Rev. David Caldwell (1725–1824): Incarnation of a Cause, a Country, and an Age

Journal of Backcountry Studies Editor‘s Note: The Journal of Backcountry Studies appreciates historian David Andrew Caldwell making available to us his forthcoming biography of his famous ancestor, the Reverend David Caldwell. In my recent book, Political Moderation in America’s First Two Centuries, Caldwell emerges as the premier political and religious moderate in the Southern Backcountry, and in David Andrew Caldwell splendid new biography, published below, he comes alive as a pastor, teacher, husband, anti-Federalist, physician, and Revolutionary War leader. RMC Rev. David Caldwell (1725–1824): Incarnation of a Cause, a Country, and an Age DAVID ANDREW CALDWELL Figure 1. Bust of David Caldwell by Michel Van der Sommen. © 2007 Michel Van der Sommen I. A LIGHT IN THE WILDERNESS Stay, traveler. Near this place lies David Caldwell. If you want to know what kind of man he was, the answer is that he lived a life with purpose and left a legacy that brings accolades more than two and a half centuries after his death. In downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, the David Caldwell Historic Park and Interpretative Center displays the busts of Rev. David Caldwell (1725-1824) and his wife Rachel, completed in 2007 by sculptor Michiel Van der Sommen. The busts present this couple in the prime of their life, attractive, physically fit, and at ease. David and Rachel‘s major achievements began while they were relatively young, he in his 40s and she in her 20s. David Caldwell Historic Park serves to educate the public about David Caldwell‘s contributions not merely as the founder and educator at the most prominent and longest lasting classic academy of ©2009 David Andrew Caldwell Journal of Backcountry Studies 2 colonial North Carolina, but as a first generation American, hero, patriarch of the pulpit patriots of North Carolina, advocate of the Bill of Rights Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, and a member of a committee drafting a Bill of Rights for the first North Carolina constitution. Throughout the sixty-year marriage this duo exerted great influence upon colleagues, clergy, and countrymen. Their country asked for their help, and they provided it. The earliest biography of Rev. Caldwell was published in 1842, eighteen years after Rev. Caldwell‘s death in 1824. Authored by Presbyterian minister Eli W. Caruthers, this biography emphasized David and Rachel Caldwell‘s assistance to the Regulator movement of 1765-1771, praised their contributions to the Presbyterian Church and education,1 briefly described David Caldwell‘s role as a statesman and constitutionalist, and avoided entirely the subject of what assistance he had rendered to the Underground Railroad. Rev. Caruthers‘s book is notable in being among the first histories in America to show how the wife helped her husband‘s ministry.2 Possibly Rev. Caruthers was influenced by Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, who describes admiration for the frontiersman‘s wife driving her husband‘s ambition. Through amusing anecdotes, Rev. Caruthers displays a knack for not putting his readers to sleep. In 1846, Rev. William Henry Foote3 began his colonial history of North Carolina with these words: ―North Carolina, in the days of colonial dependence, was the refuge of the poor and oppressed. In her borders the emigrant, the fugitive, and the exile found a home.‖ The cadence of this composition invites anticipation that he will tell a good story. He devoted Chapter XVII to Rev. Caldwell.4 Rev. Foote provides enough details that the reader can visualize and step into the time and place that David Caldwell experienced. Rev. Foote asked the question that Rev. Caruthers had not asked—what principles of religion and morals, and modifying influences, made Rev. Caldwell what he was? Rev. Foote reviewed colonial records that Rev. Caruthers had not examined, and, with these sources, explained his admiration for David Caldwell‘s heroic life and Caldwell‘s conviction that the cause of independence must be defended at the cost of life, fortune, and most sacred honor. Nowhere does Rev. Foote mention Daniel Boone, whose autobiography The Adventures of Daniel Boone, Formerly A Hunter; Containing a Narrative of the Wars of Kentucky, was first published in 1784. That work tells how Boone led people to emigrate from North Carolina into Kentucky. Boone‘s autobiography and Rev. Caruthers‘s biography about Rev. Caldwell have been cited in support of the argument that the American frontier shaped a new self-made independent character who knew who he was, ready to settle the frontier, calm even when faced with imminent peril to himself.5 1 Eli W. Caruthers, A.M. (1793-1865), A Sketch of The Life and Character of David Caldwell, D.D., Near Sixty Years Pastor of the Churches of Buffalo and Alamance (Greensborough, N.C.: Swaim and Sherwood, 1842). (Online) 2 For discussion of the difference between evangelism and fundamentalism, and their contributions to American politics, see Frank Lambert, Religion in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 3 William Henry Foote, Sketches of North Carolina, Historical and Biographical, Illustrative of the Principles of a Portion of Her Early Settlers (New York: Robert Carter, 1846), ix. (Online) 4 Ibid., 235-243. 5 See Fredrick Jackson Turner, ―The Significance of the Frontier in American History,‖ spoken July 12, 1893, republished as Chap. 1, in Fredrick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: H. Holt & Co., 1920.) Turner‘s commentary exaggerates the influence of Rev. Caruthers‘s biography; the popular Journal of Backcountry Studies 3 Rev. Foote possessed an advantage that Rev. Caruthers lacked. Whereas Rev. Caruthers had been relatively isolated as the minister succeeding Rev. Caldwell at the Buffalo and Alamance congregations in Greensboro,6 Rev. Foote states that he had served seven years constantly engaged as a Secretary of Foreign Missions and in that capacity had called upon most of the Presbyterian congregations in North Carolina repeatedly. In conversation with the aged ministers and members of the church he heard many things to which he listened with emotion and asked to hear them again.7 Rev. Foote enables the reader to experience the fears, hopes, anxieties, and burdens that Rev. Caldwell and his wife Rachel felt. In 1976, Ethel Stephens Arnett wrote an acclaimed biography of David Caldwell that reproduced the last will and testament of David Caldwell‘s father. She confirmed that David Caldwell was the son of Andrew and Martha Caldwell, not Andrew and Ann.8 The biography helped in the decision to establish the David Caldwell Historic Park. In his 1979 Ph.D. dissertation,9 Mark F. Miller emphasized Rev. Caldwell‘s impact as an educator and wrote that Rev. Caldwell would have remained obscure but for Rev. Caruthers‘s biography. However, a reverse order better hits the mark: Rev. Caruthers would have remained unknown but for Rev. David Caldwell. In the latest interpretation of David Caldwell‘s life and character, Robert McCluer Calhoon, a professor of history, focuses chiefly on Rev. Caldwell‘s impact upon political moderation and scarcely delves into his contribution as an educator.10 In the Prologue of Political Moderation in America's First Two Centuries, Calhoon begins his discussion of political moderation with Thucydides, the Peloponnesian War, 432 B.C.11 Fluent in Greek, Rev. Caldwell likely could write like Thucydides and quote him from memory. Calhoon then advances to Aristotle‘s Ethics that espouses the virtue of the middle ground as prudent and wise. Calhoon continues with a discussion of numerous other sources, up through and past the English Civil War of 1640 and the English Revolution of 1688-89.12 He identifies Presidents James autobiographies by Benjamin Franklin and Daniel Boone and Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville had a far greater impact upon Europeans in forming their opinions about the self-made Americans. 6 Mark F. Miller, ―David Caldwell: The Forming of a Southern Educator.‖ (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1979). 7 Foote, Sketches, ix. 8 Ethel Stephens Arnett, David Caldwell (Greensboro: Ethel Stephens Arnett, Junior League of Greensboro, N.C., Inc., 1976). 9 Miller, ―David Caldwell.‖ 10 Robert McCluer Calhoon, Political Moderation in America's First Two Centuries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 120–129, 144, 160–161, 174, 193. See also, Robert M. Calhoon, ―The Scotch- Irish and Political Moderation,‖ Journal of Scotch-Irish Studies, 1, no. 3 (2002): 122-141; Robert M. Calhoon, ―On Political Moderation,‖ Journal Historical Society, 6, no. 2 (2006): 275-295. 11During Rev. Caldwell‘s attendance at the College of New Jersey, the college included Thucydides in its core curriculum. See David W. Robson, Educating Republicans: the College in the Era of the American Revolution, 1750-1800 (Contributions to the Study of Education, Number 15) (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 73. 12 The most popular Tory-based history of the Revolution of 1688-1689 during David Caldwell‘s lifetime was The History of England, 6 volumes, by David Hume (1711-1776), the last volume of which was published in 1778. However, during the time that David Caldwell attended the College of New Jersey, its library did not have David Hume‘s History of England, but only the Whig-slanted History of England by Paul de Rapin-Thoyras (see Hume, Educating Republicans). Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) died before completing his popular History of England from the Accession of King James the Second, 4 vols., 1848-1861, in which he described the Revolution of 1688-1689 as not truly a revolution nor transformative. ―Not a single flower of the Crown was Journal of Backcountry Studies 4 Madison and John Quincy Adams, as well as Rev. David Caldwell, as effective advocates of political moderation in America.

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