Hobart and William Smith Colleges

We The People

ASSESSING JOHN HENRY HOBART’S EVOLVING VISION

BY THE RT. REV. R. WILLIAM FRANKLIN, Assisting Bishop of Long Island and Dean Emeritus of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University

In the 15 years following the War of 1812, the population in the region between Utica, N.Y. and Buffalo increased 150 percent. The religious emotionalism of the Evangelical Second Great Awakening was in vogue, and newcomers to Western New York were so enthralled that Episcopal leaders referred to the region as the Burnt Over District. In response, New York’s third Episcopal bishop, John Henry Hobart, canvassed the state, traveling by horse, stagecoach and canalboat to make his case to residents. Hobart had the energy of 10 men; horses dropped under his exertions. In fact, the bishop himself died in September 1830, only 54 years old, on a visit to the town of Auburn, along the same route he had taken while tending to two projects he considered most important to his role as bishop: the ill-fated conversion of Native Americans and the founding of a college.

Besides Hobart’s work ethic, his hugely influential framework of ideals and values established him as the most important leader in the American Episcopal Church in the 19th century. He was committed to an American Anglicanism founded on the republican principles of both the American Revolution and the primitive Christian Church. He saw bishops as part of an apostolic succession that stretched from the disciples of Jesus to Hobart’s own time, and therefore essential to the Church’s leadership (hence the Episcopal Church). But he also advocated an American Church governed by “the people,” not by a monarch, with bishops elected by the clergy and laity of a state. On this basis he recruited parishioners from outside the pool of Manhattan elites, inviting congregants from all classes, races and regions of the state, so that by 1830 the Episcopal Church in New York had more members than any of its counterparts in the original 13 states. Hobart’s catholic view of the Church entailed expanding missionary activity among Native Americans and the white settlers of Western New York. He reached out to Black communities, consecrating the first Black church in New York State. In 1826, he ordained New York’s first Black priest.

And he founded a college in Geneva to educate young Christian farmers, businessmen, lawyers, doctors and local politicians, not just future priests and social elites, in a humane, curious and expansive humanistic understanding of the Christian faith. This was, at least in part, intended to free students from the widespread, mounting influence of what he saw as an emotional, anti-scientific and evangelical interpretation of Christianity.

From our vantage point on this 200th anniversary, we can see that Hobart himself struggled to realize the values he preached. There were contradictions between his “We the People” credo and his aversion to the Church’s participation in secular politics of any kind, which steered him away from early abolitionist crusades against slavery and toward complicity in Native American removal policies. And yet, as a fundamental ethos for both American religion and for higher education, the values inherent in Hobart’s radical commitment to “We the People” have profoundly shaped the evolution of the Episcopal Church and the college that bears his name.

A new church for a new nation

Bishop Hobart was born in Philadelphia in 1775, the son of a ship’s captain who came from New England Puritan stock, similar to the white settlers who would populate Western New York. The Hobarts were members of Christ Church in Philadelphia, the largest Anglican church in the Colonies, whose rector William White became the first Bishop of Pennsylvania and then the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. White baptized, confirmed and ordained Hobart, and was his primary teacher and mentor.

But for Bishop White, Anglicanism could have easily disappeared in America. Before the American Revolution, the Anglican churches in the Colonies were part of the Church of England, an established state Church, which during the Revolution became the Church of the enemy. By the end of the war, there were less than 10,000 Episcopalians left in America. Anglicanism survived because William White laid out the intellectual and structural foundation of a new Protestant Episcopal Church. He was its George Washington and its St. Peter.

In his short pamphlet, The Case of the Protestant Episcopal Church Considered, published in 1782 while the war with Britain still raged, White proposed a plan for a Church not based upon the sovereignty of a monarch but upon the sovereignty of “the people.” Under this theory of church government, which incidentally would allow Anglicanism to survive in a republic, “the people” would rule by electing the bishops and by electing lay and clergy deputies to a General Convention, which would have ultimate authority over the Church.

If White was the St. Peter of this new Church, Hobart was the St. Paul. Like St. Paul, Hobart would become a traveling advocate of the new Episcopalianism, a type-A personality who crisscrossed New York from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, planting churches in virtually every town, village and city. In 1801, Hobart became a minister and then rector of Trinity Church, Wall Street, then and now the wealthiest parish church in America. In 1811, he was elected as a bishop of New York, and for the next 19 years he worked tirelessly to make New York State the model of the new American Anglicanism.

He faced a daunting task. The social and political upheaval of war with Britain — first the Revolution, then the War of 1812 — put the new Episcopal Church at a huge deficit, unprecedented in Christian history. Without schools, finances or prestige, the Church in the early 19th century was overshadowed by the Evangelical Movement, which had become the dominant form of Christianity in America, shaping the Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians, along with other new denominations. The Evangelicals emphasized the necessity of a conversion experience, divine grace forcefully encountering the individual at one moment, provoking regeneration in faith and moral benevolence. Evangelical denominations also encouraged parishioners to engage in secular national political life by voting and lobbying, for instance, to curtail certain sports and the sale of alcoholic beverages, and to support the abolition of chattel slavery.

To counter evangelical revivalism Hobart became the ultimate church planter. He quadrupled the number of Episcopal clergy in New York. He confirmed 15,000 new Episcopalians. He undertook campaign after campaign to instruct and reform, traversing the state, founding institutions, theological societies, Bible societies and a seminary. For 19 extraordinary years he devoted himself to advancing his vision of High Church theology, which promised Church members more freedom — freedom from an elaborate confessional creed and a strict code of social behavior; freedom from the pressure to show evidence of a conversion experience; freedom to exercise reason and include scientific insights in making religious and moral decisions. In his most famous work, An Apology for Apostolic Order and Its Advocates (1807), Hobart unveiled the motto of his High Church movement: “My banner is Evangelical Truth, and Apostolic Order.”

Missions to the West

With the construction of the Erie Canal, Hobart turned his attention to the western region of the state, with its Native American population and New England transplants. In October 1818, he visited the Oneida tribes and personally invited their chiefs, with their people, to join the Episcopal Church. Hobart commissioned a translation of The Book of Common Prayer into the Oneida language and in 1819 consecrated St. Peter’s Church, a chapel for a Native American congregation at the settlement of Oneida Castle. On that occasion he confirmed and welcomed 89 Oneidas into the Church. He licensed Eleazar Williams, an Oneida candidate for holy orders, as a lay reader and catechist to oficiate in the native language at St. Peter’s.

During Hobart’s missions to the Oneidas in 1818, he visited Geneva, which he believed would be a strategic location for influencing the whole of Western New York. The village was home to an academy, founded in 1798, which Hobart ventured to expand into a college — one which, with Episcopalians on its Board, would be friendly toward the Church. With support from Genevans, including local Episcopalian donors and a public subscription, funds were transferred from Geneva Academy and nearby Fairfield Academy to finance the proposed college. Hobart also secured grants for the endowment from Trinity Church in Manhattan, the New York Diocesan Convention, the Episcopal Society for the Promotion of Religion and Learning, and from wealthy Manhattan donors like the Startin family.

Geneva College, renamed Hobart College in the 1850s, was seen as part of the Church’s mission to the West. The Board was indeed made up of a majority of Episcopalians: its first president Jasper Adams was an Episcopal priest, and through the 19th century the bishops of Western New York and leading Buffalo and Rochester clergy were Trustees. But unlike the other Episcopal college in the state, Columbia College in Manhattan, Geneva was not to be under the control of the Episcopal Church. The new college was not to exclude any student on account of his particular tenets in religion, and Episcopal students were not to enjoy any particular privileges. Hobart’s intent was not to expose undergraduates to any intense Episcopalian indoctrination but rather to shield young people from the narrow influence of other denominations. Ultimately, Hobart’s vision for the college was to educate future leaders of the West — people from all backgrounds, not merely clergy or social elites: farmers, merchants, manufacturers, mechanics, lawyers, physicians and politicians. (Nevertheless, the Episcopalian influence was evident; over the first 100 years, 24 percent of Hobart College graduates entered the ministry, including 15 alumni who became bishops of the Episcopal Church.)

Alongside the classical Latin and Greek course of Columbia College, Geneva established an English course, a curriculum obviously intended for the businessmen, farmers and engineers of the new country. And yet the curriculum reflected the High Church Christian humanism of Hobart, the belief that religion does not demand the sacrifice of the knowledge, pleasures and beauty of the world: theater, science, sports, friendship, social amusements — all go to building a new continent, a vibrant humanity and a responsible citizenry.

Contradictions and evolutions

Despite this relatively progressive influence at Geneva College, Hobart’s High Church Movement eschewed secular politics. His vision for the Church was modeled on the primitive small Christian communities of the first four centuries after Christ. Under this model, which pre-dated white supremacy, the Church was universal — for all people. And yet, wary of linking the Episcopal Church in the public mind to the state Church of England, Hobart maintained that the True Church had no business engaging in political issues: the Church is divine, the state is mortal, politics are therefore taboo. He believed the Church, as the body of Christ, could not be divided over what he felt to be a political issue. So while debates over slavery split the Presbyterians, the Methodists and the Baptists into separate denominations, Hobart avoided public discussion of the subject entirely.

To avoid a clash and potential division over the issue of race, he privately tutored Peter Williams, a Black lay reader, in preparation for holy orders, rather than encouraging his study at the General Theological Seminary. Meanwhile, in 1814, Hobart helped secure a grant from Trinity Church to found St. Philip’s, the first Black Church in New York State, in lower Manhattan. In 1819, Hobart consecrated St. Philip’s, though he wouldn’t permit the parish’s clergy or members to attend the Conventions of the Diocese of New York, whose meetings were racially segregated. In 1826, Hobart ordained Williams as the first Black priest in New York State, and while he allowed Williams to join the American Anti-Slavery Society, a mob ransacked St. Philip’s in 1834, blaming Williams’ abolitionist politics; Hobart’s successor as Bishop of New York forced Williams to resign from the Society.

And although Hobart made strenuous efforts to include Indigenous tribes in the Church, the bishop neither understood nor valued Native American institutions. His ardent support of missions to the Oneidas led to his cooperation in their relocation from New York to Wisconsin. The vast Church of the Holy Apostles in the town of Oneida, Wisc. was dedicated in Hobart’s memory, but according to a 2019 history of the Wisconsin Oneidas and the Episcopal Church, congregants there were later misled by Eleazar Williams, the deacon Hobart had assigned to the church, who began “ignoring the Oneidas’ best interests and collaborating with land speculators and the government for his own self-aggrandizement.”

Though flawed and unevenly applied, the Hobartian commitment to all the people can be seen in the trajectory of the Church and of the college he founded. By the mid-1830s, Geneva College had matriculated its first Native student, Abraham La Fort, and first Black student, Isaiah De Grasse. In 1844, Peter Wilson, a member of the Cayuga Nation, became the first Native American to graduate from Geneva Medical College (or any medical college, most likely), and in 1849 Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman in America to receive a medical degree. The founding of William Smith opened Hobart College’s faculty, facilities and administration to women (though the classes were separated by gender), and over the following century, the Colleges’ curriculum expanded to include early programs in women’s studies, African American studies and the nation’s first undergraduate major in queer studies, moving ever closer to the essence of Hobart’s vision. Considering this trajectory, it is fitting that in this anniversary year the first Black Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Most Rev. Michael B. Curry ’75, D.D. ’20, is a graduate of Hobart College. Bishop Hobart’s desire to combine the High Church and the Evangelical into one — “apostolic order and evangelical teaching” — is what we see today in the many expressions of the Church under this Presiding Bishop: the Michael Curry who preaches the royal wedding sermon is the Michael Curry who leads a hand-clapping revival. Listen closely and you can hear a fuller embodiment of John Henry Hobart’s vision of “We the People” in Bishop Curry’s, which imagines “individuals, small gathered communities, and congregations whose way of life is the way of Jesus and his way of love, no longer centered on empire and establishment, no longer fixated on preserving institutions, no longer shoring up white supremacy or anything else that hurts or harms any child of God.” Hobart led the Church at a diffcult time. The pre-Revolutionary era was not coming back, and he faced the anxiety and disillusion of Anglicans who were attracted by other faiths or none. Like Hobart, Bishop Curry leads at a diffcult time for the Church and the country. In the post-Civil Rights era, he faces the anxiety and disillusion of a post-pandemic nation where many are skeptical of religion, scornful of authority, and fearful of those who do not look, think, worship or vote as they do. But in his calls for a “beloved community,” Bishop Curry advocates a climate, a mindset, an atmosphere in which all people experience dignity and abundance and see themselves and others as beloved children of God. In this work, he is manifesting the unfulfilled premises and promises of Hobart’s ministry.

 

R. William Franklin is the XI Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York (resigned) and he is currently Assisting Bishop of the Diocese of Long Island and a member of the Faculty of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He is also Dean Emeritus of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University. He thanks Judy Stark and Denise Fillion for their input on this article.