Lewis W. Green

Lewis W. Green
Lewis Warner Green (January 28, 1806 – May 26, 1863) was a Presbyterian minister, educator, and academic administrator who was the president of Hampden–Sydney College, Transylvania University, and Centre College for various periods from 1849 to 1863. Born in Danville, Kentucky, baptized in Versailles, and educated in Woodford County, Green enrolled at Transylvania University but transferred to Centre College to complete his education. He graduated in 1824 and in doing so became one of two members of the school's first graduating class. After short periods studying medicine and law, he enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1831 but returned to Kentucky in 1832 before graduating. The occasion of his return was his election as professor of political economy and ; he taught for two years, and became licensed as a preacher during that span, before taking a two-year leave of absence to travel to Europe. Some time after returning, he was elected by the Synod of Kentucky to be professor of oriental and biblical literature at Hanover College, though he stayed there for only one academic year before returning to Centre in 1839 to resume his prior teaching positions and take the office of vice president.
Green left Kentucky after a short time once again, this time in 1840 to teach oriental literature and biblical literature at Western Theological Seminary. He spent six years there, teaching and speaking at colleges around the area, before moving to Baltimore to preach full-time. After falling seriously ill and being unable to regularly maintain the position, he resigned after just over a year and a half. Around this time, he was being considered for the vacant presidency of Hampden–Sydney College and was unanimously elected to the position by the board of trustees in short order. He entered the position in January 1849 and recovered to good health soon afterwards. In addition to being president, he was a popular professor and preacher among students, and he was recruited by numerous other institutions during his seven-plus-year term. Among these institutions was Transylvania, who drew him to their presidency shortly following the establishment of a normal school—the first in the state—by the Kentucky General Assembly, though the bill that created it was repealed after a year and a half and Green resigned in late 1857.
After being elected president of Centre College in August 1857, Green accepted the position following his departure from Transylvania and entered office in January 1858. He led the school while preaching in Danville through much of Centre's firsthand experience in the Civil War, including the close-by Battle of Perryville, until his death in 1863 from an illness which he caught after helping injured soldiers recovering in Centre's main building, functioning as a hospital. He was buried in Danville's Bellevue Cemetery. He was a member of the Stevenson political family through the marriage of his daughter; as a result, he was the father-in-law of vice president Adlai Stevenson I, the great-grandfather of Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson II, and the great-great-grandfather of senator Adlai Stevenson III.
Early life and education
Lewis Warner Green was born on January 28, 1806, in Danville, Kentucky, the twelfth and youngest child of Willis Green and Sarah Reed. Lewis was orphaned as a young boy—his father died when he was five years old and his mother died two years later—forcing him to live with his oldest brother, Judge John Green. His first education came in Latin and Greek by way of "renowned teachers" Duncan F. Robertson and Joshua Fry, and he began attendance at a classical school directed by Louis Marshall in Woodford County, Kentucky, at the age of thirteen. He was baptized at Pisgah Presbyterian Church in Versailles, Kentucky, in March 1820 alongside his brother Willis. He fell seriously ill for a time during his second year at the school and suffered a "malignant fever" for several weeks, at one point with a slim chance of survival, though ultimately he recovered. Afterwards, Green entered Transylvania University and completed the coursework through his junior year but transferred in 1822 to Centre College because of a lack of support by Kentucky Presbyterians for Transylvania president Horace Holley. He graduated from Centre with a Master of Arts degree in 1824, becoming one of the two members of the school's first graduating class. Green took brief interest in law and medicine following his graduation, studying the former with his brother, John, and the latter with physician Ephraim McDowell, each for a short time. Green went on to study the Hebrew language at Yale College and also enrolled at the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1831, where he was a classmate of Henry Augustus Boardman, but did not graduate from either due to a necessity to return to Kentucky.
Career
Professor and pastor in Danville
Green was first given a chance to enter academia when he was elected professor of Greek at Centre College in August 1831, though he declined the position in order to study at Princeton, where he had just enrolled. He returned to his alma mater, though, in August 1832, when he was elected to teach political economy and . He was first licensed as a preacher on October 4, 1833, at Harmony Church in Garrard County, Kentucky, and thereafter preached in Danville, its surroundings, and elsewhere in Kentucky on nearly every Sunday. In August 1834, some months after he was remarried, he obtained a two-year leave of absence from Centre and sailed with his wife from New York to Liverpool in order to learn more and better his skills as a pastor; they arrived on September 15, 1834. The pair spent two weeks in London before traveling to Berlin, where they heard lectures from August Neander and Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg. In mid-1835 they traveled throughout Germany and Switzerland, and spent the following winter in Haale studying under August Tholuck, Karl Ullmann, and Wilhelm Gesenius. Afterwards, they went to Bonn and Paris before returning to the United States sometime after December 1835.
Green was offered the pastorate of the Presbyterian Church of Shelbyville, Kentucky, after preaching a sermon there in 1837, though he declined in order to remain at Centre. The following year, he was elected by the Synod of Kentucky to teach oriental and biblical literature at the theological seminary at Hanover College, and he resigned his teaching positions at Centre in order to move to Hanover, Indiana, so he could accept the new job. Shortly after starting there, "influential gentlemen" at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, offered him the presidency of that school in an effort to return a Presbyterian to the office, though Green declined so as to avoid negatively impacting Danville and its status as the center of the church in Kentucky. He returned to Danville having completed his stint at Hanover at the conclusion of the 1838–1839 academic year, and upon his arrival was elected vice president of Centre College, returned to his former positions teaching political economy and belles-lettres, and appointed co-pastor at Danville's First Presbyterian Church, alongside Centre president John C. Young.
Move to Pittsburgh and pastorate in Baltimore
In May 1840, soon after taking up these positions at Centre, Green was called away from Kentucky once again after the Presbyterian General Assembly unanimously appointed him professor of oriental literature and biblical criticism at Western Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on the recommendation of Charles Stewart Todd. Around this time, in the midst of his move from Kentucky, a slave state, to Pennsylvania, a free state, he made the decision to emancipate his 25 to 30 slaves, who technically belonged to his wife as an inheritance; he originally planned to have them sent to Liberia with the help of the American Colonization Society, but when the freedmen were not willing to go Green decided to free them as they were. The same year, he received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Centre and gave an inaugural address in Pittsburgh; the address was well-received, and he received invitations to speak at Jefferson College, Lafayette College, and Miami University over subsequent years. He resigned his teaching position in Pittsburgh in October 1846, which was effective in February 1847. After, he moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in order to take up the pastorate of that city's Second Presbyterian Church in order to devote himself in a full-time role to preaching. Shortly after the beginning of his pastorate in Baltimore, he fell ill and became weaker, which prompted him to recuse the position for a time. He ultimately decided to resign his position effective October 10, 1848; even so, he was well-loved by his congregation to the point that they released him from a pledge of $1,000 he had made to be put towards the construction of a new church edifice.
President of Hampden–Sydney College
In mid-1848, Green was invited to Hampden Sydney, Virginia, to speak at Hampden–Sydney College; at that time, the college's trustees had already begun considering him for their vacant presidency. On June 1, he was unanimously elected to the position. He began his duties as president near the start of the academic year and formally succeeded Acting President Charles Martin upon his inauguration on January 10, 1849, at which he delivered a speech to the board of trustees. During this speech, he called for the school to enlarge its libraries and secure and retain professors as several of his main and immediate goals; he also promoted the concept of the development of "the whole Man" as a way of campaigning for well-roundedness of students to be a priority of the college. Despite entering the office still suffering from poor health—according to the Hampden–Sydney historian John Brinkley, Green told a friend before taking the presidency that he "had come to the college to die"—he recovered in a short time and was soon after back to preaching throughout Virginia, including in the chapels of the Hampden–Sydney College church and that of the Theological Seminary. During his tenure at Hampden–Sydney, the school's enrollment and finances both increased; enrollment jumped from 27 students to 100 after his first year and again increased to 145 the year after, and the school's endowment had increased to $80,000 by the time he left office. Further, he spent vacations and time away from the college recruiting potential students and securing further increases in funding.
Green's teaching responsibilities were largely focused on classes for fourth-year students, such as evidences of Christianity, mental and moral philosophy, political economy, sociology (then called "history and philosophy of social progress"; John Brinkley wrote that Green was an "American pioneer" in the teaching of this subject), mathematical philosophy, agricultural chemistry, geology, and Ancient Greek philosophy. He was a popular professor and preacher among students and rarely were there large-scale disagreements between the students and faculty, except on one occasion during which classes were suspended for a week in the early 1850s after a student threatened a professor's life, though not much else is known about the incident. As with much of the faculty, Green was a member of a literary society and took part in their debates; in August 1851 he was successful in debating against the right of Congress to abolish slavery in Washington, D.C.
It was during Green's presidency at Hampden–Sydney that a disagreement arose between the faculty of the Richmond Medical College (now the VCU Medical Center) and the Hampden–Sydney Board of Trustees in 1853, which stemmed from the fact that the medical faculty wanted the right to appoint any new member of their staff without the say of the Hampden–Sydney board. This disagreement resulted in the Medical College being withdrawn from the benefits of the Hampden–Sydney charter and effectively becoming their own institution.
Like they had during Green's pastorate in Baltimore, the leadership of Jefferson College, in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, reached out to him in an attempt to recruit him to their presidency, though he declined the offer again; he also declined a later offer to return to Danville as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. This became a theme of his time at Hampden–Sydney: the Synod of Kentucky chose him to take a professorship at the New Albany Theological Seminary in 1850, he was reelected to his prior position at the Allegheny Seminary in 1853, and he was the prospective choice for the inaugural chair of Biblical literature at the new Danville Theological Seminary in 1854, but he was urged to decline all of these positions by members of the Synod of Virginia and people closely associated with Hampden–Sydney—and did—in order to remain there. The exception came in 1856 when Transylvania University, having been recently reorganized by the Kentucky General Assembly, elected Green to their presidency. As there were many "prominent men" in Kentucky who wanted him to accept the position, he traveled to Lexington to see the college before making a decision and was received enthusiastically. The Hampden–Sydney board of trustees were unsuccessful in convincing him to stay—one such strategy involved the proposal of a 50% salary increase—and he resigned the presidency of Hampden–Sydney upon his return to Virginia. It took effect on September 1, 1856, four days before the start of the next academic term; by this time, he had already moved to Lexington. It took until the 1954 election of Joseph Clarke Robert, then president of Coker College, for Hampden–Sydney to conduct an outside hire for president again.
Return to Kentucky: Transylvania and Centre
Green came to Transylvania in the midst of major change at the school. In March 1856, the Kentucky General Assembly passed an act which reorganized Transylvania, established a normal school there, and gave the college a new board of trustees. He was the school's first permanent president since the resignation of Henry Bidleman Bascom in 1849; his direct predecessor was the professor James B. Dodd, who had been serving as acting president since that time. When the normal school opened in September 1856, it had an enrollment of around eighty students, and it made Kentucky the eighth state with such a school. Green was inaugurated as president on November 18, 1856, on which occasion he delivered an inaugural address which was untitled. In his first months, he led a campaign in support of the temperance movement and gave a lecture to the same effect. He concluded his first year at Transylvania on June 24, 1857, and the large crowd present at commencement that day was seen by local press as a promising sign that the school might be leaving its recent struggles behind. During this first year, the school's existing academic departments remained through the reorganization and attendance stayed level with 170 total students, including 72 at the normal school, enrolled to begin the 1857–1858 academic year. This changed during the ensuing General Assembly winter session, during which the bill which had established the normal school was repealed, according to the Transylvania historian John Wright Jr., by "large majorities", to take effect following the conclusion of the present academic year on June 15, 1858. This decision was condemned by many on campus and the Kentucky superintendent of education, who remarked that the move would result in a quarter-century setback for the state's public education. Favoritism during the selection of students and the appropriation of funding for the normal school from the budget of the university at large—which was illegal—were among the arguments that led to the repeal in the legislature. As the now-dissolved normal school was among the main reasons Green had come to Transylvania, he resigned in late 1857 and formally left the position January 1, 1858.
Green was elected president of Centre College on August 6, 1857, and officially assumed office on January 1, 1858. His inaugural address was given on October 14, 1858, in Lebanon, Kentucky, at a meeting of the Kentucky Synod. By April, just months after he had taken office, he was named co-pastor of Danville's Second Presbyterian Church alongside Alfred Ryers; this was a position he held until the church building was destroyed in a fire and the congregation merged with that of the First Presbyterian Church. Even then, he preached at that church every other Sunday despite not actually being its pastor. In writing to a friend near the beginning of his term, he considered a plan to retire after six years in the position, with a goal of bringing 300 new students to the school. Enrollment declined drastically due to the Civil War and its proximity to Centre; the school's 172 students the year before the war's start had fallen to 57 two years later. Confederate soldiers occupied several campus buildings beginning September 27, 1862. On October 9, the day after the Battle of Perryville took place about 12 miles from Centre, there were only six students on campus and the faculty decided to cease holding classes and suspend college operations. The college did not reopen until October 27 and thirteen days of classes were ultimately lost. Classes were held in the new library, a project completed earlier that year, since Old Centre, the college's main building, was still occupied; at one point, nearly 3,500 Union soldiers were situated in Danville. Old Centre's capacity as a hospital was around 150 and the rooms functioning as such were not physically separated from the parts of the building involved with college operations; in fact, some students had to pass through autopsies in progress on their way to a professor's office.
Personal life and death
Green married Eliza J. Montgomery, daughter of Congressman Thomas Montgomery, in February 1827. At the time of their marriage, Montgomery was suffering from an "advanced stage" of tuberculosis, and the couple were married for slightly longer than two years before she died in 1829. The couple lived on Eliza's family farm before her death. He remarried on April 9, 1834, to Mary Lawrence. Sometime after moving back to Kentucky after his term at Hampden–Sydney, Green acquired more slaves; he owned ten during his time as Centre president. Green is a member of the Stevenson family through the marriage of his daughter, Letitia, to Adlai Stevenson I, later vice president of the United States. As a result, he was the great-grandfather of Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson II and the great-great-grandfather of senator Adlai Stevenson III. Green's grandson, Lewis Green Stevenson, was named for him.
Green contracted a disease after attending to sick and injured soldiers; he died as a result on May 26, 1863, after a five-day sickness. This period of illness included chills, delirium, paralysis, and finally unconsciousness; throughout, Green was in "extreme agony", according to the biographer Leroy Halsey. He was interred at Bellevue Cemetery in Danville, Kentucky.
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1806 births
1863 deaths
19th-century American clergy
19th-century American educators
American colonization movement
American temperance activists
American slave owners
Burials in Bellevue Cemetery (Danville, Kentucky)
Centre College alumni
Centre College faculty
Hanover College faculty
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary faculty
People from Danville, Kentucky
Presbyterian Church in the United States ministers
Presidents of Centre College
Presidents of Transylvania University
Presidents of Hampden–Sydney College
Stevenson family