Part 11

The regard of Brooklyn for the Church and the influence of the clergy on the life of Brooklyn are proverbial. To recall the names of Brooklyn’s clergy is to mention many leaders of the American pulpit. Not a little of their inspiration has come from the influence and history of Brooklyn itself. In its growth from village to city, and then to borough, it has developed along the lines of equality of social opportunity, and thus unconsciously has been reaping the fruits of the lives and examples of its Dutch founders.

[Illustration: SEAL OF BROOKLYN.]

[Illustration]

PRINCETON

PLANTING AND TILLING

BY WILLIAM M. SLOANE

Princeton is by no means one of the oldest settlements in the State of New Jersey, and yet it has a history of more than two centuries, the first homestead having been established there in 1682. Although situated midway, or nearly so, between two of the largest Colonial towns, and nearly equidistant from the head of navigation on two important streams, the Raritan and the Delaware, it remained a quiet and unimportant hamlet for over half a century. Most of the travel between New York and Philadelphia went by way of Perth Amboy and Camden; there was little to interrupt the humble labors of the settlers in clearing the forest and tilling the soil.

Yet the roll-call of Princeton’s pioneers reveals names which are now synonymous with patriotism and famous wherever American history is studied: Stockton, Paterson, Boudinot, Randolph, and others almost as renowned. Their instinctive Americanism is first recorded in a successful protest to the provincial authorities against the quartering of British troops in their humble homes during the French and Indian War.

October 22, 1746, the College of New Jersey was chartered by Governor Hamilton, an act notable in American history because the first of its kind performed without authorization from England or the consent even of the provincial legislature. The institution was opened under President Dickinson in May, 1747, at Elizabethtown. After his death, which occurred in October of the same year, the few students were transferred to Newark and put under the care of the Rev. Aaron Burr, one of the twelve trustees. On the fourteenth of the following September, Jonathan Belcher, just appointed governor, granted a new charter fuller and more formal than the first. His interest in the college was from the outset very great, and his opinion, already formed, that Princeton was the most desirable spot for its permanent site ultimately prevailed, the citizens of the hamlet proving more active and liberal than those of New Brunswick, already a good-sized town, to which likewise terms were proposed “for fixing the college in that place.”

[Illustration: “THE LINE OF HISTORIC CATALPAS.”]

Thereafter the little settlement grew rapidly and soon became a considerable village. In 1756 the new buildings were virtually completed and the college was transferred to its future home. Notable men from throughout the State and from the cities of New York and Philadelphia became interested in the new seat of learning. More noteworthy still were those who taught and those who studied in it. Within a decade after the completion of Nassau Hall the names of Burr, Edwards, Witherspoon, of Livingston, Rush and Ellsworth, of James Manning, Luther Martin and Nathaniel Niles became Princeton names. The stream of influential patronage once started continued to flow until long after the Revolution. It included men from New England on the one hand, and from the South on the other, with, of course, a powerful element from the Middle States.

[Illustration: A VIEW OF THE FRONT CAMPUS.]

Princeton College is the child of Yale. But the parting was not entirely amicable. Theological controversy grew very fierce, even for the Connecticut Valley, in the days of Whitefield’s preaching. The conservatives or Old Lights held the reins and were not kindly disposed toward the innovators or New Lights. The trouble culminated in the expulsion from Yale of David Brainerd because, defying the Faculty’s express command, he attended New Light meetings and would not profess penitence for his fault. This occurred in 1739; thereafter an even stronger feeling of discontent smouldered among the liberal Calvinists until finally the way was clear for founding a new training-school for the ministry and the learned professions on broad and generous lines. Brainerd became a most successful and famous missionary. He was betrothed to the daughter of Jonathan Edwards and died at her father’s house, a victim of his own laborious and devoted life. This was less than a year after the College of New Jersey had been founded by a body of liberal-minded men of all orthodox denominations, under the influence of a few leaders who sympathized with both Brainerd and the Edwards theology. The first charter was granted by an Episcopalian governor to four Presbyterian clergymen, and one of the original trustees was a Quaker. Governor Belcher, who enlarged the charter and made the College “his adopted daughter,” was a man of the most catholic feeling. Fourteen of the trustees under the permanent constitution were Presbyterian clergymen, an arrangement corresponding to the similar one whereby the majority of the governing body of Yale was composed of Congregational ministers. This wise guardianship has kept the two universities true to their traditions, and the flourishing condition of both is the strongest proof anywhere afforded that temporal affairs do not necessarily suffer when committed to the charge of spiritual advisers. Considerable sums of money were raised in England by the personal solicitation of Tennent and Davies, two clergymen sent out for the purpose by the Trustees. The ten laymen of the first Princeton board represented various orthodox denominations, including Episcopalians and Quakers. There is not a syllable in the charter concerning creeds, confessions, or religious tests. It is very significant of the vast improvement in public morality that a college founded under such auspices a hundred and fifty years ago was partly endowed and supported by lotteries authorized and drawn both in Connecticut and New Jersey.

From the day when the College was installed in its grand new home, history-making went on apace in Princeton. Nassau Hall was a majestic building for those days; distinguished foreign visitors to America all noted its dimensions and architecture in their written accounts of travel. Indeed, even now, with the tasteless alterations of chimneys, roofs and towers made necessary by fire and carried through with ruthless economy, it may be considered one of the great monumental college buildings in America. It is, however, far more than this; we assert without fear of contradiction that it has no peer as the most historic university pile in the world. This contention rests on the fact that it saw the discomfiture of the British at the ebb-tide of the American rebellion, harbored the Government of the United States in its critical moments and cradled the Constitution-makers of the greatest existing republic. No other university hall has been by turns fortress and barrack, legislative chamber and political nursery in the birththroes of any land comparable to our land.

The building was designed to be complete in itself; it contained lodgings for a hundred and forty-seven students, with a refectory, library and chapel. The class which entered under Dickinson, the first president, had six members, of whom five became clergymen. His untimely death a year after his election made his administration the shortest but one in the College history. During the ten years of Burr’s tenure of office (1747-1757) the total number of students was a hundred and fourteen; half of them entered the ministry. The short presidency of Jonathan Edwards lasted but a few months. It gave the glory of his name, that of America’s greatest metaphysician, to the College, the sacred memories of his residence to the venerable mansion now occupied by the Dean, and the hallowed custody of his mortal remains to the Princeton graveyard, a spot to which thousands have made their pilgrimage for the sake of his great renown. In this enclosure he lies beside his son-in-law, the Rev. Aaron Burr, who was his predecessor. At his feet are the ashes of the brilliant and erratic grandson, the Aaron Burr so well known to students of American history. President Davies, who followed Edwards, held his office for only two years, and was succeeded by Finley who presided for five. Under the latter the number of students present at one time rose to one hundred and twenty. All told, a hundred and thirty sat under his instruction, and of these less than half, fifty-nine, became clergymen.

[Illustration: JOHN WITHERSPOON.]

This tendency to send fewer and fewer men into the ministry is highly significant. It reached its climax under the next president—the great Scotchman whose name is among the most honored in the history of his adopted country—John Witherspoon. His incumbency was coincident with the Revolutionary epoch, lasting from 1768 to 1794. In those twenty-six years four hundred and sixty-nine young men graduated from the College; of these, only a hundred and fourteen, less than a quarter, became clergymen, an average of between four and five a year. This phenomenon was due to the fact that Witherspoon, though lecturing on Divinity like his predecessors, was vastly more interested in political than in religious philosophy. So notorious was this fact that many a pious youth bent on entering the ministry passed the very doors of liberal Princeton to seek the intense atmosphere of Yale orthodoxy, while many a boy patriot from New England came hither to seek the distinction of being taught by Dr. Witherspoon.

[Illustration: WASHINGTON’S HEADQUARTERS AT ROCKY HILL, N. J. (NEAR PRINCETON.)]

The first eight years of Witherspoon’s presidency embraced the period of political ferment in the Colonies which ushered in the War of the Revolution. From the very beginning of his residence in America, the new president espoused the Colonial cause in every conflict with Great Britain; he was soon accounted “as high a son of liberty as any man in America.” Not content with enlarging and improving the College course, he collected funds throughout the Colonies from Boston to Charleston, and even laid Jamaica under contribution to fill the depleted College chest. From the pulpit of the old First Church his voice rang out in denunciation of the English administration, until in his native land he was branded as a rebel and a traitor. The spread of the Reformation was more largely due to the fact that Luther was a professor in the University of Wittenberg than to any other single cause; the adherence to the Revolution of the powerful Scotch and Scotch-Irish element in the Colonies was chiefly if not entirely secured by the teachings of John Witherspoon from his professor’s chair in Nassau Hall. To him and John Dickinson, author of the _Farmer’s Letters_, belongs the credit of having convinced the sober middle classes of the great middle Colonies that the breach with England was not merely inevitable, but just and to their interest.

[Illustration: MORVEN.]

But Witherspoon was more than a teacher, he was a practical statesman. His country-seat was a farm on the southern slope of Rocky Hill, about a mile due north of Nassau Hall. Its solid stone walls still bear the classic name which he gave it, of Tusculum. In his hours of retirement at that beloved home he seems to have brooded more on the rights of man than on human depravity, more on law than on theology, more on Providence in His present dealings with men than on the remoter meanings of God’s Word. In the convention which framed the constitution of New Jersey, he amazed the other delegates by his technical knowledge of administration and led in their constructive labors; he assisted in the overthrow of William Franklin, the royal governor; was elected to the Continental Congress, and in the critical hour spurred on the lagging members who hesitated to take the fatal step of authorizing their president and secretary to sign and issue the Declaration of Independence. With solemn emphasis he declared:

“For my own part, of property I have some, of reputation more. That reputation is staked, that property is pledged on the issue of this contest; and although these gray hairs must soon descend into the sepulchre, I would infinitely rather that they descend thither by the hand of the executioner, than desert at this crisis the sacred cause of my country.”

The word “God” occurs but once in that famous document. Jefferson wrote it with a small “g.” Witherspoon was the solitary clergyman among the signers; neither he nor his neighbor, friend, and supporter, Richard Stockton, of Morven, who was a member of his church, set their hands the less firmly to sign the paper. Finally, Witherspoon was a member of the secret committee of Congress which really found the means of moral and material support for the war down to its close. He was chosen in the dark hours of November, 1776, to confer with Washington on the military crisis; he was a member, with Richard Henry Lee and John Adams, of the committee appointed that same winter to fire the drooping spirits of the rebels when Congress was driven from Philadelphia to Baltimore. He was a member, too, of the boards of war and finance, wrote state papers on the currency, and framed many of the most important bills passed by the Continental Congress. It was not unnatural that when, at the close of the war, Congress was terrified by unpaid and unruly Continentals battering at its doors in Philadelphia, it should seek refuge and council, as it did, in John Witherspoon’s college.

Thus it happened that Nassau Hall became one of the hearthstones on which the fires of patriotism burned brightest. From 1766 to 1776 there were graduated two hundred and thirty young Americans. What their temper and feeling must have been may be judged from the names of those among them who afterwards became eminent in public life. Ephraim Brevard, Pierrepont Edwards, Churchill Houston, John Henry, John Beatty, James Linn, Frederick Frelinghuysen, Gunning Bedford, Hugh Brackinridge, Philip Freneau, James Madison, Aaron Burr, Henry Lee, Aaron Ogden, Brockholst Livingston, and Wm. Richardson Davie. Those ten years produced twelve Princetonians who sat in the Continental Congress, six who sat in the Constitutional Convention, one President of the United States, one Vice-President, twenty-four members of Congress, three Judges of the Supreme Court, one Secretary of State, one Postmaster-General, three Attorneys-General, and two foreign ministers. It may well be supposed that the clergymen who were their comrades in those days of ferment were, like their great teacher, no opponents of political preaching. The influence of such a body of young men, when young men seized and held the reins, was incalculable.

“We have no public news,” writes James Madison from Princeton on July 23, 1770, to his friend, Thomas Martin,

“but the base conduct of the merchants in New York in breaking through their spirited resolutions not to import; a distinct account of which, I suppose, will be in the Virginia _Gazette_ before this arrives. The letter to the merchants in Philadelphia, requesting their concurrence, was lately burned by the students of this place in the college yard, all of them appearing in their black gowns and the bell tolling.... There are about 115 in the College and in the Grammar School, all of them in American cloth.”

“Last week, to show our patriotism,” wrote in 1774 another Princeton student, Charles Beatty,

“we gathered all the steward’s winter store of tea, and having made a fire in the campus we there burnt near a dozen pounds, tolled the bell, and made many spirited resolves. But this was not all. Poor Mr. Hutchinson’s effigy shared the same fate with the tea, having a tea-canister tied about his neck.”

[Illustration: RICHARD STOCKTON

“THE SIGNER”.]

With such a nursery of patriotism at its very hub, the temper of the surrounding community can easily be pictured. The proposition for a provincial congress came from Princeton. John Hart, a farmer from the neighboring township of Hopewell, and Abraham Clark, a farmer’s son from the neighboring county, were associated with graduates from Princeton College and delegates from Princeton town in conducting its deliberations. Both were made delegates to the Continental Congress and both, along with Witherspoon and Stockton, were signers of the Declaration of Independence. Even Francis Hopkinson, the fifth signer for this State, a Philadelphian in reality, though a temporary resident of Bordentown, was, as the friend and co-worker of Freneau and Brackinridge, intimately associated with Princeton influence. When rebellion was finally in full swing, the Committee of Safety for New Jersey held its sessions here, probably in Nassau Hall, possibly in the famous tavern. It is well known that neither the Continental Army nor the people of the United States at large were profoundly impressed by the Declaration of Independence. This was not the case in Princeton, for the correspondent of a Philadelphia paper wrote that on July 9, 1776, “Nassau Hall was grandly illuminated and independency proclaimed under a triple volley of musketry, and universal acclamation for the prosperity of the United States, with the greatest decorum.”

Seven days previous to this demonstration, the Provincial Congress, sitting at Trenton, had adopted a new State constitution; nine days later the first Legislature of the State assembled in Nassau Hall—the College library room—and chose Livingston governor. They continued more or less intermittently in session until the following October after the invasion of the State by British forces. Before the invaders they fled to Trenton, then to Burlington, to Pittstown, and finally to Haddonfield. After the battles of Princeton and Trenton they promptly returned to their first seat and resumed their sessions.

* * * * *

The storm of war broke upon Princeton early in December of the same year, 1776. The British Army, landed from Howe’s fleet in New York Bay, had entirely worsted the American forces. Brooklyn, New York, Fort Washington with Fort Lee had been successively abandoned, and Washington in his memorable retreat across this State reached Princeton on the first of December. Stirling, with one thousand two hundred Continentals, was left as a rear-guard, while the Commander-in-Chief with the rest, one thousand eight hundred, and his stores, pushed on to Trenton, whence he crossed in safety to the right bank of the Delaware. On the seventh, Cornwallis entered Princeton at the head of six thousand Anglo-Hessian veterans, driving Stirling before him. The invaders were quartered in the College and in the church. Both Tusculum and Morven, the estates of the arch-rebels Witherspoon and Stockton, were pillaged, and the new house of Sergeant was burnt. All the neighboring farms were laid under contribution for forage.

Popular disaffection followed in the course of Washington’s retreat. Large numbers of the people and many of the State officials accepted the English offers of amnesty. The patriots were compelled to abandon their homes and flee across the Delaware. Two regiments were left by Cornwallis in Princeton as a garrison. The rest of his troops were established in winter quarters at New Brunswick, Trenton and Bordentown. Washington’s thin and starving line stretched along the Delaware from Coryell’s Ferry to Bristol. Congress fled to Baltimore. Putnam, with no confidence in Washington’s ability even to hold his ground, was making ready for a desperate defence of Philadelphia.

There was as yet no French alliance, no adequate supply of money raised either at home or abroad, no regular or even semi-regular army,—nothing, apparently, but a disorderly little rebellion; for the first promise of constancy in New England and of regular support for a considerable force of volunteers had had as yet no fulfilment. The English felt that the early ardor of radical and noisy rebels would fade like a mist before Howe’s success; Canada was lost; New York as far as the Highlands was in British hands; so also were New Jersey and Long Island, which latter virtually controlled Connecticut. Howe believed the rebellion was broken; Cornwallis had engaged passage to return home.

[Illustration: HALL IN THE MORVEN HOUSE.]

While the British were lulled into security, Washington and the patriots, though desperate, were undaunted. A well considered and daring plan for a decisive sally from their lines was formed and carried to a successful issue. On Christmas night two thousand four hundred men were ferried over the Delaware nine miles above Trenton; the crossing was most dangerous, owing to the swollen waters and the floating ice; the ensuing march was made in the teeth of a dreadful storm. The affair at Trenton was scarcely a battle, it was rather a surprise; the one thousand two hundred Hessians were taken unawares and only a hundred and sixty-two escaped; nearly a thousand were captured. What made it a great event was its electrical effect in restoring courage to patriots everywhere, together with the inestimable value to Washington’s troops of the captured stores and arms. He did not occupy the place at all, but returned immediately to his encampment on the other shore to refit.

The ensuing week was certainly the most remarkable of the Revolution. The English in New York were thrown into consternation. Cornwallis hastened back to Princeton, where he collected between seven and eight thousand men, the flower of the British army. Washington’s force, on the other hand, was reinforced with a speed and zeal bordering on the miraculous. Three thousand volunteers came in from the neighborhood and from Philadelphia. The term of service for nine hundred of his men would expire on New Year’s day; these were easily induced, in the new turn of affairs, to remain six weeks longer. Washington and John Stark both pledged their private fortunes and Robert Morris raised fifty thousand dollars in Philadelphia. The mourning of the patriots throughout the Middle States was changed into rejoicing.

On the thirtieth of December the American army began to recross the Delaware; the movement was slow and difficult owing to the ice, but was completed the following day. On January 1, 1777, Washington wrote from Trenton that he had about two thousand two hundred men with him, that Mifflin had about one thousand eight hundred men at Bordentown on the right wing and that Cadwalader had about as many more at Crosswicks, some miles to the east. He thought that no more than one thousand eight hundred of those who passed the river with himself were available for fighting, but he intended to “pursue the enemy and break up their quarters.”

Next day Cornwallis, leaving three regiments and a company of cavalry at Princeton, set out by the old “King’s Highway” for Trenton. At Maidenhead, now Lawrenceville, there was a skirmish between his van and the American outposts; thence for over five miles his march was harassed by irregular bodies of his foe, General Hand being stationed in command of a detachment at Shabbakong creek, and General Greene about a mile this side of Trenton. It was four o’clock, and therefore late in the short winter day when the English General reached the outskirts of the city. There stood Washington himself with a few more detachments, ready still further to delay the British march through the town. Withdrawing slowly, the last Continental crossed the bridge over the Assanpink in safety, to fall behind earthworks, which in anticipation of the event had been thrown up and fortified with batteries on the high banks behind.

[Illustration: BATTLE OF PRINCETON—DEATH OF MERCER.

FROM A PAINTING BY COL. J. TRUMBULL.]