THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF WILLIAM HOLMES McGUFFEY: PHILOSOPHER, TEACHER, PREACHER.
By W. M. Thornton,
Dean of the Department of Engineering.
Among my earliest recollections of the University of Virginia is the figure of Dr. William Holmes McGuffey. He was a man so ugly as not to be readily forgotten; a huge mouth, a portentous nose, sandy reddish grey hair worn so long that it curled up a little above his ears, a vast forehead heightened by baldness, keen eyes that snapped and twinkled at you. His dress was wonderfully neat, but the most old-fashioned I ever saw outside a museum. For his Sunday morning lectures to his class in Bible Studies he would array himself in a dark blue coat with brass buttons cut somewhat like the evening dress coat of the present day and known from its shape as a "shadbellied coat." Around his neck was a high linen collar surrounded by a Voluminous black silk stock. When Professor Francis H. Smith first saw him he wore knee-breeches with black silk stocking and low shoes fastened with shining buckles. In my time he had reconciled himself to trousers; but it seemed to me that this was his only concession to modernity. When that mouth of his broadened into a smile he looked to me like some genial monster. When he scowled even the young devils in his classroom believed and trembled.
I never matriculated in the School of Moral Philosophy; but my dearly loved roommate, Lennox Turnbull, was an enthusiastic student of that dismal science and a prime favorite with the old doctor. Thus it was that three times a week I was regaled with stories of what had happened in Old Guff's lecture room. Lennox was a pious youth and saw to it that I attended those Sunday Bible Studies. And they were richly worth attending. It was a wonderful sight, not to be paralleled in these lazy, degenerate days. When the Rotunda clock struck nine on Sunday morning, Dr. McGuffey stalked into his lectureroom and mounted the rostrum. Every seat would be filled with ah attentive, silent throng of students. The talk would begin at once—simple, informal, direct, sententious. He did not appear so much to explain things difficult, obscure, dark; rather he seemed to illuminate them, and then the clouds would lift suddenly and all would seem plain, clear, shadowless, easy. We always resented the substitution of any casual visitor for our own professor. Once a distinguished clergyman from Baltimore happened to be here on a Sunday and took McGuffey's place. To this day I take a vengeful pleasure in using for my lectures on Dynamics one of the poor man's fatuous remarks to illustrate the incapacity of a certain type of mind for scientific thought.
It was not difficult even from these Sunday talks to detect the secret of McGuffey's method. In my experience every truly great teacher has developed his own original method—a method suited to his temperament, his topic, his time. That pseudoscience, which it is the fashion to dignify by the high-sounding name of Pedagogics, comes limping along about thirty-three years late, picks up the crumbs from the rich man's table, and tries to consolidate them into a loaf of bread. Meanwhile new subjects have arisen, new teachers have originated new methods to expound them, and little Patty Pedagogy toddles along about the same distance behind the men who lead the procession. McGuffey had discovered a method for himself and had learned touse it with matchless skill. His method was to illustrate every abstract proposition with some concrete example. His felicity and fertility in the application of this method were quite wonderful. He was rich in pungent anecdote, apt in citation from history and literature and life, skillful in analogy. The onephrase you would hear from all his students was, "He makes us think. He made them talk too, as I can testify. It needed a certain sort of skill and patience to steer the conversation away from old Guff's apothems. In the class room his procedure was Socratic. He lectured at each meeting on the work assigned for the next day; but the larger part of the time was spent in questioning on previously assigned work. He made himself, like Socrates, the intellectual midwife for his students; stimulating and clarifying their ideas by carefully directed interrogatories. He met the thoughtful student more than half way with encouragement and applause. He crushed the idler with swift sarcasm and ready ridicule. His class was to him not a mob; he individualized every man before him and searched out his intellectual quality.
He delighted in hurling explosive shells of wit and wisdom from his rostrum into the midst of his class. "Forgive your enemy! Never! Not until he repents him of the wrong and the harm he has done you. Then he is no longer your enemy." "Some men are helped by a discipline of adversity; some by a discipline of prosperity. As for me I was always best under a discipline of prosperity. I never heard of any man falling asleep while Dr. McGuffey was lecturing. There was a story, which went the rounds of the class, that Ned Massie, who sat in the front row, had learned to sleep while the Doctor was lecturing, but with his eyes open. I never believed it.
The effect of this wonderful teaching upon his auditors was no less permanent that magical. An old Virginia lawyer, Camm Patteson, writing of him thirty-six years after his graduation, says:
"He was one of the few absolutely clear thinkers that this generation has produced, and he had the happy faculty of imparting his knowledge to others in brief and perspicuous language."
Dr. James Mercer Garnett testified that "McGuffey's services as a professor are engrafted on the minds of his pupils, for it was in his lecture-room that the mind of the young pupil was stimulated to thought. * * * It was inevitable that all should gain something; even the idle student could learn by listening, without opening a text book."
A great Virginia teacher, William R. Abbott, writes me as follows:
"Dr. McGuffey had the reputation of being a great teacher, an estimate which I never thought justified; but I must say that his teaching was clear, and that he rendered the abstruse points of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy very intelligible to his scholars."
From a letter sent by that brilliant and erudite philologiaji, Dr. Edward S. Joynes, I quote the following:
"As a professor Dr. McGuffey was universally revered; as a teacher he was almost without an equal. * * * In a letter written from the University of Berlin in 1857, where I had heard the most renowned scholars of the world, I said that I had met none who were equal as teachers to Dr. Harrison, Dr. McGuffey and Professor Courtenay, and this is still my mature judgment."
Dr. Daniel Read, who was his colleague at Ohio University, said of him:
"I remember once to have heard a pupil of Sir William Hamilton say: 'Dr. McGuffey teaches Hamilton better and more easily than Sir William himself;' and he added 'He makes Mill's Political Economy plainer than Mill himself made it.'"
Dr. McGuffey was not a Virginian, not even a Southerner. He was born on the 23rd of September, 1800, in Washington County, Pennsylvania. This was sixteen years before the example of the Duke of Wellington brought trousers into fashion, which may possibly explain the Doctor's addiction to kneebreeches. His father, Alexander McGuffey, was six years old when in August, 1774, his parents emigrated from Scotland to America and settled in the backwoods. Alexander grew up on the frontier, became famous as hunter, fighter, Indian scout; served under St. Clair and Wayne; and when the wars with the redskins closed in 1794, married Anna Holmes and settled in Washington County. In 1802 he removed with his wife and infant son to Ohio and there in Trumbull County created for himself a new home.
A tender little story is told of the mother of our old professor. A Presbyterian preacher, riding through the sparsely settled wilderness, passed her cabin. As he rode by he heard the voice of a woman raised in prayer to God. There in that desolate solitude, with no human ear to hear, no human hand to help, she was- praying to her Father in Heaven; praying that her little boy might be fitted to be a minister of His Holy Gospel. The preacher rode on. He came presently to another cabin and stopped to ask who lived in the house he had just passed. He learned the name and character of the praying woman and her husband, and turned back to talk with her and her boy. The result was that this clergyman volunteered to be the boy's teacher. He lived six miles away and William's labour could not be spared from his father's farm. There the lad dwelt, worked by day, studied by night. The preacher furnished him the books; the blaze of pine knots on the cabin hearth gave him light. At regular times he would walk six miles to the clergyman's home, recite his lessons, and then walk back. Dr. McGuffey was a reserved man concerning all personal affairs; but those who knew him best find in this story the explanation of his life-long, impassioned interest in common schools for the education of the poor.
Dr. McGuffey used to talk of a school he knew in his boyhood, founded by a Presbyterian clergyman, Thomas Hughes. This school at Darlington, Pennsylvania, was called Old Stone Academy. The tuition fee was three dollars a year. The charge for board was seventy-five cents a week. The seats were logs, flattened on top and bottom by the whip-saw. It has been stated that Dr. McGuffey was prepared for college at Old Stone Academy. Of this there is no evidence. His training came from the unnamed benefactor, who has been described. When he was ready for college.his father, the Indian scout and fighter, was either unable or unwilling to help him and young William had to work his own way; teaching one year, studying the next; labouring through his vacations; enduring hardness; knowing privation. In his later years he wrote to an old friend: "Labour with us was first a necessity; it has long been a luxury." It is thus that in all ages the most valiant soldiers in the battle of life have been trained. To the capable boy poverty is no curse; riches are seldom a blessing.
When young McGuffey was ready for college it was natural that he should turn his steps to his birthplace. The dates are conclusive records of his arduous struggles. Not until 1826 was he graduated from Washington College, the same institution which has since become by consolidation Washington and Jefferson College, of Washington, Pa. Not until 1829 did he complete privately his theological studies and receive ordination to the ministry of the Presbyterian Church. It always seemed to me that Dr. McGuffey lacked something of the urbanity and unconscious graciousness of his colleagues. He was usually genial with students; but it was a sort of calculated, conscious geniality. Very slight provocation would make him austere, harsh, stern. Sometimes he was cruel, though perhaps intending always the student's highest good. "I am very fond of your ticket, Dr. McGuffey," said one of my college-mates, "but I find it difficult and make little headway." "Yes, Sir," answered the professor, "I have noticed that your appetite for Moral Philosophy was much better than your digestion." Witty, but wickedly severe! Of another student he remarked, "His head is like a gourd full of gnats; plenty of ideas, but badly arranged." I fancy that this sort of thing came from the hardness and narrowness of his early life. The man's heart-was good; he was capable of a thousand kindnesses, guilty of unmeasured generosities; but having faced and conquered many hardships, he had forgotten how to be always gentle, always serene.
No man valued more that Dr. McGuffey the dignity and the decorum of the academic life. No man resented more promptly and energetically than he any infraction of them. In my day as a student a coloured Sunday school was taught every afternoon in the old University Chapel. The young ladies of the community and certain of the students did the teaching. After the school was dismissed the little blackamoors delighted in playing about the University Colonnades. Now, the Colonnades were Dr. McGufifey's chosen promenade. Clad in his old fashioned Sunday suit, carrying a stout walking cane, he would slowly pace up one side, down the other. These little black imps were a deadly offense to him. We used to watch him stalk them, slinking from column to column and finally rushing out on them with savage aspect and brandished stick. The little demons were always too quick for him; they would dash away and escape down one of the numerous alleys, hooting derisively. I constantly hoped that he would catch one and kill him; but he never did; the poor old man went down disappointed to his grave.
His students also would on rare occasion overtax his patience; not from any lack of genuine respect and affection, but from the ingrained brutality of healthy youth. Among the divertisements of our day were bands of travelling musicians who would come and play for us at the University hotels during the dinner hour. There were usually a man with a harp, one or two boys with violins, and a black-haired damsel with a tambourine. The dark lady would trip around among the tables after each tune and solicit our contributions, which were dropped into her tarnLourine. On one of these occasions a certain student, not in the Moral Philosophy class, bribed the musicians to do his wicked will. Dr. McGuffey's lectures were given in the East basement room of the Rotunda. The rostrum was just at the entrance, separated from it by a tall wooden screen. The lecture hour was half past three. The class had assembled. The professor came in and took his seat. The roll was called and the lecture began. Just then from the hallway behind the desk the notes of the harp were heard; the violins chimed in; the tambourine added its burden. Through the lecture-room there ran a gleeful titter. Dr. McGuffey sprang to his feet and turned to go to the door. A gentle wave of applause swept over the class. The professor whirled around with that famous scowl disfiguring his countenance. "Gentlemen!" he said, "try not to be blackguards." I cannot remember that his students very seriously resented these explosions of acerbity. They knew too well his big, true heart; the grand brain that guided their studies; the noble unselfishness of his laborious life. They seemed to love him all the better for these small infirmities.
Dr. McGuffey's parents removed from Pennsylvania to Ohio during his early childhood. It must, have been a proud moment for them when the son was appointed Professor of Ancient Languages in Miami University, at Oxford, Ohio, shortly before his graduation in 1826 from Washington College. The movement for the organization of a system of public schools began in Ohio in 1825. Dr. McGuffey was thus in intimate contact with this movement from its inception all through the twenty years which elapsed until his appointment to his chair in the University of Virginia. In 1832 he was transferred to the chair of Moral Philosophy in Miami. In 1836 he was called to the presidency of Cincinnati College in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1839 he became the President of Ohio University, at Athens, Ohio, which four years later, blighted by political influences, went into eclipse. In 1843 he was made a professor in the Woodward High School in Cincinnati. In each of these positions he came into contact with new phases of the public school problem. He left Ohio a firm believer in the value of the American public school as an instrument for the development of the power and prosperity of this nation. On July 28th, 1845, he was appointed to the chair of
Moral Philosophy in the University of Virginia. He accepted the appointment, removed to Charlottesville, and at once in conjunction with Professor John B. Minor began a systematic canvass of Virginia in advocacy of public schools. These two able and devoted men used their vacations in visiting all the more important centres of population and delivering addresses supporting the movement for public schools. From 1849 to 1851 William H. Ruffner (himself the son of an ardent advocate of free schools) served the University of Virginia as Chaplain and came thus under McGuffey's influence. It was Ruffner who twenty years later organized the public school system of Virginia and it was at the University of Virginia that he held the first Summer School of Methods. Dr. McGuffey did not live to see the present generous consummation of his hopes. The public schools of Virginia which he saw were far below his ideals. They taught boys in his trenchant phrase "to read well enough to devour a dime novel and to write well enough to forge a cheque." Doubtless he looks down now upon the tree which he helped to plant with sentiments more complacent and hopes more roseate. Certainly he must be counted among the pioneers in public school work in Virginia.
I think no one ever forgot that Dr. McGuffey was a clergyman. There was nothing of ecclesiastical bombast or pretension about him; but somehow all who saw and heard him felt that here, to use a good old phrase, was a Man of God. When he first came to Charlottesville, Professor George Tucker still occupied the pavilion No. 9 on the Lawn which the Board of Visitors had assigned to his successor. For this reason Dr. McGuffey and his family were for several months inmates of the old Kelley home on Park Street. There still resides among us a lady who was then a tiny little girl, living with her grandmother, Mrs. Kelley. I wish I could have her tell you, in the same delicately delicious way in which she told me, the story of Dr. McGuffey's love for little children, of the games he played with her and his own little ones out on the lawn, and of his leaving them to go and compose his sermon. The old house had a great garret room under the roof with a window in either end. The doctor would pace slowly around it, thinking out his discourse; and the little girl would stand on the lawn and watch him pass one window and then race around the house and catch him as he passed the other. It brought back to me those familiar promenades of William and Laura backwards and forwards, around the Triangle and up and down the Colonnades. We were young then and they seemed to us so terribly old. We would stand and watch them and wonder what they talked about, what antediluvian flowers of senti-. ment shed their fragrance on the air they breathed. They kept early hours and in the evenings their house was soon closed and the windows darkened. Dr. McGuffey's porch was in consequence the most sequestered spot on the University Lawn, and a favorite resort for lovers. One night a fond couple suddenly heard a movement behind them. The wily and witty old professor had opened the door and stood in his bath robe looking down on the pair. "My young friends," he said in most courteous accents, "would you mind very much if I asked you to go away? The murmur of your voices brings back to my dear Laura and to me such sad memories of our lost youth."
From the beginning Dr. McGuffey had trained himself to the habit of ex tempore discourse. He never wrote out a sermon or a lecture and spoke always without notes or from a mere scrap of paper on which he had scrawled a few topical headings. A member of his household told me that of more than three thousand public discourses his ordination sermon was the only one he had ever composed in writing. Preparation, however, was never stinted; he had always thought out his whole argument so fully that his mastery of the subject seemed complete. His tone was even and quiet; his enunciation crisp and cold. If I were called upon to describe his style in one word I should say it was clear. That certainly was its dominant character. He was fond of preaching and for more than two years supplied the pulpit of the Charlottesville Presbyterian Church in the interim between the pastorates of Rev. William J. Hoge, D. D., and Rev. Edgar Woods, D. p.; that is, from the fall of 1863 to the spring of 1866. The lady of whom I have spoken had by that time grown into womanhood. "Of all the sermons I have ever heard," she told me, "I remember those best." A striking compliment paid after fifty years to discourses whose appeal was rather to the head than to the heart. For Dr. McGuffey was never eloquent. There was no fervor, no tenderness, no pathos, no passion in his sermons. His religion was morality untouched by emotion.
He preached often to the coloured people and was greatly beloved by them. When they determined to buy the old Delavan building in Charlottesville for a church Dr. McGuffey helped them with a handsome donation. Their pastor was William Barnett, a negro born in Africa and educated in America. To him and to Dr. McGuffey are largely due the helpful and friendly relations, which have always existed between blacks and whites in Charlottesville. Dr. McGuffey never owned a slave; but his hired servants gave him a constant loyalty. His cook, Susan Robinson, served him for twenty-one years. Her granddaughter, Susan Jones, still living and the wife of our good neighbour, William Gibbons, was from her childhood an inmate of his household, and if she were here tonight would speak to you as she spoke to me of Dr. McGuffey, with the simplest and sincerest reverence and affection. "He was a perfect gentleman," she said, "and a true Christian. He loved the coloured people and helped them whenever he could." She told me again, what I remembered in part, the story of McGuffey's funeral; how Barnett and his congregation asked and received permission to attend the services in the Public Hall of the University; how the whole coloured congregation, save the few who could not obtain a dispensation from their duties, was present; and how they followed the body of their friend to the University cemetery and sang their funeral hymns over his open grave. I do not know what Dr. McGuffey's sentiments were on the once burning question of negro slavery nor have I cared to enquire. One thing is certain; he was no mere fair-weather friend to Virginia and the Virginians. When the dark days came he shared in all its tragic force the affliction of our people.
Pavilion No. 9, which was assigned by the Visitors to Dr. McGuffey at the time of his appointment, remained his home thenceforward to the end of his life. After the death of his first wife, who was Miss Harriet Spinning of Dayton, Ohio, and was survived by three children (two daughters and a son), he married again Miss Laura Howard, the daughter of one of his colleagues. It was this lady whom the students of my day remember so well as the constant companion of his else solitary walks. It can hardly be doubted that as the years advanced upon him he withdrew himself too much from the society of his associates and friends. Men need in part at least to live with men. Dr. McGuffey cut himself off voluntarily from all such intimacies, and the lack of the wholesome reactions which arise from daily contact with our fellow-workers soon began to affect his temper and his acts. He grew arbitrary and exacting, absented himself from the meetings of the University Faculty, ran his school by selfmade rules and paid little attention to the general laws and usages ordained for the government of the University. His graduating examinations were held under a code of his own devising and he seemed to grade his students with scant reference to the examination papers and mainly on his general estimate of their attainments reached by personal observation during the months of the session. My room-mate left the University on account of 'ill health in the spring and was not present to take the graduating examination; he had been an excellent student and was a personal favorite of the professor. Dr. McGuffey wrote to him that if he cared to come back and receive it, he might have his diploma, although he had not completed the course. Such lawless proceedings were not altogether foreign to the natural temper of a man, who strove always to exalt the spirit above the letter of the law; but it is not difficult to believe that in some measure .they were symptoms of the impending end. In all other respects the natural force of the old professor seemed unabated. He .strode blithely along, brandishing his stout stick, his eyes keen, his head erect, his speech crisp and trenchant. If he was a law unto himself, the other lawmakers never cared or dared to overrule his decisions.
No account of Dr. McGuffey's work as a friend of education would be complete without some reference to the series of Spellers and Readers, which he prepared for use in American schools. It was at Miami University, while he was Professor of Ancient Languages, as we learn from Dr. Daniel Read, "that he became the author and compiler of these excellent books. He conducted large classes in Latin and Greek, and at the same time while compiling his Readers, he most laboriously taught a class of mere beginners, in order to be better qualified to prepare a set of books to teach children by progressive steps and practical methods to read, to spell, to pronounce, and to understand the English language." For many years these books were standards for the primary pupils. I myself was brought up on them and I never knew a child of my generation, who had not been taught to spell and read out of McGuffey's books. The sales ran into the millions, and the publishers had nothing to do but sit by the printing presses and get rich. I am informed by descendants of the members of his family that Dr. McGuffey himself, after the payment of the original $1,000 royalty, never made anything from these remarkable books. He gave the copyrights away and consistently refused to accept any honorarium from the firms who were growing opulent on the results of his labours. It would seem however that millionaires sometimes have souls. When a wonderfully fat dividend was to be declared the publishers would send Mrs. McGuffey a present. Among the heirlooms of the family are still beautiful shawls, handsome bracelets, costly breastpins—contributions by the publishers to what we might call the McGuffey conscience-fund. I think they should at least have sent the old doctor a fresh supply of knee breeches and silk stockings.
Once upon a time there was a little boy, who lived with his grandparents on an old-fashioned plantation in Albemarle County, thirteen miles from Charlottesville. His playmates were the darky boys and girls on the place. His lessons were taught to him from McGuffey's books. Thirteen miles of Albemarle red clay roads were no joke in those days, and the old family coach with the fat old coach horses and the negro driver consumed a whole day on one trip to town. Such journeys were rare and this little boy in all his life had never been so far from home. At last the day came when his grandmother told him that she would take him to town, and asked what he most wanted to do and see. "I want to go to the University," was his reply. The kind old lady had expected toy shops, candy stores, anything but the University. "Why do you wish to go to the University?" she asked. "I want to see Mr. Guffey," answered the little boy, "the great Mr. Guffey—the man what wrote the readers."
[Remainder omitted]
