J. Wilbur Chapman, a biography

Front matter

J. Wilbur Chapman

BY FORD C. OTTMAN

INTRODUCTION BY JOHN F. CARSON

Contents

INTRODUCTION .

LINEAGE

ENVIRONMENT . 5 COLLEGE AND SEMINARY .

Introduction

FoR more than a quarter of a century Dr. J. Wilbur Chapman was a potent presence and a formative force in the councils and activities of the evangelical church.

He was conspicuous, not as one who sought preferment or place, but as one who, “‘for Christ’s sake and the Gospel’s,”’ gave himself to the service of his fellowmen. He was great - among us in that he was the servant of all.

Though he was unique there was no singularity in his person or his ministry. He had no eccentricities of manner or of speech, nor did he need such aids. He was heard, and heard gladly, in all parts of the world because of an undertone of reality, a ring of certainty, a note of conviction: all

‘of which were constant in his personality and directed his simple yet cogent and sinewy speech.

Throughout his ministry Dr. Chapman maintained a high conception of his office. This he magnified and was himself thereby enlarged. A man among men, he was genial, jovial, ready of wit; yet ever and everywhere a minister of Jesus Christ. Although clericalism was to him an abomination he was always the clergyman.

As an ambassador of Christ he was loyal to the commission and the message he received. He faithfully delivered his message, and his ministry was therefore effective and fruitful.

The cardinal truths he believed and defended were the Divine Inspiration of the Scriptures, the Deity of Jesus

Xl xii INTRODUCTION

Christ, the Personality of the Holy Spirit, the Primacy of the Atonement, and the Return of our Lord.

Love for Christ was his ruling passion, the evangel of Christ was his message: in the life helived, in the sermons he preached, in the books he wrote, in the songs he composed.

- He was a preacher to preachers. There are ministers in all lands who, but for his compelling touch, would not be preaching to-day, and innumerable others who, because of their contact with him, are preaching with greater power. He had a passion for souls, but he had also a passion for soul winners. Great were the evangelistic meetings that he conducted, but equally great were the conferences that he held for ministers. In these conferences ministers of Jesus. Christ were born anew to a higher ideal, to a finer consecration, to a more spiritual ministry. .

It is eminently fitting that the story of his eventful life should be written, not for his sake, not to magnify one who has passed beyond the reach or need of man’s praise, but for our sakes who live, that the image of the man may be impressed upon us, and that the inspiration of his life-work may summon us to nobler service.

There are many who might have written his life as it was seen and known in its public phases. Important and suggestive as these aspects were, such an account would be but fractional. The hidden values would be absent from the reckoning.

The fine parts of Dr. Chapman’s life were invisible—his dreams and ideals, his spiritual aspirations, his far-flung vision, his broad plans; all that the ministry of light and shadow, of gladness and tears, of losses and gains, had wrought in the evolution of his character: these were the

INTRODUCTION xili man, and except his biographer had knowledge of them he could not tell the whole story.

To write his life none among his friends was so well qualified as Dr. Ottman. He knew Dr. Chapman as few men knew him. He knew his inmost life, and by him was loved and trusted. In all his ministry Dr. Ottman was his confidant, his companion in the home and on his world journeys, his friend and counsellor, a sharer of his joys and sorrows. Such intimacy supplies a biographer with materials for a sympathetic and revealing interpretation.

I have read the manuscript of this volume. Its literary style is chaste and elevated. Its wealth of historic reference is instructive. Its survey of world conditions during the period covered is most discriminating. Its delineation of the character and its estimate of the services of Dr. Chapman are accurate, appreciative, and compelling.

What Boswell did for Johnson and Francis Wilson did for Joseph Jefferson, Ford C. Ottman has done for J. Wilbur Chapman.

In these times, when the call to the ministry is so urgent, I wish that this book might be placed in the hands of all the young men in our colleges and theological seminaries. As the story of Brainerd inspired Henry Martyn, a student of Cambridge, and made him a missionary, so should this story of Chapman inspire young men and lead them into . the holy ministry of the Gospel.

JOHN F’. CARSON.

eos WILBUR CHAPMAN A BIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER I LINEAGE

THROUGH heredity our ancestors may enrich or im- - poverish us, but the law of heredity defies uniformity and fails to account for endless variations.

Out of common clay all men are formed: some to be vessels of honour; others to be vessels of dishonour. We cannot appreciate the worth of the one or apprehend the use of the other without consideration of the mystic force that moulds the clay into the form it takes. The ethics of the spirit are not less mysterious than the ethics of the dust.

Ruskin has disclosed the weird potentialities in the mud we trample under foot. But by whom or by what is this potentiality controlled and evolved? By whose ingenuity may the atoms of this mud be separated and then combined into the sapphire, the diamond, and the ruby set in a star of snow?

Organic chemistry may be defined as the chemistry of the carbon compounds. But who frames and executes the law that determines whether the carbon compound shall be a bit of graphite or a gem for a royal coronet?

Equally arresting are the questions relative to the evolutionary forces of the spirit.

Biography, the writing of a life, means more than a superficial survey of a field. It involves the sending of thought-shafts, where no eye can penetrate, deep down into intellectual processes, into dominating emotional forces, far aloft into the celestial realms of spirit guidance, backward in perhaps a futile search for natural causes, and onward thence to discern the index finger of God pointing the way over which the feet are to travel.

The study of a genealogical table, however alluring, is freighted with dangerous possibilities. Blue blood, like the more common kind, has its disturbing whirlpools. Yet all of us are more or less curious to learn something of our lineage. We ponder over the hieroglyphics of old tombstones and we dig into the musty records of past generations in the illusive hope that, somewhere along the line, we may discover a distinguished ancestor to whom, if we are not quite willing to credit our fame, we may charge our folly.

Moody used to tell of a man who, in tracing the line of his ancestry, ran up against a horse thief, which discouraged all further research. Yet even such a man might have derived comfort from the suggestion once made by Spurgeon ‘that, were the best of us willing to go back far enough, we should find our common ancestor to have been a gardener under indictment for stealing his Master’s fruit.

Genealogical trees with trunks “‘gnarled and twisted into myriad strange forms” mark the channels through which the blood of human nature pours. But mere blood, patrician or plebeian, is neither guaranty of greatness nor antecedent of littleness. The scion of royalty is often

LINEAGE 5 degenerate, and out of obscurity may emerge distinguished nobility.

In tracing the lineage of him of whom this book is to speak we enter in and pass through the lordly council halls of a life rarely endowed and crowned with world-encircling accomplishments.

The Bible tells us of ‘“‘a man sent from God, whose name

was John.” It is the terse delineation of one destined to be the forerunner of Another greater than himself. Without irreverence, but with a similar suggestion, we may say, ‘“‘there was a man sent from God, whose name was John’”’— the first of the Chapman lineage to set foot on American shores. _ Joane, the mother of that same John, was a granddaughter of Roger and Joane Sumner, who lived in Oxfordshire, England, about the year 1578. In the sixth generation there was born of this lineat Roxbury, Massachusetts, on the twenty-seventh of November, 1745, Increase Sumner, who became the Governor of Massachusetts. The genealogical record of the Sumners enrolls other great and illustrious names: Edwin Vose Sumner, Major- General in the United States Volunteers, who turned the tide against the Confederates at the battle of Seven Pines; Charles Sumner, the distinguished United States Senator from Massachusetts; John Bird Sumner, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of all England; Charles Richard Sumner, the Bishop of Winchester. Such are the names that bear witness to the richness of the blood that flowed in the veins of Joane, the mother of John Chapman.

John was a Saxon as the name Chapman implies. The word means—so it is said—a peddler. But Bardsley, in his book on “English Surnames,” published by the Hutton

Company, London, 1873, will not permit of so summary a definition. Asif defending the name against such aspersion, he says: “The Chapman, I will have you know, was a great man. He was not a hawker or peddler but had a fixed residence and a shop (a store, doubtless a department store) and if ever he took to the road he drove double or even four-in-hand.”’

John Chapman, it may be inferred from the character of his mother, was not without such education as his times made possible.

Oxford had already discovered her great need of Rugby, and Rugby was crippled for lack of the free district school. But the Motherland had not yet awakened to the insistent call for a Common School System, although her delectable daughter Priscilla, across the ocean, had already blazed the trail, building in the American forest, first the Church and next to it the free school, even before she had laid the footing-stones for her own habitation.

But John was by no means untaught. His parents knew something, perhaps considerable, of books, and the parish curate, as appears to have been the custom, was doubtless the schoolmaster. Such was the early training, and then, constrained by the frugality of those days, John at the age of fourteen was “bound out” for seven years of apprenticeship to learn the art of weaving.

When this time of servitude had run its monotonous course, and John was free, the lure of London, the Mecca of all English boys, drew him with its multiple enchantments.

The road over which he travelled entered the city at the Paddington Gate. Paddington was not then the great railway terminal it is to-day. It was, however, the centre

LINEAGE 7 where the post-boys changed horses for the last lap down to the general office on the Strand.

John, so it is stated, slept the first night at “The Blue Owl”—the little hostelry to which Chaucer has given fame—and where later, once at least, ‘“‘the great Johnson sat with Goldsmith, and together they cracked wits over their pipes and beer.”

Of the length of time John remained in London we have no record, nor of the events of his stay any chronicle; but the direction of his life takes a determinative turn when next we hear of him strolling in Epping Forest. Perhaps wearied with the sights and sounds of the city he sought the forest solitude to think out for himself the course of his ‘career. Epping Forest was not unlike Sherwood, where Robin Hood and his merry outlaws lived in the realm of the greenwood and the fat and jolly Friar Tuck tock tribute from his more opulent brethren.

In such romantic haunts, with “giant oaks and silvery birches, a realm prodigal of trees, o’er-canopied with green leaves until the sun had ado to send his rays down, carpeted with brown moss and emerald grasses, thicketed with a rich undergrowth of bryony and clematis, prickly holly and golden furz, and a host of minor shrubs,” aimlessly wandered the English boy, dreaming of his future, little anticipating the violent twist about to be given to any preconceived plan of his own. Suddenly, against his will, every purpose thwarted, every tie broken, he was by force arrested and borne on and on for many years, an exile, to return to England nevermore.

In a word he was kidnapped, carried to a man-of-war, and impressed into service, to go forth not knowing whither he went.

But God knew, and John Chapman was borne whither God had planned, and where, again with no consent of man, he should become the first of his line in America and the progenitor of him concerning whom these pages are written.

What the experiences were of John Chapman while under enforced service to the English Government we have no means of determining. We know that he lived during the reign of Queen Anne—“The Augustan Age of English Literature’—so called because of the eminent literary men whom the Queen gathered about her and whose ability she encouraged. The great military leader of her reign was the Duke of Marlborough, husband of the imperious Duchess for whom the Queen had so deep and romantic an attachment.

Anne had ascended the throne on the very day on which the Triple Alliance between England, Holland, and the German Empire against France had been renewed. Louis XIV had from the beginning favoured the claims of the Pretender and in various other ways he had given offence to the English, resulting at last in a declaration of war against France. The war lasted eleven years and involved the French and English colonies in America.

In June, 1707, a large body of men under the command of Colonel. Marsh sailed from Nantucket for Port Royal, Acadia, convoyed by an English man-of-war, and later on we read of ships and troops leaving Boston accompanied by a fleet from England with troops under Colonel Nicholson. John Chapman had undoubtedly come into Boston Harbour on one of these English men-of-war.

A little more than a century before, John Alden, a cooper in Southampton, was doing some repair work on the never-to-be-forgotten Mayflower, and by some influence he

LINEAGE 9 was led to join the company of Pilgrims that sailed for Plymouth Rock. He settled in Duxbury, and in 1621, to the great distress—it may be inferred—of Miles Standish, he was married to Priscilla Mullins. For more than half a

veentury he was one of the magistrates of the colony, and he outlived all the signers of the Mayflower compact. A grandson of this John Alden, Captain Samuel, a few years younger than John Chapman, was living at Duxbury when the English fleet sailed up the channel between Hull and the Lower Light and came to anchor where the Charles and the Mystic unite their tides. Captain Samuel Alden in some manner became acquainted with John Chapman and heard from his own lips the story of his impressment into

“the English service. The Captain still lived in the old home at Duxbury where, highly esteemed by his neighbours, he held a position of trust in the town. Through his influence or by his help—just how we are not told—John Chapman managed to make his escape from the English troopship and, cleverly eluding an attempt to recapture him, fled to North Stonington, Connecticut.

Weaving was in demand in the new as well as in the old England, and with it John, having been qualified by his apprenticeship, soon became fully occupied. Manifestly and for obvious reasons he lived a quiet and retired life. There is a brief suggestion of his having drifted eastward to Wakefield, Rhode Island; but about 1708 we find him busy with his loom at North Stonington and there, on the sixteenth of February, 1710, he was married to Sarah Brown. He remained in Stonington for the rest of his

- life, dying there in 1760 being—as the record reads—“‘ over 80 years of age.”

The names of the descendants of John Chapman, tothe end of the third generation, with the methodical precision of the custom of the Puritans, were written and are now to be found in the official records of North Stonington, Connecticut.

In the first generation we find the names: Sarah, Jonah, John, William, Andrew, Thomas, Sumner, and Eunice.

Doubtless in memory of John’s mother, and in recognition of her illustrious ancestry, the seventh child was called Sumner. The other Bible names show the Puritan spirit that governed their selection.

Andrew, the fifth child, was born at North Stonington, March third, 1719. He was married to Hannah, the daughter of Benoni Smith, the year 1746.

To them ten children were born and to each was given a name taken from the Bible: Andrew, Joseph, Ruth, Hannah, Andrew 2nd, Nahum, Nathan, Amos, Sarah, and Jonas.

Andrew, the first born, died in his fourth year and in his memory Andrew the second was named.

The eighth child, Amos, was among the early pioneers from New England.

The first white settlement was made in Ohio at Marietta, These settlers came mostly from New England, and among them were veterans of the Revolutionary War.

In 1787 Congress had made provision for such settlement, and General Arthur St. Clair had been sent out as governor. | His humiliating defeat by the Indians evoked the wrath of Washington who recalled him and sent the brave and daring Anthony Wayne to retrieve the disaster. By him the Indians were routed at a battle on the ee not far from the present site of Toledo.

LINEAGE 11

In 1795 the treaty of Greenville was signed and all northern Ohio was ceded to the United States and was soon thickly settled by a tide of immigrants flowing in from New England.

In 1816 Indiana was admitted to the Union and, during the six years preceding, the population of Ohio had grown from two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand; while that of Indiana had increased threefold.

Northern Indiana is doubtless the moraine of a sometime glacier that piled up, north of the Wabash, with deposit of - clay, gravel, and boulders, which characterize that half of the state. Southern Indiana is altogether different. The Wabash, famed in song and story, navigable for three ~ hundred miles, crosses the state midway of its latitude and then, with a sharp turn southward, constitutes its western boundary with Illinois and, in conjunction with the Ohio, throws southern Indiana into a great peninsula. Here, through uncounted centuries, a forest vast and undisturbed had endowed the soil with a depth and richness surpassed by no garden spot on earth. The Whitewater Valley was and is yet an area of most delightsome fertility and verdure.

But more significant even than the physical aspect of these fair forest glades is the character of the people that flowed in to take possession of them.

In Boston the Ohio Company had been organized, and to it there had been made a grant of one and one half million acres. Immediately the great northern watershed into Lake Erie, as well as southern Michigan, became the centres of teeming populations. The great tide of immigration flowed around the Whitewater Valley but not into it. Only very quietly, man by man, and family by family, this garden spot of the state came to be occupied.

Gradually but persistently the cornfields and orchards of the husbandmen emerged from the falling forests of the pioneer. While these forests were tumbling, to be turned into bridges and town halls and schools and homes, there came among the pioneers Amos Chapman, who had met and married Elizabeth Cox and afterward settled in Wayne County, Indiana. ;

To them were born nine children: Amos, Mary, Sidney, Rosann, Nancy Fewell, Joseph Fewell, Betsey Ann, John, and Ellis.

Amos Chapman, the first born, became a physician and on December seventh, 1820, married Anna Garner, who was born May tenth, 1799, and died in 1835.

To them were born six children: Elizabeth, Mary, Alexander Hamilton, Ann, Matilda, and Garner.

Alexander Hamilton, the third child, was born in Brownsville, Indiana, August twenty-sixth, 1826. With his father he studied medicine, but never followed the profession. He lived successively in Brownsville, Alquina, Richmond, Knightstown, Richmond (all in Indiana), West Florence, Ohio, and again and finally in Richmond, Indiana. He was married at Westville, Ohio, to Lorinda, daughter of James and Mary Bell McWhinney.

To them six children were born: Ida Lorinda, J. Wilbur, Edwin Garner, Anna Mary, Jessie Luella, Charles Rachford.

Both parents died in Richmond: the mother October twenty-ninth, 1872; and the father, March sixteenth, 1878..

Chapter II Environment

J. WILBUR CHAPMAN was born in Richmond, Indiana, on Friday, June seventeenth, 1859.

The natural environment of Richmond, his home life, his boyhood associates and activities, the church, the school, the very atmosphere, surcharged with elements that were to break into flames of civil war—all these made their con- ~ tribution to the moulding of his character.

In 1804 two men from Kentucky, Judge Peter Fleming and Joseph Wasson, a soldier of the Revolution, discovered the Whitewater Valley and made the first entry of land near the line that divided Ohio from what was then known as the Indian Territory.

Prior to that time no white man had ventured to invade the forest of the Whitewater Valley where the wild beast and the Indian roamed unmolested except when at war with one another.

For nearly a century a divine palladium had turned aside the swirling waves, one after another, of alien immigration, to reserve the cathedral forest aisles for Puritan and Quaker, the latter, as a guerdon for their meekness, taking possession of the greater. part of the inheritance.

In 1806 David Hoover, with some companions, left his father’s house on the Miami and, having passed the Kentucky settlement on the Whitewater, explored the west

'13 bank of the Middle Fork to within a mile and a half of the present site of Richmond.

They returned home, declaring that they had found gushing springs of cold water, future mill-seats, limestone and gravel quarries and, in fact—‘‘the promised land.”

Upon this favourable report the Hoover family, the same year, 1806, moved up to the Middle Fork and took possession of several hundred acres of choice land.

Judge Hoover belonged to the Society of Friends and he delighted to call himself a John the Baptist of that sect which settled and fixed its indelible i impress upon Richmond.

This same Judge Hoover was the ancestor—so it is by some supposed—of the modern Joseph destined to control the granaries of the world during a famine more devastating than the one that swept over and desolated Egypt.

For ten years the town was called Smithville, after John Smith, one of the first settlers.

When the townsite was laid out, and lots began to be sold, the townspeople objected to the plebeian “Smithville.” The question was referred to Thomas Roberts, James Regg, and David Hoover.

Roberts suggested Waterford, Reggs liked Plainfield, Hoover proposed Richmond. Hoover’s preference was adopted and Smithville was discarded for Richmond.

Timothy Nicholson, now more than ninety years of age and living in Richmond, states that:

Friends, chiefly from North and South Carolina, were the first settlers in Richmond in 1806, and for several years they constituted much the larger part of the citizens, and even now Richmond is often called “The Quaker City of the West,” as ae is termed “The Quaker City.”?

Richmond now has a population of more than thirty thousand, an area of more than three thousand acres, one tenth of which is devoted to public parks.

During the first half century of the settlement public libraries multiplied throughout the Whitewater district and many homes were possessed of collections of standard and high-class literature.

The Lyceum became popular, and posted courses of lectures by such gifted men as Edward Everett, Bayard Taylor, George William Curtis, Doctor Hall, Wendell Phillips, and Park Benjamin. Concerts were also given by Ole Bull and Annie Louise Carey.

This tranquil region gave to the state four governors: ~ Wallace, Noble, Ray, and the great war Governor, Oliver Perry Morton, afterward U.S. Senator.

General Lew Wallace, brevetted on the field after the capture of Ft. Donaldson, and subsequently author of “Ben Hur”; Dr. Edward Eggleston; James Whitcomb Riley; William M. Chase, America’s great portrait painter; Eads, who engineered the building of the St. Louis Bridge and the Mississippi Jetty; Honourable George W. Julian, member of Congress: all were Whitewater boys.

But of those born in the Whitewater district there is none nobler, none worthy of more enduring fame than he who for Christ’s sake lost his life, to find it again multiplied by the number redeemed through his ministry.

In his letter Mr. Nicholson writes:

DEAR FRIEND:

In response to thy request I may say, in 1870, I purchased the property No. 132 South Ninth Street, Richmond.

Alexander Chapman and family lived in a plain two-story brick house, No. 124, north of us, there being only a small brick cottage between us.

T had not previously been acquainted with Alexander Chapman. At that time Wilbur was engaged in selling milk, delivering it to customers from his wagon.

Peddling milk at eleven years of age! Yes, and selling newspapers, and working for a confectioner, and keeping ‘books, and doing all kinds of work to earn a little something that he might relieve the strain upon his father, and to speak of it often thereafter in public addresses for the encouragement of boys that were passing through a similar struggle!

Yet it must not be supposed that his home was one of poverty. It was quite the contrary. ©

Charles White, who recently died, was an intimate boyhood friend of Wilbur and has left this record:

I have seen statements about Dr. Chapman’s early life that

would lead one to believe that his parents were very poor. This is not correct. There was indeed the brief period of disappointment and struggle; but Mr. A. H. Chapman always maintained income and the family lived very comfortably, and abundantly supplied. ’ After a few rapid changes this vocation finally assumed the form of the Insurance Adjustor, an office never accorded except to men of the highest intelligence and integrity. In opulence or stress the family enjoyed the most cordial social standing in the best homes in Richmond.

Mr. White refers also to the “milk business” in a way that implies less of hardship than might have been supposed:

He never “peddled milk on a cart” as has been said. For about ~ a year he lived at ‘‘ The Greenway Dairy’—just south of Richmond, one of those model Whitewater farms, the pride of the county, as a member of the Pyle family who conducted it. They were expert horsemen and their stud always embraced driving and saddle horses of superior merit. Wilbur did deliver milk for them but behind as fine coach horses as any high stepper that ever crossed Fifth Avenue.

Dr. Chapman from imperishable memories has drawn for us a picture of his boyhood home:

My own experience in connection with my early home was unique. My father was in more than comfortable circumstances; and the earliest memory of my boyhood is associated with the comforts that in those days would be considered wealth, but in the light of the vast fortunes which men are able to acquire to-day, it would be looked upon as little more than a fair competency.

I think that for myself, at least, it was the good Providence of God which changed the fortunes of my father, and compelled me to experience what was certainly discomfort and, I might almost say, the hardship of life.

By one of those reverses of fortune, so often experienced in American business life, my father’s property was swept away; and I can to this day recall how the location of our home was changed from one part of the city to another, and the house in which we dwelt, instead of being commodious, was extremely small.

I have always felt that by this experience my ministry has been enriched; and when I have preached to others concerning the disappointments of life, I have remembered the pained expression of my father’s countenance when he realized that his wife and children must battle more strenuously, and bear heavier burdens than he had ever meant them to bear.

I also recall how my mother, with her naturally sunny disposition, greeted reverses with a smile and filled the rooms of our smaller home with the music of the hymns she sang.

I have a most beautiful memory of family worship; of the Sunday afternoons when as a household we read God’s Word together and sang the hymns of the church; and the influence which has been exerted on my life by this memory has been very great.

My mother died when I was little more than a child, and my father soon after was called Home, but as I look back on my boyhood trials, I can see how God used them to help me on.

I can see my mother sitting one day at the window, her work in her hands, and her children playing at her knees, when, dropping the work which was occupying her mind, and folding her hands, with upturned face, she began to sing softly—

‘‘Come thou fount of every blessing, Tune my heart to sing thy praise.”

In after years I heard Patti sing. I stood one whole night waiting in line to buy a ticket which would admit me to the great music hall in Cincinnati where this queen of singers was to render her part of the Oratorio of the Messiah; but Patti made no such impression upon me as was made by my mother.