Horace Holley’s impact on academia

SALISBURY — Horace Holley was mentioned in letters by U.S. presidents. He was a prominent clergyman in Boston, and he was the major figure in American higher education in the pre-Civil War American West.

“He was the most significantly insignificant person in American history,” declared James P. Cousins, professor of history at Western Michigan University and author of “Horace Holley: Transylvania University and the Making of Liberal Education in the Early American Republic.”

Cousins spoke at the Scoville Memorial Library on Saturday, April 8.

He said Holley’s legacy is in how institutions of higher education see themselves, and in the role of university presidents as “champions of causes.”

Cousins said he stumbled on the Salisbury Association Historical Society’s Horace Holley papers via a newspaper article about the sale of the Holley-Williams house.

The piece mentioned the association would take possession of the papers.

“It could be anything — tax records from the 1870s, love  letters from World War I.”

What Cousins found, however, was a cache of Horace Holley materials that made the first two chapters of the book possible.

Other Holley materials are “all over the place,” Cousins said – in Salt Lake City, Austin, Ann Arbor, Boston and Durham, N.C.

So finding the Salisbury collection was a big boost.

Holley was the third son of Luther Holley. He was born in Salisbury in 1783.

Horace was sent to Williams College and then to Yale.

He didn’t do very well at first, and spent some time back in Connecticut, working for his father’s dry goods store and developing a) an overwhelming ambition and b) a strong dislike for the people of Salisbury, whom he referred to as “unfeathered two-legged animals.”

Back in school, Holley became an enthusiastic federalist and clashed with his father to the point where the latter declined to pay his son’s tuition.

(Holley’s brother picked up the tab.)

Horace modified his Calvinist training and became the minister of a Unitarian church in Boston in 1809.

“He changed his entire cosmology because the offer was just too good,” said Cousins.

He also married Mary Austin, cousin of Stephen F. Austin (the “Father of Texas”).

Holley built a considerable reputation with charitable organizations and in education. He hobnobbed with politicians and intellectuals, and became a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers.

In 1815, Transylvania University in the frontier town of Lexington, Ky., sounded Holley out on becoming university president. Holley refused, but the primary figure, Henry Clay, was persistent, and Holley accepted the job in 1818.

His wife was reluctant to leave Boston and her family in New Haven, but Holley went anyway.

He took the scenic route, visiting colleges along the way and meeting President James Monroe.

The trip took six months. When he arrived in Lexington, there was considerable hoopla — a parade and a great deal of attention.

The school, which had been struggling, soon had a similar enrollment to that of Yale or Harvard.

Transylvania University attracted the attention of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that if Virginia didn’t get moving on establishing its own university, all its sons would be heading to Kentucky.

Holley’s ambition served him well. The TU medical school attracted top — if somewhat eccentric — talents.

At TU, under Holley, the practice of academics publishing under their own names became established.

The university became “an intellectual symbol,” Cousins said.“Not just a place to build gentlemen, but the heart of an intellectual republic.”

The ambition eventually caught up with Holley. His federalist, elitist attitude ran afoul of a wave of (Andrew) Jacksonian populism and he stepped down in 1827.