The roots of college accreditation extend back to the tumultuous days of the antebellum period, earlier than most studies assume. Historians typically describe accreditation as having arisen in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Awash in colleges and universities, the story goes, modern America needed a means of evaluating its myriad educational institutions. Observers inside and outside the academy called for standardization and assessment in order to promote academic rigor and to distinguish credible schools from substandard alternatives. The desire for oversight authority was met by regional and national organizations, whose mission was to recognize, publicize, and, in some cases, reward colleges and universities that met certain curricular and administrative criteria. Among the largest and most influential of these new entities were the National Association of State Universities (1895), the Association of American Universities (1900), the General Education Board (1902), and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (1905).Footnote 1
While the establishment of these associations and foundations represented a crucial development in the history of higher education, the accreditation movement had an important antecedent in the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education at the West (SPCTEW). Evangelicals founded the SPCTEW in 1843 in order to manage the unbridled development of colleges on the antebellum American frontier.Footnote 2 Despite the Society’s religious character, it strongly resembled later, more secular accrediting bodies in its desire to regulate the academy.Footnote 3 According to Hugh Hawkins, accreditation circa 1900 meant “authentication of an educational unit by an external authority as meeting certain standards and (at least by implication) thereby fitting into a system.”Footnote 4 The SPCTEW defined its activities circa 1850 in the very same terms. Acknowledging the Society's role as an early accrediting body extends the chronology of associationalism and accreditation backward into the antebellum period, illuminating the transition from the “old-time” church college to the modern research university and liberal arts college. As prior studies have shown and this article confirms, examining this interim period reveals the importance of denominational relations, community engagement, capital fund-raising, and Civil War–era politics to the reshaping of American higher education from the mid-nineteenth century forward.Footnote 5
Organized by northeastern clergy in partnership with four religious colleges and one seminary in what was then “the West,” the nondenominational SPCTEW was established to oversee higher education in the area north and west of the Ohio River. Its primary purpose was to act as a clearinghouse for eastern donations, which it would disperse only to those western institutions that met its high standards for instruction, administration, and piety. Every year, institutions submitted their budgets, policies, and courses of study for review by the SPCTEW's board of directors. Inspectors also conducted on-site evaluations of current and potential beneficiaries. Successful applications were published in the Society's annual report, which communicated member institutions’ achievements to the world, along with their deficiencies. In addition to its original recipients—Illinois, Marietta, Wabash, Western Reserve (now Case Western), and Lane Seminary—the SPCTEW took on numerous other institutions over its thirty-year tenure, including Beloit, Heidelberg, and Macalester as well as Pacific University and the College of California (now University of California, Berkeley). All but a few of the schools it sponsored survive to the present.Footnote 6 Between 1843 and 1874, the organization distributed around $600,000 in aid—roughly two years’ worth of operating expenses for each of the twenty-six institutions it sponsored.Footnote 7
Despite its successes, the SPCTEW struggled to uphold its principles and meet challenges to its authority. The organization aspired to provide “regulating power” over college growth and serve as “an umpire capable of deciding how the limited means at command might be best distributed for the promotion of Christian learning at the West.”Footnote 8 But it takes integrity to be a credible referee, and the Society did not always offer dependable or disinterested supervision. Prior studies of the SPCTEW have overlooked how the organization, despite pledges of aid and professions of nonsectarianism, sometimes failed to furnish appropriations and maintain impartiality.Footnote 9 The Society's relationships with Knox College and Iowa College (now called Grinnell) exposed its shortcomings. These schools alternately obeyed and outwitted the SPCTEW as it suited their interests, exploiting antislavery sentiment, in particular, to advance their purposes. The colleges’ independent maneuverings for resources directly interfered with the Society's goal of overseeing higher education in the West. Although the two colleges’ machinations did not necessarily represent all of SPCTEW beneficiaries, their actions warrant detailed examination for what they reveal about their benefactor. Drawing on correspondence from Knox's and Grinnell's archives as well as on SPCTEW's surviving records, this article shows how the colleges’ activities laid bare the weaknesses of the Society's operations and forced the regulatory association to engage in the very brand of ecclesiastical politics it had vowed to transcend.
Historians have long debated how great a role sectarianism played in the rapid multiplication of religious colleges in the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 10 The consensus today is that denominational colleges served both ecclesiastical and local interests. They received financial support from each constituency, with some churches making a larger fraction of contributions than others.Footnote 11 Scholars also argue that as denominational consciousness grew over the course of the nineteenth century, churches often became more involved in college affairs and administration.Footnote 12 This transition likely accounts for the obscuration of the SPCTEW's pioneering efforts at accreditation; after the Civil War, the once ecumenical Society submitted to the trend and became an avowedly Congregational enterprise. Knox's and Iowa's antebellum dealings with the SPCTEW foreshadowed its eventual conversion to denominationalism. Their stories illustrate how institutional resistance, antebellum politics, and ecclesiastical rivalry helped delay the growth of accreditation until the turn of the twentieth century, when secular organizations took up the reins of regulation.
Best Laid Plans: The Origins and Principles of the SPCTEW
The early nineteenth century found many Protestants in the United States swept up in the evangelical fervor of the Second Great Awakening. These born-again Americans considered the West a place of both peril and promise. They believed America's moral fortunes lay in the region's “redemption” and that the establishment of a Christian civilization on the “godless” frontier could move the entire nation to repentance and rebirth. To further this goal, colleges and seminaries sprung up across the West to train ministers and civic leaders for future service. Referred to since as “denominational” schools, many of these institutions were privately founded and were not under formal ecclesiastical control. While denominational bodies may have made donations, local boosters also contributed. Typically, colleges defined their purposes as pan-Protestant, although they usually associated more closely with the predominating affiliation of their trustees and faculty. In general, they admitted students regardless of creed.Footnote 13
Among the most active of the college-founding denominations were Congregationalists and Presbyterians. The theologically similar sects had agreed under their Plan of Union of 1801 to work together in organizing and administering new churches in the West. Nascent western congregations would be associated with one or both denominations and would accept ministers and members from either sect. Congregationalists and Presbyterians would also collaborate in the training of ministers and missionaries by founding colleges. By 1860, this partnership produced twenty-five institutions of higher learning in the West.Footnote 14 Marveling at the effectiveness of this Calvinist collaboration, Horace Mann quipped that the frontier had been “conquered, religiously speaking, from [the Sauk warrior] Black Hawk to John Calvin.”Footnote 15 Western colleges maintained frequent contact with eastern sponsors and regularly sent fund-raising agents east to solicit donations from individuals and congregations.
Two events in 1837 threatened to derail the Plan of Union's progress in promoting education. Disagreements over whether new forms of revivalism comported with Calvinism led to a schism within the Presbyterian church. “Old School” congregations withdrew from the Plan of Union, leaving only Congregational and “New School” Presbyterian congregations available for solicitation by western colleges formed under the agreement. To make matters worse, that year a financial panic crippled the American economy. As the depression set in, purse strings tightened. Many donors defaulted on their pledges, heightening competition among western college agents for what little money was left. When these competitions fell out along denominational lines, their sectarian overtones further strained the Plan of Union. Six years into these internecine contests, Presbyterian and Congregational church leaders, along with western college officials, decided enough was enough. Working in concert with representatives from Lane Seminary as well as Illinois, Marietta, Wabash, and Western Reserve Colleges, leading clergy and laymen formed the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education at the West in 1843. Its ambitions were even more extensive than its title. SPCTEW founders sought not only to promote higher education on the frontier but to supervise its growth. The work of enlightening the West “is so great in itself, and multiplies so rapidly,” they felt “that it cannot be done without system.”Footnote 16 At its New York City headquarters, the Society would pool donations from individuals and congregations. The directors would allocate funds to those western colleges it deemed worthy of eastern support, making the SPCTEW the first parachurch organization to make grants to colleges rather than individual students.
Since the financial panic, quality control had become a pressing concern to college watchers. The economic downturn heightened easterners’ concerns about redundancy among western colleges, as well as fraud. Speculators had been known to create “wildcat” or “paper” colleges—Potemkin institutions intended to boost land values in the local area. In order to root out scams and “counteract … the tendency to a reckless multiplication of ill projected and ill managed institutions,” the Society subjected each applying institution “to a rigid examination as to its origin and location, the principles upon which it was founded, its means of self-support, its relations to similar Institutions, and its prospective usefulness.”Footnote 17 Applicants were required to submit their current budgets to the SPCTEW board of directors, which was made up primarily of clergymen. Typically, the colleges would request the SPCTEW provide an amount sufficient to balance their books for the year. That sum could vary considerably—from 18% to 75% of a college's total annual budget of about $10,000. The SPCTEW directors would evaluate these requests, select beneficiaries, and determine annual appropriations, which were intended to cover current expenses (salaries, books, supplies, etc.) rather than endowments or building projects. The Society's annual reports regularly noted that more applications were rejected than accepted.Footnote 18
Hoping to boost its credibility as an arbiter and avert sectarian tensions, the Society billed its parachurch operations as nondenominational. Although founded and led by Congregationalists and Presbyterians, it considered applications from any institution, provided the school was not directly controlled by a church. In addition to Plan of Union schools, it also supported German Reformed, Lutheran, and Methodist institutions. Historians have celebrated its broadminded, nonsectarian approach to college philanthropy.Footnote 19 Ecumenism separated the SPCTEW from the denominationally specific education organizations earlier established by the Baptist (1814), Episcopal (1818), and Dutch Reformed (1828) churches to provide scholarships for ministerial candidates.Footnote 20 The Society’s nonsectarian stance was as much strategic as altruistic. Natalie Naylor notes: “As an interdenominational cooperative group, the College Society denounced sectarian competition among colleges to promote its own cause and to discourage appeals from colleges that launched their own campaigns rather than … submit to its financial audits and evaluations.”Footnote 21 Lyman Beecher, social reformer, education advocate, and godfather to the SPCTEW, spoke to this concern when he warned the founders that if their venture were to succeed “Congregational feeling and prejudice against Presbyterianism … [would need] kind attention and careful watching to prevent its becoming sectarian and deeply mischievous.” Beecher felt confident that the Society's corresponding secretary, Theron Baldwin, an eastern Congregationalist turned western Presbyterian, could “pacify and avert” any conflicts.Footnote 22
Strengthening Baldwin's hand were the provisions the Society put in place to forestall sectarianism. In addition to stipulating that its beneficiaries operate independently of denominations, it forbid recipients from fund-raising among eastern churches except on behalf of the Society. Furthermore, it was understood that the Society would publish all colleges’ applications for funds, with the thought that sunlight would provide the best disinfectant against interdenominational enmity. Nevertheless, Knox College and Iowa College became the flies in the ointment of this carefully crafted system, upsetting the Society's orderly vision for western college development. Denominational concerns figured in each school's initial negotiations for assistance. Once admitted, the Society's unfulfilled allotments forced both schools to continue independent fund-raising efforts among individual Congregationalists in the East, undercutting the SPCTEW's jurisdiction and compounding ecclesiastical tensions.
Pleading Self-Defense: Early Tests of the SPCTEW's Authority
Knox College and Iowa College had similar origins. Like many western colleges in the antebellum period, they were devised as college colonies. Under this scheme, ambitious clergy from New England and New York raised money to purchase townships. Subscribers bought farm or village plots, and a few sections were set aside for a college and a preparatory academy as well as a church. Construction was financed by the sale of previously unclaimed land. Once established, these evangelical communities hoped their pious purposes would inspire the moral reformation of their surroundings.Footnote 23
Although both Knox and Iowa generated enthusiasm for their prospective colonies, neither succeeded in fully implementing its plan. Knox was established under the leadership of George Washington Gale, a reformer from New York's Burned-Over District and an outspoken advocate of manual labor education. Gale's company, which included mostly New York Presbyterians, but had some Vermont Congregationalists as well, began settling the northwestern Illinois township that would come to bear his name in 1836. The Panic of 1837 frustrated their early efforts. Although the state chartered Knox Manual Labor College at Galesburg that year, the school made only modest progress at first. It took four years to initiate a college course, and a fire in 1843 destroyed one of the main academic buildings. Meanwhile, across the Mississippi River in Iowa, a group of Congregational missionaries from Massachusetts dubbed “the Iowa Band” joined forces with a few local Presbyterians and began planning the territory's first college. They formed the Iowa College Association in April 1844 and selected a plot in northeastern Iowa, soon to become Buchanan County, as the intended location of their colony. Land there was not only abundant but fertile and rich in water power for milling. If the college could purchase a sizable acreage early, future land sales would provide an ample endowment for posterity. All that was missing was the money. The Association hoped that a portion of the $30,000 needed to obtain the township could be garnered from the East.Footnote 24
Both colleges sought the aid and endorsement of the SPCTEW in 1844. On the face of it, they were viable applicants. Each college was led by a mixture of Congregationalists and Presbyterians, and neither was founded or controlled by a denomination. In their submission, Knox's trustees commented that, out of deference to the Society, they “had abstained from calling on many of those from whom we might confidently expect assistance, waiting for the result of our application.” Admission to the SPCTEW fold would allow Knox to “pursue the work of collecting funds from our eastern friends,” namely Presbyterian colleagues of Gale and the other trustees, “without the unpleasant embarrassments which must attend separate and conflicting action.”Footnote 25 Likewise, although the Iowa Band generally professed Congregationalism, “the matter of church-polity was an open question” in their circle. It was understood that “some would be one [denomination], and some the other.”Footnote 26 Asa Turner, who was chosen to present their case to the Society's directors, was fond of saying: “We are a religious institution in spirit. We are not a sectarian college in practice.”Footnote 27 Despite these pledges of nonsectarianism, however, Knox's and Iowa's plans gave the Society pause.
Aspects of the two colleges’ designs did not accord with the Society's expectations and standards. Knox's campus in Galesburg was just one hundred miles north of Jacksonville, the site of one of the SPCTEW's original beneficiaries, Illinois College. A majority Congregational school, Illinois was a particular darling of the Society's (Theron Baldwin was among its founders and remained a trustee), and Knox College seemed close enough to threaten its livelihood. Baldwin believed that as a regulator of college growth, the Society must prevent any “supernumerary institution” from competing with its western beneficiaries for local funds or from interfering with its coordination of eastern donations.Footnote 28 Privately, he also accused Knox of “[thrusting] their Institution upon an occupied field for the sake of securing land.”Footnote 29 The Iowa College Association's emphasis on the commercial potential of their intended location likewise prompted fears that their plan “would take the college out of the bosoms of the churches and throw it into the cold regions of speculation.”Footnote 30 Finally, Knox's “Oberlin tendencies”—its support for coeducation, abolitionism, and manual labor—sparked fears of radical excess among the directors’ moderate membership.Footnote 31
Both schools’ applications were denied. Although the Society made no promises of future assistance, their advice came free. The state of Illinois did not warrant multiple colleges as of yet, they told Knox. Were the college to reduce its offering to a secondary curriculum and a normal school, the Society might entertain its application as an academy, provided it also cancel its manual labor and coeducation schemes and rein in its abolitionism.Footnote 32 To Iowa they counseled a change in location and an extended local capital campaign among the territory's churches. Its academic offerings should be modest at first and should only expand commensurate with its resources.Footnote 33 Critiquing these applications gave the Society its first opportunity to play the umpire role it envisioned for itself and direct, if not dictate, the development of higher education in the West.
Iowa and Knox responded differently to their initial rejections. The Iowa College Association stayed in close contact with Baldwin and even hosted him on his visit to the territory in 1845. Taken by the view of the Mississippi from the bluffs at Davenport, the Society's secretary encouraged his hosts to choose the scenic spot as the site of their college. He confessed, however, that its location, just fifty miles from Galesburg, would encroach on Knox's turf and feed suspicions among that college's mostly Presbyterian leadership “that my whole judgment is suspect in reference to their Institution.” Were New School Presbyterians and Congregationalists to “blend in perfect harmony” within Iowa's leadership, they could help Baldwin show Presbyterians in the East that the cooperative spirit still prevailed in the West and that the Society's ecumenical aims deserved continued support. “[It] would in the highest degree be disastrous to have a division,” he said.Footnote 34 Eager to please the Society, Iowa's board, composed of ten Congregationalists, added two Presbyterian trustees to their number in 1846 and another in 1847. They set about raising start-up capital from local donors and churches and opened a preparatory academy in 1848. By 1850 they had enough qualified students to initiate a college course.Footnote 35
Whereas Iowa's actions reaffirmed the Society's authority, Knox's response undercut it. In June 1845, its trustees appointed as college president an outspoken Congregationalist, Jonathan Blanchard, who had developed a name for himself in the West as a charismatic reformer, especially in the cause of abolition. Knox's trustees hoped that his denominational affiliation would help their college shed its reputation as a purely Presbyterian school and broaden its appeal to wealthy Congregationalists in the wake of the Society’s denial of support. Although Knox's board had abandoned hope of securing SPCTEW aid, Blanchard encouraged them to play hardball and reapply.Footnote 36 With the college's renewed application, the new president enclosed a threat: were Knox to be rejected again, Blanchard would publicize to Congregationalists that the college's antislavery views had been the reason. Congregationalists’ decentralized church government and New England origins made them generally more progressive than Presbyterians on slavery and other political issues. Baldwin resented how Blanchard “thrust that question [of antislavery] upon our Board” and predicted that the Knox situation was “likely to put the regulatory power of the Soc[iety] to a serious test.”Footnote 37 The Society agreed to send auditors to examine the college “so that this board may be better prepared” to make a final decision.Footnote 38
Blanchard was absent when the Society's inspectors appeared in Galesburg in the summer of 1846, having left for the Western Congregational Convention in Michigan City, Indiana. The first of its kind, the meeting gathered Congregationalists from across the West, many of whom were unhappy with the Plan of Union and its ambivalence on slavery. Blanchard secured the convention's endorsement of “the character and standing” of Knox College, and the assembly voted to “commend the enterprise to the benevolent regards of the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education [at] the West.”Footnote 39 Knox was the only college to receive such a commendation. Meanwhile, in Galesburg, the Society's auditors found that Knox's financial practices were sound and its curriculum was less radical than rumored. The school was deemed far enough from Illinois College to prevent competition for students. Its manual labor curriculum had been dissolved, the visitors learned, and the male and female departments were kept entirely separate. Antislavery sentiment prevailed, but none but Blanchard was judged “ultra” on the subject, and it was said he did not let his politics interfere with his presidency.Footnote 40
All in all, the report was positive, but the examiners knew that their findings were, in some ways, immaterial. They concluded that Knox College would survive “whether this Society aids it or not” because if it “[needed] foreign assistance,” it would “apply for it at the East if refused by this Society.”Footnote 41 Blanchard's handiwork in Michigan City had shown that Knox could easily muster Congregational support. “Though I am myself extremely moderate in my ecclesiastical opinions,” he explained, “I yet feel it my duty, being myself a Congregationalist, to inform those concerned of my intention in case Knox College was rejected … to appeal to Eastern Congregationalists.” Knox's president estimated that his sect's contributions represented “three-fifths to nine-tenths of all the funds raised to aid Western Colleges.”Footnote 42 Were his school to poach some of these donors, the Society's general fund would shrink, and its monopoly over eastern church donations would crumble. Thus, when Knox's application came before the SPCTEW directors, they voted unanimously to provide the college an award of $2,000. Baldwin noted that “control of the Eastern field … would be worth much more than the amount of the appropriation.” He preferred not to devote “any energies & time” to the Society's “self-defense.”Footnote 43 Over the next eight years, the Society pledged almost $6,000 to Blanchard's college.Footnote 44
Concerns about sectarianism weighed heavily on Baldwin as the Society continued its activities. The Plan of Union began fraying in the late 1840s as the Mexican-American War intensified debates about slavery's extension and as Congregationalists grew resentful of New School Presbyterians’ influence over their western partnership. Initially, the Society tried to position itself above the fray by continuing about its business and adopting new colleges. The directors added Beloit College, a budding Congregational school in Wisconsin, to the SPCTEW rolls in 1848. The same year they extended assistance to Wittenberg College, a Lutheran school in Ohio, the first of several non–Plan of Union beneficiaries.Footnote 45 But by 1851, Congregationalist discontent had become too strident to ignore.
To lose the support of Congregationalists would be catastrophic to the SPCTEW, both financially and ideologically. According to Iowa agent Harvey Adams, Baldwin feared “that the Coll[ege] Soc[iety] would not be so popular if certain facts were generally known,” namely that “Presb[yterians] have control of all the Western Colleges & Seminaries.” Adams exaggerated about this, of course, but not about Baldwin's anxiety. The secretary desperately wanted Iowa in the Society's fold in order to reassure Congregationalists, and he encouraged the college's reapplication. For his part, Adams advised embracing the sectarian divide. If Iowa College “were entirely free from Presbyterians, it would be to our advantage,” he wrote, because their otherwise Congregational college could fund-raise in eastern churches unabashedly, just as Knox had threatened.Footnote 46 But his superiors preferred to take Baldwin up on his suggestion. They had been making a concerted effort to curry favor with the Society since their initial rejection, and when they reapplied in 1851, the Society promised $1,000 in assistance—as much as it pledged to Illinois College and twice the grant it awarded Knox that year.Footnote 47
“Reconnoitering the Field”: Threats to the SPCTEW's Power of the Purse
The Society's rules prohibited its beneficiaries from “public” fund-raising among eastern churches, but not from privately cultivating individual donors. College agents were expected to help SPCTEW officials raise money for the organization's general fund among the churches. Yet they could also continue “reconnoitering the field,” as Baldwin put it, so long as they kept him informed and restricted their activities to “a private effort among wealthy men alone … to secure donations only of large amount.”Footnote 48 Private support was often necessary, not only to expand endowments but also to cover current expenses. Historians have overlooked an essential shortcoming of the Society: it could not always raise enough money to furnish the appropriations it pledged.Footnote 49 In 1847, for instance, Blanchard complained privately that Knox received only “five hundred and forty-nine dollars upon an appropriation of two thousand.”Footnote 50 Iowa's application of 1853 noted an “unpaid balance from the College Society” of $200 on their pledge of $1,000.Footnote 51 Baldwin knew an especially generous donor could put these colleges on firm enough footing to eliminate their need for the Society's patronage altogether. But when these gifts came exclusively from members of one denomination, they smacked of sectarianism.
The secretary's fears of interdenominational competition were amplified after 1852. That year, Congregationalists from East and West met in Albany and formally withdrew from the ecclesiastical provisions of the Plan of Union. Their departure came largely in response to Presbyterians’ tentativeness on the slavery question. By that time, the abhorrent provisions of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 had transformed many moderate antislavery northerners into passionate abolitionists. When the Presbyterian General Assembly officially punted on the issue of ministerial slaveholding, irate Congregationalists vowed to establish churches and ordain clergy in the West independently to eliminate any taint of proslavery influence in the pulpit. They pledged to continue cooperating with Presbyterians in benevolent enterprises like the Society, but thereafter they grew less inclined to obey these lame-duck ecumenical organizations.Footnote 52 The SPCTEW's endorsement and aid remained meaningful and sought after, but amid what James Findlay has called “a strong reorientation toward denominational self-consciousness,” institutions worked denominational angles with greater regularity and aplomb.Footnote 53
Despite securing the Society's patronage, Blanchard continued using abolitionism to Knox's advantage among Congregationalist donors from Connecticut to Chicago.Footnote 54 He kept in close contact with brothers J. P. and Samuel Williston, affluent Congregationalists from Massachusetts who supported Knox and Oberlin primarily because of the schools’ antislavery sentiments. Blanchard griped to the Williston brothers about the Society's measly allotments, noting that Knox's appropriation was less than half that of other schools. “I have requested them … to put us on a level with other western colleges.” he wrote. “This they ought by every principle of their organization to do … But the Society by all its actions has shown itself hostil[e] to this institution.”Footnote 55 Blanchard intimated Knox's politics were the source of the Society's bias, and his appeals to the Willistons’ sympathies proved effective. Between 1845 and 1857, J. P. Williston donated a total of $50 to the Society and $7,000 to Knox College. The latter sum was almost $1,200 more than what Knox received from the Society in the same period.Footnote 56 In 1853, Knox reported to the Society that despite its support, current expenses still exceeded revenues by $1,600.Footnote 57 Fortunately for the college, that same year Charles Phelps, a wealthy abolitionist from Cincinnati, donated parcels of land valued at over $30,000 to Knox to support the teaching of the “Christian Principles of Humanity, Anti-Slavery, Literature, Science, and Morality.”Footnote 58 Blanchard gushed to Baldwin that Phelps's criteria “[showed] the mind of the donor to be strong, comprehensive, and actuated by the fear of God and the love of man.”Footnote 59 The president’s comments could be read as a swipe at the SPCTEW's conservatism. They were uncharacteristically redacted by the Society when Knox's application was published in the SPCTEW's annual report for 1853.Footnote 60
Iowa College could be just as ecclesiastically savvy as Knox when it came to eastern fund-raising. They made waves in Congregational circles in 1852 when they rejected an offer from the Des Moines Presbytery to endow a professorship. Iowa's trustees would have been grateful for the Presbyterians’ money had it not come with strings attached. The denomination stipulated that they, not the college, would fill the chair.Footnote 61 Iowa declined, preferring to control its own appointments. A year earlier, one of its eastern agents befriended Preserve Carter, a wealthy Congregationalist deacon in Waterbury, Connecticut, who had not donated to the SPCTEW since 1849, when he gave $24.Footnote 62 Between 1851 and 1853, his donations to Iowa College totaled over $5,000, enough to endow a Carter Professorship of Ancient Languages and Literature.Footnote 63 When Iowa agents poached current Congregationalist contributors to the Society's general fund, they undermined the Society's power of the purse and put the organization on the defensive once more.
Two incidents in the summer of 1853 brought the SPCTEW's weakened authority into sharp relief. Encouraged by Carter's generosity or emboldened by growing denominationalism, Iowa agent Asa Turner began targeting the Society's smaller-time Congregationalist donors when he visited Connecticut on a fund-raising tour. Turner regularly pledged that Iowa was “not a sectarian college in practice,” but what held true on their frontier campus did not necessarily apply in eastern situations. Baldwin got word of Turner’s activities and sent off an irate letter to an Iowa trustee, reporting that when the Society's agents made the usual summer fund-raising visits to donors in Norfolk and Glastonbury, they “found that Br. Turner had been there … & they could do nothing.” Baldwin himself had been flummoxed around the same time on a visit to Philadelphia. There, James Smith, a “zealous Congregationalist” who had formerly given the Society $100 a year, agreed to resume donating to the SPCTEW provided his gift “could not only go to Iowa College but be in addition to the regular appropriation of the Society to that institution.” Baldwin worried that were more middling Congregationalists to follow Smith and the Connecticut donors’ lead by redirecting or earmarking their contributions, they would dilute the Society's general fund. “[These] smaller sums do directly interfere with the annual collections of the Society,” the secretary complained. Denominational giving undermined his ecumenical enterprise and weakened its ability to fulfill its pledges.
Iowa's agents and supporters put Baldwin in a bind. “The Society cannot … control such donations” as Turner had secured or Smith had given, he said. Still, he felt “it would be better to have them pass through the Treasury of the Society as additional appropriations” than have them go directly to the colleges from the donors. This way the SPCTEW, and the cause of nonsectarian accreditation, would save face. On that same score, Baldwin persuaded the directors to pass a new resolution requiring that colleges submit vouchers for every individual gift secured in the East. These would appear in the SPCTEW annual report “among our donations,” despite never actually residing in the Society's coffers.Footnote 64 The new measure helped Baldwin keep tabs on wayward agents from the West. Furthermore, publicizing individual giving under the Society's banner helped maintain the appearance of ecumenical cooperation and benevolent oversight at a time when both were under threat.
“Very Peculiar Circumstances”: The SPCTEW Breaks Its Own Rules
When it came to their dealings with the Society, Knox's and Iowa's paths diverged in 1855. That year, a financial windfall led to Knox's “relinquishment of claim to further aid from the [SPCTEW].”Footnote 65 With the arrival of the railroad, the college's earlier land speculation, of which the Society had been so critical, began paying huge dividends. When Galesburg became a train town, its land values soared. “The Trustees will realize enough from the sale of property to make the College one of the best endowed institutions in the country,” Knox gloated in its final report to the Society.Footnote 66 Blanchard had earlier advised delaying the sale of remaining plots until they appreciated.Footnote 67 The college bided its time by securing donations from eastern Congregationalists as well as the Society. However, of the almost $6,000 the SPCTEW had pledged over the course of a decade, the college received only about $2,000 according to an audit later commissioned by the trustees.Footnote 68 In ironic contradiction of the Society's purposes, sectarian fund-raising made up the difference, as Phelps's and the Willistons’ donations showed. Riches did not bring peace to Knox College, however. Blanchard's Congregational bravado and abolitionist activism finally wore out his welcome with Knox's Presbyterian trustees in 1857. The president’s activities had introduced sectarian tensions within the college's board as early as 1849, but crisis was averted the following year when an equilibrium of Congregational and Presbyterian trustees was achieved. After a vacancy arose on Blanchard's side in 1856, however, Presbyterians launched a power play and refused to rebalance the board by appointing another Congregationalist. Instead, they persuaded Blanchard's faction to support a Baptist candidate, who turned out to have Presbyterian sympathies. At the next year's meeting of the trustees, the Presbyterian faction forced the president's resignation. A war of words then ensued between Congregationalists and Presbyterians in the region. For years afterward, the two sects traded accusations and published their diatribes in the Illinois press. Knox effectively became a Presbyterian school from then on.Footnote 69
With fewer Presbyterians among its ranks, Iowa could envy Knox's good fortune without fearing its tribulations, or so it thought. George Magoun, Iowa's clerk and future president, complained to Baldwin that his institution should have ignored the Society's advice in 1844 and pursued land speculation in a manner “similar to that which has given Knox College an endowment of more than $300,000.”Footnote 70 Instead, Iowa College ran a deficit of $5,000 in 1856.Footnote 71 Baldwin's suggested location for the college proved costly. In 1854 the college had been forced to relocate to another area of Davenport after an eminent domain dispute with the town council. Constructing a replacement college building was expensive. James Smith and J. P. Williston offered onetime gifts of $300 and $500, respectively, to support this additional Congregational outpost in the West, but their donations were insufficient to fill the gap. Savings bonds, reputable but hardly lucrative, yielded only $80 in interest.Footnote 72 Of the $750 they were promised by the Society for 1856, Iowa's treasurer had received only $300 by January 1857, “[causing] the institution great embarrassment.”Footnote 73 “We see not how we shall keep the wheels going during the year unless this sum is granted and paid us by the Society,” one of its faculty wrote on behalf of the trustees, underscoring the SPCTEW’s history of unfulfilled appropriations.Footnote 74 For 1857 Iowa asked $2,000 to curtail its ballooning budget deficit. The directors pledged $1,500, but Baldwin added, “I cannot say how fast it will be paid.”Footnote 75 Ultimately the Society gave $1,047.
As unreliable as the SPCTEW's appropriations were, its assistance had become more vital than ever amid rising expenses. Yet just as Iowa's need soared, the Society's support wavered. One reason was the directors’ decision to reduce payments to colleges west of the Mississippi in order to make a “final effort” to its original beneficiaries in the Midwest.Footnote 76 Once those institutions’ needs were provided for, the SPCTEW could more concentrate its energies on newer member schools, which by then included the College of California (Congregational), the College of St. Paul (Presbyterian—later became Macalester), the College of the German Evangelical Conference of the West in Missouri (Lutheran—now Eden Theological Seminary), and Pacific University (Congregational). This first-in, first-aided financial strategy was partly to blame for the Society's reduced support to Iowa, but ecclesiastical politics were the larger reason. Having allayed the concerns of eastern Congregationalists, the Society now worried about satisfying eastern Presbyterians, whose donations had declined in recent years.Footnote 77 Fearful of further desertion, the SPCTEW's directors broke protocol and entertained an application from Yellow Spring College, a church-controlled Presbyterian college in Burlington, Iowa, less than seventy miles downriver from Iowa College.
Founded by the local presbytery in 1855, Yellow Spring applied to the SPCTEW for assistance in 1857. Patronage of the school would violate the Society's charter, which prohibited funding schools under explicit ecclesiastical control. Further, the Society directors deemed it “inexpedient” to aid two colleges so close together and in the same state. Nevertheless, in December 1857 they appointed a committee of two Presbyterians and one Congregationalist to consider the request. The committee's report decried denominational control and championed cooperation in keeping with the Society's founding principles. Yet citing “the very peculiar circumstances of the case,” they recommended aiding both schools. Hoping to prevent a denominational schism within the board, the directors agreed.Footnote 78 For 1858 Iowa was to receive $900 and Yellow Spring $100, a small sum by comparison but highly significant given the breach of protocol.Footnote 79 To compensate for the unorthodoxy of the gesture, the Society convened another committee of six Congregationalists and four Presbyterians “to prepare and publish an address on the subject of mutual co-operation of different denominations in the support of Christian Colleges.”Footnote 80 Ironically, its members were “unable entirely to harmonize” on a final version in time for the 1858 annual report. Their draft was included but “definite action” was deferred.Footnote 81 As Baldwin confessed, the rivalry in Iowa had laid bare “a state of uncertainty between the two denominations in respect to cooperation” and the SPCTEW's future.Footnote 82
Since Iowa College's fortunes were bound up with the Society's, Baldwin's observation boded poorly for the school. Iowa's denominational machinations had come back to haunt them. The college pled “innocent in the division which exists between Congregationalists and [New School] Presbyterians in Iowa in College matters.”Footnote 83 But clearly some directors of the Society felt otherwise and were willing to defy precedent to punish them. Baldwin explained that the “very peculiar circumstances” in question were largely of Iowa College's making. Despite its Plan of Union auspices, the school had developed a reputation as being Congregational thanks to its denominational fund-raising in the East and the preponderance of Congregationalists among its trustees. Moreover, amid the recession generated by the Panic of 1857, Presbyterians in the Society increasingly resented Iowa's “summary” refusal to consider their sect's offer of an endowed professorship five years before.Footnote 84 Worst of all, word got out that Iowa had offered its vacant presidency to Jonathan Blanchard, whose mischief SPCTEW directors remembered all too well. In an apologetic postscript to Iowa's application for 1859, a trustee felt compelled to add: “The election of Mr. Blanchard was sprung upon the Trustees by his friends without previous notice and has occasioned no little dissatisfaction on the part of a minority.”Footnote 85 Although Blanchard declined the offer, the damage was done. The next year, Iowa College requested $2,000, but the Society pledged only $200. To Yellow Spring they promised $660.Footnote 86
The Society's cold shoulder helped drive Iowa College into the arms of Josiah Bushnell Grinnell, an avowed Congregationalist. Grinnell was every bit as ardent an abolitionist as Blanchard. He even dared to put up John Brown and his men when they passed through Iowa a few months before their 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. The community Grinnell founded in the center of the state was also sympathetic to the would-be martyr for abolition.Footnote 87 Many residents had first learned of the settlement from plans Grinnell published in The Independent, a magazine dedicated expressly to promoting Congregationalism.Footnote 88 With its proximity to a planned railroad junction and its commercial ambitions, his design resembled both Galesburg and the Buchanan County plat originally envisioned by the Iowa College Association. By 1858, Grinnell's eponymous community was prospering, and an academy and normal school had been established. But he still lacked a college to complete his colony.
Prominence in Congregational circles had secured him a seat on Iowa College's board of trustees in 1854, and he used that position to lobby for Iowa College's merger with his enterprise. His offer grew more appealing in 1858, when the college lost a lawsuit against Davenport over another eminent domain dispute concerning the extension of a major thoroughfare through campus. Combined with the challenge from Yellow Spring, the reprised town-and-gown dispute convinced the trustees that southeastern Iowa had become hostile terrain. As Josiah Grinnell reported in a letter to The Independent, Iowa College's “early friends” concluded it was “unwise to nourish a college for the state, and the whole Congregational element of the state … on the extreme Eastern border.”Footnote 89 In September 1858, the trustees voted to remove to Grinnell, where the town's namesake promised seventeen acres of land and its people pledged $40,000 in subscriptions.Footnote 90 Iowa College would be a colony after all, and a Congregational, abolitionist one at that.
Although Iowa continued receiving aid from the SPCTEW after its move, it was five years before Theron Baldwin conceded the wisdom of its trustees’ decision.Footnote 91 The secretary fondly remembered his visit to Davenport in 1845 and the view from the city's surrounding bluffs.Footnote 92 But to him, Iowa College's relocation amounted to more than just a lost vista; it symbolized the defeat of the Society's original vision. The accrediting organization was founded with the hope of cultivating a virtuous and orderly collegiate landscape in the West. Ecumenical cooperation and fiscal responsibility would characterize both the Society and the institutions in its care. The board’s control of eastern funds would ensure western college growth remained sensible and harmonious. But fifteen years at the SPCTEW's helm had taught Baldwin that reality could be unkind to idealism. Iowa's move exemplified how financial, political, and denominational pressures weakened his organization's authority. What's worse, by aiding Yellow Spring, the Society had heightened the denominational competition it hoped to forestall and had precipitated Iowa College's embrace of an avowedly Congregational and openly speculative venture. Chastened, perhaps, by the experience, SPCTEW directors voted to cease appropriations to Yellow Spring after 1860.Footnote 93 Iowa College reopened at Grinnell in 1861.
Conclusion
In the years that followed, Knox's and Iowa’s Plan of Union peers also aligned with one sect or the other in keeping with the larger trend toward denominationalism. The Society persevered for a time, but the addition of a Methodist university, Wilberforce, to its rolls in 1866 was the last gasp of its ecumenism. Theron Baldwin, steward of the Society's nondenominationalism, died in 1870. Four years later, the SPCTEW merged with the American Education Society, another nonsectarian philanthropy, this one dedicated to providing scholarships to ministerial candidates.Footnote 94 By that time, Congregationalists had assumed control of both organizations, which were together renamed the American College and Education Society, later simply the Congregational Education Society. In a complete reversal from its nondenominational origins, the organization required all applicants be approved by state and local Congregational church bodies, make reports to state church conferences, and have majority Congregationalist boards of trustees. As David Potts has argued, the postwar shift toward ecclesiastical control in higher education extended to other major Protestant churches as well.Footnote 95 By the turn of the century, secular organizations arose to stem the denominational tide, taking the place vacated years earlier by the ecumenical SPCTEW. The modern research universities which emerged in this period eschewed traditional religious influences. All but a few of the new college associations and foundations followed suit.Footnote 96
One of the most dominant educational philanthropies to appear in the early twentieth century was the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT). Andrew Carnegie founded the organization in 1905 as a pension program for American college faculty. The industrialist endowed his foundation with an initial gift of $10 million worth of bonds in U.S. Steel, a sum large enough to make any future fund-raising unnecessary. As one scholar of accreditation has written, “the [CFAT's] major program was not one of finances. Rather it was the definition of a college.”Footnote 97 Under the leadership of former MIT president Henry S. Pritchett, the Foundation introduced a national system of admissions criteria for institutions to adopt were they to be considered legitimate “colleges.” Almost overnight, the CFAT revolutionized accreditation in higher education. Institutions hurried to conform to its standards and become eligible for its funds. The immensity of its endowment gave the Foundation the authority the Society had craved but could not achieve. Unlike the SPCTEW, the CFAT wielded near absolute power when it came to enforcing discipline among its beneficiaries.Footnote 98
In his annual report for 1908, Pritchett surveyed prior standardization efforts, including the activities of religious education societies. Despite its secular orientation, the CFAT “found common ground with these organizations in the consideration of education from a general rather than from a local point of view.” The Foundation sympathized with church boards’ missions “not only to lessen useless competition, but also to increase unity and efficiency.” Pritchett acknowledged the work of religious education societies, including the Congregational Education Society and its SPCTEW predecessor and their ongoing contributions toward improving American higher education: “Those who are studying the general progress of education are naturally interested in the work of these boards and in their attitude toward educational progress.”Footnote 99 Nevertheless, Pritchett remained somewhat suspicious of denominational boards’ motives. He commended their attempts at regulation, yet he still had to ask whether their work was “primarily one of education or one of religious propaganda.”Footnote 100 His organization, like the SPCTEW before it, refused to accredit colleges under church control.
Could a religious association really provide disinterested supervision of higher education? Pritchett could be forgiven for his skepticism. It had been forty years since the SPCTEW had attempted endorsing institutions across ecclesiastical lines. Two generations later, Pritchett was unaware of the Society’s ecumenical stance. Its pioneering effort at impartial oversight had long since been eclipsed by the denominational takeover of religious colleges. The writing had been on the wall since the 1850s when Knox and Iowa, desperate to secure their futures, resorted to sectarian fund-raising strategies that undermined the SPCTEW's authority and its ecumenical ambitions. Their political maneuverings revealed the Society's growing internal dysfunction. Not only were its grants unreliable, but when push came to shove, the nondenominational association chose to violate its own tenets in order to preserve its livelihood. That decision, and others like it in the ensuing years, cost the Society both its legitimacy and its legacy as a accrediting body.
