John Monteith (August 5, 1788 – April 5, 1868)Roscoe O. Bonisteel, John Monteith, first president of the University of Michigan, Michigan Historical Collections, Bulletin 15, Ann Arbor, MI, 1967, p.6. was an American Presbyterian minister, educator, and was the historical first president of the University of Michigan.
Monteith was born near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1788. He received his formal education at Jefferson College and worked as a schoolteacher in Cumberland, Maryland. He later continued his education at Princeton Theological Seminary and was licensed as a Presbyterian missionary in 1816. He was proficient in French and Latin and had knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, which facilitated his missionary work.
In 1817, at the behest of Augustus B. Woodward, Chief Justice of the Michigan Territory, Monteith became the president of the Catholepistemiad (now the University of Michigan), an entity created by an Act to reorganize the territory's education. He served from 1817 to 1821 before leaving Detroit for a professorship at Hamilton College. During his time in Detroit, he organized the First Protestant Society of Detroit in 1818, which initially served all Protestants in the city, including Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Baptists, before they separated to form their own congregations. In 1825, the remaining members of the Society established the First Presbyterian Church of Detroit. In 1820, he founded the First Presbyterian Church in Monroe, Michigan.
Early life and education
John Monteith was born August 4, 1788, on a farm in the vicinity of what is now Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, but which was then Straban twp., York Co., Pennsylvania.Philip E. Bursely, "Notes on the Search for the Birthplace of the first president of the University, John Monteith," in Vertical File, John Monteith, Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, MI. About 1805, the family moved to Coitsville in northeast Ohio, to a farm close enough to the state line that the family regularly attended church in New Bedford, Pennsylvania, in the Hopewell Congregation. According to his diary, his father's health was feeble, and so John worked at farming to support the family.Diary, John Monteith papers, Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Nevertheless, at age twenty, under the guidance of his pastor, William Wick, Monteith began to study Latin grammar and to educate himself in the hours not devoted to agriculture. He soon started his formal education at Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, and graduated with a BA in 1813.
After a short stint as a schoolteacher in Cumberland, Maryland, he continued his education at Princeton Theological Seminary which had opened in 1812 with one professor and only a dozen students. There he lived in the home of the president, Archibald Alexander, and tutored Alexander's young sons, James Waddel Alexander, William Cowper Alexander and Joseph Addison Alexander.John Comin and Harold Fredsell, "John Monteith, Pioneer Presbyterian of Detroit", in Public Education in Michigan, Gerald L. Poor and Gladys I. Griffin, Central Michigan University, 1959. By the time he graduated in 1816, he could write in French and Latin and knew Hebrew and Greek. When Alexander received a plea from the frontier outpost of Detroit for a minister from Lewis Cass and Henry Jackson Hunt, he suggested Monteith should accept the offer. Monteith was licensed as a Presbyterian missionary in spring of 1816 and set out for Detroit.
Detroit, Michigan Territory
Arrival On June 25, 1816, Monteith disembarked at Detroit from the schooner he had boarded forty hours earlier at Buffalo. In addition to the fifteen hundred soldiers housed at Fort Shelby, his new home had a population of about nine hundred souls, over half of whom were French Catholics.Silas Farmer, The history of Detroit and Michigan, or, The metropolis illustrated : chronological cyclopaedia of the past and present, 1884 p. 224 Monteith had been called to serve the Protestant portion of the population and five days after his arrival, he preached his first sermon at the Council House. Although he had been licensed to preach, no church organization was yet contemplated, because Monteith had not yet been ordained as a full-fledged minister of the gospel.
The City Library of Detroit In March 1817, Monteith helped to organize the City Library of Detroit, a proprietary library which was open to anyone who could afford to buy a $5 share.Russell E. Bidlack, The City Library of Detroit 1817-1837: Michigan's First Public Library, University of Michigan Department of Library Science Studies No. 2, 1955. Monteith wrote the constitution and became the institution's first librarian. Several of the town's prominent citizens bought more than one share, and by April 6 when Monteith set off on horseback for New York, he had collected $450 to use to purchase books in the east. The three hundred volumes he purchased were consigned for transport to Detroit, and had arrived safely by July 25, when the first issue of the Detroit Gazette announced their arrival.
The Catholopistemiad or University of Michigania
Returning to Detroit, on August 20, 1817, Monteith was summoned to the quarters of Augustus Brevoort Woodward for "an interview on the subject of a university". Six days later, the plan for the university was legally established by action of the territory's executive and judicial officers who comprised Michigan's legislature. Under the plan, the Catholepistimiad, or University of Michigania, was to be established with professorships in thirteen fields of human knowledge: literature, mathematics, natural history, natural philosophy, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, economics, ethics, military science, history, intellectual science, and universal science. Initially, John Monteith was to hold seven of the professorships, and Gabriel Richard, a Catholic priest, was to hold the other six. In addition, Monteith was to serve as the university's president and Richard would be its vice president.
The university's officers had authority over all institutions of public education in the Michigan Territory including colleges, schools, libraries, and museums. The cornerstone of the first building, commonly called "the Academy", was laid in Detroit on September 24, 1817. By August 1818, a teacher named Lemuel Shattuck was able to open his Lancastrian School in the lower story. So far as is known, no collegiate students were matriculated under Monteith's presidency and thus his duties as president consisted mainly of making plans and helping to raise funds. On April 30, 1821, a new act was passed, changing the name to the University of Michigan, and abolishing the office of president in favor of a board of twenty trustees. Although Monteith was offered the chairmanship, he soon left to accept a professorship at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. It would not be until 1837, sixteen years after Monteith had left Detroit, that classes would first be organized at the university's new home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Nevertheless, the entity formed in 1817 is the direct legal antecedent to today's University of Michigan.
Religious institutions in Michigan On May 12, 1817, while on his trip east to buy books for the library, Monteith was ordained by the Presbytery of New Brunswick, his former professor Archibald Alexander leading the charge. Now fully authorized to conduct marriages, baptize and perform communion, he organized the First Protestant Society of Detroit on March 27, 1818. At first, this society served all Protestants in the city—Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, Baptists, etc. Gradually, as each denomination gathered strength, it broke away to form its own congregation—the Methodists in 1818, the Episcopalians in 1824. In 1825, the remaining members of the Society formed the First Presbyterian Church of Detroit.
In the year the First Protestant Society was founded, a recession caused the financial support for Detroit's new institutions to falter, and so, in January 1819, Monteith again traveled to the east, this time to raise funds to build a place of worship."Articles of faith and covenant of the First Presbyterian church, of the City of Detroit". 1850. Travelling as far as Washington, D.C., and Charleston, South Carolina, he eventually cleared $1200 on the trip. The building was finished and dedicated on February 27, 1820. On January 20, 1820, he founded the First Presbyterian Church at Monroe, the oldest institution of its denomination in Michigan.First Presbyterian Church of Monroe, "History"
On June 7, 1820, Monteith married Sarah Sophia Granger of Portage, Ohio, a town not far from his father's farm in Coitsville. She contracted an epidemic fever while on a trip to visit her parents a mere fifteen weeks after the wedding, and died on October 9, 1820.Albert H. Ratcliffe, "Dedication, January 8–16, 1949. Monteith Memorial Presbyterian church, Seven Mile road at Greenview, Detroit, Michigan" When Monteith married a second time, on August 30, 1821, at Florence, Ohio, to Abigail Harris, he had already resigned his post at Detroit in order to take up the professorship of Latin and Greek at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. From this union, eventually, nine children would be born. His daughter Sarah S. Monteith would marry to Colonel Nahum Ball Gates, the father-in-law of Theodore Yale Gardner.History of Lorain County, Ohio, Williams Brothers, Leader Printing Co., Philadelphia, January, 1879, p. 108-109
Hamilton College During his tenure as Professor of Latin and Greek at Hamilton College, John Monteith played an important role in a religious feud that nearly destroyed the young institution.W.H. Cowley, "Notes on the Life of John Monteith, 1788-1868", 1975. Hamilton had been chartered in 1812 and was the third institution of higher learning in New York after Columbia and Union College. In 1821, the entire faculty consisted of a president, three professors, and two tutors. Henry Davis, the president, belonged to the New Divinity school of theology, and believed in religious revivals. He did not, however, approve of Charles Grandison Finney and the particularly emotional revivals he led beginning in 1824.
Finney's base of operation was Whitesboro, a few miles from Hamilton College. Monteith soon became a devoted follower. Monteith responded to Davis's objection to the new preaching style by meeting with students and trustee Gerrit Smith and praying publicly from the pulpit, claiming that: "Thou knowest, O Lord that the faculty of Hamilton College have sinned in high places: and we pray Thee, O Lord, if they are obstacles to Thy work, that Thou wouldst remove them out of the way".
Amid controversy, John Monteith left Hamilton in the spring of 1828. The feud had had significant results for Hamilton College, reducing the number of students from 107 in the spring of 1823 to 9 in 1829, the year following Monteith's departure.
Manual labor schools and abolitionism
Manual Labor Academy of Pennsylvania at Germantown While at Hamilton College, Monteith had become enamored of the manual labor concept of education. George Washington Gale, a fellow alumnus of the Princeton Theological Seminary, was then living nearby, and had begun to read about New England manual labor schools modeled on those established by Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and by the Alsatian pastor J. F. Oberlin. Monteith observed first-hand Gale's new Oneida Manual Labor Institute at nearby Whitesboro.