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The following are remarks Paul Hicks ’58 made at a recent
gathering on January 20, 2002, of the Princeton Club of Georgia.
The talk, "Princeton in Georgia's Service," detailed the
lives of various Princetonians who were from Georgia. Included were
Joseph Henry Lumpkin, Class of 1819, as well as six U.S. senators,
four govenors, and one Supreme Court justice, all of whom graduated
from The College of New Jersey between 1790 and 1820. The Univerity
of Georgia will publish Hicks's book, "Joseph Henry Lumpkin,
Georgia's First Chief Justice" in May of this year. You can
reach Paul Hicks at phicks@westnet.com
Princeton in Georgia’s Service
At a ceremony in 1896 commemorating the sesquicentennial of Princeton
University, Woodrow Wilson delivered a speech whose title, "Princeton
in the Nation’s Service," has become a motto for the university.
In reading that speech, I was particularly struck by Wilson’s
comments about the extraordinary number of Princeton graduates that
entered public service during the early days of the republic. There
were twenty-one senators, thirty-nine representatives, twelve governors,
three Supreme Court justices, one vice-president and a president,
all within a period of about twenty-five years, and all those from
a college that seldom had more than one hundred students.
That early evidence of Princeton in the nation’s service intrigued
me as I had found a similar record of Princeton in Georgia’s
service, while doing research for the biography of Joseph Henry
Lumpkin, Georgia’s first Chief Justice, who was a member of
the class of 1819. Among the Georgia graduates of Princeton in the
thirty-year period between 1790 and 1820, there were nine who served
in Congress, including six U.S. senators. Two of the senators were
also among the four graduates who became governors, while a third
was U. S attorney general in Andrew Jackson’s administration.
Moreover, in addition to Lumpkin serving as chief justice of the
state supreme court, another Princetonian of that era was appointed
to the U. S. Supreme Court, also by Andrew Jackson.
Historians who have written about the university, like Woodrow Wilson
and Thomas Wertenbaker, have given much of the credit to John Witherspoon,
Princeton’s sixth president, for inculcating a spirit of public
service among the graduates, both during his era (1768 to 1794)
and afterwards. Witherspoon, a leading figure in the national Presbyterian
Church, brought a renewed emphasis on the need of the church for
a well-educated clergy. Also, beginning early in his presidency,
he traveled and preached in the South to raise funds and attract
students. As a result, according to Wertenbaker, "Throughout
the south the College of New Jersey was revered and loved. To mention
Nassau Hall brought to mind sound scholarship, true piety, and men
of high character. Congregations vied with each other in obtaining
Princeton men as their ministers, and the father who could enter
his son under Witherspoon considered himself fortunate indeed."
It is not clear whether it was the residual influence of Witherspoon
or other factors that influenced Joseph Henry Lumpkin to enter Princeton.
He had begun his undergraduate education at Franklin College (later
named the University of Georgia), which was founded by Yale men
(hence the mutual love of bulldogs), but the trustees eventually
saw the light and named a Princeton graduate and trustee, Rev. Robert
Finley, as President in 1817. When Finley died a few months later,
however, the college was closed long enough to convince Lumpkin
to head north to finish his education.
Even though Lumpkin later in life became a leading Presbyterian
layman, Princeton was not likely to have been selected as his college
because of its ties to the Presbyterian Church, as he and his family
were then all Baptists. There were a number of Princetonians, however,
who were prominent in Georgia at the time, and perhaps Lumpkin was
influenced by someone like Peter Early, a graduate of Princeton
in the class of 1792, who had served as governor for two terms and
had been succeeded in the U.S. House of Representatives by Lumpkin’s
older brother, Wilson. Certainly the most notable Princeton graduate
at that time, southern or otherwise, was James Madison of Virginia,
who had just completed his second term as President of the United
States.
Whatever was the impetus for choosing Princeton, Joseph Henry Lumpkin
and his younger brother, Thomas Jefferson, both entered as mid-term
juniors in the summer of 1818 after a long trip that probably took
them by river boat and stage to Savannah from their home in Lexington,
Georgia and then via ship to New York, finishing with a final stage
out to Princeton. As Wertenbaker describes the experience, "To
the newcomer Nassau Hall seemed impressive with great stone walls
pierced by long rows of windows…its many bedrooms and studies,
its Prayer Hall, its classrooms, its cupola." The Lumpkin brothers
had just missed the student rebellion of 1817, which resulted in
dismissal of 24 of the 130 undergraduates for actions that included
imprisoning the tutors in their rooms, barring the doors of Nassau
Hall and making a bonfire with wood from the college outbuildings.
Apparently, the riot was triggered by the undergraduates’ revolt
against an increase in the discipline and religiosity at the college
imposed by the president, Ashbel Green. In describing the aftermath
of the riot and expulsions, Green said sanctimoniously, "The
tornado which has struck us, though it was violent and in passing
shook us rudely, yet has carried away in its sweep much of the concealed
taint of moral pestilence and left us a purer atmosphere."
Among the students who managed to survive and even succeed at Princeton
despite Green’s "purer atmosphere" of discipline
and piety were the Lumpkin brothers and a dozen or so other Georgians.
These included George Walker Crawford, who was a member of the class
of 1820. Although less well-known nationally than his cousin, William
Harris Crawford, who was treasury secretary under both Madison and
Monroe, George Crawford has the distinction of being Georgia’s
only Whig governor during a long period when the Whig party was
otherwise widely successful in Georgia. Prior to his election as
governor, he served briefly in the U. S. House of Representatives,
filling a vacancy caused by the death of Richard W. Habersham, a
member of the Princeton class of 1810, whose Princetonian father
and uncle had both been members of the Continental Congress. Crawford
served two terms as governor, and it was during his second term
in 1845 that Georgia finally created a supreme court, leading to
Lumpkin’s role as chief justice. Crawford became secretary
of war in President Zachary Taylor’s cabinet, but after Taylor’s
death in 1850 he remained out of public office, except when he served
as chairman of the state secession commission in 1861.
Two of Lumpkin’s other contemporaries at Princeton went on
to become U.S. senators. One was Alfred Iverson, who, unlike his
Whig classmate, George Crawford, was a member of the Democratic
Party. After serving one term as a U. S. representative in the late
1840s, Iverson was elected to the senate in 1855 and gained nation-wide
recognition as an aggressive defender of slavery and early promoter
of secession. In the balloting for one of Georgia’s two seats
in the Confederate States senate, Iverson was defeated by Robert
Toombs. When Toombs declined the position in order to take a general’s
commission in the Confederate army, Governor Joseph Brown offered
the seat to Lumpkin, but he chose to remain as chief justice.
The other future senator was Lumpkin’s classmate, Walter Terry
Colquitt, who was born a day after Lumpkin on December 27, 1799,
during the official period of mourning for George Washington, thus
connecting each of them to the revolutionary period. After Princeton
they both developed successful law practices, based in large part
on their reputations as impressive courtroom orators. In one case,
Lumpkin defended a boy of fourteen accused of murdering another
boy of the same age, and Colquitt was prosecution counsel. When
Lumpkin made his summation, he told the jury, "I am to be followed
in this discussion by a man whom I have known since boyhood. Walter
Colquitt, even when a boy, was one who wanted a peer or superior
as an adversary…Today, to find himself unequally matched, the
great, eloquent, powerful lawyer, with yonder stripling sitting…silently
appealing for forgiveness…Colquitt will find such combat unfit
for the prowess of the man he is…" Lumpkin won the case,
and, according to one commentator, "the tears of the jury flowed
freely in sympathy with the tears of the multitude who crowded the
court room." Colquitt was first elected to Congress in 1838
as a Whig, but after a hiatus of several years, he was returned
to the House and then elected to the Senate in 1843, where he served
as a leader of the radical wing of the Democratic Party until his
resignation in 1848. His son, Alfred Holt Colquitt, a member of
the Princeton class of 1844, followed in his political footsteps,
serving as governor, U. S. representative and senator.
Although Lumpkin did not have much of an appetite for holding political
office, he did serve in the Georgia legislature during 1824 and
1825 as a representative of Oglethorpe County, just as his father
and brother Wilson had done before him. He was elected on the Democratic-Republican
ticket, which was then headed by Governor George M. Troup, a graduate
of Princeton in 1797, who had already served as a U. S. senator.
As commander in chief of the state’s militia, Troup made Lumpkin
an aide-de-camp on his military staff with the rank of colonel,
an insider position he shared with Seaborn Jones, a member of the
class of 1806, who was then the state’s solicitor general and
later was elected to Congress as a Jacksonian Democrat.
Lumpkin’s admiration for Troup was so strong that he named
his first son Joseph Troup Lumpkin. It is interesting to speculate
how much the Princeton connection with Troup helped to enhance Lumpkin’s
political standing as a young legislator. Despite his junior rank
in the state house of representatives, Lumpkin was made chairman
of a select committee to investigate charges by Troup that the administration
of John Quincy Adams was interfering with Georgia’s sovereign
rights with respect to both Creek Indian lands and slavery. In his
investigation, Lumpkin enlisted the aid of John MacPherson Berrien,
a Princeton graduate in 1796, who was then in the U. S. senate and
was later attorney general in Andrew Jackson’s cabinet. Lumpkin
complained to Berrien in a letter about the "intermeddlings
of the United States government with our domestic concerns."
As Georgia’s relations with Washington further deteriorated,
Lumpkin introduced a resolution in the legislature endorsing a declaration
by Troup that, "having exhausted the argument we will stand
by our arms." Although Troup’s threatening statement was
a harbinger of Georgia’s secession and the war that would come
thirty-five years later, the resolution was not adopted, but Troup
was ultimately successful in getting all the Creek lands ceded to
Georgia.
Troup was succeeded as governor in 1827 by John Forsyth, a member
of the class of 1799 at Princeton, who had previously served in
the U.S. senate and as minister to Spain. In 1829, Forsyth and Troup
were both re-elected to the U.S. senate as political allies, but
by 1832, they had become opponents on the issue of whether Georgia
should follow the lead of South Carolina’s John Calhoun (a
Yale man) in support of Nullification. In November of 1832, South
Carolina had adopted an ordinance "to nullify certain acts
of the Congress of the United States, purporting to be laws laying
duties and imposts on foreign commodities."
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The old Troup faction had split and John Berrien, who by then had
resigned from Jackson’s cabinet, became the leader of the Georgia
nullifiers, while Forsyth backed Jackson and opposed the doctrine
of nullification. Thus, three men who had graduated within only
a few years of each other from Princeton were at the center of one
of the most important political fights in Georgia’s and the
nation’s short history. When The Force Bill was introduced
in Congress, authorizing use of the federal land and naval forces
in collecting revenue, Forsyth voted in favor of the measure in
the senate. The only member of the Georgia delegation in the House
of Representatives to side with Forsyth was his close personal friend
and political ally, James Moore Wayne, a member of the class of
1808 at Princeton. Although the political atmosphere in Georgia
at the time was filled with invective on both sides, one of the
more light-hearted attacks from the pen of a nullifier was this
bit of doggerel:
"John Forsyth and James M. Wayne;
I do believe they are insane;
And if they will their seats resign,
The people will no more repine…" etc.
In the Georgia gubernatorial election of 1833 Wilson Lumpkin, a
staunch Jackson ally, won by a large majority, which in the view
of E. Merton Coulter, a respected historian of the period, "marked
the death-blow to nullification" in the state. The national
crisis ended that year when Jackson signed the Force Bill and a
compromise tariff law on the same day. Jackson rewarded Forsyth’s
loyalty by appointing him secretary of State in 1834, a position
he continued to hold under President Martin Van Buren until 1841.
The vacancy created by Forsyth’s resignation from the senate
in 1834 was filled by Alfred Cuthbert, a member of the class of
1803 at Princeton, who was reelected in 1837 and remained in the
senate until 1843. Thus, beginning with Berrien’s election
in 1825, followed by Forsyth’s in 1829 and Cuthbert’s
in 1834, the same Georgia seat in the senate was held continuously
by Princetonians for a total of nineteen years.
Wayne was also rewarded by Jackson with an appointment in 1835 to
the U.S. Supreme Court, where he served until his death in 1867.
He remained on the federal court throughout the Civil War, even
though his son served as Georgia’s Adjutant General and later
as a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army.
After leaving the legislature in 1825 to pursue his successful legal
career, Joseph Henry Lumpkin remained a loyal member of the Troup
faction. Although he never again ran for public office, Lumpkin
maintained an active interest in politics and, along with many other
old Troupites, changed his political affiliations first to the State
Rights party and then to the Whig party. In 1844, he even traveled
to the Whig national convention in Baltimore to support his friend,
former U.S. Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, a member
of the Princeton class of 1803, as a candidate for vice president
on the ticket with Henry Clay.
In 1845, the Georgia legislature finally voted to establish a supreme
court. Beginning with Troup in 1824, almost every Georgia governor
had called on the legislature to create a court of appeals, but
it took two Princetonians, Governor George Crawford, from the class
of 1820, and his Democratic gubernatorial opponent, Matthew McAllister,
a classmate of Lumpkin, to get the court approved.
There is no evidence that his Princeton connections had anything
to do with the choice of Lumpkin as the senior member of Georgia’s
supreme court. However, it is evident that the educational and extracurricular
experience at Princeton greatly influenced a remarkable group of
Georgians, including Lumpkin, who graduated from the college between
1792 and 1820. No doubt they were all to some extent influenced
by John Witherspoon, either directly or through his successors,
Smith and Green. As Mark Noll observes in his book, Princeton and
the Republic, 1768-1822, "The story of the Princeton circle
in the age of Witherspoon, Smith and Green…illustrates the
great importance of the American Revolution in the national period…At
Princeton the Spirit of 1776 was ever present…It opened careers
of responsibility and honor to graduates. It sustained a perpetual
preoccupation with politics…"
Much of that preoccupation with politics can be traced to the importance
at Princeton of the two literary societies: the American Whig Society
and the Cliosophic Society, which were the most important extracurricular
activities on campus for undergraduates of that era. They fulfilled
a social need and provided educational opportunities beyond the
classical curriculum, especially as forums for public speaking and
writing. Students from the South most often became Whigs, which
had been founded in 1769 by James Madison, though its archrival,
Clio, claimed precedence by four years. At almost every society
meeting there was a debate on at least one topic, followed by a
vote. The Cliosophic Society minutes for 1818 record debate topics
ranging from light-hearted to serious, such as: "Is it better
to be married or single?"; "Is it better for a college
to be situated in a village or a large city?"; "Is religion
founded on the fear of future punishment or the desire of future
bliss?"; and "Would success of the revolutionists in South
America be beneficial to our country?" One Princeton graduate,
writing about the influence of the two literary societies, noted
that "To the training in literature, oratory, debate, and parliamentary
proceeding given in Whig and Clio Halls, stimulated as it is by
a peculiar atmosphere of tradition and scholarship, generations
of statesmen, clergy and leaders of men have justly ascribed their
success."
Those comments, written in 1898, recall the speech by Woodrow Wilson,
who spent part his childhood as the son of a Presbyterian minister
in Augusta, Georgia and practiced law, albeit briefly, in Atlanta
before switching to an academic career. Toward the end of his address
in 1896, Wilson spoke in terms that still ring true today:
"It is indispensable, it seems to me, if [a college] is
to do its right service, that the air of affairs should be admitted
to all its classrooms. I do not mean the air of party politics,
but the air of the world’s transactions, the consciousness
of the solidarity of the race, the sense of the duty of man toward
man, of the presence of men in every problem, of the significance
of truth for guidance as well as for knowledge…We dare not
keep aloof and closet ourselves while a nation comes to its maturity.
The days of glad expansion are gone; our life grows tense and
difficult; our resource for the future lies in careful thought,
providence, and wise economy, and the school must be of the nation."
Paul DeForest Hicks, Jr.
Class of 1958
January 30, 2002
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