Horace Holley, old Transylvania University's celebrated president, was
born at Salisbury, Connecticut, February 13, 1781, the son of Luther
Holley, a wealthy merchant. He was fitted at Williams College for Yale,
from which institution he was graduated in 1803. Holley studied law in
New York for awhile, but soon relinquished it for theology, which he
returned to Yale to pursue. In 1805 he was appointed to his first
pastorate. Going to Boston in 1809, as pastor of the Hollis Street
Unitarian church, he at once made a great reputation for himself as an
eloquent pulpit orator. Holley was at Hollis Street for nine years,
during which time he was a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard
University, as well as a member of several civic boards. He was elected
president of Transylvania University, of Lexington, in 1817, and he
journeyed to Kentucky in the following spring, where he went carefully
over the ground and finally decided to accept the position. He entered
almost at once upon the most difficult task of converting a grammar
school into a great university. Success soon crowned his efforts,
however, and Transylvania took her place by the side of Harvard, Yale,
and Princeton, as one of the higher seats of learning in the United
States. In at least one year under the Holley régime, Transylvania had
the largest student body in this country. The institution was as well
known in New York or London, among scholars, as it was in the West.
Several of the professors were men of national reputation, and the
students came from all parts of the United States. Never before in the
South or West has a seat of learning had higher hopes for the future, or
greater success or reputation than had Transylvania under Horace Holley.
Then the Kentucky Presbyterians and others launched Dame Rumor,
freighted with falsehoods and misrepresentations galore. The president
was charged with every crime in the calendar: he was an atheist, an
agnostic, a blasphemer, a wine-bibber, and all that was evil. The whole
truth was this: he was a Unitarian, holding the Christ to be the
greatest personality in history, but denying him as the very Son of God.
This his prejudiced, ill-advised enemies were unable to understand.
Driven to desperation by the bitter crusade that was being waged against
him, Holley resigned, in March, 1827, after nine years of great success
as head of the University, which after his departure, fell away to
almost nothing. He went from Kentucky to Louisiana, where he endeavored
to re-organize the College of New Orleans, and in which work he wore
himself out. Late in the summer he and his wife took passage for New
York, but he contracted yellow-fever, and, on July 31, 1827, he died.
His body was consigned to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, but his fame
is secure as an American educator of distinguished ability. The finest
bit of prose he ever wrote, perhaps, is contained in one of his Kentucky
letters to his wife in Boston, written while he was in Lexington looking
over the lay of the land, which, as subsequent events proved, he utterly
failed to anticipate in its most dangerous and damning aspect.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _A Discourse on the Genius and Character of the Rev.
Horace Holley, LL. D._, by Charles Caldwell, M. D. (Boston, 1828);
_More Colonial Homesteads_, by Marion Harland (New York, 1899);
_Lore of the Meadowland_, by J. W. Townsend (Lexington, Kentucky,
1911).