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Presbyterians In Educational Work In North Carolina Since 1813

Address at the Centennial Celebration of the Synod of North Carolina, in Alamance Church, Guilford County, October 7. 1913.

By C, Alphonso Smith,

Pot Professor of English in the University of Virginia.

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In Exchange Univ. of North Carolina SEP 2 7 1933

PRESBYTERIANS IN EDUCATIONAL WORK IN NORTH CAROLINA SINCE 1813

Address at the Centennial Celebration of the Synod of North Carolina, in Alamance Church, Guilford County, October 7, 1913.

By C. Alphonso Smith,

Poe Professor of English in the University of Virginia.

No one can read the history of North Carolina without con- ceding to Presbyterians both priority and primacy in education- Indeed those who are not Presbyterians have paid tribute to Presbyterian influence in education more unreservedly than have Presbyterians themselves. Dr. Kemp P. Battle*, a distinguished Episcopalian, says that the Scotch-Irish, another name for Presbyterians, gave to North Carolina not only many of its leaders in peace and war — the Grahams and Jacksons and John- stons and Brevards and Alexanders and Mebanes and hosts of others, "but, above all, most of its faithful and zealous instruc- tors of youth, such as Dr. David Caldwell, of Guilford, and Dr. Joseph Caldwell, of the University, Dr. David Ker** and Mr. Charles Wilson Harrisf, the first professors in the University, and that progenitor of a line of able and cultured teachers and founder of a school eminent for nearly a century for its wide- spread and multiform usefulness, William BinghamJ, the first."

Dr. Charles Lee Raper§, a Methodist and dean of the graduate department in the University of North Carolina, after mention-

* History of the University of North Carolina (1907) I, 38.

**Dr. David Ker (175S-180)) was not only the first professor to be called to the University but as "presiding professor" lie was the first executive or president. He had been a Presbyterian preacher and teacher in Fayetteville.

tMr. Charles Wilson Harris (died 1801), professor of mathematics at the University was the sec- ond professor called to the new institution. He organized the first literary society nt the Lniver- sity, was for a time "presiding professor," and suggested the name oi lis liiendanJ fellow-Prince- tonian, Joseph Caldwell, to succeed himself in the chair of mathematics.

+He had preached and taught in Wilmington before coming to the University as professor of Latin in 1801. He resigned in 1805 to become the founder of Bingham School. Of his son, Wil- liam James Bingham (1802-1S66), father of William Bingham, the author, and of Major Itol.ert Bingham, the present distinguished principal of Bingham Scl ool, Mr. Waller P. Williamson fays (in Our Living and Our Dead, II, p. 372): "I venture to say he was the means of putting more teachers upon the rostrum, more professional men into the various professions, more preachers in the pulpit, and.more missionaries into the field than any ten other men in the Stitte."

%The Church and Private Schools of Xorlh Carolina (1898). p. 31.

ing such Presbyterian schools and churches as Sugar Creek, Poplar Tent, Centre, Bethany, Buffalo, Thyatira, Grove, Wil- mington, and the schools and churches of Orange and Granville Counties presided over by the famous Henry Pattillo, declares that "The Presbyterians have been more thoroughly devoted to education than any other denomination. It has meant life as well as light to them; it has made them independent and patriotic, strong and noble. They were really our first teachers, and during the latter half of the eighteenth century they were well-nigh our only ones." "In North Carolina, as in several other States," says Dr. Charles Lee Smith*, a Baptist, and the only historian of education in the State, "the higher education owes its first impulse to the Presbyterian Church and Princeton College. To the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians occupying Central and Piedm nt Carolina is due the lasting honor of having es- tablished the first academies in the Province, and it is said that it was through their influence that the clause providing for a university was inserted in the initial Constitution of the State." No further testimony is needed to show that in educational work in the State the Presbyterian Church has been first and foremostf . It shall be my purpose not to trace the history of Presbyterian schools, not to speak of what the Synod as a Synod has done, but to put the emphasis on a few great Presbyterian leaders. There are six names that seem to me both typical and representative. I shall try to individualize these and to indi- cate the distinctive achievement of each. These names, if I understand their significance, not only link the years of the cen- tury into oneness of aim and achievement but project the light of a larger promise into the new century upon which the Synod of North Carolina today enters.

I. David Caldwell (1725-1824).

There is no difficulty in selecting our first most representa- tive figure, for when the Synod of North Carolina was formed

*The History of Education in North Carolina (1888), pp. 23, 52.

tin 1810 the University of North Carolina conferred three D. D.'s and five M. A.'s. Each one of the eight recipients was a Presbyterian preacher who taught as well as preached in Central or Piedmont Carolina. It looked very much like a called meeting of Orange Presbytery. See Battle's History of the University of North Carolina I, 186.

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a hundred years ago the most famous educator in the South was David Caldwell. He was eighty-eight years old at this time and had only recently begun to show the physical marks of age. His mind, however, was still vigorous, his memory tenacious, his humor unfailing, his will unbroken, and his ap- pearance majestic. Only a few months before, when Virginia had been threatened by a British invasion in the war of 1812 and volunteers were called for from Guilford County, Dr. Cald- well had been helped up the steps of the old court house to make the appeal. His text was: "He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one." So ardent was the old Dominie's patriotism and so irresistible his message that not only did more than the required number of Guilford men start forthwith for Virginia, but among them a young Quaker found himself. Bid- ding defiance to all inherited and acquired convictions this young man served faithfully in the ranks and returned to attest not so much the willingness of one Southern State to help another as the impossibility of standing unmoved before David Caldwell when David Caldwell was aflame with a great theme.

At this time, however, Dr. Caldwell was already looked upon as belonging more to the past than to the present. But what a past it had been! This man's life had spanned the most dramatic transition of modern history. He was born when Peter the Great, of Russia, lay dying. He had lived under George I, George II, George III, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madi- son. He was to die under the presidency of Monroe. He had corresponded since early manhood with his friend, the great Dr. Benjamin Rush, of Philadelphia, "the Sydenham of Amer- ica." Pastor of Alamance and Buffalo Churches since 1768, his fame as preacher, teacher, physician and patriot far trans- cended State lines. Students had come to him from every section of the country south of the Potomac. From his log school-room, which was also his home, there had gone forth five governors and more than fifty ministers. He had been a member of the State Constitutional Convention of 1788, and was the first to whom the presidency of the new university had been offered. He was more familiar with the earlier and later stages of the Revolutionary War in North Carolina than any

other man, living or dead. He had been with the members of his two congregations when they fought at Alamance and at Guilford Court House. A price had been set upon his head. He had reasoned with Governor Tryon, argued with Cornwallis, and counseled with General Greene.

The greatest personal loss that had come to him was in the wanton and deliberate burning of his books, letters, and manu- scripts of every kind. His family was compelled to stand idly by and see armful after armful of these memorials of an heroic past dumped by the British into the flaming oven in the Doctor's back yard. Though his books were his tools, Dr. Caldwell was often heard to say that he regretted most of all the loss of his private papers. Had these been preserved I believe that Dr. Caldwell's name would appear in every history of the American Revolution, while now it appears in none, and that the part played by North Carolinians i^ that great struggle would never have been subject to either cavil or question.

All honor to your second pastor, men of Alamance and Buffalo, Dr. Eli W. Caruthers. Had he not written the life of Dr. Cald- well, the name of the great educator would today be but a rumor. Dr. Caruthers could not, however, in 1842 make amends for British barbarism in 1781, but he did what he could. Like Walter Scott's Old Mortality, who found pleasure in cleansing the gravestones of the martyred Covenanters, Dr. Caruthers has lovingly removed the mosses and lichens from the grave of a great man. He has thus rescued and restored the name and fame of one who would otherwise have been but a drifting tra- dition.

A teacher's eminence may be measured in part by the eminence of his contemporaries; his services, by the achievements of his pupils. On both counts Dr. Calwdell's fame is enhanced. He had as contemporaries such Presbyterian teachers as Dr. John Makemie Wilson (1769-1831) and Dr. James Hall (1744-1826). Both had gone with him in 1810 to receive the degree of Doctor of Divinity from the University of North Carolina. Dr. Wilson, a playmate of Andrew Jackson, had opened a classical academy one year before the Synod of North Carolina was formed and in twelve years he had trained twenty-five Presbyterian ministers.

Dr. Hall, a scientist, theologian, educator, scholar, and soldier, reminds one of "the spacious times of Great Elizabeth," when men, uncertain whether the pen was really mightier than the sword, compromised by handling both with equal skill. A special interest attaches to this warrior-preacher at our centen- nial celebration because as a delegate from Orange Presbytery he had served as Moderator of the General Assembly in Phila- delphia and because he was the Moderator of the Synod of the Carolinas when it met for the last time as a combined Synod in 1812.

Among Dr. Caldwell's graduates we shall mention only three but each added a distinct chapter to educational achievement in North Carolina. Rev. Samuel E. McCorkle, D. D., (1746- 1811) was offered the first professorship in the University of North Carolina but declined. He was the orator of the day on that famous October 12, 1793, when the cornerstone of the Old East was laid. The first graduating class at the University numbered seven, of whom six had been pupils of Dr. McCorkle. In the first Board of Trustees of the new University he was the only preacher and the only teacher. He was the author of the by-laws of the University, which contained also courses of study for all the classes; and his famous academy, Zion- Parnassus, at Thyatira, six miles west of Salisbury, had the first normal school in America. Archibald D. Murphey (1777-1832), another pupil, said in 1827: "The usefulness of Dr. Caldwell to the liter- ature of North Carolina will never be sufficiently appreciated." The same has often been said of Murphey himself. "When our history is written," says W. J. Peele*, "if greatness is measured by the public benefit it confers, perhaps Macon, Murphey, and Vance will stand together as the three greatest men the State has yet produced." In 1817, as chairman of the committee appointed by the preceding legislature, Mr. Murphey filed his famous report on education. "I doubt if a more able and schol- arly report," says James Y. Joyner, Superintendent of Public Instruction, "was ever filed by any man on any subject in any North Carolina legislature." John Motley Morehead (1796- 1866), twice governor of North Carolina, attended Dr. Caldwell's

*Lives of Distinguished North Carolinians (1898) p. 125.

school when his teacher was ninety years old but when his ability as an educator and his range as a scholar were, in Governor Morehead's opinion, worthy of all praise. John Motley More- head became distinctively our greatest industrial governor, but he made educational history when he founded in Greensboro the famous Edgeworth Female Seminary, the only school for women in the State founded and owned by an individual. It lasted from 1840 to 1871 and its grateful anji loyal alumnae may still be found in every Southern State.

Though dead nearly a hundred years, Dr. Caldwell reminds us better than any other teacher in our history that education means the development of personality through contact with personality. His students did not go to a library, a laboratory, a faculty, or even a school or college. They went to David Caldwell. He died just as the forces that tend to institution- alize and impersonalize education were girding themselves for the century-long contest. They are in the saddle today but the time is coming when the voice of the old Dominie, like the voice of Johnny Armstrong^ the old ballad, will be heard

"Saying, Tight on, my merry men all,

And see that none of you be ta'en, For I will stand by and bleed but awhile,

And then will I come and fight again.' "

II. Joseph Caldwell (1773-1835).

When David Caldwell died in 1824 the sceptre passed to Joseph Caldwell, first President of the University of North Caro- lina. Though not related one to the other the two men had much in common. Both were of Scotch-Irish descent, the elder from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the younger from New Jersey; both were graduates of Princeton; both were preachers as well as teachers; both were students of science as well as of the classics; both were men of affairs as well as of books; both fought persistently and successfully the forces of French infi- delity that were making rapid headway in the new republic; and both lived long enough to glimpse the after-glow of their own widening fame. The difference between them was one chiefly of temperament. There was a sweetness, a balance,

a poise and patience about David Caldwell which, if not con- spicuously lacking, were not distinctively present, in the charac- ter of Joseph Caldwell. The first president drove from Prince- ton to Chapel Hill in a sulky arriving in time to take the chair of mathematics at the beginning of the session of 1796. He was twenty-three years old and the University one year old.

From the opening of the University until the enforced resig- nation of President David Lowry Swain in Reconstruction times the University was presided over continuously by Presbyter- ians. For the first nine years of its existence (1795-1804) there was no president but a presiding professor. The two presiding professors*, before Dr. Caldwell became president in 1804, had been Dr. David Ker and Mr. Charles Wilson Harris, both Pres- byterians. Of his Professor ot Latin, William Bingham, a Scotch-Irishman of Ulster, and an honor graduate of the Uni- versity of Glasgow, Dr. Caldwell afterwards wrote: "Whoever shall have occasion to be acquainted with this man shall find him to be one of those whom the great poet of England has de- nominated to be among 'the noblest works of God.'

Joseph Caldwell found himself, then, among congenial col- leagues. As first president of the oldest State University in America he occupied a position of rare opportunity but of almost unexampled difficulty. There was no precedent to follow and no one to whom he could turn for assured guidance in that dim neutral belt of authority that lay between the Faculty on the one hand, the Board of Trustees and the Legislature on the other. He resigned once with the intention of devoting himself ex- clusively to the study of higher mathematics, his favorite field; but at the end of three years he was unanimously re-elected to his old position which he held till his death in 1835. During these years the University grew rapidly in renown, in resources, in fruitful scholarship, and in public service. The man and the place had met.

Dr. Caldwell was not only a scholar and administrator; he was a great citizen. He advocated so ably the building of rail- roads that he was called the father of internal improvements. "So long," said Paul C. Cameron, "as the great trunk line rail- road from Morehead City shall increase the wealth and com-

merce of the State, the name of Caldwell will be remembered as its first projector in the letters of 'Carlton.' " He was ap- pointed scientific expert to run the boundary line between North and South Carolina in 1813. He erected a building in which to use the costly astronomical instruments bought by him in London, and thus inaugurated the first college observatory in the United States. He was so ardent an advocate of common schools and academies that the new Presbyterian institute at Greensboro, established a year after his death, was promptly named for him. Among its earliest teachers were Dr. Alexander Wilson, Mr. Silas C. Lindsay, and Rev. John A. Gretter. "This trio," said Dr. Charles Phillips, ' 'taught a school of the highest pretensions ever known in North Carolina. Its students joined the junior class in the University." Six years after Dr. Cald- well's death his name was given to Caldwell County, the first county in the State to honor the name of a teacher.

Near the top of the monument erected on the campus of the University "by the President of the United States, the Governor of North Carolina, and other alumni" to the memory of Dr. Caldwell may be seen a railroad wheel, an engineer's transit, and the Bible. The union of these symbols, rather than the symbols themselves, together with the inscription on the south face — "He was an early, conspicuous, and devoted advocate of the cause of common schools and internal improvements in North Carolina" — indicate the public services by which Dr. Caldwell received and will retain the lasting gratitude and affection both of the Presbyterian Church and of the State of his early adoption.

III. Elisha Mitchell (1793-1857).

During Dr. Caldwell's absences from the University the position of acting president had always fallen to Professor Elisha Mitchell. Immediately after Dr. Caldwell's death Dr. Mitchell was made president pro tern and filled the position till the election and arrival of President David Lowry Swain. Dr. Mitchell was a graduate of Yale in the class with Denison Olmsted, James Longstreet, author of Georgia Scenes, and George

E. Badger, Senator and Secretary of the Navy. Dr. Olmsted, a Presbyterian, was his colleague at Chapel Hill for a short time and it was these two men who began the great work of making the soil, the climate, and the resources of North Caro- lina known to the citizens of the State and to those far beyond the State.

Dr. Mitchell came to Chapel Hill in 1818 and was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1821. Till 1825 he filled the chair of mathematics and natural philosophy but when Dr. Olmsted was called from Chapel Hill to Yale Dr. Mitchell entered upon his chosen field of geology and mineralogy. During his thirty- nine years of service he grew steadily in mental stature, in use- fulness to the State, and in the esteem of all who knew him. "His massive, tireless frame," says Dr. Battle*, "his encyclo- pedic information and readiness to impart it, his broad humor, his firm but not narrow Calvinism, his genial manners, his la- borious reading, his kindness of heart and unfailing generosity, his intrepid spirit, his firm reliance on his opinions, would have made him conspicuous anywhere."

It was an able faculty in which he served, the Presbyterian members alone constituting a body of men of whom any univer- sity might be proud. Of President Swain, an elder in the Pres- byterian Church, Governor Vancef said: "He who would fully comprehend the great work of David Swain's life would have to stand upon the battlements of heaven and survey the moral world with an angel's ken." There was also Dr. James Phillips, Presbyterian minister and professor of mathematics, whose public services, if they have suffered eclipse at all, have suffered it because they have been overshadowed by the combined ser- vices of his son, Dr. Charles Phillips, and his daughter, Mrs. Cornelia Phillips Spencer. When some one said in Governor Vance's presence that Mrs. Spencer was the brainiest woman in the State, he replied promptly: "Yes, and man, too."

Able as were his friends and colleagues, however, Elisha Mitchell seems to me to have made a deeper and more personal impress upon the State than any of them. He was the first

*History of the University of North Carolina I, 681.

tW. J. Peele's lives of Distinguished North Carolinians, p. 244.

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who saw clearly, and wrought for a lifetime to make patent and potent, the vision of physical North Carolina, — its illimitable wealth of forest and field and mountain, its hidden ores, its majestic waterways, its cities and sanatariums, its workshops and factories and, above all, its lone mountain peak, unequalled but unacknowledged. He knew no Eastern Carolina or Western Carolina but only North Carolina as God made it. He became a martyr not to science in general but to the scientific develop- ment of North Carolina. His death on the highest peak of the Blue Ridge, which he had proved to be the highest, swept the State with a wave of patriotic and personal devotion un- paralleled in our history. Of the many resolutions which his death called forth none seem to me quite so beautifully phrased as those from Davidson College: "Through the whole of a long life he was an assiduous and enthusiastic devotee of science, and to us there is something of a melancholy, poetic grandeur and greatness in the place and manner of his death, whereby science in burying one of her worthiest sons has hallowed a new Pisgah, which future generations shall know and mark."

Dr. Mitchell lives today not because Mt. Mitchell and the Elisha Mitchell Scientific Society and Mitchell County perpet- uate his name but because he wrought at a splendid design. He did not live to complete it — it is not completed yet — but by scientific reports in many national journals, by special articles in magazines and newspapers, by personal appeals in season and out of season, by repeated visits and prolonged investiga- tions, he affected powerfully the public opinion of his time and left- North Carolina a richer, a wiser, a more forward-looking State than he had found it. I can never read Browning's great poem, The Grammarian' s Funeral, without thinking of the burial of Dr. Mitchell. As the grammarian's pallbearers ascended the mountain they chanted, you remember, the praises of their hero, catching more and more of his spirit as they neared the far summit:

"That low man seeks a little thing to do,

Sees it and does it: This high man, with a great thing to pursue,

Dies ere he knows it.

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That low man goes on adding one to one,

His hundred's soon hit: This high man, aiming at a million,

Misses an unit.

Here — here's his place, where meteors shoot,

Clouds form, Lightnings are loosed,

Stars come and go.

Lofty designs must close in like effects:

Loftily lying, Leave him — still loftier than the world suspects,

Living and dying."

IV. William Joseph Martin (1830-1896).

Dr. Mitchell was succeeded by William J. Martin. He was a native of Virginia, had been a graduate student of the Uni- versity of Virginia, and for three years had served with dis- tinguished success as professor of natural philosophy and chem- istry at Washington College, now Washington and Jefferson College, Washington, Pennsylvania. He succeeded at once in securing a large appropriation for laboratory work at the University of North Carolina and thus put the study of chem- istry upon a higher and more scientific plane than it had before occupied. On September 21, 1861, after drilling the students in military tactics, he resigned his chair and entered the Con- federate Army. After serving as Captain of the Twenty-eighth North Carolina Infantry he was made Lieutenant-Colonel of the Eleventh, the famous "Bethel Regiment." After the Battle of Gettysburg he was made Colonel. Four times wounded his commission as General had just been signed when the surrender at Appomattox gave him again to the cause of education. After serving two years longer at Chapel Hill, he founded the Colum- bian High School at Columbia, Tennessee, was elected professor of chemistry at Davidson College in 1869, and arrived at his new post in 1870. Here his life work began and here his fame as a teacher and moulder of men was established.

Davidson College had opened its doors in 1837. No more favorable place for a Presbyterian college could have been found in the entire South. Not far from its site had flourished such classical schools as Crowfield, Sugar Creek, Queen's Museum,

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Zion-Parnassus, Providence, Rocky River, Poplar Tent, and Bethany, all under Presbyterian control. Though founded long after the Revolutionary War, Davidson College gathered up and conserved the best traditions of that heroic age and took its name from General William Davidson, a noted Revolutionary soldier, on whose broad acres the college was built and whose heroic death at Cowan's Ford had hallowed both his name and his estate. Among the presidents of Davidson College who have passed to their reward may be mentioned Dr. Robert Hall Morrison, Dr. Samuel Williamson, Dr. Drury Lacy, Dr. J. L. Kirkpatrick, and Dr. George Wilson McPhail. When Colonel Martin came to Davidson it already counted on its honor-roll of professors such men as General D. H. Hill, soldier and litter- ateur, Washington C. Kerr, who as State geologist continued the work of Elisha Mitchell, Dr. Charles Phillips, who helped Dr. Kemp P. Battle and Mrs. Spencer to lift the University out of the chaos of Reconstruction, and many others who had given the institution high rank throughout the South, a rank more than maintained from that day to this.

Colonel Martin's professorship, lasting from 1869 to 1896, is still the longest in the history of Davidson. From 1880 to 1884 it was my privilege to know him in his class room and in his home, and of all the college professors under whom it has been my lot to sit, my heart and head yield first place to William J. Martin. As a teacher it was not his scholarship that made the deepest impression, though his scholarship was ample and constantly renewed. It was first of all his ability to distinguish with lightning rapidity between the essential and the non-es- sential. He pierced instantly to the centre of a subject and expounded it from the centre outward, not from the circumfer- ence inward. His philosophy seemed to be, "Take care of the centre and the circumference will take care of itself." In his presence I felt a new reverence for nuclear fact and nuclear truth. Chemistry did not seem to be an end in itself but rather one of the windows through which Nature peered to let us know how she looked and how she acted.

It has always seemed to me that with but little additional training Colonel Martin would have made a great teacher of

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history, literature, sociology, or anything else, not because his range was wide but because his vision was central and unerring. His method was essentially that of the soldier, — he captured the outworks only as an incident in his march to the citadel. Prescott tells us that the secret of the brilliant victory won by Cortes over the Aztecs at the Battle of Otumba was that the Spanish commander, disregarding the two hundred thousand Aztec soldiers that stood in front of his little band, ordered his men to strike straight for the person of the commander-in-chief. "There is our mark"! said he. "Follow and support me!" That was Colonel Martin's method and it is a method as appli- cable to the study of literature as to the study of chemistry, to the conduct of life as to the attainment of learning. But I am sure that I speak for all those who knew Colonel Martin when I say that the man was greater than the professor. He taught chemistry professionally, he impressed manhood unconsciously. We were predisposed to admire him, for we knew that this prompt and resilient figure had come to us, like Little Giffen of Ten- nessee,

"Out of the focal and foremost fire,

Out of the hospital walls as dire."

I never heard him allude even remotely to the war, but the sulphurous fumes in his laboratory spoke "to my imagination of battle, and the imperial figure that moved amid them was al- ways that of the Confederate soldier, the "gentleman unafraid."

It has been said that higher education in the South was re- tarded shortly after the war because so many Confederate sold- iers became teachers, the implication being that the four years given to battle might more profitably have been given to books. The charge rests on a curious misconception of what higher education means. If it means bookishness, the charge has much to support it. But if it means manhood, self-reliance, disciplined conduct, instant obedience to authority, the ability to ally oneself for life or death with a great cause, then I know no breed of men to whom the South owes more than to her soldier teachers, her Robert E. Lee, her D. H. Hill, her Robert Bingham, her William J. Martin.

14 V. Calvin Henderson Wiley (1819-1887).

But if Presbyterian educators have profoundly influenced college and university standards, they have had an even greater influence upon the common schools. From 1861 to 1865 the colleges and universities of the South found themselves depopu- lated. Students had become soldiers. The University of North Carolina, Davidson College, Wake Forest, and Trinity either closed their doors or ministered to a constantly diminishing student-body. But a still greater peril threatened: it was that the common schools might be closed and the money collected for them used for war purposes. That our schools were not closed and that the funds were not diverted is due to one man, Calvin Henderson Wiley. To him belongs the greatest single- armed achievement in the history of public instruction in the South. If Caldwell Institute in Greensboro had done nothing else than prepare this man for college, it would have justified its existence and vindicated the faith of its founders. North Carolina had already produced men to whom the common schools were a theory, a possibility, even an ideal. With Calvin H. Wiley they were a passion.

Dr. Wiley's life was uneventful except for the new ideas at which he wrought. He did not find the handle of his being until 1852. From 1845 to 1852 his ambition was to make the history of North Carolina known at home and abroad through historical novels. I have always had a peculiar sympathy and admiration for him in this effort. It bespoke the patriot and the far-sighted patriot. If the history of North Carolina is ever to become a part of the cultural consciousness of men, as I believe it is destined to become, it must be interpreted by the constructive imagination as well as by the analytic reason. It must be told not merely in chronicle and textbook but in song and story. In Scotland it is said that every spot has its legend and every stream sings its song. But it was not the historians that made it so : it was Walter Scott and Robert Burns. Nobody in North Carolina had seen this so clearly, I think, as Dr. Wiley. To put his ideas into effect he published in New York in 1847 a novel called Alamance, or the Great and Final Experiment.

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Chapter 47 describes the Battle of Guilford Court House, and Dr. David Caldwell is one of the leading characters. In 1849 appeared Roanoke, or Where is Utopia? This novel was pub- lished in London under the title of Old Dan Tucker and his Son Walter, a Tale of North Carolina. In 1852 his last novel was published in Philadelphia and was called Life in the South: a Companion to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Strange to say, it is a story of the eighteenth century ending with the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge. But more astonishing still is the beginning: "Whoever will examine the map of North Carolina will at once be struck with the fact that Providence did not design the State for a commercial one . . . The wild and restless demon of Progress has not yet breathed there its scorching breath on the green foliage of nature." Plainly Dr. Wiley had not yet found himself.

But in 1852 he was elected our first superintendent of educa- tion and a new era in North Carolina history began. From 1852 to 1865, when the position of superintendent was abolished, Dr. Wiley was the foremost common school advocate in the Un- ited States*. These figures tell their own story: In 1853 there were 800 teachers in the public schools of North Carolina; in 1860 there were 2,286. In 1853 there were 83,373 pupils; in 1860 there were 116,567. In 1853 the receipts were $192,250; in 1860 they were $408,566. In 1858 North Carolina had a larger school fund than Georgia, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, or Maine.

Dr. Wiley continued his activity in behalf of the public schools till his death in 1887. His fame was national and he was a familiar platform figure in many States. In 1866 he was ordained a Presbyterian minister. But his greatest work was done between 1852 and 1865. The monument erected to him in Winston in 1904 bears this inscription: "Erected by the pupils of the Graded Schools of Winston to the memory of the Rev. Calvin H. Wiley, D. D., as one of the founders of the schools of this city and as the father of the public school system of North Carolina." But the best comment on his service is

*Horace Mann, with whom Dr. Wiley is often compared, became president of Antioch College in 1852 and died in 1859.

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found in his last report made to Governor Jonathan Worth, January 16, 1866: uTo the lasting honor of North Carolina^ her public schools survived the terrible shock of cruel war, and the State of the South which furnished most material and the greatest number and the bravest troops to the war did more than all the others for the cause of popular education." Well does Superintendent James Y. Joyner say*: "If ever man was inspired and called of God to a work, Calvin H. Wiley seems to me to have been inspired and called to his."

VI. Charles Duncan McIver (1860-1906).

When Calvin H. Wiley died, Dr. McIver was principal of the literary department of Peace Institute in Raleigh; when Colonel Martin died, Dr. McIver was president of the State Normal and Industrial College for Women in Greensboro. During these nine years no one brain in North Carolina developed more rapidly than his and no one man did a work of vaster or more beneficent import.

I need not dwell upon his life. You know it as well as I. You men and women of Buffalo and Alamance and Greensboro can still see his hurrying Scotch figure moving upon the streets of the city that guards his remains. His interests and activities were many, but one purpose, one passion dominated them all. He belongs with Dr. Wiley rather than with any of the others whom I have mentioned. Neither he nor Dr. Wiley was a great teacher or a great scholar in the modern sense. They were moulders of public opinion rather than of individual lives. It was the multitude rather than the one man that sent the chal- lenge to their souls. When the crisis came they confronted a whole State, a State that was either openly opposed to them or passively indifferent. They said to the State: "I am no better than you and no wiser; but in this one matter I see more clearly than you. I will not go to you; you shall come to me." And the State came.

When Dr. McIver was called to Peace Institute, the education of women at State expense had no strong advocates in North

fAddreas at the Unveiling of the Monument to Calvin H. Wiley, at Winston, September 9, 1904.

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Carolina. The Presbyterian Church, it is true, had given to the cause of woman's education such men as Professor Richard Sterling and Rev. J. M. M. Caldwell (grandson of Dr. David Caldwell), both at Edgeworth Female Seminary in Greensboro. It had given Dr. Robert Burwell and his son, Captain John B. Burwell, the first principals of Peace Institute. But Dr. Mc- Iver's conception of woman's education does not seem to me to have been suggested or even remotely influenced by his Pres- byterian predecessors.

Dr. Mclver's distinctive contribution to the educational his- tory of North Carolina lay in his advocacy of woman's education not as an end in itself but as a means of decreasing the alarm- ing illiteracy prevalent in the State. He and Dr. Wiley were thus making for the same goal, but they saw the goal from dif- ferent angles and approached it by different routes. Dr. Mc- lver's service to the State touched, it is true, every phase of educational effort; but his central and controlling thought from first to last is found in such sayings as these: "The cheap- est, easiest, and surest road to universal education is to educate those who are to be the mothers and teachers of future genera- tions." "An educated man may be the father of illiterate children, but the children of educated women are never illiter- ate." "The proper training of women is the strategic point in the education of the race." "Educate a man and you have educated one person, educate a mother and you have educated a whole family." "We could better afford to have five illiterate men than one illiterate mother."

It is easy to say that the underlying thought in these selec- tions is not new. Perhaps it is not, though I for one have never seen the same thought expressed with half the same directness or sense of personal conviction. But Dr. Mclver's life work was not a new thought: it was a new era. No reformer builds on a new thought. He takes an old but unrealized thought, interprets it in terms of practice and policy, translates it from the passive voice into the active voice, dedicates himself to it, inscribes it on a banner, rallies the hostile and heedless to its defence, till at last it becomes self-supporting and self-propel- ling. This was Dr. Mclver's mission and this is the heritage

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that he leaves to all reformers whether in church or state who in the long years may follow him.

Such, ladies and gentlemen, is the story in meagre outline of some of the men whom the Presbyterian Church during the lifetime of this Synod has given to education in North Carolina. One hazards nothing in saying that if these six men had never lived or if they had devoted their constructive effort to more personal ends, the history of the State would have to be re- written. David Caldwell spoke for them all when he said: "I have never tried to be rich but only useful." It is the old but always uplifting story of a man's finding himself by losing him- self in a great but needy cause. David Caldwell was not David Caldwell till students began to flock to him and he felt the thrill of imparting light and leading to those who were to be the heralds of a new democracy and the builders of a new continent. Joseph Caldwell was himself re-made by the years in which he was shaping the destiny of a great commonwealth by shaping the destiny of its nascent university. Elisha Mitchell would have remained only Professor Mitchell of Yale had he not come to feel himself the trustee of the regnant promise of physical North Carolina. William J. Martin would have left an honored but not a loved name had not the call come, as it came to his great chieftain at Lexington, to beat his sword into a ploughshare and to till and plant for eternity. Calvin H. Wiley would have died an unknown lawyer or a would-be novelist had he not heard the pathetic voices of little children calling to him out of the dark. And Charles Duncan Mclver would still be teaching girls the exceptions in the Latin third declension had not a passion for human service flamed into his young life and burnt it to its un- timely but victorious end.

"Heroes of old! I humbly lay

The laurel on your graves again; Whatever men have done, men say, —

The deeds you wrought are not in vain."

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

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Holling PH

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

0 019 598 296 /

Hollinger Corp.