born this month
Francis Landey Patton
January 22, 1843-November 26, 1932
Author, theologian, university president
Francis Landey Patton, a man whose roots in Bermuda go back to the 1720s and after whom Francis Patton School is named, enjoyed a 50-year career in the United States as a theologian, author and educator.
He was a Presbyterian minister who rose up the ladder to become president of Princeton University in 1888, serving in the position for 14 years.
Descended from a long line of seafarers, Patton was the eldest of three sons of George Patton, a sea captain, who used a portion of the fortune he earned from a life on the high seas to purchase Carberry Hill, on Keith Hall Road, Warwick, as his family home.
Patton was born and raised at Carberry Hill—a property that is still owned by the Patton family—and attended Warwick Academy. He received his religious education at Christ Presbyterian Church in Warwick, where Rev. Marischal Keith Frith became a major influence and the inspiration for his future calling as a minister.
He was sent off to boarding school in Ontario, Canada, then moved on to Knox College, a Presbyterian seminary, and the University of Toronto, although he did not graduate from either institution. He earned his academic credentials in the U.S., graduating from Princeton Theological Seminary, in Princeton, New Jersey in 1865. It was a milestone year for the newly-minted man of the cloth. Patton was ordained as a Presbyterian minister and on October 10, at the historic Brick Church in Manhattan, he married Rosa Stevenson, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister.
Manhattan was his base during his first years out of seminary. He received his first posting to the Eighty-fourth Street Presbyterian Church—now known as West-Park Presbyterian Church—where he held forth with fiery sermons and espoused a conservative doctrine.
His reputation as a teacher and theologian and his popularity as an after dinner speaker grew rapidly, according to the Princeton University publication, The Presidents of Princeton, which also observed: “Even those who disagreed with his rigid conservative Presbyterian views admired his intellect and wit.”
He became the darling of conservative Presbyterians, who were opposed to liberal views of religions that were emerging around the late 1800s. When millionaire and conservative Presbyterian Cyrus McCormick established a chair in didactic and polemical theology at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Chicago, Patton was appointed to the post.
While in Chicago, he continued to do battle against the forces of modernism. In 1874, he brought charges of heresy against a minister whose liberal views alarmed him. The case made national headlines, but Patton came out the loser.
He continued his rise up the church hierarchy. He became editor of a church paper The Interior, and was elected moderator of the church’s general assembly. And Patton, who published his first book The Inspiration of the Scriptures in 1869, continued to churn out books.
In 1881, he moved back to New Jersey to become a professor at his alma mater, the Princeton Theological Seminary, which historian Duncan McDowall described as “a bastion of old-school Presbyterianism.”
Seven years later, he was appointed president of Princeton, which was then known as the College of New Jersey and had a long connection with the Presbyterian Church.
Patton’s appointment was not universally welcomed and his legacy was mixed. He oversaw Princeton’s expansion, with the construction of new dormitories, a gym, infirmary and auditorium and hired more professors including Woodrow Wilson, a future president of the U.S., but he did not light any fires as an administrator. The high point of his tenure was presiding over the school’s 150th anniversary celebrations, which saw its name officially changed to Princeton University. U.S. President Glover Cleveland attended the festivities.
He is described in The Presidents of Princeton as a “wonderfully poor administrator.” He lacked “initiative in important policy matters, resisted meaningful curriculum reform and was lax in matters of discipline and scholarly standards.” Historian Duncan McDowall said his legacy “was shaped as much by what he didn’t do as by what he did.” Students were still required to take Greek in an age that demanded more practical skills, and Patton resisted calls to establish a law school and a graduate school.
Woodrow Wilson, who was pushing for the law school, became so frustrated he threatened to resign. In the end, Patton was done in by his resistance to change. He resigned in 1902 and Woodrow Wilson replaced him as president. After that it was back to Princeton Theological Seminary for Patton. He was president until 1913. Despite his shortcomings, Patton was popular with students. In 1906, they petitioned to have a dormitory named after him. Every year, Princeton’s Class of 1891 sent his wife a birthday telegram.
Patton lived out his last years at Carberry Hill, where over the years he welcomed high-flying visitors from home and abroad, including Woodrow Wilson, Canadian prime minister McKenzie King, Rotary Club founder Paul Harris, and James Morgan, the owner of Southlands Estate in Warwick.
Patton’s son George, whom he controversially hired to be a secretary at Princeton, followed him home to Bermuda, where he was appointed inspector of schools. Patton, who became totally blind in his old age, became known as the ‘Grand Old Man of Bermuda’. He was routinely showered with tributes in the press on his birthday.
Reporting on his death in its December 1932, The Bermudian magazine said: “He was a mighty intellectual, a brilliant theologian, philosopher and speaker of mesmeric and tremendous power, and an inspiration to a morally confused world by reason of the perfect inner harmony of his life.”
Duncan McDowall wrote that “posterity has not been kind to the man who was Bermuda’s most known theological and pedagogic export”. His name lives on at Francis Patton School in Hamilton Parish. A plaque pays tribute to him at Christ Church.
In 2007, Patton, along with educators Adele Tucker, Matilda “Mattie” Crawford, Edith Crawford, Millicent Neverson, May Francis Smith, all of whose careers were on island, was honoured by the Post Office in a ‘Pioneers of Progress’ stamp issue.
Sources: ‘The Grand Old Man of Bermuda’ by Duncan McDowall, The Bermudian, Fall 2008; The Presidents of Princeton University, Princeton University website.
