“The history of Trinity College is the history of Braxton Craven.” So said Thomas N. Ivey, an early biographer of the Methodist minister and educator. Ivey, a graduate of Trinity College, astutely described the inseparable connection between the man and the institution. Craven (1822–1882) devoted his life and career to building a humble school into a respected liberal arts college that would one day become Duke University.
Craven was part of a generation of North Carolinians who understood the importance of education and sought to improve young Tar Heels’ future prospects. Despite his successes, he remains less well known than contemporaries such as David L. Swain, long-time president of the University of North Carolina, and Calvin Wiley, the first superintendent of North Carolina Common Schools.
Just as the school he led, Craven came from humble origins. A native of Randolph County, North Carolina, he was the son of Ann Craven and Braxton York, a cousin of Brantley York, the founder of Union Institute. At the age of seven Braxton became the ward of Nathan Cox, a neighbor and antislavery Quaker. For the next nine years Craven labored hard for Cox, describing his upbringing as being “sorely oppressed.” At the age of fifteen Craven, along with his cousin J. Wesley Craven, converted to Methodism. “In a few weeks they both developed into good Christian workers,” recalled Rev. Colin Murchison. “Braxton was notably able in prayer.”
Starting a School
Almost entirely self-taught, Craven started a subscription school and preached on Sundays. He eventually saved enough money to attend the Quakers’ New Garden School (now Guilford College) for two years. Upon returning to his home community, he began assisting Brantley York at Union Institute, a recently organized school for the families of Methodists and Quakers. In 1842 when York left to organize another school, Craven succeeded him as principal. For the next forty years the man and the school would be inextricably bound.
Knowing how badly the common schools of North Carolina needed improvement, Craven sought to make Union Institute a normal college for the training of teachers. In 1851 and 1853 the ambitious young principal convinced the North Carolina General Assembly to grant charters to Union Institute to establish a normal school. No state funds accompanied the charters, however, as Craven had hoped. To continue operations, Union Institute borrowed ten thousand dollars from the state Literary Fund at 6 percent interest. Craven ended up paying off the loan himself. By his own admission, the normal school was not entirely successful.
That same decade the Methodist minister and educator also sought to establish closer links between the school and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In 1851 the church’s North Carolina General Conference agreed to train its future ministers for free at Union Institute. Five years later the conference adopted the school as its college. Finally, in 1859 the conversion of a normal school into a denominational college was completed. The church took control, annulled the normal school, and established Trinity College. Craven selected the name of the college and the motto: Eruditio et Religio (Knowledge and Religion).
During this two-decade-long transition from local school to college, Craven also underwent important changes. In 1844 he married Irene Leach, the first woman to graduate from Union Institute and a teacher at the school. Eventually, they had four children, two daughters and two sons. To enhance his credentials as an educator, Craven earned an A.B. degree from Randolph-Macon College in 1849 by passing an examination for the full course of study. Two years later both Randolph-Macon and the University of North Carolina awarded him honorary A.M. degrees. He later received a D.D. degree from Andrew College in Tennessee and an LL.D. degree from the University of Missouri.
Craven taught a wide variety of courses, including ancient languages, metaphysics, constitutional law, and biblical literature. He was especially adept at mathematics. When he earned the A.B. degree from Randolph-Macon, he proved to a math professor that his solution to a calculus problem was correct. In 1869 the Trinity president challenged the Smithsonian Institution’s calculation regarding a solar eclipse. Craven’s estimate proved to be more accurate.
A Product of the Antebellum South
Through all of these struggles to establish Trinity College on a firm foundation, Craven remained very much the product of antebellum southern culture. Although reared by an antislavery Quaker in a part of the state known for its political dissent, unionism, and opposition to slave labor, Craven accepted slavery as a part of southern life. In fact, Craven was a small slaveholder. He owned two slaves in 1850—a seventeen-year-old woman and a twenty-year-old man. In 1860 Craven owned three slaves—a forty-eight-year-old male and two females aged thirty-eight and twenty. During the 1850s he also occasionally hired slaves to help Irene in the household or presumably to help him on the farm. (He relied on farming for extra income.) Whether the enslaved labor—hired or owned—did any work to maintain the school is unknown. Two of the slaves remained with the family for several years after emancipation and the Civil War: Isum, who stayed two years, and Ann, who stayed five years.
Apparently, Craven showed no compunction about owning slaves. In a class lecture about slavery, he declared: “American slavery is complete control of the master over the slave. . . . This includes perpetual title to own or transfer jurisdiction over all time, labor and talent; over arrangements, positions, words and actions; obligation to support and protect the slave. . . . Slavery is not contrary to law. . . .” In an apologia, he added: “[Slavery] is by no means as severe in practice as the law allows.”
In an 1860 essay titled “Southern Civilization,” the Trinity educator deplored what he regarded as a lack of culture in the South. Ignoring the presence and influence of slavery, not to mention the volatile political situation dividing the nation, he argued: “Nobody could keep John Brown from being hung. He grew up for a halter and will have it. If he cannot find it in Kansas, he will have it at Harper’s Ferry.” Although the author of two novels, he ridiculed the “influential literature of the South” as “poor and poisonous. It consists chiefly of novels, moonstruck poetry and newspaper intelligence.” He concluded: “no people ever surpassed the South in braggadocio, fustian, and yarns generally.”
When the war came, Craven joined the Confederate cause. A close student of military history, especially Napoleon’s battles, Craven formed the Trinity Guard with his students and trained them during the summer of 1861. For a brief month in December 1861–January 1862, the Trinity president served as superintendent of the Confederate prison at Salisbury with the rank of captain.
The war brought other unwelcome changes. Because of ongoing internal disputes within the North Carolina General Conference, Craven resigned his presidency of Trinity and accepted a pastorate at Edenton Street Methodist Church in Raleigh, 1863–1865. This break in service to the college proved short-lived. He returned to the presidency in the fall of 1865.
When the war ended, Craven immediately sought reconciliation with northern Methodists. The Methodists had divided regionally in the mid-1840s when Bishop James O. Andrew inherited slaves. At the General Conference in 1844 northern Methodists insisted that he “desist” from his exercise of episcopal duties until he divested his property in human beings. Affronted, southern white Methodists met in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1846 and formed the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.
A mere three months after the conclusion of the war, Craven approached Bishop Edward Raymond Ames about reuniting the Methodist church. Ames was an influential church leader who had traveled extensively through the United States before the war.
Craven’s letter to Ames in July 1865 provides remarkable insight into his thinking about the great issues that cleaved the nation and the church. At the close of the war, he admitted that the Methodist Episcopal Church, South was demoralized and in disarray. To obliterate “the great breach in Methodism,” Craven hoped to avoid “vindictive sectionalism.” He argued that “political questions” should not divide the church. A choice between “unionism or slavery” no longer existed. “Now that the great evil [slavery] is irrevocably dead,” he conceded, “Common sense” should prevail in reunifying the church.
Craven worried that the northern Methodists might be more interested in seeking retribution than in seeking reunification. He warned against such retaliation: “Admit that slavery is wrong; if we damn all who have held the contrary opinion, we shall send to perdition very many of our English and American ancestors. We of the South erred, we have been punished, and I trust we have repented. . . .”
The Reconstruction Experience
Still, Craven held an overly optimistic view of how reconstruction of the church and nation might proceed. Rejecting the notion that the South had committed treason, Craven called secession “an error of judgment.” He maintained that the South was not “hostile to the Government or the Northern states; the Union feeling has not been as strong in twenty years as it now is.” Craven boldly proclaimed: “The great heart of the people was never in the war at all. . . .” As for slavery, he said that southerners “give up slavery willingly and many of them gladly.” Nor was there a “grudge” or “ill will” toward the freedmen. It was only from listening to “foolish or wicked advice” from Union soldiers and sympathizers that freedmen brought opprobrium on themselves. The course of Reconstruction and the treatment of freedmen in the years that followed would dramatically disprove Craven’s delusional estimation of the South’s response in the first days after the end of the war.
As Reconstruction proceeded, Craven seemed to tread a fine line between the state’s newly formed Republican Party and the Conservative Party, which consisted principally, but not exclusively, of secessionist Democrats. Craven counted among his sturdiest friends and supporters Republican governor William W. Holden; Republican chief justice of the state supreme court Richmond Pearson; and Democratic governor Zebulon B. Vance. As president of Trinity, he took students to Washington, D.C. On two of those occasions Craven visited Republican presidents Grant and Hayes.
Craven’s true political sympathies, however, may have revealed themselves in a letter to Governor Jonathan Worth in 1867. A unionist Whig before the war and a native of Randolph County, Worth bitterly resisted the military occupation, Reconstruction policies, and Freedmen’s Bureau imposed by the victorious North. Writing to Worth, Craven decried local efforts to elect “Red Strings” in the upcoming elections. Red Strings, also known as Heroes of America, openly opposed the Confederacy, harbored deserters and dissenters, and conducted guerrilla warfare against the Home Guard and Confederate troops sent to quash them. Predicting that the election of Red Strings would be “disastrous” to the county, Craven cautioned that they were “moving heaven and earth” to win. He concluded: “I see nothing now, but for all true men to stand shoulder to shoulder, watch and wait.”
Craven’s dedication to Trinity College never wavered despite continuing financial challenges. The president sometimes paid debts and faculty salaries when budgets fell short. Nor did he entertain ambitions to become a bishop. “All of his hopes and aspirations,” declared an early biographer, “seemed to have been centered in the College.” In his sermons Craven “seldom touched on theological problems.” Instead he talked about “daily life” and elevating people “morally and spiritually.” A man of “encyclopedic knowledge,” the Trinity president liked to say his “supreme object was to ‘make men.’” Widely respected both within the church and throughout the state, Craven won many admirers. David Swain, the former governor and longtime president of the University of North Carolina, offered this appraisal: “Craven is as intelligent, intelligible and honest as the ancient oracle. . . .”
Craven died in 1882. Ten years later Trinity College moved to Durham. With the establishment of the Duke Endowment in 1924, Trinity became Duke University.
Still, Craven’s legacy extended long beyond his death. According to William E. King, Duke University archivist from 1972 to 2002, many of Craven’s descendants are alumni of Duke, and three have served on the Board of Trustees. Braxton Craven Middle School on the original site of Trinity College is named for him. The handsome Craven Quadrangle on the Duke University campus provides convenient housing for students. It is especially close to Cameron Indoor Stadium!
In sum, the history of education in North Carolina would look much different without the vision, drive, and accomplishments of Braxton Craven.