Jeremiah Chamberlain

Jeremiah Chamberlain (January 5, 1794 – September 5, 1851) was an American Presbyterian minister, educator and college administrator. He was president of three institutions of higher education between 1823 and 1851, specifically Centre College (1823–1826), the College of Louisiana (1826–1828), and Oakland College (1830–1851).

Born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to a former Continental Army colonel, Chamberlain studied under David McConaughy in his youth before enrolling at Dickinson College. He graduated from Dickinson in 1814 and from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1817. Following a mission trip, he took his first pastorate at a Presbyterian church in Bedford, Pennsylvania, where he stayed from 1818 to 1822. He left upon his election as president of Centre College, which had been chartered nearly four years earlier and was struggling financially. During his time in Danville, Centre awarded its first five degrees and transferred governing authority to the church in exchange for financial support. Chamberlain left Centre in 1826 to become president of the College of Louisiana, a predecessor of Centenary College of Louisiana, and stayed until 1828. He then moved to Mississippi and made plans, later approved by the church, to open a school in Claiborne County. The school opened as Oakland College in May 1830; Chamberlain was its first president. He was strongly anti-slavery and helped to create the Mississippi Colonization Society during the 1830s.

Chamberlain was murdered at his home in 1851 by a local landowner named George Briscoe, who struck Chamberlain with a whip several times before fatally stabbing him in the chest. Most reports agree that the men were engaged in an argument, though the subject of the argument is disputed; some conclude the reason to be Chamberlain's anti-secession and anti-slavery views, while other reports make note of a student that was recently expelled from Oakland for a pro-secession speech as a possible motive. Chamberlain was buried two days later in Oakland College Cemetery, the same day Briscoe's body was found following his purported suicide. Oakland ultimately did not survive the Civil War and the death of another of its presidents; the campus was sold to the state of Mississippi in 1871 and reopened as what is now Alcorn State University.

Early life and education Jeremiah Chamberlain was born January 5, 1794, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. His father was James Chamberlain, the son of immigrants from Ireland and a colonel with the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War, and his mother was Ann Sample, from York County, Pennsylvania. He was one of five sons (and one of nine children in total) in the family. Jeremiah was raised on his family's farm near Gettysburg, and he received his primary education from a classical school in York County. In 1809, aged fifteen, Chamberlain left the family farm to study under, and board with, the teacher and minister David McConaughy, described by the biographer William Buell Sprague as having "kept an excellent school for the preparation of young men for college". He graduated from Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1814; after leaving Dickinson, he enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary and was a member of its first graduating class in 1817. The Bedford church had been organized around 1780 and Chamberlain is listed as its third pastor by church historian George Norcross. Chamberlain also directed a classical school during his time at Bedford, and he preached from time to time at a church in Schellsburg. In 1819, he was appointed to more missionary work by the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA), this time for six months in the Missouri Territory.

Entrance to academia, 1822–1828 On December 31, 1822, Chamberlain was elected president of a young Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. several years before he was elected president in 1822. Chamberlain entered office upon his formal inauguration on July 2, 1823. and likely earlier as he had vacated Centre's presidency in September 1826. His immediate successor at Centre was David C. Procter in an interim capacity for roughly seven months until Gideon Blackburn was appointed to the full-time role. Chamberlain was the first of three consecutive Dickinson-alumni presidents of Centre.

In Louisiana, like at Centre, Chamberlain taught classes as part of his role as president, though only those for juniors and seniors; he was paid $3,000 annually. After presenting his plans to the Mississippi Presbytery, the school was approved and the PCUSA opened Oakland College in Claiborne County on May 14, 1830, with Chamberlain as president. Its initial enrollment was three students, all of whom had come to Oakland from Louisiana, though it grew to 65 students by the end of the first term. The college received a charter from the Mississippi Legislature in 1831. A donation of $20,000 by John Ker allowed Oakland to establish an endowed professorship in theology in 1837; the minister S. Beach Jones was the first person permanently appointed to the position, though he had left to take a pastorate in New Jersey by October 1838. By 1839, the college's assets had grown to include a campus of , nineteen buildings, and an endowment approaching $100,000 (equivalent to $ million in ). Oakland received one of the largest donations to any antebellum Mississippi school, a $50,000 gift from the Natchez, Mississippi, businessman David Hunt, who donated roughly $150,000 in total to the school over its lifetime. By 1850, Oakland had graduated roughly 100 students.

Personal life An 1839 map of the Colony of Liberia, which shows a "Mississippi Colony" Chamberlain married Rebecca Blaine (October 29, 1792 – October 12, 1836), of Carlisle, on July 29, 1818. The couple had eleven children before Rebecca's abrupt death at age 43. Chamberlain remarried to Catharine Metzger, of Hanover, Pennsylvania, in 1845; they did not have children. One of Chamberlain's sons attended Oakland and graduated in 1851 but shortly after died of yellow fever.

Chamberlain was opposed to slavery. (Some sources claim he received this degree in 1825, during his term as president of Centre, though contemporary newspaper reporting shows that he received a D.D.) from Centre at the school's 1828 commencement and no sources list him as having received the same honorary degree from Centre twice. While Briscoe's exact motives are not known, sources agree that he arrived outside Chamberlain's house, perhaps drunk, and the men began to argue. Briscoe proceeded to accuse Chamberlain of dishonesty and made other disparaging remarks before knocking Chamberlain to the ground by hitting him in the head with a whip. When Chamberlain stood, holding a piece of wood in an attempt to defend himself, Briscoe stabbed him in the chest with a Bowie knife. though a modern biography by Dickinson College says he died in his wife's arms some "minutes later" and a contemporary report from The Port Gibson Herald and Correspondent specifies that he died in roughly fifteen minutes. and the expulsion of a student, supposedly for giving a speech in favor of secession. Some sources classified the murder as an assassination. Its next two presidents were James Purviance, a missionary and minister who resigned due to ill health in 1860, and William L. Breckinridge, a minister who, like Chamberlain, later became president of Centre College. The college closed in 1861 at the outbreak of the American Civil War. It reopened briefly after the war's end, under the leadership of president Joseph Calvin, though his death soon after quickly led to the school's permanent end. In 1871, the campus was sold to the state, and it reopened as Alcorn A&M College (now Alcorn State University). Chamberlain's papers were originally housed by the academy before being moved to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson.