Wesleyan College - Veterropt Yearbook (Macon, GA)

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Ol)rea6 of Sacrifice great struggle. John Howard, Elijah Sinclair, John W. 1 alley, I.ovic Pierce, and J. L. Moultrie, all ministers of the Methodist Church, traveled over the South on horseback, begging from door to door for money for the new college. Although the cost of the building was only about $50,000, it was hard to raise the money. In 1837 there was a great financial panic which lasted nine years. George Foster Pierce was only twenty-eight years old when he came to this new college as president, but already he showed promise of becoming the eloquent speaker of whom Lord Macaulay later said: “The purest diction in use on the American continent today is that of George Foster Pierce.” Pierce, in addition to his arduous duties as presi¬ dent of a brand-new college and minister of the Meth¬ odist Conference, wrote innumerable articles in maga¬ zines and newspapers of the day defending the right of woman to equal education with men. Many of these articles we have today, showing his intense devotion to the college. In one of these he says: “If it is allowed to fail, it will be a blot on the church to which it belongs, a disgrace to the state, and a misfortune to generations to come.’ Four years after the opening of Wesleyan, financial disaster befell the new college, and the college proper¬ ties were sold at auction. But here, also, the friends of Wesleyan showed their willingness to make any necessary sacrifice to save her for future generations. President William H. Ellison along with George W. Persons, William Baily, John Rawls, James Dean, Ambrose Chapman, James A. Everett and William Scott bought in the buildings with their own money and carried on the work of the college as usual until such time as the church could repay them. It was in 1842 that the Methodist Church assumed full responsibility for the college, although even before this the group who were most active in founding the college w’ere Methodist ministers. The Georgia Messenger for December 1 1, 1838, carried an announcement of a benefit being put on by the Sewing Society of the Methodist Church to raise money to send girls to Wesleyan whose circumstances were too limited to permit them to attend. This was the first example of a “scholarship fund for worthy students, and it was raised in the first year of Wesleyan’s existence. Today scores of girls • 9 •

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•m ■ Ol)£ Scarlet From THE very earliest DAYS, more than a hundred years ago, when t he idea of equal education for women first dawned upon the world, Wesleyan College has inspired in the hearts of men and women a deep feeling of selfless devotion. It has always been so. Wesleyan has never been wealthy; never, for long at a time, free of hardship; yet a scarlet thread of sacrifice on the part of those who loved her has been woven into every year of her history. It is unique among colleges, this brave, sacrificial loyalty that Geok ;k Foster Pierce has carried the college through so many trying periods. Many great and wise and influential people have given their devotion to this college; a few of them have been wealthy, a great many of them humble. The urgent desire to fight to the death for Wesleyan was born even before her charter was granted. The handful of men who appealed to the state legislature for the charter had already argued themselves hoarse with those who said “the female mind was incapable of development and “all that a woman needed to know was how to read her Bible and paint a daisy in water colors. No doubt they were al¬ most too exhausted to think of their best points as they spoke to the legislature on December 23, 1836 a legislature tired and eager to get home for Christmas and not at all interested in woman’s education anyhow. hen the bill seemed lost, esleyan’s first champion outside of that little group of founders sprang to his feet. Alexander Stephens, then a young lawyer, was so moved that he made an impromptu speech. It was delivered in so fiery and eloquent a manner that his hearers were convinced, and the charter granted. It is unfortunate that we have no record of his speech, hut it was made from the heat of his convictions and he had no notes. We do know that he said later he considered his efforts on behalf of woman ' s education among the most important things he had ever done. As soon as the charter was granted, there began for the founders a period of - 8 -

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arc receiving aid from funds raised for this purpose by friends of Wesleyan, benefac¬ tors, anti alumnae. By 1861, no doubt Bishop George Pierce and his colleagues had routed the “enemies of the college” who, Pierce said, “de¬ nounced the idea in the begin¬ ning as farcical and ridiculous, and periled the accuracy of their judgment on predictions of its failure.” By this time we hear no more about people saying that women could not learn. Then trouble descended in the form of the War Between the States. Most south¬ ern colleges closed during this period, some of them permanently; but not Wes¬ leyan. Some of her students had harrowing experiences in getting to the college; many of them stayed in the dormitories through Christmas holidays because of the dangers of travel; all of them practiced the most rigid economy in order to send blankets and supplies to the Soldiers’ Hospital. The college opened its doors to refugee families so that they might be able to eke out an existence. But the thought uppermost in the minds of the president and faculty was that Wesleyan should go on, that nothing must be permitted to hinder her great work. A bint of some of the hardships suffered by the faculty at this time is given in these excerpts of several letters from Cosby W. Smith to members of his family: “We opened yesterday with forty pupils, but others have come in since and we Iio|k that they will return gradually as they find that Macon is comparatively safe now. We hear that most of Sherman’s army has gone back in the direction of Marietta. “W e are trying to devise some plan here to get along, and perhaps we may suc¬ ceed in working it out. We propose to sell the gas pipes in the building in this way: g pil cs k ong to us, the pianos to the trustees. We have more pianos than we then u ° Ur P nt,patronage. We might swap the gas pipes for pianos and We exn et ,Kar ' ’ 1 not a °f our parlor furniture and our iron safe, etc. heavy work.’’ “ ° Wh ° ,e CO,,e S c course, though it will give us northern ma • H 1 prtsl cnt ot college at the time of the War, the only of the War 7 - ° thlS capacit y ° n, y fourteen years after the close of the War-at a t,me when relations between the North and South were still - 10 .