Jeremiah Chamberlain

Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Chamberlain was a pioneering Presbyterian minister, educator, and institution builder. As the founding president of Oakland College, Chamberlain led the institution from its humble beginnings in 1830 until his untimely and violent death in 1851.

Chamberlain was born near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on 5 January 1794 to devout Presbyterian parents. His father served as a colonel in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and his mother reportedly dedicated him to the ministry as an infant.

Chamberlain attended Dickinson College from 1812 to 1814, during which time he made a profession of faith and joined the Presbyterian Church. He then studied under Archibald Alexander and Samuel Miller at the newly established Princeton Seminary. He graduated seminary and was licensed to preach by Carlisle Presbytery in 1817.

In 1817, the Presbyterian General Assembly appointed Chamberlain and another Princeton schoolmate, Sylvester Larned, to “visit the destitute towns on the Mississippi, between Natchez and New Orleans; and if practicable, visit the settlements on the Mobile.” The Mississippi Synod reported that he conducted the first-ever protestant worship service in Mobile. After a six-month mission, he returned north in 1818 to pastor and teach in Bedford, Pennsylvania.

Chamberlain again traveled south in 1822, this time to accept the presidency of Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. He left in 1825 to become president of the state-funded college at Jackson, Louisiana. Religious revivals spread among students during his time at Princeton, Centre College, and in Louisiana. A disagreement with the college trustees over the place of religion in students’ instruction led him to resign in 1828 and establish his own academy in the same town.

Chamberlain’s educational and pastoral efforts coincided with a denominational push to establish a Presbyterian school in was then the Southwest US. The General Assembly resolved in 1825 that “it is expedient forthwith to establish a theological seminary in the West.” Church historian Milton Winter notes that “there was no Presbyterian institution in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and the Arkansas Territory—an expanse of 145,000 square miles.”

In response to this need, Mississippi Presbytery appointed Chamberlain president of its newly proposed college in 1830. The school first met at Bethel Church in Claiborne County, with three students who had followed Chamberlain from Jackson, Louisiana. It moved to its permanent home in January 1831. Chamberlain reportedly felled the first tree on the site. He also labored off campus, preaching in local churches and, though a slave owner, serving as an officer in the Mississippi branch of the American Colonization Society.

Oakland College grew quickly under Chamberlain’s leadership. The school held its first commencement in 1833 and reported nearly one hundred pupils in 1834. Cornelius Grafton estimated that two hundred graduates and more than two thousand students passed through Oakland between 1830 and 1861, with an average attendance of about one hundred at any given time. Church historian Walter Posey observed that after twenty years under Chamberlain, “the physical plant contained thirty cottages for the occupancy of the students, residences for the president and the professors, two halls for the literary societies, a library of four thousand books, and a large main building, one hundred feet by sixty.”

Chamberlain’s fruitful work ended abruptly in 1851. Westward expansion “forced the territorial slavery question,” which divided Mississippians into secessionists and Unionists. The Oakland faculty had been accused of Unionist sympathy. A printed flyer, circulated on September 1, asserted that the college had expelled a student, Randolph Duncan, for making a states’ rights speech on campus. Chamberlain dismissed the charge in a flyer of his own, explaining that “young Duncan is neither expelled nor suspended” and that “his sentiments on politics have not placed him in his present position.” One report identified local secessionist George Briscoe as a source of the now debunked rumor.

On the afternoon of September 5, an intoxicated Briscoe drove through the college campus and, seeing Dr. Chamberlain outside the president’s house, “renewed the charge of having expelled the young Duncan.” When Chamberlain denied it, Briscoe “sprang from his carriage and struck him down with the butt of his whip.” Briscoe struck him a second time and then stabbed him with his eight-inch Dirk knife, “pointing it downward towards his heart.” Chamberlain’s daughters witnessed the attack. His son-in-law rushed to him, asking, “Are you badly hurt?” Chamberlain replied, “I am killed.” He died moments later inside the president’s house. Briscoe was found two days later and died of apparent self-inflicted poisoning.

Chamberlain is buried in the Oakland College Cemetery on the campus of Alcorn State University. Oakland College closed during the Civil War. The Presbyterian Church sold the property to the state of Mississippi in 1871 and used the proceeds to open Chamberlain-Hunt Academy in Port Gibson, named in Chamberlain’s honor.