443-463; and Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70, 3
(September, 1998), 581-605. Davidson’s piece, which which argues for the banishment of separate
spheres discourse from scholarship, and Kaplan’s piece, which uses that discourse to tie domesticity and
national expansion together, are the most significant for this work.

4Cathy N. Davidson, “No More Separate Spheres!” 444-445.
SAmy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 581.

135

observes that the prominence of separate spheres discourses coincided with national
expansion and discourses of manifest destiny, as well as with sectional strife, and so
contrasts the language of domesticity not only with a public or market sphere, but with
that which authors considered foreign and consequently sought to exclude fi'om or
integrate into the domestic nation. She then examines how authors sought to stabilize a
gendered domestic sphere on racial and imperial bases, yet found that the need to
dynamically exclude or integrate the foreign in turn destabilized the domestic sphere.“
But the public or professional sphere was similarly destabilized when men sought
to stabilize men’s activities by making affectionate marriage as much of an obligation as
was their public and professional activities. College professors, students and texts
constructed discourses of separate spheres to undergird an exclusively male sphere of
men’s obligations in public life, yet destabilized those spheres when they treated
affectionate marriage as an important part of men’s lives. But antebellum college leaders
and students, like other antebellum authors, used discourses of separate spheres not only
to construct gendered spheres of public and domestic activity, but to construct bounded

social spaces based on race, class and education as well.7 Therefore, it is important to

 

6Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 583.

7Wayland, Elements of Moral Science, 281, ff. See especially 284,295. Roscoe [Pseudonymous],
“Desire for Excellence,” The Philologian Department of the Platonean and Philologian 1, 1 (June, 1847),
9-10; Charles White, Political Rectitude: A Baccalaureate Address, Delivered July 23, 1846, by Rev.
Charles White, President of Wabash College (New York: Leavitt, Trow, and Co., Printers, 1846), l4-22,
see especially 21. On Euro Americans’ construction of spheres of appropriate action for Native
Americans, see Robert F. Berkhofi’er, Jr., The White Man ’s Indian; Susan Sleeper Smith, Indian Women
and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (University of
Massachusetts Press, 2001), 2. The literature on European Americans construction of images of Afiican
Americans is vast. For a general work, see Winthrop D. Jordon, Black Over White: American Attitudes
Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina for the Institute of Early
American History and Culture, 1968). For a work on Indiana, see Andrew R L. Cayton’s discussion of

136

consider how they constructed these discourses and how colleges sought to
institutionalize, reproduce, and distribute them.

In July, 1846, Charles White delivered his baccalaureate address entitled Political
Rectitude, to the Wabash College community and the graduating class. White opposed a
politics of principle and rectitude to politics of self-interest, a discourse familiar to his
audience from republican rhetoric, Jacksonian politics, and long-standing political conflicts
in Indiana. White presented the individual virtues that Wabash College cultivated in its
students as individual men as the proper principles for government policy. White also
infused this discourse with claims that citizens ought to act within their own appropriate
spheres.

When, under the righteous authority and excellent influence of the
high-minded and just, every citizen is pushed to all his civil duties,

restrained from all civil wrongs, and has a wall of defence thrown around

all his civil rights and true interests, then there is enjoyed the highest and

largest freedom capable of existing under human governments. The

boundary of exact rights marks out to each man the largest sphere which

can possibly be appropriated to him;.... 3
White spoke of “citizens” and “men,” never mentioning women or a domestic realm or
sphere. He spoke of spheres providing a “wall of defence,” and a “boundary of exact

rights.” He described spheres as “the place of his rest,” “the scene of his physical action

and intellectual accomplishments,” “his fortress,” and the place where citizens would “find

 

attempts to permit slavery in Indiana in Frontier Indiana (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996),
187-93, 246-247.

8Charles White, Political Rectitude: A Baccalaureate Address, Delivered July 23, 1846, By Rev.
Charles White, D. D. President of Wabash College (New York: Leavitt, Trow & Co., Printers, 1846), 21.

137

no obstructions, no interruptions...” where “...no man, not even the government, may
enter without his permission.”9

White did not speak of separate spheres differentiated by gender or mention
women or a domestic sphere. His project to construct a whole set of spheres of public
and political action by men. The college White led, like almost every college at the time,
admitted only men. Wabash College had recently made an aflirmative decision to refilse
to admit women to the college. ’0 The Presbyterian ministry which qualified White for the
Presidency, and so authorized him to deliver the baccalaureate address was limited to men.
White’s primary audience was the collegiate senior class which was exclusively men.
Wabash College itself used Francis Wayland’s textbook, The Elements of Moral Science,
in which Wayland defined professional and political activity as an obligation of men, and
as limited to men.11

White instead sought to differentiate and bound the physical, intellectual and
political action of groups of men based on their education and personal virtue, which was
closely related to their social class. He spoke of a group of “high-minded and just” men
who would exercise “righteous authority and excellent influence” over other citizens.
Combined with White’s other addresses, which promoted Wabash College, collegiate
curriculum and its classical core as the key to personal virtue in the West, White’s scheme

presented the classical curriculum as a significant marker in the bounding of separate

 

9Ibid., 21.

loWabash College Trustee Records, Book 1, p. 67 (September 30, I835); Manhart, Indiana
Asbury University, I, 75-76.

llElements of Moral Science (New York), 18.

138

spheres for public political action. White thus extended, in a discourse of appropriate
spheres, the consistent claim of the Wabash College faculty and community that the people
of the West needed education in Protestantism and republicanism and the classics in order
to become virtuous citizens, and that institutions like Wabash College were able and
necessary to provide that education and religion.12

White spoke of appropriate spheres in only two, out of more than thirty, pages of
his address. But he used it to claim that broad suffrage and frequent elections would not
provide freedom. Broad suffrage and frequent elections might, he argued, “raise to power
temporary despots to crush the people in temporary slavery.”l3 This concern that the
people of the West, lacking education, might elect despots was a familiar one in the
rhetoric of college leaders. But a broad suffrage, frequent elections, and a broad range of
elective offices were the first issues in Indiana politics. Jonathan Jennings and the
advocates of statehood had emphasized these very issues in their attacks on Territorial
Governor William Henry Harrison, their campaign for statehood, and their construction of
the Indiana Constitution of 1816.”

A pseudonymous author “Roscoe” employed a similar discourse of appropriate
spheres in an article “Desire for Excellence” in the student periodical of Indiana Asbury

University. He considered the end for which “man” was designed, observing a “capacity

 

”Charles White, The Duties of Educated Young Men at the West: An Address Delivered to the
Candidates for the Baccalaureate, July 20, 1842, By Rev. Charles White, D. 0., President of Wabash
College (Indianapolis: Cutler and Chamberlain, Printers, 1842).

'3 White, Political Rectitude, 21.

14Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 226-261.

139

for almost unlimited improvement, more especially in intellectual and moral excellence.”
Roscoe wrote of man as a unified subject, claiming that “the most casual observer will
here find ample evidence to substantiate the fact that man was designed for a high and
noble destiny.” But Roscoe then suggested that each person has an “appropriate sphere,
and it is by a proper effort for excellence in that particular place that he becomes
evident.”"

By not specifying what capacities and avocations would differentiate men or how
men in difl‘erent spheres ought to relate to each other, Roscoe did not introduce an explicit
hierarchy like White’s righteous and high-minded men. But like White, he sought to
create separate realms of appropriate action, and so presented boundaries and restrictions
on the activities that would be considered appropriate for some men. But whereas
White’s construction of separate spheres reinforced his explicit goal of creating a
hierarchy of authorities and subjects, Roscoe’s construction is more ambiguous. His use
of separate or appropriate spheres in and of itself introduced a non-specified
differentiation of people that destabilized the unifying concept of “man” and (masculine)
human nature with which he began his inquiry.

The comparison of White’s and Roscoe’s discourse and constructions exhibit the

common use of separate spheres discourse, and its use beyond bounding of separate male

and female or public and domestic spheres. But the comparison also shows how such

 

15 Roscoe, “Desire for Excellence,” The Philologian Department of the Platonean and Philologian
l, 1 (June, 1847), 9-10. The Philologian and Platonean societies were the two literary societies of Indiana
Asbury University. The periodical was divided into Philologian and Platonean “departments” under the
title Platonean and Philologian.

140

discourse was unstable in relation to other antebellum concepts and categories, including
the unified category of “man.” The following discussion will examine how the
construction of separate spheres in the better-known sense of male and female or public
and private spheres was similarly destabilized by college leaders’ attempt to employ them
in the context of affectionate marriage.

Wayland, like many writers of the antebellum period, made marriage a foundation
of civil society.16 But he took the extra steps of doing so in a formal presentation of moral
philosophy. Wayland treated the duties of men, women and children to each other in a
thirty-two page section titled “Duties Which Arise from the Constitution of the Sexes,”
under the heading “Reciprocity” in an ninety-six page section on “Duties to Man.”
Wayland did not explicitly label marriage as an obligation per se. But several of his
assumptions and arguments demonstrate that he considered life-long, exclusive
monogamous marriage of a man and a woman a filndamentally normative relationship.
First, Wayland began his discussion of “The General Rule of Chastity” with the dual
premise that “sexual appetite” is part of human nature, and that “the Creator” limited it to
particular relationships. He then used both biblical passages and social arguments, or in
the terms of the doxological moral philosophy of the day, “natural religion” and “revealed
religion,” to conclude that “the moral law limits the indulgence of this desire to individuals
who are united to each other for life.”17 Wayland’s introduction to his section on

marriage itself also suggests that he saw it as normative. From biblical passages he

 

'“Wayland, Elements of Moral Science, 279.

l7Wayland, Elements of Moral Science, 271.

141

 

 

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describes it as “established by God.” From arguments of how society works, he concludes

”‘3 Wayland considered marriage to be both the

that marriage is “the origin of civil society.
natural result of a sexual appetite and limits based on it by society and revelation, and a
relationship established by revelation. Both nature (and society) and revelation and
required it. ‘9

After proclaiming that marriage is indissoluble for life, is an institution of God, and
is a mutual contract, Francis Wayland proclaimed that afi‘ection is the basis of marriage:

The basis of this union is affection. Individuals thus contract

themselves to each other on the ground not merely of mutual regard, but

also of a regard stronger than that which they entertain for any other

persons else....Now such is the nature of human affections that we derive a

higher and a purer pleasure fi'om rendering happy those whom we love

than from self-gratification....The same principle is illustrated in every case

of pure and disinterested benevolence. This is the essential element on

which depends the happiness of the married state. To be in the highest

degree happy, we must prefer the happiness of another to our own.”
Wayland went on to say that the disposition to seek the partner’s gratification arises from
“unreserved affection, this is the very means by which affection is created....And the
manifestation of this temper is under all circumstances obligatory upon all parties.”

Finally, Wayland said that “the marriage contract binds each party, whenever individual

gratification is concerned, to prefer the happiness of the other party to its own....If it

 

18Wayland, Elements of Moral Science, 279.

1”This section introduces a more detailed discussion of what Wayland concluded the obligations
of men and women within marriage were. Therefore it does not go into a detailed discussion of
antebellum marriage or other commentary on it. The two secondary sources used at length here are Jan
Lewis, “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly
44, 3 (October, 1987), 689-721; Ruth Bloch, “The Gendered Meaning of Virtue in Revolutionary
America,” Signs 13 (1987), 37-58.

20Wayland, Elements of Moral Science, 280.

142

 

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[pleasure] can be enjoyed by but one, each should prefer that it be enjoyed by the other.”21

Wayland’s treatment of affection was remarkable not only by its presence in a
moral philosophy text, but by his insistence that it was a duty or obligation that could be
enforced on both parties. He made such afl’ection the second of three obligations of
marriage.” He derived the obligation to affection from both biblical injunctions and fiom
the broader concept of benevolence:

Hence the duty of cultivating affection imposes upon each party the

obligation to act in such a manner as to excite affection in the bosom of the

other. The rule is, ‘As ye would that others should do unto (or be affected

towards) you, do ye even so unto (or be ye so afl‘ected towards) them.’

And the other gospel rule is also verified: ‘Give, and it shall be given unto

you, good measure, pressed down, and heaped together, and running over,

shall men give into your bosom.23
This language was directly from the New Testament. But just as importantly, it was a

language of affections and generosity. It spoke of treating others not by contract, but by

generosity and according to one’s own affectionate self-regard.

 

2'Ibid., 281.

22Wayland, Elements of Moral Science, 283. Marriage as a moral or civil obligation was not in
itself remarkable. Jan Lewis treats marriage as a civil duty at length in “The Republican Wife: Virtue and
Seduction in the Early Republic ” William and Mary Quarterly 44 (October, 1987). She quotes from “The
Genius of Liberty (F rederickstown Maryland, April 14, 1798, 105-106): “That MAN who resolves to live
without WOMAN, or that WOMAN who resolves to live without Man, are [sic] ENEMIES TO THE
COMMUNITY in which they dwell, INJUROUS TO THEMSELVES, DESTRUCTIVE TO THE
WORLD, APOSTATES TO NATURE, and REBELS AGAINST HEAVEN AND EARTH.” “From the
Genius of Liberty,” Key (Frederickstown, Md), April 14, 1798, 105-106, as quoted in Lewis, “The
Republican Wife,” 709.

23Wayland, Elements of Moral Science, 283. Benevolence was a specialized and contested term
in antebellum Christian theology and moral philosophy. Theologians and moral philosophers used it to
refer to action that did not serve one’s “self-interest,” which itselfwas a deeply contested term. The
reference to treating others as oneself comes from Matthew 7: 12, a part of Matthew’s “Sermon on the
Mount” (Mattew 5-7). The reference to “a measure pressed down” is from Luke 6: 37-38, which was in a
similar “Sermon on the Plain.” Wayland employed the material from Matthew’s “Sermon on the Mount”
(Matthew 5-7) and Luke’s “Sermon on the Plain” (Luke 6: 17-49) quite frequently, including to
emphasize the evil of adultery (Luke 5: 27-30).

143

 

 

But Wayland then turned to a language more recognizable as that of moral
philosophy and its obligations:

To cultivate affection, then, is not to strive to excite it by any direct efi’ort

of abstract thinking, but to show by the whole tenor of life a disinterested

goodness that our happiness is really promoted by seeking the happiness of

another. It consists in restraining our passions, in subduing our selfishness,

in quieting our irritability, in eradicating from our minds everything which

could give pain to an ingenuous spirit, and in cherishing a spirit of

meekness, forbearance, forgiveness, and of active, cheerful, and incessant

desire for the happiness of the one we love.”
Here, Wayland returned to the core of the moral philosophy project, calling young men to
exercise self-discipline and restraint over their passions.” Educators commonly urged
such self-discipline and restraint as a means toward rationality. But here Wayland called
young men to exercise such restraint to cultivate affection as a form of benevolence
towards their wives, towards cherishing, desire, and “the whole tenor of life” as a
“disinterested goodness” in seeking “the happiness of the one we love.” Affectionate
marriage, as Wayland portrayed it, required men to restrain their passions not in order to
be coldly rational, but to be appropriately affectionate to their wives.

Wayland’s and college educators’ calls for men to restrain their passions and show

appropriate affection were an important counterpart of the better-known calls for women

 

24Wayland, Elements of Moral Science, 283-284.

” Wayland, like other moral philosophers, emphasized that rationality, interest and conscience
impelled men to restrain their passions or appetites. Wayland described such restraint as producing both
individual and societal happiness. Wayland, Elements of Moral Science, 55-60. David Enoch Beem, a
student at Indiana University, emphasized such a role for rationality in “Some Bitterness Mixed with the
Sweet,” MSS, December, 1857, David Enoch Beem Papers, William H. Smith Memorial Library, Indiana
Historical Society, Indianapolis, Indiana.

144

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to exercise restraint to maintain their sexual purity.” Wayland repeatedly emphasized that
marriage was an exclusive and life-long union of two people, that such marriage was the
only appropriate context for sexual activity. He made violation of such strictures, as either
fornication or adultery, an especially grievous sin, both by biblical standards and by moral
standards. Wayland reinforced a gendered distinction between female virtue as sexual
purity and male virtue in appropriate public moral action in the collegiate moral
philosophy course, which was almost exclusively available to men.

The rarity of discussions like Wayland’s likely arose from the dilemma that
Wayland himself encountered and did not resolve. Like other moral philosophers, he
insisted that men’s public lives, as professionals and citizens, placed certain obligations
upon them. Wayland began to address the tension between civil and marital obligations by
insisting that men’s professional and civil obligations could not be subordinated to those of
marriage. But he quickly qualified that judgement by the obligations of husband and wife
to “prefer the happiness of the other party to their own.” But Wayland went no farther in
his explanation. His failure, or refilsal, to resolve this dilemma left him at least implicitly
upholding a public sphere, beyond marriage, and excluding women from it.

Wayland asserted that marriage was “a voluntary compact.” Therefore, he argued,
“there are some things which by this compact each surrenders to the other, and also other
things which are not surrendered.” First, Wayland addressed conscience, saying that since

the conscience concerned duties owed to God, “nothing appertaining to the conscience”

 

26This prescriptive literature of female virtue is discussed at length in Ruth H. Bloch, “The
Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America” Signs 13, 1 (January, 1987): 37-58, and in Jan
Lewis, “The Republican Wife.”

145

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could be surrendered “to any created being.” “For either party to interfere with the
discharge of those duties which the other party really supposes itself to owe to God is
therefore wicked and oppressive.”27

Wayland’s insistence that nothing of conscience could be surrendered in marriage
carried the possibility of conflict between husband and wife should the husband insist by
his conscience on something objectionable to his wife, or if the wife insisted by her
conscience on some activity from which women were generally excluded. Wayland
claimed:

Neither party surrenders to the other anything which would violate prior

and lawfill obligations. Thus a husband does not promise to subject his

professional pursuits to the will of his wife. He has chosen his profession,

and if he pursue it lawfully it does not interfere with the contract. So also

his duties as a citizen are of prior obligation; and if they really interfere with

any others, those subsequently formed must be construed in subjection to

them.
Thus Wayland carved out the realms of professions and civic life from the affectionate and
benevolent obligations of the husband in marriage, labeled them as exclusively open to
men, and reduced any moral ground for wives to circumscribe their husbands’ professional
and civic activities. Though Wayland carved out a separate sphere for men within
marriage, he did not describe any realms that women might similarly withhold from marital

obligations. Both, by his account, might put filial obligations above those of marriage. But

Wayland did not describe these in anything like the gendered sense that he used in

 

27This insistence that neither party surrender anything of conscience presumed that no female’s
conscience called her to participate in any aspect of the public and professional world. Women were
excluded both by Wayland’s assumption about conscience, and by his emphasis on men’s professional and
civil commitments.

146

describing men’s public obligations.”

But Wayland did not satisfy himself with such an exclusive set of affairs. His next
paragraph read like a second thought on his claim: “On the other hand, I suppose that the
marriage contract binds each party, whenever individual gratification is concerned, to
prefer the happiness of the other party to its own. If pleasure can be enjoyed by both, the
happiness of both is increased by enjoying it in common. If [pleasure] can be enjoyed by
one, each should prefer that it be enjoyed by the other.”29 Wayland thus qualified the
previously stated primacy of men’s civil and professional obligations. He did not further
clarify or comment on how or when men’s civil and professional obligations were superior
to their obligations in to their wives and marriages. He simply ended that topic.

Wayland then asserted that the marriage relationship involved particular duties,
including “the duty of mutual assistance.” But for Wayland, mutual assistance amounted
to separate spheres of activity for men and women. The husband had duties “to provide
for the wants of the family; and the wife to assume the charge of the affairs of the
household.” He then continued, speaking explicitly about separate spheres: “His sphere
of duty is without, her sphere of duty is within. Both are under obligation to discharge
”30

these duties because they are parties to this particular compact.

Although Wayland spoke in terms of affectionate obligation and mutuality in

 

28Wayland, Elements of Moral Science, 281.

”Ibid., 281.

30Wayland also reinforwd separate spheres in a discussion of parental faults. He said that the
father who engaged so much in business as to be out of the home always neglected his child, while the

mother who spent all her time socializing in fashionable society “violates her most solemn duties.”
Wayland, Elements of Moral Science, 284, 295.

147

marriage, and of separate civil and domestic spheres, his insistence on husbands’
sovereignty over the household reinforced contemporary conservative notions of family
life. He based such claims on Christian scripture, contemporary divisions of men’s and
women’s duties, and concepts of female character and virtue.31 In fact, Wayland argued
that the fact of husbands’ civil role, as well as biblical scripture, gave ultimate decision-
making power in households to husbands.
As, however, in all societies there may be differences of opinion

even where the harmony of feeling remains unimpaired, so there may be

differences here. ...The right of deciding must rest with either the one or

the other. As the husband is the individual who is responsible to civil

society, as his intercourse with the world is of necessity greater, the voice

of nature and of revelation unite in conferring the right of ultimate

authority upon him.32

Yet Wayland also insisted that husbands’ power was far from absolute. He wrote
that “The law of marriage, both from scripture and from reason, makes the husband the
head of the domestic society.” But Wayland qualified husbands’ authority, saying “Hence
when a difference of opinion exists (except as stated above, where a paramount obligation
binds) the decision of the husband is ultimate.” That Wayland intended to qualify
patriarchal authority by affectionate marriage was clear as he continued: “The husband,
however, has no more light than the wife to act unjustly, oppressively, or unkindly; nor it

the fact of his possessing authority in the least an excuse for so acting.” Wayland then

referenced scripture and women’s dignity in submission as support for his position.”

 

3'0n the gendering of virtue in early America, see Ruth H. Bloch, “The Gendered Meanings of
Virtue in Revolutionary America” Signs 13, 1 (January, 1987): 37-58.

32Wayland, Elements of Moral Science, 281-282.

33Wayland, Elements of Moral Science, 285.

148

 

Wayland made his view of women clear in his portrayal of wives’ submission within
affectionate marriage. Wayland continued his arguments for headship by characterizing
wives’ submission: “By this arrangement the happiness of the wife is increased no less than
that of the husband. Her power is always greatest in concession. She is graceful and
attractive while meek and gentle; but when angered and turbulent she loses the fascination
of her own sex, without attaining to the dignity of the other.”” “And it is to remembered
that the act of submission is in every respect as dignified and lovely as the act of authority;
nay, more, it involves an element of virtue which does not belong to the other.”35

Wayland thus reinforced contemporary patriarchal portrayals of men and women
and separate spheres in society. He confronted the possibility of mutuality and equality in
affectionate marriage, but backed away from the implications of subjugating men’s public
and professional lives to marital obligations. But the colleges’ strict separation of spheres
was being broken down not by revisions in college leaders and textbooks, but by the
decisions of students who chose to attend collegiate institutions but to pursue English,
Scientific, Teachers’ and even women’s courses.

Conclusion

The faculty and trustees of Wabash College, Indiana Asbury University and Indiana
University reflected both Wayland’s categories and ambivalence. By 1844, Mrs. Harriet
Dunn Larrabee, wife of Indiana Asbury Professor William C. Larrabee, was operating a

female academy in Greencastle. William C. Larrabee along with Governor Joseph A

 

34 Wayland, Elements of Moral Science, 282.

35 Wayland, Elements of Moral Science, 285.

149

 

Wright headed its board of trustees. Many Indiana Asbury students taught in the school.
Yet the Indiana Asbury Trustees repeatedly denied requests to open the college to women,
until they relented in 1867. The courses were very similar to those in Indiana Asbury, even
at the collegiate grade. The school enrolled forty-five women in 1850. When Mrs.
Larrabee retired, Joseph Tingley, and Indiana Asbury graduate took over the academy
under the name Heman’s Academy. In 1853, it reported enrollment in excess of one
hundred young women.” Similarly, the Wabash College trustees denied opening the
college to women in 1835, but appeared to support a separate female academy in 1837.86 A
female academy existed in Bloomington by 1840.87 Most of the college leaders supported
the education of women as long as it took place outside the collegiate institutions. Thus
the colleges created separate spheres for women, both rhetorically and institutionally. In
this arrangement, they sought to educate women, while maintaining a separate male sphere
for education for public leadership.

As the collegiate curriculum became available to women in academies like that in
Greencastle and in colleges like Oberlin, the absurdity and the conflict grew. Oberlin is
lauded as the first college to admit women to study the regular collegiate course along with
men. But in 1846, the Oberlin campus and faculty were divided over a joint appearance by
Abbey Keller Foster and her brother Stephen S. Foster, not because of their abolitionism,

but because they appeared on stage together. In 1847, when Anna Mahan, daughter of

 

85”Manhart, Indiana Asbury University, 75-76.
86Wabash College Trustee Records, Book 1, p. 67 (September 30, 1835).

87“Minutes of the Edgeworthian Society, 1840-1844,” ed. Lawrence Wheeler, Indiana Magazine
of History 46, 2 (June, 1950), 179-202.

150

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President Asa Mahan, sought to give her graduation address alongside the male class, after
completing the class with them, the adminstration refused.88 Separate spheres did
not exist in any simple sense, either in colleges or in society. But the colleges sought to
create and maintain such spheres in their policies on admission and public events, and in
the content of the curriculum itself. Even as women increasingly gained access to
education and to positions of influence, if not office, the colleges continued to seek to
produce young men to serve in positions where women were legally or institutionally
excluded, in business and government, and in the professions of ordained ministry, law and

medicine.

 

88Robert Samuel Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College From its Founding Through the Civil
War I, 266-280.

151

 

Chapter 6

The Colleges’ Denunciation of and Production of Romance

Life

I slept and dreamed that life was beauty,

I awoke and found that life was duty.

Was then thy dream a shadowy [sic] lie?

Toil on! toil on! sad heart, courageously,

And thou shalt find thy dream to be

A noonday light and truth to thee.1

This poem, which appeared without attribution in the first volume of the Wabash
Magazine in January, 1857, hints at the contest between romanticism and the empiricism
of the didactic enlightenment in the antebellum colleges. The author awakes from a dream
of beauty to realize that life involves more duty than beauty, but he maintains the dream
and the beauty it presented as both guide and truth. The duty of life and the beauty of the
dream will coexist, albeit uneasily. The poem appears in the college magazine of Wabash
College. At The Indiana Asbury University, the Platonean and Philologian contained
many sentimental introspective descriptions of Indiana and “the West,” as well as romantic

poems of disappearing Native Americans.2

 

1“Life,” in The Wabash Magazine 1, 1 (January, 1857), 28. In Wabash College Archives, Eli E. Lilly
Library, Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana.

2“A Poem,” Athaneum of Indiana Asbury University 1, 1 (January, 1842), 1; “Our Periodical: Its

Object” Platonean Department of the Platonean and Philologian l, 1 (June, 1847): l; [Professor]William
C. Larabee, “Recollections of the Past” Philologian Department of the Platonean and Philologian l, 1

152

-... 1...}.

 

 

These poems and other articles, when set against the moral philosophy curriculum
and against the published orations of faculty, show that the colleges became fundamental
institutional locations of the rise of publishing, the gendering of virtue and literary creation
of “separate spheres,” and conflicts over the place of sentimental fiction and romanticism
in America. The colleges were male-lead institutions that educated young men for virtuous
activity in their personal and civil lives. They sought to achieve this through education in
the obligations of moral philosophy and exposure to classical virtues paired with the
mental discipline to read them in their Greek and Latin forms. So it is not surprising that in

the college courses and in published orations fiom official occasions, the college faculty

 

constructed binary categories of men and women, public and domestic spheres, and
realistic and sentimental literature. Student literary societies and collegiate magazines
provided competing collegiate voices whereby young men participated in, created and
published sentimental literature that subverted the binary categories of classical/romantic
and realistic/sentimental literature. But even as they subverted those binary categories,
they reinforced those of men and women and of separate public and domestic spheres

which the classical and moral philosophy curricula created.3

 

(June, 1847), 10-1 1; Professor Wheeler, “Flowers,” Philologian Departrnent of the Platonean and
Philologian l, 1 (June, 1847), 12-13; W. H. Conwell, “The Real and the Ideal of Classic Poetry”
Platonean Department of the Platonean and Philologian l, 2 (July, 1847), 7-8; Oscar, “New England’s
My Home,” Philologian Department of the Platonean and Philologian 1, 5 (October, 1847), 1.

3Two commencement addresses that denounwd novels, and are examined closely here, were Lucien
W. Beny, The Obligations of Young Men to Redeem their Time: A Discourse to the Graduating Class of
The Indiana Asbury University, July, 1852. By Lucien W. Berry, D. D. (Indianapolis: Indiana State
Journal Steam Press Print, 1852; and Charles White, A Pure and Sound Literature: A Baccalaureate
Address, Delivered July 22, 1845 (Indianapolis: Printed by Morrison & Spann, 1845). Both colleges
made the effort of getting their addresses to Indianapolis for publieation. Publication in Indianapolis
suggests that they were distributed beyond the college communities in Greencastle and Crawfordsville,

respectively.
1 53

Lucien Berry and Charles White on Sentimental Fiction

In his 1852 address to the graduating class of Indiana Asbury University, “The
obligations of young men to redeem their time.” Lucien Berry advised young men how
they were obligated to redeem their time, Berry condemned fictional literature. “I have
very little hesitation in passing on the whole class of them [novels] a sentence of
indiscriminate condemnation.” He addressed his condemnation under several headings.

“ 1. Novel reading destroys the love for reading in general. It creates a diseased

appetite that loathes substantial food.”

“2. Novel reading generates a sickly, morbid sympathy altogether averse to the
virtue that bears that name.”

“3. The tendency of the practice [of novel reading] is to produce skepticism. I do
not mean merely a disbelief of the Bible; its tendency is to produce universal
skepticism.”

“4. It interferes with our domestic social relations.”

“5. Once more, novel reading is opposed to moral purity.”4

Berry’s criticisms show how the colleges participated in the institutional

denunciation of novels and sentimental literature that Cathy N. Davidson and others have

made so familiar.’ Western college leaders expected the colleges to become institutions

where young men would develop intellectual and moral faculties that would restrain their

 

4Lucien W. Berry, The Obligations of Young Men to Redeem their Time: A Discourse to the
Graduating Class of The Indiana Asbury University, July, 1852. By Lucien W. Berry, D. D.
(Indianapolis: Indiana State Journal Steam Press Print, 1852): 17-23

SCathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989).

154

affections. Clergy and faculty employed this “didactic enlightenment” to curb emotion and
circumscribe speculation in reason and emotion.6 They proposed that the white, middle-
class men whom they trained would then raise families, educate youth, and lead civil
society in the West and the nation.7

Notions of self-discipline in the colleges as in the larger literate society, were starkly
gendered. Ruth H. Bloch and Jan Lewis show how popular novels and prescriptive
literature emphasized female sexual purity as the core and source of female virtue, and
made republican marriage and motherhood a pillar of male virtue and thus of the republic
itself.8 But when the colleges trained men in self-discipline and restraint in their civil
activities, the colleges provided an important complement to this prescriptive literature for

women. While sentimental literature promoted female virtue, which was drawn around

 

“Henry F. May labeled this effort to develop reason and religion in a relationship where they ight
restrain each other as “Didactic Enlightenment,” which he considers an attempt to circumscribe
speculative and emotional extremes of both religion and reason. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 307-363. Henry F. May and Mark A. Noll both find
that New England clergy only made Deism, defined by them as reason unrestrained by religion, a primary
symbol of their social fears after 1790. Before the upheaval of the 17805 and 17905, they had balanced
their fears of Deism with hope that reason, without guidance from religion, might buttress both faith and
morality, and that the French Revolution would either spread American principles or at least defeat the
Catholic establishment in France. The opinions and fears of the New England clergy were important at
that time not only in their contests for authority in New England, but also because they were beginning to
send missionaries into Western New York and into Ohio, where low levels of literacy and formal authority
increased clerical concern. Noll traces the Princeton College faculty’s turn from optimism to alarm to the
publication of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America, 184,
226, 263-264; Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic: The Search for a Christian Enlightenment in
the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989): 90-92.

7Lyman Beecher, A Plea for the West; chher, A Plea for Colleges; Lucien W. Berry, The
Obligations of Young Men to Redeem their Time, 28; Charles White, A Pure and Sound Literature, 4.
Also see the charters of Wabash College, Indiana Asbury University, and other antebellum colleges.

8These concepts will be discussed at length below. On a gendered division of virtue in early national
America, see Ruth H. Bloch, “The Gendered Meanings of Vitrtue in Revolutionary America” Signs 13, 1
(January, 1987): 37-58. On the role of female sexual purity as private virtue which protects men’s public
virtue, see Jan Lewis, “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic” William and
Mary Quarterly 44, 3 (October, 1987): 689-721.

155

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sexual purity and the home, moral philosophy promoted virtuous action by men in civil
affairs. But the collegiate magazines and the records of collegiate literary societies show
that male college students not only read the sentimental literature that their professors
denounced, but wrote and participated in it as well. They thereby subverted both official
collegiate denunciations of sentimental literature and separation of sentimental literature
and moral philosophy into entirely separate categories.9

Romanticism also entered the colleges in historical romances and other genres less
objectionable to college officials. The sentimental novels of the antebellum era faced
much more resistance than did the historical romances. While the college leaders
condemned the sentimental novels outright, for combining imagination, sentimentality and
focus on women; they expressed much more ambivalence about the historical romances, in
part because historical romance built on long-accepted forms of historical writing.10

Berry criticized novels for exercising imagination and sympathy out of proportion
to other faculties and beyond contact with reality. By Berry’s account novel reading
would “destroy love for reading in general” by exercising the imagination without

exercising the faculties of intellect and morality. Such uneven exercise of one faculty

 

S’An example of such subversion of categories was David Enoch Beem’s 1857 essay at Indiana
University, “Some Bitterness Mixed with the Sweet.” Beem recounted several students’ vandalism of a
sugar still and the punishment they fawd. In good moral philosophy form, Beem showed the punishment
following inexorably from the young men’s actions and suggested that if they had rationally considered
the consequences, they would have refrained fiom such action. But be appealed to sentiment when
reflecting on time missed with friends and relatives when they remained in jail during the Christmas
holidays.

10In A Pure and Sound Literature, Charles White condemned novels and other sorts of fiction, but
promoted histories, travel accounts, and other genres that presented highly romanticized perspectives on
real events and places. Gary L. Ebersole addresses this blurring of lines between fiction and non-fiction
accounts in Captured By Texts: Puritan to Post-Modern Images of Indian Captivity (Charlottesville,
Virginia: University Of Virginia Press, 1995), 98-110.

156

would make science, history, theology and devotions, and all religious topics too “dry”
and “destitute of interest.” Such a state is, in Berry’ words, “so violent a resistance to the
mental order which God has established,” that “there is but little doubt, that every
inveterate novel reader is more or less insane.”ll Beny’s statement reveals how college
professors conceived of both nature and human as minds as created and precisely ordered
by God, so that properly trained human minds could discern laws and evidence of creative
design in nature. Berry’s also claimed that novel reading “generates a sickly and morbid
sympathy altogether averse to the virtue that bears that name.” He claimed that by
presenting human suffering in highly emotive terms where readers could do nothing to
alleviate the suffering, novels desensitized readers to real sufi’ering to the point where they
would not respond to real suffering. In the psychology of the day, which drew close
parallels between physical exercise and mental exercise, sympathy so excited but not acted
out would wither and die from disuse.

The fictional (imaginary) aspect of novels was also dangerous because it might
lead to skepticism. Berry claimed novel reading not only exercised imagination out of
proportion to reason (intellect) and conscience (morality); but the mental exercise of
reading novels also involved a suspension of disbelief, a belief that the events were real.
When readers then had to deal with disappointment that the events were not real, they
might become skeptical to the point that they would doubt the realism and authority of
non-fiction works, texts on science, politics, and morality, and ultimately the Bible. Berry

recognized that novel reading could subvert cultural authorities, including moral

 

llBerry, Obligations of Young Men, 18.

157

philosophy, the core of the collegiate project, and opposed those authorities to novel
reading.

The editors of The Wabash Monthly of Wabash College, also recognized that the
proliferation of periodical literature threatened to subvert cultural authorities by publishing
authors and works deemed to be “inferior.” “But at the present day,” they wrote, “every
one who desires it may, with little expense and much less thought, give expression to his
opinions, and in this way periodical literature presents an inviting field to minds of an
inferior stamp...” But, they also claimed, “while periodical literature afi’ords increased

facilities to inferior writers, on the other hand it exerts a depressing and enervating

 

influence upon authors of real genuine mind.”12

In a series of arguments, Berry identified novel-reading with women, insisted that
women (and their “moral purity”) should be especially protected fiom novels, and claimed
that novel-reading was a danger to America itself because it could ruin the young men
who would lead the nation. His arguments cohered around claims that novels raised

unrealistic expectations and so assured disappointment (and skepticism), and an image of

female character as particularly weak and malleable. In these arguments, Berry

- a . o r.
constructed binary categories of women and men, female and male hterature, and domestic
and public spheres. .!

 

Beny began by warning the young men and women in his audience that:

An enemy, young gentlemen, could not wish you a greater calamity than to
be wedded to one of these weeping, languishing, misanthropic novel readers, her

 

12“Some of the Evil Influences ofOur Periodical Literature.” The Wabash Monthly 1, 7 (April,
1860): 216-226, 218.

158

mind filled with images of pollution and crime, and anticipating in a husband
perfections unattainable, in any state to which man may be raised. And as to you,
young ladies, I could never think of counseling you to wed one whose brain has
been completely addled by lovesick tales and dreamy nonsense. A follower of Jo.
Smith is to be preferred before him.13
Berry simultaneously warned that novels were dangerous, whether describing virtue or
vice, and established clear distinctions male and female novel readers. Novels on virtue
created unrealistic expectations, and so encouraged skepticism, while other novels
polluted readers’ minds by encouraging vice. Berry then presents women as naturally
novel readers, while if a man read a novel, his brain had been completely addled.

But when Berry warned that novels endangered “moral purity,” he seemed to
present a very different image of women. He worried that some Christians owned novels
and so allowed their sons to read them, adding, “and even their daughters too, whose
minds should be guarded against impure imaginations and against an acquaintance with the
polluting details of crime, even as holiness guards the angels before the throne.” Berry
thus moved from describing women as dangerous novel readers to vessels of purity who
should be especially protected from the evils of novels. The common ground of Berry’s
portrayals of women was that they were not college-educated virtuous men. They were
not trained in the self-restraint of passions that the college sought so thoroughly to instill
in their male students.

Berry articulated this separation of men and women and a separation of spheres

when he summed up his arguments against novels and presented them as a threat to the

United States.

 

13Berry, The Obligations of Young Men, 22.

159

The perpetuity of this free Government, the continuance of its republican

institutions, the unobstructed administration of its equitable laws, are matters of

supreme moment to young men - to educated young men, into whose hands,

without a shadow of a doubt, the places of honor and power, and wealth and

usefulness in the church and nation will fall. This fair heritage descends to them of

right as the sons of its present owners; and it cannot be a matter of indifl‘erence to

them whether it shall come down to them, all fertile and blooming, covered with

fruits and teeming with life and happiness, or be broken and desolate and ruined.

The mere possibility that there are influences at work calculated to overthrow the

fair fabric of our Government, is sufficient to arouse the spirit of any young man

and prompt him to the greatest exertion.“
In Berry’s portrayal, the public realm of government not only was a male domain or
sphere, it was heritable right of educated young men, such as those he was addressing in
his graduation speech. The fiee government, the republican institutions, the happiness of
the nation rested in the hands of young men. The dangers to it included novels and novel
reading, which in his portarayal were female literature and predominately female readers
who might lead men astray. The few male novel readers, by Berry’s claims, had their
brains addled and so were insane, and by legal definitions of the day, not truly men.

In A Pure and Sound Literature: A Baccalaureate Address Delivered July 22,

1845, Charles White, President of Wabash College warned graduates of that institution of
the dangers of novels and other “light reading” on the bases similar to Lucien Berry, but
he also named dire consequences that Berry lefi to the audience to consider. Where Berry

was concerned about atrophying intellect and sympathy, White claimed that light reading

would “enfeeble the intellect of the country essentially and permanently.” Berry worried

 

l4Berry, Obligations of Young Men, 28.

15Charles White, A Pure and Sound Literature: A Baccalaureate Address, Delivered July 22, 1845
(Indianapiolis: Printed by Morison & Spann, 1845): 4.

160

that even moral novels endangered young people by creating idealized individuals that
would lead to disappointment with actual people. White not only warned that
“consequent dissatisfaction with the unexciting incidents and monotonous matter-of-fact
duties of real life,” and that in their disillusionment, the young would “abandon the ways
of industry and virtue, and repair to vicious society, to the gaming table, to the theater, to
intemperance, to debauchery.”l6 White presented the same gender perspectives and railed
against the same disruption of “social relations” that Berry did. White, like Berry, made
men and only men, the citizens and guardians of the public sphere.

In all communities, especially in all free nations, young men, if correctly and

liberally educated, are by far the most important citizens. They are quickly to be

the most efficient patrons, the ablest friends of morals, the safest depositories of

power, the strongest assurances of duration, the truest sources of glory.17
White made more clear than did Berry, that the key figures were not only men, but men
who were “correctly and liberally educated” to be citizens, patrons, and guardians of
morals and power.

White differed most significantly from Beny in presenting positive alternatives to

novels and other “light reading,” by suggesting a “good and noble” literature. He is quite

 

l”White, Pure and Sound Literature, 6. This diflerenoe between Berry’s vague and unnamed dangers
and White’s naming of dangers and enemies was typical of the college addresses of Indiana Asbury
University and Wabash College respectively. The Presbyterian leaders consistently named dangers,
whether nature, Native Americans, Catholics, enthusiasts, mobs, “heathens,” “mohomedeans,” or atheists.
The Methodist leaders at Indiana Asbury raise some of the same concerns, but tend not to single out
persons or groups as dangers or enemies.

1“'White, Pure and Sound Literature, 4. Compare this statement about men’s role as citizens to
Berry’s warning that to marry a novel reader would be the worst thing a man could suffer and for a
woman would be worse than marrying John Smith, founder of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, who
promoted polygamy.

161

 

precise about what such a literature should be, what effect it should have, and on whom.
Such a literature will consist of “productions affording both eloquence and truth, vivacity
and purity, refreshment and instruction, thrilling interest and intellectual discipline. It will
“aid fatigued lawyers, harassed legislators, care-worn merchants, jaded physicians, and
exhausted students.”18 White then recommends several categories, and particular works in
each category. He includes voyages and travels, which are “true,” even if the authors are
not scientists; oratory, which presents “mental energy,” “logical skill,” and “original 5
invention”; sermons, which discuss “the immeasurable, the perfect, and the eternal” in
passionate terms; philosophy, which treats men’s mental and moral capabilities as well as 2

his interests; history, which teaches “the methods of Providence with the world and the 5

 

methods of the world with Providence”; and poetry, which gives voice to the purest
expressions of the intellectual and moral nature.”

But several of the genres which White proposed as “good and noble literature”
included romantic and other conventions that immediately blurred White’s distinction
between fiction and realism and between the didactic empiricism of the colleges and the
romantic affections of the very novels which White and Berry denounced. The historical

writing of the period, as well as the travel literature and poetry combined historical

 

accounts with the romantic sentimentality which male authorities denounced from church

pulpits and collegiate podiums, in speeches and published articles.20 But in the hands of

 

18Ibid., 12.
19Ibid., 12-13 , l4, 17, 19-20 22.

20Gary L. Ebersole, Captured by Texts: Puritan to Post-Modern Images of Indiana Captivity.
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 99, 100-102, 117-119.

162

male college students, historical romances in turn aflirmed republican virtue in male and
female forms and turned it to defend the American republic against male passions and
imperial ambition.

“The beauties of female character always lay hold of the heart, and call for the
admiration of the sternest men.” Thus David Enoch Beem, a student at Indiana
University, begins a 1857 sketch of “a model wife” whose “highest ambition was to please
her husband.”21 She has “the charms of character, the forgiving spirit, the meek
disposition, and the confidence of soul which are as lasting as life itself.” Beem says that
“In this admirable woman, a kind and loving disposition existed from her earliest years,
until the time of her death. The same serenity of soul, the same desire to please others,
and make her friends happy,” continued throughout her life. She faced great trials with
unmatched “fortitude and resignation,” first as an orphan, and later as a rejected wife.
Though her husband, to whom she was both “best fiiend” and advisor, broke her heart and
crushed her spirit by rejecting her to seek another for his ambitions, “she murmured not,”
and “no bitter reproaches escaped her lips.” Beem made her story an example for all
women, saying: “Let women read it. Let wives practice by her examples, and many a

desperate home will become happy.”22

 

21David Enoch Beem, “Josephine, Empress of France,” (Manuscript, November 30, 1857), David
Enoch Beem Papers, Box 2, File 11, W. H. Smith Memorial Library, Indiana Historical Society,
Indianapolis, Indiana.

22Beem, “Josephine, Empress of France,” 2. Catherine N. Davidson argues that prefatory material,
such as Beem’s encouragment to read of Josephine as a way to establishing a peaceful home, whether
added by author or publisher, not only show how authors (or publishers) intended works to be read, but
also how people might have read them. Catherine N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the
Novel in America. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 5, 6, 20.

163

But this “model wife,” was neither an American wife nor strictly a character of
sentimental fiction. Beem made a romantic hero of Josephine, Empress of France, her
marriage to Napoleon Bonaparte, and her forced separation from him.23 In Beem’s hands,
Josephine began as a poor orphan girl living on Martinique with no companions except the
children of slaves, with whom “she innocently and happily spent her childhood.” General
Beauharnois, J osephine’s first husband, received but the briefest mention before Napoleon
elevates Josephine from orphan-hood and play with “dusky children of Africa” to Empress
of France. Although she places her husband’s happiness above hers and advises him in his
actions, she is doomed by her position.“ Her husband, the emperor, had a “heart
fashioned after ambition, and love fell before its quenchless flame. He must have an heir,
and so casts her aside.” He thereby “deeply wronged a pure and noble woman.” Beem’s
Josephine was entirely the victim of her husband’s imperial ambitions: “She calmly
sustained the greatest injustice that woman could suffer,” but carried on, with her

character and virtue intact and affirmed.”

 

23Such a well-reported, and therefore known woman and events evidently provided rich material for
sentimental literature. In her introduction to Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette, Cathy N. Davidson
shows that the events of Elizabeth Whitman’s death had been widely reported in the papers and moral
tracts, such that Foster’s audience would have been familiar with the basic story-line. Also, Whitman’s
status as a daughter of a prominent minister and relative of Jonathan Edwards, Aaron Burr, and John
Trumbull seems to have heightened the allure of the story, much as that of Josephine, Empress of France,
would have. Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette, or, The History of Eliza Wharton; A Novel; Found on
Fact. Edited with an Introduction by Cathy N. Davidson, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), x,
V111.

24Beem writes that Josephine could foresee her downfall. Although the downfall of a grasping person
is a routine device in sentimental fiction, Beem’s particularly strong attribution of virtuousness to
Josephine and ambition to Napoleon suggests that Beem does not intend to cast Josephine’s downfall as a
result of her desires or actions.

2S‘Beern, “Josephine, Empress of France,” 2.

164

 

“31171-19-“

Beem’s essay is one of several manuscript essays that he wrote and dated, but of
which there is no record of vocal or published presentation.26 Cyrus Nutt, a professor at
Indiana Asbury University, penned “Josephine,” which appeared in the collegiate
magazine, Platonean, to which both students and faculty contributed. “L’Imperatrice,”
appeared in the Wabash Monthly in 1857.27 Students and faculty at separate colleges in
antebellum Indiana produced these essays for use in their college communities. They
praised the virtue and romantic love of the woman born on Martinique, in June, 1763, as
Josephine Tashcer de la Pagerie. She married a French military officer, Viscount
Alexandre de Beauharnois, and returned to France with him. After Beauharnois was
guillotined during the French Revolution, Josephine caught the attention of Napoleon
Bonaparte, and the wed in 1796, while he was Commander of France’s Italian Expedition.
Though Josephine had two children by Beauharnois, her marriage to Napoleon was
childless. In 1810, Napoleon arranged to have the marriage annulled on grounds that no
parish priest had been present when they were wed in the Notre Dame Cathedral. She
received an estate, kept her title as Empress, and was visited by Napoleon, who wed

Marie Louise of Austria.28 The annulment of her marriage and her reaction are the

 

26The David Enoch Beem Collection at the Indiana Historical Society contains many undated
manuscript essays. A few include notice that the essay was delivered as a spwch on a given occasion,
such as a literary society function, Fourth of July celebration, or commencement. Others, like the
Josephine manuscript, do not have any such notations. Although they may have been written for classes or
other occasions, I have not been able to discover specific evidence that any of them were.

2llerus Nutt, “Josephine,” The Platonean Department of the Platonean and Philologian l, 3
(August, 1847), 34-35; “L’Imperatrice,” The Wabash Monthly 1, 3 (March, 1857). This discussion means
to address Catherine N. Davidson’s concern that discussion of the history of books (or in this case, essays)
must take into account genre, audience (or hypothetical audience), implied authors and implied readers,
and the way texts operate in given cultures. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 5.

28Compton ’s Interactive Encyclopedia.

165

 

 

primary subject of the various essays discussed below.

Josephine was a popular literary subject in antebellum America. Memoirs of
Josephine and several biographies and magazine articles on Josephine circulated and were
widely advertised in the United States.” Publishers also included Josephine’s name in
advertisements for other books, such as a biography of Marquis de Lafayette, and in broad
histories of important people. P. C. Headley’s The Life of Josephine appeared in two of
the booklists examined, one at the back of William Bacon’s Parental Influence, Authority
and Instruction: Their Power and Importance, and at the back of John Lauris Blake’s The
Modern F armer...or, Home in the Country; Designed for Instruction and Amusement on
rainy days and Winter Evenings. 3” Memoir of the Empress Josephine: Historical and
Secret Memoirs of the Empress Josephine, First Wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, appeared
in a list at the back of Albert Barnes’ The Church and Slavery.31 Josephine also appears

among a list of heroes and heroines featured in Abbot ’s Illustrated Histories, in a book-list

 

29A keyword search for “Josephine” in the University of Michigan’s Making of America website:
http://moaumdlumich edu revealed more than three hundred matches. Several of the documents
concerning Josephine are used as sources in this work. In this author’s sample, sixteen of twenty matches
surveyed actually corresponded to the Josephine who was Empress of France.

30Both The Life of Napoleon, by J. G. Lockhart, and The Life of the Empress Josephine, by P. C.
Headley appear in a “List of Popular Books” published by Derby and Miller at the back of John Lauris
Blake, The Modern Farmer...or, Home in the Country; Designed for Instruction and Amusement on rainy
days and Winter Evenings, by Rev. John L. Blake (Auburn, New York: Derby and Miller, 1854):
Advertisements, 3, 5. In the same list, the publishers advertise P. C. Headley’s The Life of General
Lafayette with the statement: “with a portrait, uniform with Headley’s Josephine.” Ibid., 1.

31 Mademoiselle M. A. Normand, Memoir of the Empress Josephine: Historical and Secret Memoir o
the Empress Josephine, First Wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, translaged from the French by Jacob M.
Howard, Esq., with Portraits . Two Volumes, in “Parry and McMillan’s Publications: Ladies Historical
Library,” appended to Albert Barnes, The Church and Slaver (Parry and McMillan, 1857): 210.

166

 

appended to a guide to rhetoric and character.32

The literary accounts vary in style. But with only one exception, they present
Josephine as romantically in love with Napoleon and sufl‘ering greatly at his decision to
dissolve the marriage. Only John B. C. Abbot’s blow-by-blow account of the annulment
and Napoleon’s and Josephine’s reaction that day and night presents Napoleon as torn by
the decision, with both still passionately in love with each other afierward.33 A pair of
sentimental poems presented Josephine respectively as a sufl‘ering picture of virtue who

takes joy in never having caused a tear, and as a woman fated to great fame and suffering

”I. all“. '_ WEI."

respectively.34 G. S. Weaver and Byron Sunderland explicitly used Josephine as a model

of feminine virtue, Weaver presented her as humble, Christian and opposed to fashion. F

 

Sunderland made her a Christian heroine alongside Hannah Moore and Margaret Fuller.35
In The Young Lady ’3 Counsellor, or, Outlines and Illustrations of the Sphere, the Duties

and the Dangers of Young Women... Daniel Wise made Josephine the perfect image of

 

32A bbot 's Illustrated Histories: Comprising Xerxes the Great, Cyrus the Great, Alexander the Great,
Darius the Great, Hannibal the Carthinagin, Julius Caesar, Cleopatartra, Queen of Egypt, Constantine,
Nero, Romulus, Alfi'ed the Great, William the Conqueror, Queen Elizabeth, Mary, Queen of Scots,
Charles 1, Charles 11, Queen Anne, King John, Richard I, William and Mary, Marie Antoinette, Madame
Roland, and Josephine, in “Harper and Brothers, Choice Works for Libraries,” appended to George
Winfred Hervey, Rhetoric of Conversation: Or Bridles and Spurs for the Management of the Tounge,
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853): 384.

33John B. C. Abbott, “The First Wife of Napoleon,” The Ladies ’ Repository: A Monthly Periodical
Devoted to Literature, Arts, and Religion 12, 3 (March, 1852): 112-114.

 

3"’Mrs. M. A. Bigelow, “The Empress Josephine” The Ladies’ Repository: A Monthly Periodical
Devoted to Literature, Arts, and Religion 9, 1 (January, 1849): 22; E. L. Bicknell, “Josephine,” The
Ladies ’ Repository: A Monthly Periodical Devoted to Literature, Arts, and Religion 18, 7 (July, 1858):
410.

35G. S. Weaver, Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women, on the Various Duties of Life... (New
York: Fowler and Wells, 1855): 36, 65; Byron Sunderland, Discourse to Young Ladies: Sermon by Byron
Sunderland, Pastor of First Presbyterian Church...Delivered the 22'" Day of January, 185 7 (Washington:
C. Wendell, printer, 1857): I6.

167

female courage and self-reliance. She endured after the terrible pain and injustice of
Napoleon’s annulment.36

Although the collegiate essays differ somewhat in their portrayals of J osephine’s
rise to power, they share several fundamental characteristics. All reconstruct the life of a
real historical character to present a particular story. All emphasize the afl‘ections,
particularly those of Josephine. All present Josephine as a model to be sympathized with
or emulated, but do not r give her real agency as she confronts her husband the emperor
and the imperial state.37 Finally, each author uses his essay to address gendered virtue,

marriage, and republicanism in America. While Nutt and the author of “L’Irnperatrice” i

 

leave such connections clear but implicit, Beem gives explicit directions that American
women ought to read of and emulate Josephine.38

When Beem’s essay is set against other writings Josephine, the romantic element is
apparent. But much more explicitly than other collegiate authors, Beem constructed a
sentimental allegory of a virtuous woman and her maniage as symbols of the republic

threatened by the personal ambition and imperial interests of her husband. Unlike Beem’s

 

36Daniel Wise, The Young Laafy ’s Counsellor [sic.], or, Outlines and Illustrations of the Sphere, the !
Duties, and the Dangers of Young Women... (New York: Carlton and Phillips, 185— [illegible]): 158. E

37In this respect, the Josephine essays resemble The Coquette, as presented by Cathy N. Davidson.
They present Napoleon as rakish and ambitious to the point that he sacrifices his virtuous wife; but they 1,
do nothing to challenge or change patriarchal gender relations. Davidson, The Coquette, xv.

 

38Nutt and the author of “L’Imperatrice,” do not make explicit direct connections between
Josephine’s virtue and affections and the American republic. But their overwhelming emphasis on
Josephine’s virtue and affections and the direct contrast to Napoleon’s as emperor, are and would have
been known as devices of sentimental literature. David Enoch Beem, “Josephine, Empress of France,” 2.
Based on a review of advice literature and fiction from the 1770s through 1801, Jan Lewis argues that in
the marriage and republicanism in the early nation cannot be understood apart from one another. Jan
Lewis, “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic,” Willliam and Mary Quarterly
(1987), 690, 707.

168

essay, neither Cyrus Nutt’s “Josephine,” nor the annonymous “L’Imperatrice,” say
anything of Josephine playing with African children, but they do note that she went to
France, and won the affections and hand of General Alexander Beauharnois.” Whereas
“L’Imperatrice” emphasizes Beahamois’ military exploits and favor at the court of Louis
XVI, Nutt emphasizes that Josephine won his hand by her knowledge and ability.
Whereas Beem acknowledges that Josephine gave Napoleon wise counsel, Nutt attributes
Napoleon’s success in his rise to power to Josephine herself.

The Indiana college essays, and much of the other writing on Josephine, belong to
a genre of romantic history that blurred distinctions between fictional accounts using
historical events and historical accounts embellished or romanticized for sentimental
effect."0 That “L’Imperatrice,” is set as a narrative poem in free verse does not change its
generic function. In their use of sentimental devices to create romantic fiction, these

pieces resemble numerous European American accounts of warfare with or captivity by

 

39Cyrus Nutt, “Josephine,” The Platonean Department of the Platonean and Philologian l, 3
(August, l847),l.

40This blurring of fiction and historical events is clear in a comparison of Francis Parkman’s
putatively historical writing with James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, or reading of eaptivity
tales and other romantic accounts of conflict with Native Americans. Jane Tompkins, Sensational
Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1 790-1890 (New York: Oxford, 1985). It is also visible
in the subtitles of two early American novels. Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette, is subtitled “The
History of Eliza Wharton; A Novel; Found on Fact. William Hull Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, is
subtitled “Or, the Triumph of Nature, Founded in Truth.” Cathy N. Davidson discusses both novels in
her introduction to The Coquette. Edited with an Introduction by Cathy N. Davidson, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986), vii, ix, xi. Davidson traces some of this blurring of realism and fiction to
contemporary concepts of authorship. “The early national era antedated the Romantic period’s notions of
the author as the prime creator of art and a concomitant privileging of the author’s intentions. During the
post-revolutionary period, a residual Puritan emphasis on relating ‘truth’ or ‘history’ still underscored the
older notion that the writer merely formulated what everybody already new.” Both Beem’s and Nutt’s
apparent assumption that everyone knew of Josephine suggest that this influence was at work here.
Davidson also points to the large sales of novels as a cause of what she calls “genre-blurring,” but that is
less of an issue here, since these essays were not sold. Catherine N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word,
29-30, 40.

169

| — ..— ulnra-T‘il'lllm
k .1 n .'

 

 

Native Americans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Gary L. Ebersole
argues that captivity accounts and other literature of the period after 1780 cannot be
simply divided into realistic historical and fictional categories. Instead, sentimental
literature became both producer and product of a new epistemology and moral
significance for literature, where sentimentality embellished historical accounts and
fictional accounts took on didactic functions“l Novels contested old authorities, such as
ministers, by claiming to portray everyday life more realistically than the clergy and other
authorities had.42 An article in the June, 1847 Platonean of Indiana Asbury University,
the magazine in which Nutt’s essay appears, claims to evaluate a wide range of novels on
precisely the criteria of how well they represent real life scenes and actions. Produced by
different authors in similar collegiate communities in 1847 and 1857, the Josephine essays
are not novels, but they do employ the conventions and devices that Ebersole and
Davidson find in the literature of the 1780s and 1790s. They thereby suggest that these
literary conventions and generic ambiguities continued to exist, at least among college
students in the American West, well into the nineteenth century.

Another article in the same issue of The Platoneaon Department of the Platonean

 

“The free-verse poetic form of “L’Imperatrice,” only reinforces the blurring of romantic and
historical narrative.

”Gary L. Ebersole, Captured by Texts: Puritan to Post-Modem Images of Indiana Captivity.
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 99, 100-102, 117-119. Davidson shows several ways
that authors of novels claimed to present more realistic events than did preachers and teachers. One was
to claim that they must warn of women of the real dangers of seduction which threatened female virtue.
Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 50-51; Davidson, The Coquette, (1986) xiii. Also, an article in the
Indiana Asbury University Platonean and Philologian, evaluates novels on almost precisely these criteria;
namely whether they realistically portray real-life events. “Desultory Thoughts on Novels” The Platonean
Department of the Platonean and Philologian l, 1 (June, 1847), 3.

170

and Philologian of Indiana Asbury University also demonstrates that college students in
1840s Indiana continued to employ particular moral, social, and literary conventions of the
late eighteenth-century didactic moral literature. In “Female Influence,” an author known
only as “S” deplored the invisibility of female influence in the “social, intellectual, and
moral world.” But S. maintained an image of women as sentimental, afl‘ectionate, and
moral; and she focused on military exploits, statesmanship, and collegiate-university
accomplishments, from which women were absolutely excluded, as the important realms
of public accomplishment; and she placed a burden on women to protect not only their
own sexual purity, but also the morality and virtue of men.43

According to Davidson, the colleges, as bastions of opposition to novels, were the
last place where the literary conventions of the sentimental novel would have been likely
to appear.“l But in the Josephine essays, young men, educated in the male and public
virtue of the classics, wrote about a heroic woman in sentimental style. The college essays,

like the published memoirs, biographies and articles, appear to provide guidance in virtue

 

43S.’s focus on “public” accomplishments in affairs of state, warfare, and university affirms that the
gendered division of virtue in male public virtue and female private virtue resting on sexual purity, which
Ruth Bloch locates in the 17805 and 17905, was still influential in 18405 Indiana. Ruth H. Bloch, “The
Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 13, 1 (January, 1987): 37-58. S’s emphasis on women as affectionate, and as responsible for
shaping male virtue by using their own to “tempt” or “seduce” men into virtue similarly shows that the
conventions of “affectionate republican marriage,” as described by Jan Lewis for the 17805 and 17905,
were also still influential. Jan Lewis, “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early
Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 689-721.

“Davidson argues that “the novel became the chapbook of the nineteenth century — that is, a cheap
book accessible to those who were not educate at the prestige men’s colleges, who were outside the
established literary tradition, and who (as both Charles Brockden Brown and Helena Wells noted) for the
most part read few books besides novels.” She also argues that to authorities in churches, colleges, and
governments, criticizing novels, which represented alternative authorities, were coextensive with being
such authorities. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 14, 41.

171

 

 

E:

 

 

to women. Even though the Indiana colleges, like most colleges, did not admit women,
nearby female seminaries and literary societies provided frequent opportunities for
collegiate men and young women to exchange thoughts and essays." Written in and
evidently for the male college community, the Josephine essays demonstrate that by the
18405 and 18505, college students, who received the most strident criticism of novels and
other “light literature,” employed the conventions of the sentimental novels. Thus they
confirm that men not only wrote, but read sentimental literature; thereby showing that '5;
claims of a clear distinction between serious or “pure and soun ” and realistic male serious .-

literary forms and sentimental female literary forms were a construction of college

 

presidents like Lucien W. Beny and Charles White and other authorities.“ The distinction E
rested on the institutionally enforced exclusion of women from colleges, the status of
morally educated citizens, and institutions of the male-constructed “public sphere.”

Beem’s essay works as an allegory of the republic in part because Beem gives

Josephine so little agency in her rise to eminence. ‘7 Beem’s Josephine, who has had little

 

45“An Indiana College Boy in 1836: The Diary of Richard Henry Holman” edited, with an
Introduction, by Holman Hamilton, Indiana Magazine of History 49, 3 (September, 1953): 281-306; “The
Minutes of the Edgeworthian Society, 1840-1844” edited, with an Introduction, by Lawrence Wheeler, t...
Indiana Magazine of History 46, 2 (June, 1950), 184. The place of women in antebellum colleges "
involves an interesting process of historieal revisionism. Many aspects of colleges were unclear, such as
whether their existence began with their chartering, their first class, or completion of the first building.
Many commemorative histories claim that their colleges admitted women sometime during the antebellum I .
period. But in most cases, they are “borrowing” the status of separate female aeademies or seminaries,
which collegiate faculty and their wives often supported or taught in, but which were legally and
practically separate from the collegiate institutions.

 

4”Cathy N. Davidson, “Preface: No More Separate Spheres!” American Literature 70, 3 (September,
1998), 443-463, 447; Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction,
1790-1860. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

"Whereas Nutt portrays Josephine as an important mover in Napoleon’s rise to power, Beem merely
acknowledges that she gave him good advice.

172

to do with politics and her own rise to power, then sufi‘ers entirely at the hand of her
ambitious husband. In Nutt’s account, Josephine is affectionate and suffers deeply, but
her active role in her ascent precludes the type of tragic fall which Beem portrays.“

All the Josephine essays emphasize her affections and her affectionate role in her
marriage. Beem speaks of Josephine’s meek and forgiving character. Nutt says that
Josephine was “required to sacrifice the strongest affections which intertwine around the
heart,” such that “the variety of fortune through which she has passed, commands the
sympathies of us all.” Nutt also says of the separation: “The sacrifice is most painful,
tearing asunder tender cords of affection.”‘9 The author of “L’Imperatrice,” speaks of
Josephine as “the example of undying love,” and when ambition seized Napoleon, “She
felt its portent/ Naught but the hand of God, she knew, could/ Check the demoniac
strength of Bonaparte’s ambition.” But two key aspects of such marriage were the
building of female virtue on sexual chastity and an image of marriage as ”friendship raised
to the highest pitch.”so S”’s Female Influence” said that Republican women were to be
virtuous and wise; display presence of mind, patience and vigor; and above all be
companions and helpers to their husbands.” Women thereby became key figures in the

republic because through affectionate republican marriage, they could inculcate virtue in

 

48See David Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs on the emphasis on rhetoric
and essays.

"Ibid., 34, 35.
50Lewis, “The Republican Wife, “ 707-709.

51“S,” “Female Influence,” 36. On other such literature, see Jan Lewis, “The Republican Wife,” 696-
697.

173

 

 

their husbands and the republic. Women might even “tempt” or even “seduce” men, who
might otherwise act rakishly, into virtuous behavior.52

The ideology of such marriage rested largely on assumptions of women’s sexual
chastity and men’s susceptibility to women’s influence through the conscience or moral
sense.’3 Thus, in sentimental fiction and in these collegiate essays, women and their sexual
purity, were burdened with supporting the entire edifice of republican virtue. If women
failed to maintain their personal virtue, they could not “tempt” men away from rakish
behavior toward virtuous behavior. Women then would be responsible for the lack of
public virtue in the men around them, and so for the ill health of the entire republic.”4

But here, affectionate maniage met a broader vision of the American republic as
men and women living by self-discipline, self-control, and forms of deference in an
increasingly liberal world. Republican marriage would ideally rest on both affection and

virtue. Commentators explicitly set such marriage against the European world, where

 

”Jan Lewis, “The Republican Wife,” 690, 695-696, 700-701, 720.

’3 This emphasis on virtuous women using sexual attraction to reform male behavior and cultivate
male virtue appears in S. “Female Influence,” The Platonean Department of the Platonean and
Philologian 1, 3 (August, 1847): 35-37. On the division of virtue into female private virtue resting on
sexual purity and male public virtue in the realms of state, warfare, and academia, see Ruth Bloch, The
Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 13, 1 (January, 1987), 37-59. 47. Jan Lewis addresses commentators’ fears that some men would
not be susceptible to temptation to virtue. Such men were a danger to society, but they were explained as
lacking conscience or cultivation of their moral sense, which in turn re-emphasized the need to educate
men and women in virtue. “The Republican Wife,” 715-720.

54Bloch presents this distinction between private or personal women’s virtue and men’s public virtue.
Bloch, “The Gendered Meaning of Virtue,” 44-50. Lewis recognizes that this burden lay on women
without giving them the rights and privileges of citizenship. Lewis, “The Republican Wife,” 699. One
essay that Lewis cites, suggests explicitly says that “if all women were rational, unaffected and virtuous,
coxcombs, flatterers and libertines would no longer exist.” Miss C. Hutchings, “Reflector No. D(,”
Ladies’Monitor, Jan. 2, 1802, 156; quoted in Lewis, “The Republican Wife,” 700.

174

\F

 

rim"
5
I

marriage was presented as the result of hierarchical family arrangements and other sexual
activity as the result of personal self-indulgence, as opposed to personal self-control; and
against the emerging liberalism, which they identified with self-interest, as opposed to self-
discipline and self control.55
Writings on republican affectionate marriage prescribed marriage and sexual purity
for women, prescribed that women seek above all else to be helper and companion to their
husbands, and called women to inculcate virtue in their husbands. But these were not the
only gendered prescriptions for virtue. The colleges called men to to control their
passions, desires, and interests, and so defer their private desires and interests to the public
good of the republic. Moral philosophy texts, taught to seniors by college presidents,
emphasized development of faculties of intellect and conscience to restrain passions and
irnagination.’6 In baccalaureate and inaugural addresses, first delivered on oflicial
occasions and then published for distant audiences, faculty called students and graduates
to restrain both passions and interests to serve society.” Student essays showing the folly

of vices emphasized use of rationality in considering the consequences of action and using

restraint. Public addresses attacking political enemies emphasized their lack of virtue and

 

SSJan Lewis, “The Republican Wife,” 707.

56Wabash College used Francis Wayland’s Elements of Moral Science (1835,1838, 1861) from their
first classes in 1835 through the Civil War. Indiana Asbury University used either Thomas C. Upham’s
Elements of Mental Philosophy 2 vols. (1835), or more likely his Elements of Moral Science Abriged and
Designed as a Textbook for Academies and High Schools (1842). Indiana University presidents used
Duglald Stewart and Thomas Reid’s text to create their own lectures. See the eatalogs of the respective
schools.

5”All of Charles White’s baccalaureate addresses as President of Wabash College were published as

pamphlets, usually in Indianapolis, but sometimes in New York or in Andover, in Biblia Sacra. The
Western Christian Advocate published baccalaureate addresses of many Methodist Colleges.

175

rationality and their pursuit of self-interest. Much of the college curriculum, particularly
the classics, mathematics, and moral philosophy were built around instilling rational self-
control of passions and interests.”

Both republican marriage and the colleges promoted forms of deference or
benevolence in particularly republican ways. Just as prescriptions of female sexual purity
and afl'ectionate republican marriage called women to enter and maintain affectionate
marriages where they would defer to their husbands; collegiate lessons on male virtue
called men to cultivate and exercise rationality to defer their passions and interests both to
their own intellect and morality and to the common good of a unified society. With such
prescribed but circumscribed duties, affectionate marriage and collegiate education both
became mechanisms for producing male republican citizens. But there was no equality
here. As the Josephine essays demonstrate, men could and did write and read sentimental
literature, while women remained excluded from the classical colleges, whose purpose was
to train men to be male citizens.” Jan Lewis suggests that affectionate republican
marriage allowed women a political role not in citizeship or motherhood, but in

marriage.60 Lewis argues that this prescribed role of republican wife long preceded that of

 

58On duties, see Charles White, Duties of Educated Young Men at the West, and Lucien W. Berry,
The Obligation of Young Men to Redeem Their Time. On restraint and rational consideration of
consequences, see David Enoch Beem, “Some Bitter Mixed with the Sweet,” MSS essay. On politics see
Charles White’s baccalaureate address Political Rectitude, and David Enoch Beem’s manuscript essay,
“Politicians as They Really Are.” On the collegiate curriculum, see the rest of this study.

59Davidson treats Benjamin Rush’s concern with educating men and women to produce “republiean
machines” at length. Afl’ectionate republican marriage, as presented by Jan Lewis amounts to almost as
mechanistic a tool for producing republican citizens. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 62-64.
“Lewis, “The Republican Wife,” 690, 707 .

176

republican mother.61 But in the colleges, afl‘ectionate marriage did not yield equality or
opportunity, but rather dilemma and paradox. Of the moral philosophy texts used in the
three Indiana colleges, only Francis Wayland’s Elements of Moral Science broached the
subject, and Wayland refused to resolve the dilemma he found over whether men’s public
and professional obligations ought to be subjected to the obligations of affectionate
marriage.62
In the hands of Beem, Nutt, and the author of “L’Imperatrice,” Josephine became

a heroic example of such female virtue. All the authors present Josephine as an active
counsel and supporter of Napoleon’s campaigns, but at the end of her marriage, all three
make her a passive victim of either her husband or the imperial state. Nutt ascribes her
more agency than do Beem, or “L’Imperatrice,” making her the agent of Napoleon’s rise
to power. But when Nutt portrays her assent to the annulment, he makes her assent an
inevitable, required action, not an agentive one.

But the business must proceed, the Council of State is called, the

principal actors perform their several parts, to Josephine and her

son most painful. She is required in the presence of that assembly,

to express her consent to the dissolution of her marriage, which she

did with tearful eyes and faltering voice. This painfiil ceremony

ended, the assent of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities is

speedily obtained, and Josephine having been fourteen years wife of
Napoleon, and six years queen of ‘the great nation,’ retaining the

 

61Lewis, “The Republican Wife,” 702-703. This political role and duty of marriage of course came
with a burden. At least one writer made explicit the implieation that to remain outside of marriage was to
rebel against self, family, society, nature, and God. “That MAN who resolves to live without WOMAN,
or that WOMAN who resolves to live without Man, are [sic] ENEMIES TO THE COMMUNITY in
which they dwell, INJUROUS TO THEMSELVES, DESTRUCTIVE TO THE WORLD, APOSTATES
T0 NATURE, and REBELS AGAINST HEAVEN AND EARTH.” “From the Genius of Liberty,” Key
(Frederickstown, Md.), April 14, 1798, 105-106, as quoted in Lewis, “The Republican Wife,” 709.

62Wayland. Elements ofMoral Science, 280-281; 285-286.

177

title of Empress, retires, at the age of forty-two, to her favorite seat
at Navarre."3

In neither essay does this woman, this empress whose character all three authors
recommend, offer any resistance to the actions of men or the state. Beem lauds her in
typically sentimental form for facing the annulment with unparalleled “fortitude and
resignation, and that she “murmured not,” though her “heart was broken.”"4

While all three authors recommend female virtue as they portray it in Josephine,
and they present Napoleon’s divorce of her as both wronging Josephine and as a threat to
the republic, they present fundamentally different threats and fears, both of which were
embedded in expressed anxieties about the republic. Beem presents a bare allegory, where
Josephine, who is virtuous by sentimental, Christian, and secular republican standards, is
wronged by her husband, who acts out of bare ambition and interest. Josephine provides a
particularly stark image of female virtue because her rapacious husband can embody male
ambition and interest or serve as the deux ex machina of the imperial state. Beem and
“L’Imperatrice,” present Napoleon’s personal ambition as the cause of her downfall, while
Nutt, presents the imperial state as the source. Nutt presents Josephine as wronged by
inexorable power of the imperial state. Nutt allows the possibility of “the emperor’s
extravagant ambition to perpetuate his name and power.” But he emphasizes “the
inexorable law of state policy. In his account, “the cruel decree...must be obeyed.” Both

betrayal of virtue by interest and ambition, and the inexorable demands of an imperial state

 

63Nutt, “Josephine,” 35.
64Beem, “Josephine, Empress of France,” 1, 2.

178

were anxieties of republicans. In one case, unvirtuous men would sacrifice the republic for
their own self-interest and ambition. In the other, an over-powerfill state, like that of
Britain, would develop its own interests and corrupt law, constitution, and men.

Conclusions

The essays written in the Indiana colleges, and essays throughout America,
employed romantic fiction to reinforce gendered divisions of republican virtue. By
elevating a European empress to romantic heights of feminine virtue and tragedy, male
authors created an allegory of female virtue and male ambition. For Nathan Enoch Beem,
it was but one more step to create an allegory of American republican virtue and imperial
ambition. He crafted a woman who became an empress through sentimental feminine
virtue without any hint of ambition, and so suffered entirely at the hands of her ambitious
husband. The Indiana college essays and the evident popularity of other published essays
show that romantic literary conventions, which clergy and faculty at the colleges warned
young men to avoid, penetrated the colleges and other bastions of male education. But in
the colleges and other venues romantic conventions and affectionate marriage become a
means of upholding both a republican gendering of virtue and a defense of the republic
from both sentimental women and men’s passions and ambition. Thus they upheld and
defended the very institutions and social expectations which their critics suggested they

would corrode and destroy.

179

Conclusions

The story of Indiana’s movement from frontier to a region between 1800 and 1850

 

is not Frederick Jackson Turner’s story of a series of frontiers peopled first by Native
Americans and then by traders, ranchers, miners and farmers in succession. Instead it is a

rich and complex web of stories of how Miami and Potawatomi peoples and Anglo

 

American soldiers, traders, planters, farmers, government ofiicials, teachers, preachers and F“
laborers, sought, often at the same time, to shape Indiana and the surrounding area in their

image. In the contests that arose between them, they shifted the physical and biotic

environment, occupied and claimed land, created new avenues of exchange and markets, i

and created new boundaries on the land and between identities based in ethnicity, class and
gender. But these contests occurred much more concurrently than historians have
sometimes considered. That Frances Slocum, or Maconoqua, and her family were
petitioning Congress to keep their land in 183 9, when the colleges at Hanover,
Bloomington, Crawfordsville and Greencastle were in 11.111 operation is one small
suggestion of how contested and incomplete the dominance of the builders of an American
West remained in the 18305 and 18405.

The struggles of these peoples and institutions have continued into new centuries.

 

The dispute between Vincennes University and the University of Indiana, with the State of
Indiana in the middle, dragged out until 1895, when the State of Indiana paid the

Vincennes Institution for the land sold in the 18205. The University of Vincennes gained

180

support from a property tax levied on Gibson County land.l In 2002, one hundred and
seventy years after the first steps in its founding, Wabash College continued the campaign
that began its existence. As of 2002, the college supported the Wabash Center for
Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion and planned to open a new building for
the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.2 Indiana Asbury University, established as an
institution to educate and refine men for leadership in Indiana, recognizes Vernon Jordan,
an Afiican American who was born in Atlanta and became a lawyer, civil rights activist,
banker and presidential adviser, as one of its most esteemed graduates.

The same is true for the Miami and Potawatomi of Indiana and Michigan. In 1897,
Gabriel Godfroy, struggled to remain a Miami after the federal government ruled that he
had “voluntarily placed himself within the definition of a citizen” rather than a tribal
Miami.3 In 1996, Stewart Rafter published The Miami Indians of Indiana: A Persistent
People, 1654-1994, reminding that some Miami have remained in Indiana throughout the
development of the state and region. Susan Sleeper Smith’s work opens a new and
promising vein by deconstructing the identities of several women and families in the region
who concealed and exploited their Native American heritage and kin ties in various ways.
In 2000, the federal government recognized the Gun Lake Tribe of Potawatomi as a
federally listed Native American group. In September, 2002, The United States Sixth

Circuit Court of Appeals turned down a request by the Gun Lake Pottawatomi to force

 

lWelsh, “Vincennes University, 225-228.
thtp://www/wabashcenter.wabash.edu; http://www.liberalarts.wabash.edu.

3Rafert, The Miami Indians of Indiana, 175; Sleeper-Smith, Rethinking Cultural Encounter in
the Western Great Lakes, 140.

181

 

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I .‘Klr'l'r..li . I ‘
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the state of Michigan to negotiate a casino compact with the tribe so they could build an
180,000 square foot casino in Bradley in Allegan County, on grounds that the band did
not own any tribal land in Michigan. By that time, the conflict had divided much of that

rural county’s population for nearly three years.4

 

 

 

 

‘Like the conflicts of the mid-nineteenth century, this one is complex and turns on local
concerns. A few residents have used racial epithets against the Potawatomi, usually connecting them with
“laziness”. But the issue also pits advocates of economic development against people who seek to
maintain the rural character of their community, and against long resident conservative Protestants who '
who have long held that gambling is immoral and a “corrupting vice.” “Michigan Facing Another Casino
Compact Dilemma,” The Detroit News (December 25, 2000), accessed at
11_ttp://www.dctnews.com/ZOOO/mctro/OOl.225/metro-167269.h_tr_rl; “Appeals Court Denies Tribe’s Casino
Plan,” The Grand Rapids Press (September 21, 2002), Al, A6.

182

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