Memoir of Rev. Nathaniel Colver, D. D., with lectures, plans of sermons, etc

Preface

At the time of the great Chicago fire, this book was mainly written ; the manuscript, with the exception of a few of the chapters, was in the hands of the printer, and nearly one half of the whole volume had been stereotyped. All this, including the manuscript, was of course destroyed ; of the printed portions not even the proofs having been preserved. Various causes have delayed the reproduction of what was lost. At length it is given to the public, though with a painful consciousness of many faults in the work, and with the single hope that in the attractions of the topic and the honest intention of the writer some compensation for these may be found.

The names of those to whom I am indebted for material appear in the course of the narrative, and need not be repeated here. I beg them all to receive the assurance of my cordial appreciation of the excellent aid they have afforded me. The biography of an active public man, so active as to have kept little or no record of his own life, and so careless of all save the work he was doing as to have given almost no attention whatever to the preserving of such current chronicles as might aid one in adjusting the incidents of his career, with only scraps of correspondence, even, to be made available — is a difficult thing to write. Save with the help I have had, I do not see how it could, in this case, have been done at all ; and even with such help the difficulties have been manifold. I

Tl PREFACE.

can testify, however, that the interest of the subject has fully compensated me for all the perplexing toil thus made necessary. If I hare succeeded in preserving in some degree this interest so that it shall be to the reader what it was to the writer, it may profit the one as much as it certainly has the other.

J. A. Smith.

Chicago March I, 1 8 73,

CHAPTER I. Parentage — Birth — Early Life - - . - 9

CHAPTER IT.

Conversion — Call to the Ministry - - - 24

CHAPTER in.

Pastorate at Fort Covington — Missionary Work

IN Northern New York . - ... 44

CHAPTER IV.

Antimasonry --------66

CHAPTER V.

New Fields and New Labors - ... - 83

CHAPTER VL Widening Spheres - ...... 104

CHAPTER VIL The Tremont Temple Pastorate - - - - 127

CHAPTER VIIL Antislavery 154

Vlll CONTENTS.

CHAPTER IX.

Antislavery and Missions - - - - - i8o

CHAPTER X.

South Abington — Detroit ..... 203

CHAPTER XI.

Cincinnati • 222

CHAPTER XII.

Latest Pastorates — Theological Teaching - - 241

CHAPTER XIII.

Among the Freedmen ------ 260

CHAPTER XIV.

Beside the River ..----. 275

CHAPTER XV.

Personal Characteristics 302

Appendix

CHAPTER I.

Biography like history repeats itself. Human character amidst all its rich variety retains resemblances which tend continually to reappear, while so similar, in spite of all their differences, are the vicissitudes of man's lot in this world, that to some extent the story of one human life is the story of all. Few men have a right to suppose that the record of their career is one entitled to claim a permanent place, or that it is of importance beyond the more or less limited circle of their personal associations.

What is true of men in general, in this regard, is especially true of ministers of the Gospel. Moving in a sphere of hfe which, with all its publicity, is seldom characterized by extraordinary incident ; with so much in the personal and spiritual history of eacli that is common to the whole class ; summoned to their self-sacrificing course by like convictions, tested by like ordeals, and working and achieving in the strength of the same commanding motive, it is not to be expected that so much sameness in the career should perinit great variety in the record. It is only when one in this sphere of life is made conspicuous by marked personal characteristics, by eminent service, or by his relation to some momentous epoch in human progress, that the story of his life may properly be presumed entitled to a place in current biography. It is in the conviction that all these things were true of Nathaniel Colver, that this attempt is made to sketch his life, his character, and his services to humanity and religion.

There is lying before the writer of these pages, at the present moment, a collection of faded, yellow manuscripts. They are diaries, letters, abstracts of sermons, outlines of essays, belonging originally to one of a class of men whose record, perhaps, is less distinct and familiar to us of the present generation than in justice it ought to be made; — one of those to whom the, cause of religion and of Baptist truth in this country is more indebted than seems always to be appreciated.

EAULY LIFE. 11

Called to preach Christ in sparse settlements, rather than in crowded cities, to the poor on the frontier rather than the rich at the centers of pop^ ulation, these men, adopting the Apostle's view that it were better to labor, working with their own hands, than to become " chargeable " to those whose worldly wealth was as limited as their own, united often the care of the farm with that of the church, and providing in this way for those dependent on them, found means to keep alive many a feeble church which otherwise might have died for lack of nutriment, and to carry the Gospel to many a wilderness home where otherwise it might never have been known.

The earliest of the diaries found amongst the manuscripts just mentioned, bears date March 7, 1793. Upon that day the writer with his family arrived in Orwell, Vermont, then but a small settlement, now a prosperous New England town. Two days are spent in adjusting home affairs. Upon the Sabbath he preaches from Rev. iii, 6, " He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches." A day or two after he is "at Mr. Babcock's, to get an axe laid." The day following, " studied in the forenoon, in the afternoon tapped sap-trees." Next day, "gathered sap in the forenoon, afternoon studied." Sunday coming again, he preaches from Rom. xii, 13, and Deut. xxvi, 5. Tlie next day, " stormy, did chores and read Allein." A few days later we find him attending the sick, soon after that attending a council. On two successive Sabbaths, he preaches from Solomon's Song : upon the first from v. 16, " His mouth is most sweet ; yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem ; " on the second, from iii, 11, " Go forth, O ye daughters of Zion, and behold King Solomon with the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the gladness of his heart." Here is the skeleton of a sermon preached at another time from the words, " Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man," Col. iv, 6 :

1. The Grace of Sobriety.

2. The Grace of Consideration.

3. The Grace of Modesty.

4. The Grace of Truth.

5. The Grace of Meekness.

6. The Grace of Expedience.

7. The Grace of Religion.

Thus observing, your answers to every man will be as they ought.

A glimpse of the controversies then current

EARLY LIFE. 13

one finds, also, in the following title to what seems to have been published as a pamphlet :

An Address to the Churches of the Presbyterian and Congretional Orders on Abraham's Covenant, showing what it Jis, and what it is not.

The scriptural mottoes selected for the titlepage, were evidently meant, especially the second one, to be suggestive.

What is truth ? John xviii, 38.

It is a snare to a man to devour that which is holy, and after voweth to make inquiry. Prov. xx, 25.

In the " Preface to the Reader," we find this :

If I am a scribe instructed unto the Kingdom of God, I shall bring forth things new and old out of Scripture treasure, and you will need to read or hear attentively, and search the Scripture store, and see if my scrip is supplied from thence.

We may venture to copy the following specimen of the doctrinal teaching of the essay:

I now conclude I have fully proved that the covenant made with Abraham was not the Covenant of Grace, and that every person who attends carefully to the matter will see that God's promise to multiply Abraham's natural offspring to a great nation, sufficient to people the land of Canaan, and his promise to multiply Christ as the stars of heaven or dust of the earth (Gen. xxii.iy) are promises of a distinct nature, and the one a type of the other ; that Abraham himself was one of the production of Christ multiplied ; and that all the production of Christ are related to God in a different Covenant from what they are when the Apostle calls them the offspring of God (Acts xvii.) saying " For we are all the offspring of God," that is, the product of His creating power. This all Calvinists ought to own, and that the new birth only brings persons out of one relation into the other.

We may finish these quotations with the quaint lines with which the essay concludes :

14 KATHANIEL COLVER.

The worth, of truth no tongue can tell : 'T will do to buy, but not to sell.

Happy portion he has got, Who buys the truth and sells it not.

Wft have, in these notices and extracts, introduced to the reader Elder Nathaniel Colver, the father of the subject of this biography ; a laborious, self-sacrificing minister of the gospel, for much of his life in the frontier settlements of Vermont and Northern New York. Among some notes furnished us for use in these pages by Hon. E. D. Culver, of New York, we find the following particulars, which will be of interest in this connection :

" Nathaniel Colver was one of eleven children, whose father was Nathaniel Colver Sr., and his mother Esther Dean. The father was a minister of the Baptist denomination, as was Ms father of the same name. His mother was descended from the Dean family. The name of her father is not remembered, but connected with her family as brothers or uncles of hers were James Dean, John Dean, and Erastus Dean. The first of these. Judge James Dean, late of Utica or Westmoreland, N. Y., is remembered for his eminence as a judge and as a friend of the Indian tribes. He negotiated some important treaties with the

EAELY LIFE. 15

Indians, and was held in high repute among them for his integrity. The Dean family was long noted for the natural eloquence of its members ; and it was long since said that the subject of this memoir took his natural eloquence from the Deans. His father was a remarkably close thinker, a logical reasoner, and a clear Biblical expounder, but he had none of those flashes of eloquence which characterized Nathaniel. The mother died when Nathaniel was young, the father lived until 1831 or 1832.

" The family was made up of seven daughters and four sons. The youngest son, Matthew Scott Colver, died at the age of six years, from a fracture of the skull by the kick of a horse. Another brother, John D. Colver, a youth of great promise and earnest piety, and who had, in the hopes and expectations of his parents been early designated for the ministry,* died at the age of twentythree. Few hearts were ever so wrung with grief as were the hearts of those parents by that death.

" The surviving brother was the late Phineas Colver, who died in 1834. While Nathaniel and

* According to what appears in a statement by Nathaniel, to be found further on, John D. Colver had finally decided to become a physician. The time of his death was just as he was entering upon the practice of that profession.

Phineas both lived, and especially after both had entered the ministry, their hearts were like those of David and Jonathan, firmly knit together. Phineas was the senior of Nathaniel, in the ministry, by some ten years. He was ordained over the Baptist church in Champlain, N. Y., in 1810. This little body had been gathered through the labors of his father, some twelve years previous, and though weak in numbers, was a well instructed and united body. It was dissolved by the ravages of the war in 1812-14. In March of the latter year, Phineas removed to S wanton, Vt., and was settled over the church in that place. His ministry was eminently successful there, und large additions were made to the church. He continued in the pastorate of that church till 1818, when he removed to and was installed over the church in Milton, Vt., and soon after he gathered and organized a church in the adjoining town of Colchester, ministering to both churches with gratifying results until 1825. He then accepted the call of the church in Fort Ann, N.Y., and for some six years served that church and the one in Kingsbury. In 1833 he visited a son who was in Laporte, Indiana, where he succeeded in organizing a church of thirty-five members,

EAELY LIFE. 17

and on his way back to his home in the East he died at Livonia, Livingston Co., N. Y. As a minister Phineas was quite unlike Nathaniel. He had little of the dash or brilliancy of oratory, but was more like his father, close, logical and clear. He had a most retentive memory of the Scriptures, and had few superiors as a clear expositor and an invincible disputant."

Character and genius are in some respects an inheritance, in some respects an attainment. That from such a stock as has been described above should have sprung a nature at once gifted and hardy can surprise no one. Yet much of what was most marked, both in the gifts and in the deeper nature of Nathaniel Colver, was a result from the action of peculiar circumstances upon the tendencies, both of character and of genius, received at his birth.

He was born at Orwell, Vt., May 10, 1794. When he was between one and two years old, or in the year 1795, the family removed to Champlain, in the northern part of the State of New York. The life here was even more that of the pioneer. Northern New York was then mostly a wilderness. Indeed, to this day, in portions of it, more of what may remind of the dense forests, with their mighty solitudes, ranges for the hunter or ambushes for savage enemies, which once clothed almost the whole continent, may be seen than in ^ny other district east of the Rocky Mountains. What those anxious for glimpses of wilderness life seek now in the woods or on the lakes of the Adu^ondacks, might, at the time of which we write, have been found almost within gun-shot of each settler's door.

But we will allow the subject of our narrative himself to sketch the scenes amidst which his boyhood passed. In the year 1864, seventy years after the date to which we have referred, while upon a visit to Vermont in behalf of the Institution at Richmond for educating Freedmen ministers, to which he had devoted himself, he made .use of the opportunity to visit Champlain ; proceeding thither by rail from Burlington — his mode of travel itself a symbol of the mighty changes three-score years and ten had brought. We copy from his diary under date of August 5 and 6, 1864:

Visited in Champlain, and went to see the old farm where I grew up from childhood — from one year old to fifteen. My father moved here from Vermont in 1795, and settled on the bank of Champlain river. It was then all a wilderness. In Champlain and Chazy, two townships, there were but thirteen families. He'

EAELY LIFE. 19

built a small log-house on the bank of the river. Nothing now but the cellar-hole remains. The large plum orchard and the cherry trees are all gone, and the grape vines. There I learned to trap the musk-rat and the mink, and also the wolf and the bear. I could remember in what direction, and about where, in the wilderness as it then was, my brother next older and myself caught four wolves in one winter. We caught them in fox-traps, and by fastening the trap to the end of a pole, the wolf was unable to pull his foot out. Let me here relate an instance of the sagacity of this animal. We set the trap in a springy place, and fastened it to a pole, as usual, but there was a hickory pole, long covered in the soft, springy ground with briers, moss, etc., that we did not notice. The wolf which got into the trap did, and digging under the pole passed under with the trap, which thereby had a firm fastening, and pulling his foot out went on his way, as we found when we came to the trap.

Oh, how freshly the scenes of youth came up to me, as I stood by that old cellar-hole. Just across a little river, on the swale, my younger brother was kicked to death by a horse one morning, as we were leading the horses back from the watering. Then first I met death. There, in that little dwelling, some stones of which remain, I spent my Sabbaths, with the old family Bible, as we had no meeting to go to. Oh, how fresh the remembrance of weeping there over the story of the cross. My mother early taught me to read and to love that old Bible. All the books I remember in our house for years, was that Bible and father's " little Bible," which he took with him when he went to preach, the Psalm-book, a spelling-book, and the " Third Part." And I here record my gratitude to God, that instead of Sunday School novels, I was shut up in my younger days to that dear old Bible. If I have any strength in the preaching of the Gospel, to that mother and that book am I indebted. I had nothing else to feed my mind with, and so I ate up that Bible. Dear, precious Bible ! And dear, precious mo'^her, who taught me to love it !

Afterwards, we built on the upper part of the fann. That house, too, is gone. But there is the well which father and I dug together ; and there are some of the apple-trees which I put out with my own hands. There my brother older died — a noble young physician. He was always in poor health, so was sent off to school and had a fine education. He died of bilious cholic, from which he had always suffered. His death was glorious. The house was full of the kind neighbors. He knew that mortification had begun at his feet. He was calm as heaven ; telling his Christian experience to solemn listeners, the trial of his faith by the way ; shook hands with them all, myself last, and bade them farewell. After this he closed his eyes, was quiet for several minutes, then opened them and smiled beautifully. He said, " These are the happiest moments of my life." After a moment he repeated the same words, with the happiest look upon his face, and then fell asleep in Jesus. There, at that death-bed side, the reality of religion and my own want of it so fastened upon my mind that it never left me, till I think it ended in my conversion. Oh, the beauty of a young man dying in faith !

As I stood there, upon the site of that old house, how time was annihilated ! How present and fresh the past ! In my father's family there was much hard sickness. I only had good health, and mine was the lot of service and toil. But in it all I can see the hand of God, in His providential training, and forming my body and mind for my subsequent life. I went to the grave-yard, the sleepers in which are now being removed. But I could not distinguish the graves of my two brothers and my grandmother on my mother's side. God will find them at the last day.

One sister, and a niece, were living in Champlain at the time of this visit, and by their presence would aid him in restoring the links of association between present and past. That distant past, those years of developing boyhood, were full of significance to him, as they also are to us. He seems to have been athletic beyond his years, and although only fifteen when the family returned to the Southward, he was already

EAELY LIFE. 21

in a great degree the family dependence for needful service on the farm. At some time during this period, he enjoyed the advantages of two winters' attendance at a school. This was all he ever had of school-training ; so that there must have been truth as well characteristic quaintness in his rejoinder when inquired of many years later, where he had graduated — "In the Northeast corner of New York, in a log-heap." To fell the timber, break up the new ground, and thus convert the wilderness to a fruitful field, was a severe tax upon muscles young as his ; but he was already preparing for hke work in another field, when again he would " hft up the axe against the thick trees." Even his sports, as we have seen, tended to develop readiness, dexterity and hardihood. Besides those of which he himself speaks in the above extracts, there was also the spearing of salmon in the river. In this also he acquired great skill.

And so we find no material difficulty in picturing the boy whose manhood was to be so much the fulfillment of what was then in diminutive type. We have but to reduce the stalwart frame, as so many knew it, to slenderer yet still robust proportions ; to take away from the face its furrows of care and thought, and see instead the smooth outlines of boyhood, yet with signs of that early maturity which the necessity to early think for others as well as himself induced ; to soften the glance of the resolute eye, yet retain its quick, keen, sagacious outlook upon men and things ; and to watch him while courageously facing his daily toil, or with the same courage tracking and trapping the wild denizens of the near forest, or surprising the alert salmon with an eye more quick and a movement more swift than even his own — and the boy Nathaniel is before us. The father was much from home, and the mother an almost constant sufferer from ill health. The diary of the former, consisting for the most part of brief records of preaching appointments, indicates that he traveled extensively through the region of country about, preaching in dwellinghouses, or in the open air, or in barns, or wherever an audience, large or small, could conveniently assemble. The care of the children devolved mainly upon the mother, and how judicious and wise that was, with what good use of the limited means allowed her, the emphatic tribute of her son, given above, sufficiently shows. - When Nathaniel was fifteen years of age, the

EARLY LIFE. 23

family removed to West Stockbridge,'Mass. He was sent on, for some reason, in advance of the family, and it illustrates the resolute spirit of the youth, that he performed the entire journey — a long, and for much of the way a lonely one — upon foot. Little did he know, or dream, toward what higher fortunes and nobler destinies he went : what a call awaited him in the new home to which he looked with a boy's eager curiosity, trudging onward with more than a boy's cheerful hardihood.

Chapter II Conversion— Call To The Ministry— First Pre A Cuing. — 1809-1821

OuE material for any account of that period of Mr. Colver's life which immediately followed the removal of the family to West Stockbridge, is even more scanty than for that already noticed. Very probably there would, in any case, be little to record. A country lad pursuing some round of manual labor, varied by such social opportunities as might be afforded in the rustic community where he had his home, and possibly by meagre and inadequate ones for an imperfect mental culture, could, in the uneventful routine of his life, supply very little of material to a biographer. The single fact which we have to mention for the six years between his removal to Stockbridge and his coming of age, is the choice which he made of a calling. At what time he was apprenticed to the trade of a tanner and currier does not appear.

We simply know that when, upon arriving at young manhood, he comes before us in a more conspicuous way, this is the business in which he is engaged, and for which he had evidently prepared himself with the expectation of making it the occupation of his life.

Incidents, however, which we shall notice directly, suggest the belief that even during this period of obscurity he had not failed wholly in calling attention to himself as one who might have other work in the world than that to which he had first put his hand. The fact, alone, that immediately upon his conversion he was spoken of by those who had known him from boyhood as one having gifts for the ministry, and this even, so far as appears, before he could have had much opportunity to exercise himself in less conspicuous spheres of Christian usefulness, is significant to the effect suggested. Indeed, all acquainted with his more marked characteristics as developed later, will readily understand how impossible it was that even as an uncultivated youth he should have been quite lost in the common crowd of such. It is impossible to believe that such public questions as were filling the land with excitement, just at the time when he was beginning to look out upon life witli the consciousness that he him^ self must there act a part, failed to rouse within him the spirit which in later years kept him in full sympathy with all that most nearly concerned the weKare of his country and his race. He was twenty years of age when the War of 1812 began. We cannot suppose that Stockbridge, though a remote country town, took no share in the stirring questions which so deeply concerned the national honor and the inviolability of the national flag ; or that the voice which a few years later was heard from one end of the land to the other in the advocacy of more than one great cause, was now wholly silent.

Some degree of practice even in public speaking he would seem to have had ; and we can scarcely imagine him even thus early opening his lips without impressing such as heard him with the conviction that he was one of those who have things to say that are worth the hearing. This supposition is confirmed by an incident which occurred in a brief campaign he himself made near the end of the war. In 1814, Washington having been burned by the British and Philadelphia being threatened. New York itself was believed to be in danger. The Governor of the State, De Witt Clinton, accordingly issued a call for six thousand militia to rendezvous at that city for its protection. It must have been simply his desire to serve his country which induced Mr. Colver to take part in this enterprise. As a resident of Massachusetts, the call of the Governor of New York could have had no other interest to him than such as he himself chose to allow. We find him, however, enrolled with the troops assembled for the protection of New York, and remaining for several months in camp with them ; their location being upon a hill near where Canal street now crosses East Broadway. The enemy not advancing upon the city as had been anticipated, the citizen soldiery found httle occasion for their service, and Mr. Colver enlivened the dullness of camp life by reverting to his trade and making shoes for the soldiers. It was characteristic, however, of his versatile and ready spirit, when, one of his fellow-soldiers having been arrested and taken before some city magistrate, Mr. Colver, dropping the last and hammer, stepped at once into the sphere of the advocate. Having, or thinking that he had, some reason to doubt if his comrade would be treated fairly in the pending examination, he demanded permission to defend him, which he did to such good effect that the man was acquitted. The feature of this incident which gives it value for us, is the fact that a gentleman of means, Avho was present, perceived in the off-hand advocate such signs of talent that he came to him after the trial was over, and though a stranger offered, if he chose to make the law his profession, to put him in the way of obtaining a legal education. This Mr. Colver declined, returning unambitiously to his soldiering and his shoe-making. Occasion for further military service on the part of himself and his compatriots not appearing, they were soon discharged, and returned to their homes.