A Biography of our Founder, Samuel Eells 1810-1842

- by Claude M. Fuess, Amherst 1905

Samuel Eells, the inspired Hamilton College graduate who founded Alpha Delta Phi, wrote its Covenant and determined its ideals, must always be a source of interest to later brothers. We should like to have detailed information as to how he lived, what books he preferred, what daily routine he followed, how his motives and ambitions developed, indeed all that stirred in his restless brain during the tumultuous heyday of Jacksonian Democracy. Unfortunately, the materials for an intimate biography are not extensive. A few of his letters and formal addresses throw light on his unusual character. He left behind a brief account of the circumstances leading to the inception of the Fraternity. A memorial volume of the current conventional type was edited by his brother, James, in 1873, more than thirty years after his death. The only existing portrait, while attractive enough, has little distinctive individuality; and we lack descriptions of him by classmates and friends.

In an unpublished account of his family genealogy, Eells imagines some future descendant pursuing his memorandum and then placing his hand thoughtfully on this brow and wondering what manner of man was this Samuel Eells who thus meditated and wrote in the early nineteenth century, who practiced law in Cincinnati and was graduated at Hamilton College. Although I am not his kinsman, this is precisely what I am trying to do in this sketch of the Founder. The vague and undiscriminating eulogies left by his contemporaries offer no help in recreating a flesh-and-blood figure. When we are told that, as a child, he showed no tendencies towards "vicious habits", or that, as a collegian, "he had not an enemy among his fellow students", we long for anecdotes which, however trivial, would transform this colourless paragon into the very human personality that he must have been. We do, however, possess the evidence which proves him to have been the tragic victim of a dynamic turbulent mind in a feeble body, endowed with exceptional talent which, except in the founding of Alpha Delta Phi, never came to full fruition. Only the Fraternity, established when he was but twenty-two years old, has endured through more than a century of rapidly evolving American society as the continuing symbol of his greatness.

In the document already mentioned, Eells says of his forbear, "I believe there are few families in this country who can trace the genealogy through so many links of the ascending chain and find cause to congratulate themselves on being descendants of a nobler or better ancestry." Of supreme importance in Eells' development was his Puritan inheritance from his earliest colonial ancestor, John Eells, through an almost unbroken line of Congregational clergyman - men whom he calls "pious and educated progenitors." In nearly every paragraph Samuel wrote or spoke was a strong, sincere emphasis on morality and religion. His father, the missionary pastor of a church in Westmoreland, then a frontier hamlet in the Mohawk Valley, often took long and lonely horseback journeys through the wilderness, labouring for the Western Educational Society. Samuel, the second son in a family of five boys and one girl who grew to maturity, was born on May 18, 1810, and brought up in an atmosphere of simple culture and piety, like that in The Vicar of Wakefield. His education, began at his mother's knee with the Bible as a textbook, was animated by seriousness of purpose. This seriousness lasted all his life.

Even as a youngster Samuel was not physically robust, and the grim symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis - then known as consumption - showed themselves very early. When he was barely fifteen, confinement to his studies broke down his health; and his observant father placed him during the warm summer months on a farm so that he could get fresh air and exercise. By 1826, he had recovered sufficiently to attend Clinton Academy, probably the best school in Oneida County, where he displayed a precocious ability in writing and public speaking and was prepared acceptably for Hamilton College. Once again, however his vitality was unequal to the nervous strain, and he was obliged to leave almost immediately. Still only a boy he was ill and without money. In those days physicians were not agreed on the proper therapy for tuberculosis, but Eells decided for himself that his only hope lay in an outdoor existence. A sea voyage seemed to offer what he instinctively wanted. Consequently, with no companion and almost no financial resources, he set out on foot for New Haven, carrying his bag over his shoulders.

For almost a year the youth spent most of his time on sailing vessels, not on a luxurious passenger's cabin but as a hard-working seaman. Gradually his vigor and resistance returned, and he even held his own with the tough crew of a fishing vessel off the Newfoundland Banks. Reinvigorated and ambitious, he returned to Westmoreland in November, 1828, and immediately matriculated at Hamilton as a Freshman, being certainly the most mature and experienced member of his class. The progress of his ailment had been temporarily retarded, and he was ready for the arduous study which always brought him happiness.

Samuel Eells' father had been one of the committee of three who organized and opened Hamilton College in 1812, secured its charter from the State of New York, and formulated its curriculum and general policies. For this reason, as well as because of its convenient location not far from Westmoreland, it was natural that Samuel should go there. In 1828, however, the young and small college was apparently moribund. The President was at odds with the Trustees, who had rashly spent on building the income and capital which should have been appropriated for salaries. The disgruntled faculty were, at the same moment, engaged in a controversy with the Trustees over a matter of undergraduate discipline. In 1829, ten Trustees had resigned in disgust, the faculty consisted only of the President and one Professor, and the student body had shrunk to nine. It did not seem likely that the institution could keep from disintegrating completely.

No classes were graduated in 1829 or 1830, but the few undergraduates were loyal, new teachers were secured, and by Eells' Junior year a respectable number of students were enrolled. With his prestige and intelligence he was quickly recognized as a leader; and his skill in guiding others was soon demonstrated in a remarkable way. It was a period when literary societies of an exclusive and secret nature were being formed in American colleges. The origins of this movement are not easy to trace, partly because the records are not available and partly because the members could not disclose some of the "mysteries"; but Baird's Manual of American College Fraternities presents the bare facts. Eells himself was no innovator. Kappa Alpha founded at Union College in the autumn of 1825, is "the oldest secret brotherhood of a social and literary character which has had a continuous existence in American colleges", and is called by Baird "the parent of the present vast system of American college fraternities." It was closely followed at Union by two rivals - Sigma Phi (March 4, 1827) and the Delta Phi (November 18, 1827). Baird suggests that the model for all three was Phi Beta Kappa, established on December 5, 1776, at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia. Originally Phi Beta Kappa, like the Masonic Order, was esoteric, with a badge, a grip, an oath of fidelity, a ritual, and an idealistic and spiritual purpose; but neither Baird nor anybody else has explained how these features happened to develop at Williamsburg in the midst of the Revolutionary War. At any rate, Phi Beta Kappa soon changed to an honourary scholarship society, as it is today; while the three later fraternities at Union - the so-called "Union Triad" - furnished the pattern for the unique American college-fraternity system as it exists in the twentieth century.

In his own account of what happened, Eells declared that, when he arrived on the Hamilton campus, he found there two literary societies - the Phoenix and the Philopeuthian - the latter of which he rather reluctantly joined; but, discovering these rival groups indulged in recruiting tactics little short of unscrupulous, he was led by his moral sense to consider the creation of a new fraternity which would, as a positive policy, disavow what he regarded as jealous and unsavory competition. In the autumn of 1830, while these ideas were germinating in his fertile mind, a deputation from the Union Chapter of Kappa Alpha visited Hamilton with the intention, frankly disclosed of establishing there a new chapter of their fraternity. Eells, who had his own theories and desires, and who was also not without the instincts of a politician, defeated these alien plans, and then proposed to selected members of both Phoenix and Philopeuthian that they found a new society, based on the loftiest of intellectual and moral ideals - a society which, within a limited community and membership, would have some of the aspects and influence of a religion.

The first meeting of this select group, held on a winter's evening in Eells' room, Number 15, Back Middle, Kirkland Hall, was attended by five students. Three of them were Seniors: Eells himself, Lorenzo Latham, who died in 1860 in New Orleans; and John C. Underwood, who died in 1873, in Richmond, Virginia. The two Juniors were Oliver Andrew Morse, who died in 1870, in New York City, and Henry Lemuel Storrs, of a famous clerical family, who later became a distinguished clergyman and died prematurely, in 1852 in Yonkers, New York. Most of the actual planning was evidently carried through by Eells, who had an orderly as well as imaginative mind. According to his own testimony, he drew up the Constitution, and he and Latham together devised the emblems and the symbols. Later in the year 1832 other members were added, and the mother chapter of Alpha Delta Phi was thus in full operation at the time of Eells' graduation.

As if endowed with some prophetic quality, Samuel Eells, in a statement prepared some years later, left behind him his conception of what Alpha Delta Phi intended to be and to do. It comes down to us as an authentic expression of the Founders design:

"In the first place, the new association must differ from others, in all points necessary to the exclusion of that jealousy and angry competition which I have always felt to be the bane of college life. In the second place, it must be built on a more comprehensive scale than other societies, in regard to its intellectual proportions, providing for every variety of taste and talent, and embracing every department of literature and science. In the third place, it must be national and universal in its adaptations, so as not merely to cultivate a taste for literature or furnish the mind with knowledge; but with a true philosophical spirit looking to the entire man, so as to develop his whole being - moral, social, and intellectual. In the fourth place, it must be made a living, growing, self-perpetuating institution, which can be done only by stamping its whole character and arrangements with a great and manifest superiority to other societies, and by attaching its members to it, by an indissoluble bond of union and binding them to real and personal interests in its welfare. Finally, its actual visible organization must be deferred till the general plan can be thoroughly matured, every preliminary settled, every influence secured, that may enable the enterprise to command assurance of success."

Obviously, this is the conception of a thoughtful, far sighted mind, insistent on sketching the design before raising the structure. All the essential preliminaries were pondered and settled before that crucial first meeting was held. The intellectual basis was, of course, unmistakable. Members were to associate with one another because of a need for extending their knowledge and sharpening their wits. The whole fraternity movement in its early stages was in part an attempt by scholarly young men to provide for themselves the acquaintance with English literature which college courses did not then supply. It was also affected by the intense interest in debating and public speaking aroused by the Revolutionary orators and later by the "God-like Dan'l" Webster himself. Judging by Samuel Eells' own oratorical efforts, he must have admired and tried to imitate Webster, whose masterly addresses at Plymouth and Bunker Hill were already being disclaimed by collegiate prize seekers and whose Reply To Hayne was delivered while Eells was still an undergraduate. The literary background of Alpha Delta Phi was manifest and significant, wholly natural in the light of earlier experiments in undergraduate group organization. But Eells deliberately undertook to go beyond this and link the members together in their devotion to something deeper. Although he was, as we have seen, intuitively and persistently a scholar, his vibrant and comprehensive imagination transcended the narrow bounds of mere knowledge derived from books. Something of his philosophy was revealed in his Valedictory Address to his classmates - an address which, because of a prevailing epidemic of cholera, was never delivered. From this I shall quote only the passage in which he suggests that it is the duty of all his hearers to prepare for "another and happier state of being...by the faithful and conscientious discharge of our duties to God and our fellow men." I am sure that the spiritual significance of the Fraternity meant much to him. He wove his own personal ideals, his religious faith, into the warp and woof of Alpha Delta Phi.

It is a pity that we cannot more clearly visualize this young Hamilton graduate, the brightest member of the Class of 1832. His portrait, painted some years later, shows him with a resolute, almost stern, expression, like some belated Cotton Mather or Jonathan Edwards. He was tall, with raven hair, high cheek bones and pointed chin, and a piercing gleam in his dark eyes - eyes which might have been those of a crusader. His contemporaries stressed his pallor and the emaciation accompanying his disease. The effect which he produced as an orator was long remembered by those who heard him. Never flippant or cynical and seldom humourous, he was impressive because of his rich voice and his overwhelming sincerity. He could not have been painfully sanctimonious, for he owned copies of Smollet and Fielding, but he had no time or inclination for levity. Altogether he was a man to be reckoned with - a man who, but for the probability of recurring illness, was certain of a bright future.

Leaving behind him his Fraternity fully formed, Eells set out after Commencement in 1832 to join his father, who had moved some months before to Ohio. As he said "Good-bye!" to one of his Alpha Delta Phi brethren, he did not expect to live more than ten years longer, but he intended to crowd a maximum of achievement into that decade. As a matter of fact, his career was almost terminated before it was even started. The dreaded cholera had spread everywhere that summer and after Eells had boarded the boat at Buffalo for Cleveland, he was attacked by the infection. The frightened passengers fled from him as soon as they discovered the situation and insisted that he should be set ashore at the first landing. Only one, less timid or more sympathetic than the others, brought him some calomel and tendered a little assistance. At Dunkirk, in spite of his protests, he was deposited on the wharf in an abandoned shed and left to his fate. Here again no Good Samaritan, not even a physician ventured near him, but he ultimately persuaded two small boys to bring him some hot water and more medicine. There the Founder of Alpha Delta Phi lay for a week alone, unfed, even unattended, on the verge of death. Then miraculously he rallied and proceeded to his destination. This adventure did nothing to strengthen his none too sturdy constitution.

It would have been natural for Samuel to follow his ancestors into the Christian ministry, and he would have been well fitted for that calling. Instead, however, he turned to the law - perhaps in emulation of Daniel Webster - and like him also he used teaching as a crutch to support himself while he was studying. Before long, he was in Springfield, Ohio, soliciting pupils for his school. Beginning with only two children, he soon had a full classroom, doing all the administration and instruction himself. Meanwhile, in his evenings and on Sundays he busied himself in the traditional fashion, reading Blackstone under the direction of a local attorney. As usual, he was alert and industrious, but he was constantly taxing his feeble body more than it could endure. Somehow the months passed, and in February, 1835, he was admitted to the Ohio Bar, turned over his now prosperous school to other hands, and hung out his shingle in Cincinnati. Although clients came only slowly, his quality was soon recognized and before the close of that year he accepted a partnership with Salmon P. Chase, later Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury and Chief Justice of the United States. During this period, labouring with his habitual tenacity, he built up a substantial reputation in that section of Ohio.

At the close of 1837, with characteristic ambition, Eells withdrew from his firm and opened his own office, but his health was getting even more precarious and his prospects were accordingly dismal. In various ways he sought rest and diversion, but on each occasion when he returned to his desk he was unable to meet the responsibilities of his practice. His case, as he well knew, was hopeless. In sheer desperation he spent several months with his father at Amherst, Ohio; and during the winter of 1839-40 he sailed to a warmer climate in Cuba. In September, 1840, when he had given the law one more unsuccessful trial, he broke down completely and resigned himself to death. Entertaining himself by preparing a history of his family for one of his younger relatives, he ended:

"And now, my beloved kinsman, farewell till thou reachest thy home on the other side of the gulf. I will be there on the shore to meet thee! Till then God bless thee, and - Farewell!"

This brave but pathetic manuscript is dated August 16, 1841. As he grew weaker, he was taken into the home of one of his Cincinnati friends, Seth W. Pomeroy. There on Sunday morning, March 13, 1842, he died quite peacefully. He had not yet completed his thirty-second year.

Eells' friends might well have placed on his tombstone Hamlet's words to his father's ghost, "Rest, rest, perturbed spirit!" But he was not allowed to be quiet even in his grave. He was interred in the City Cemetery of Cincinnati, but seventeen years later the casket, for some family reason, was moved to a vault in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1929, when the new Chapter House at Hamilton was occupied, the remains were transferred to the Samuel Eells Memorial Hall on the campus which he loved and where his best work was done.

To the Fraternity, which was so largely his own creation, Samuel Eells never wavered in his loyalty. Busy though he was professionally, he found time to found a second chapter of Alpha Delta Phi, in 1835, at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio. Before his death, and in several instances through his instigation, chapters were also established in Columbia (1836), in Yale (1836), in Amherst (1836), in Brown (1836), in Harvard (1837), in Geneva (1840), and in Bowdoin (1841). Of special interest to Eells was the formation of the Hudson Chapter, at Western Reserve College in Northern Ohio; and although he was then desperately ill, he managed to take the trip to Hudson and there on July 1, 1841, took part in the first initiation ceremonies. By the time of his death, Alpha Delta Phi was broad and varied in its scope, with several flourishing chapters and rapidly mounting prestige. Eells held the position of National President from 1832 until 1836, when at his request, he was succeeded by his friend, Charles Kilbourn, Hamilton, 1833. It is Eells' own jeweled badge which the International President, by tradition, is privileged to wear during his term of office.

After examining attentively what others wrote about him and what he said about himself, I have the impression that he was unavoidably a lonely man. We hear nothing of any love affair. Probably his awareness of malady and an explicable unwillingness to transmit it to children would have prevented him from marrying, even if he had had any such impulse. But it is significant that in his memoir not one women, with the exception of his mother, is mentioned; and all his close relationships seem to have been with his own sex. He had many devoted male friends, as we have seen, but he was uncomforted by a women's sympathy or affection.

Eells' biographer emphasized three attributes of his which seemed to him worth special mention: his extraordinary personal magnetism, which all his life assured him a position of leadership among those with whom he was associated; his "ease in conversation", which made him "the center and life of any circle in which he might be"; and his unostentatious yet avowed and controlling piety", which destined him to be an "intelligent and true servant of God". Doubtless much more could have been said about these and other characteristic traits. I should like however, to stress particularly his accomplishments as an orator. Although he enjoyed no small success as a practicing attorney, he confessed that the law was for him an unsatisfying profession. It involved, he said, "severe and incessant labour", and he was disturbed because it introduced him "to a very dark part of human nature." Such distinction as he achieved was due largely to his fondness for public speaking. Indeed, had his health been more normal he might have gone far in either politics or preaching, for he loved to talk on his feet. Some address of his which have been preserved - one at Miami University on "The Study of Classics", one before the College of Teachers in Cincinnati, and one just before his death to City Bible Society of the same city - making it unquestionable that he was a cogent and persuasive orator, serious in his manner, logical in his thought and skilled in rhetorical phrasing. He had studied with profit his Demosthenes and Cicero, his Burke and Webster, and he did have opportunities to follow their methods in his pleading before court.

Eells was President of the Biennial Convention of the Alpha Delta Phi Society held at New Haven, Connecticut, on August 15, 1839, and delivered there his best-known oration, under the title "On the Law and Means of Social Advancement." Published in a pamphlet of sixty-nine pages, it was 24,000 words in length and must have taken at least two and one-half hours to deliver! Very few addresses, even in that voluble period, could have tested more painfully the endurance of an audience or the physical energy of the speaker!

Eells could, in an emergency, gather his powers for such an ordeal. Nevertheless, he was seldom really well, and the most important factor in his career was his disease, from the fatiguing symptoms of which he could not escape and which made it seem as if he were trapped by circumstances. Repeatedly checked in his aspirations, often unable to carry through what he had started, he could hardly be buoyant or jocular; and it is not strange that he regarded life and its problems with accelerating sobriety. If we get the impression of a rather somber personality, it is because he had little to make him cheerful.

Above all Samuel Eells left on his contemporaries the impression of a Christian gentleman of heroic stature. All the evidence, interpreted through our modern eyes, indicates that his life was virtuous, not because of lack of temptation but because of positive moral decision. His career had both philosophy and pattern. In the rough-and-tumble of a Gloucester-fisherman's daily routine he commanded respect. He battled defiantly against a debilitating disease. He competed on even terms and without complaint against his rival in a most exciting profession, giving up the fight only when he was too much exhausted to struggle any longer. Finally, he conceived and created a fraternal order, which has persisted through changing generations and, even now, after more than a century and a quarter, claims the devotion of its members.