Grass-roots Garrisonians in central Massachusetts: The case of Hubbardston's Jonas and Susan Clark

Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Winter 2003 by Koelsch, William A

In 1897 codicils, Clark mandated the establishment of a three-year undergraduate college for men, under a president and faculty responsible directly to the Trustees. Tuition should be free the first year of this new division's existence, rising to $25 per year in the second, and to $50 in the third (a tuition charge which was indeed not increased until after World War I). Clark also specified that the college should be a place where young men of limited means "may obtain at a moderate cost..a practical education which shall fit them for useful citizenship and their work in life," leaving half his residuary estate to endow the new institution. After Jonas Clark's death but before that of Susan Clark, the college was established on these terms.

In terms of broadening access to higher education, the new college also fulfilled the hopes of its abolitionist founders. When it was announced, the Worcester Board of Trade's magazine reported that "Many a boy said at once, 'That means a college course for me, since I can board at home and still go to college."' The streetcar system allowed students from all parts of the city and twenty-seven surrounding smaller towns to get to the university for a five-cent fare. Simplified entrance requirements, living at home or boarding inexpensively near the campus (there were initially no dormitories), no intercollegiate sports, low tuition and the prospect of saving one year's worth of that, combined to broaden access to higher education for many students for whom college would otherwise have been out of the question. The inaugural group of seventy-nine undergraduate students was thirty-two larger than any Massachusetts college had ever enrolled in its first year.

On the evidence, Magdol's suggestion that we need to examine post-Civil War institutions and communities for evidences of the abolitionist legacy appears to have merit. Clark University in its intellectual foundations had indeed drawn on the burgeoning research model pioneered in this country at Johns Hopkins, from which President Hall and many of the original Clark faculty had come, and thus deserves its place in the historical record of late nineteenth-century research university foundations. Morally committed by Jonas and Susan Clark to equality of opportunity and to the elimination of all "religious, political or social bias," Clark University, and especially its "collegiate department," may plausibly also be seen in Magdol's terms, as a post-- emancipation legacy of the abolitionist movement.

1 Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 80.

2 See, e.g., Edward Magdol, The Antislavery Rank and File: A Social Profile of the Abolitionists' Constituency (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986) and Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

3 See Andrew S. Barker, "Chauncey Langdon Knapp and Political Abolitionism in Vermont, 1833-1841," New England Quarterly 73 (2000): 434-462.