Elihu Whittlesey Baldwin was a prominent American Presbyterian minister and the first president of Wabash College.
Background
He was born on December 25, 1789 in Durham, Greene County, the fourth child and eldest son of Deacon Jonathan Baldwin, and grandson of Abiel and Mehitable (Johnson) Baldwin of Durham, Connecticut His mother was Submit, daughter of Deacon Christopher and Patience Lord of Saybrook, Connecticut He was a sober-minded boy with little relish for sports but fond of books, and exceedingly careful, it is said, in the selection of his reading. His parents were people of limited means, and he secured his education in the face of many difficulties.
Education
He prepared for college under his pastor, Rev. Jesse Townsend, an alumnus of Yale, which college Baldwin entered in 1807. At the opening of his sophomore year he left college to earn money, and spent a year in Bethlehem, Connecticut, as assistant in the school of Rev. Azel Backus and later took charge of the academy in Fairfield. In 1810 he returned to the next lower class in college, graduating in 1812. After two years more of teaching at Fairfield, he entered Andover Theological Seminary, from which he graduated in 1817.
Career
On September 10, of that year, he was ordained as an evangelist at Londonderry, N. H. , by the Presbytery of Londonderry. He had expected to take up missionary work in western New York and Ohio, but while visiting in New York City he was persuaded to accept the position of city missionary. The field given him was a populous, destitute, and immoral section of the city, and here he labored with self-forgetting zeal for three years. His activities resulted in the establishment of the Seventh Presbyterian Church, over which he was installed pastor on December 25, 1820. During his ministry, in spite of many difficulties, it grew into a church of 600 members. In 1834, a visitor to the city asked him to become president of a Presbyterian college recently founded on the edge of civilization in the upper Wabash country, and in February of the following year he accepted, leaving his church the first of May. Having spent several months in securing funds for the college, he entered on his duties in November, and was inaugurated in July 1836.
He gave himself to the upbuilding of the college without reserve, declining two calls to important city churches. He had to face ecclesiastical divisions and collisions, stringent poverty, the reluctance of men of means in the East to extend aid to new colleges in the West, and the general lack of appreciation of the fact that the educated men needed for teaching, preaching, and other professions in the West ought to be educated in the West. To all these he proved himself superior. From the start, the institution was intended to offer liberal culture to all classes, but in order to get a charter from the legislature, "prejudiced against colleges, pianos, and Yankees, " it was necessary to name it "Wabash Manual Labor College and Teachers' Seminary. "
After a tedious journey into the northern part of the state in behalf of the college during the summer of 1840, he was taken ill and died in October of that year.
Achievements
Elihu Whittlesey Baldwin is rememvered for his religious tracts: "On Fashionable Amusements" (New England Tract Society, 1815) and "Universalism Exposed" (New England Tract Society, 1823). He also published works aimed at use in Sunday schools - a book of moralizing stories, "The Five Apprentices" (1828) and "The Young Freethinker Reclaimed" (American Sunday-School Union, 1829).
He was a gentle, simple, practical man, of sound learning, with no unusual gifts save unflagging energy and an extraordinary capacity for heroic fidelity to duty.
Connections
On May 12, 1819, he married Julia, daughter of Elias A. and Elizabeth (Cook) Baldwin of Newark, New Jersey.
