Coming to America - Princeton Theological Seminary

spring/summer 2008Coming to AmericaPTS’s Earliest International Studentsby Kenneth W. HenkeThe first international student in Princeton Seminary’s recordsis John Ross, born in Dublin, Ireland, on July 23, 1783. He wasborn of Roman Catholic parents, but was orphaned when quiteyoung. At nineteen he went to sea to see the world. On his wayto Liverpool, he was seized by a pressgang and put aboard a Britishman-of-war. He eventually escaped, but afterward in Barbadoesand again elsewhere he was seized and pressed into British navalservice. On his final escape he boarded a vessel bound for Americaand worked for his passage. He landed at New London,Connecticut, with no hat, no shoes, and no money.While in Ireland Ross had learned shoemaking and set aboutfinding work as a shoemaker in New London. Eventually, he joineda local Protestant church, and after a time felt a call to ministry.He received some support from a women’s aid society for studiesat Middlebury College in Vermont and, after preparation there,came to Princeton Theological Seminary. He is recorded as beinga member of the Class of 1816, the second class at the Seminary.When Ross arrived, Archibald Alexander was the only professor,with eleven students. Samuel Miller arrived soon afterward.Ross studied at Princeton Seminary from 1813 to 1816. He begandoing mission and evangelization work in Philadelphia and appliedto the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missionsfor service as a missionary abroad. The board was not able toprovide funds to send him overseas, so they encouraged himto serve as a missionary to the American frontier. He was ordainedby the Presbytery of Redstone and traveled by horseback preachingand serving churches in western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indianaas those areas were being settled. He preached at the old fortat Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the days when houses were the exceptionrather than the rule in that place, and founded the FirstPresbyterian Church there. He eventually settled in the Richmond,Indiana, area, where he supported himself by farming and servedas pastor of Beulah Presbyterian Church in Richmond.Ross was also a colporteur for the American Tract Societythroughout eastern Indiana and western Ohio. He is consideredone of the pioneers of the Presbyterian Church in Indiana. It is saidthat he “was fond of preaching as long as he was able to stand in thepulpit,” and he is recorded as still preaching with vigor long afterthe age of eighty. When he died in 1876, going on ninety-three,he was the oldest member of the Muncie (Indiana) Presbytery, theoldest surviving member of his seminary class, and one of the oldest(if not the oldest) ministers in the Presbyterian Church.John Burtt, a member of the Class of 1824, was born inScotland in 1789. He had served as a teacher in Scotland beforecoming to America and was already in his thirties when he joinedthe Sixth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia and decided tostudy for ordination to the ministry at Princeton Seminary. Besidesserving several pastorates in this country, he edited magazines andtwo large-circulation church newspapers, and published a volumeof poetry.Also listed with the Class of 1824, although he only attendedPrinceton Seminary from February until October of 1822, isGilbert Crawford of Scotland. It is uncertain when he came to thiscountry, but after studying at Princeton Seminary he served a seriesof churches in upstate New York, and for a few years in Wisconsin.Likewise, James Kerr of the Class of 1824 was born in Scotland,

spring/summer 2008attended Princeton Seminary from 1821 to 1823, and spent therest of his ministerial career as a missionary in the American South,especially rural Virginia and North Carolina.Another Class of 1824 member from abroad was JohnMitchelmore, born in England in 1793. He came to America in1816 when he was twenty-three, joined a Presbyterian church, andby 1819 felt a call to the ministry. The presbytery arranged for himto do preparatory studies at the classical academy in Lawrenceville,from which he graduated in 1822. He then came to study atPrinceton Seminary and after graduation served several unitedchurches in rural Delaware until his untimely death in 1834, whenhe perished in the burning of the steamboat William Penn, onwhich he was a passenger traveling to Philadelphia. It is recordedthat he died while trying to calm and assist his terror-strickenfellow passengers. Among his last acts was to take off the largecloak he was wearing, wrap it around a little child, and throw itashore, where the child was saved. When he could do no more onthe ship and the heat had become unbearable, he jumped from theburning deck into the cold waters of the river and swam for shore.However, the shock from the extremes of heat on the burning deckto the chill of the water was too much, and though he was able toreach the shore, he perished before anyone could come to his aid.Each of these students, though born and raised abroad, choseto stay and follow their pastoral vocation in the young America.It should be remembered that at this time the areas from which theycame—England, Scotland, and Ireland—were the “old country,” andit was America, particularly rural America and the American frontier,that was one of the important mission fields of the day. Even todaysome of our international students stay to work in this country, especiallyamong the immigrant groups and first- and second-generationAmericans from the countries of their own origins.The first student from overseas to come to PrincetonTheological Seminary who did not have English as a first languagewas likely David Christian Bernard Jadownicky (as his name readsin the records of the First—now Nassau—Presbyterian Churchof Princeton.) The “David Christian” part of this name was likelya later addition, taken at the time of his baptism, for the earlycatalog records of the Seminary simply read “Bernard Jadownicky,”and a published letter by him in Ashbel Green’s Christian Advocatefrom June 1823 is simply signed “B. Jadownicky.”This unlikely Princeton Theological Seminary student was borninto a Jewish family in Poland in 1799. At thirteen he was sent toa Jewish Talmudical School in Berlin to study to become a rabbi.In Berlin Jadownicky learned to write and speak fluent German,and after graduating in 1818 served as a rabbi in the German townof Solingen, famous to this day for its manufacture of swords, knives,and cutlery. After a few years he came across a copy of a HebrewNew Testament that had been lately published in London.Jadownicky found this reading compelling, and this led to hisfurther reading of Hebrew language tracts and pamphlets designedto explain Christian beliefs to Jews. Finding himself religiouslyperplexed, he went to speak with a Jewish convert who was nowa Protestant minister in Frankfort. The result of the conversationsand instruction he received was his own conversion and baptisminto the Christian faith in April 1821. Taking the advice of someof his new Christian friends, he decided to pursue Christiantheological studies and prepare himself as a Christian missionaryto the Jewish people. On his way to Berlin to take up these newstudies he met a pious German nobleman, Adelberdt, Count vonder Recke, who had set up a settlement for converted Jews (whoafter their conversion usually lost their previous means of makinga living in the Jewish communities in which they had lived) ona forty-acre farm near Dusseldorf. The Count asked Jadownickyto spend some time at his residence and help with the project.About this time the Count became aware of the AmericanSociety for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews in New York,which had a similar idea for setting up a colony for Christian Jewsin North America. They envisioned the Count’s farm as a stagingground for sending converted European Jews on to their projectedlarger community, which they hoped to establish somewhere inupstate New York. The Count asked Jadownicky to go as his agentand give further particulars about the situation in Europe to ameeting of the North American group. The group was favorablyimpressed with Jadownicky, asked him to work with them, andarranged for him to continue his studies in Princeton.Since Greek and Latin were not part of the usual rabbinictraining, Jadownicky first took the necessary language classes atPrinceton University (known in those days as the College of NewJersey) before proceeding to theological studies at the Seminaryfrom 1823 until 1825. It would appear that he lived, at least forsome time, in the home of Charles Hodge. In a letter written inDecember 1822, Hodge writes: “I am studying German again:having a teacher in the house I hope to make more progress thanI did before. We find Mr. Jadownisky [sic—the ‘c’ in Jadownicky ispronounced soft, as an ‘s’, so it would be natural for Hodge to spellit this way] a pleasant and intelligent young man.” In December1823, he joined the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton.Jadownicky continued his studies and his work with theAmerican Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews forseveral years, but appears to have left that work around 1826. Afurther mention is made of him in the Life of John Kitto compiledafter Kitto’s death by the noted Glasgow Presbyterian leader andscholar John Eadie. Kitto had lost his hearing at age twelve, afterfalling from a ladder, but by his early twenties felt called to fulltimeChristian service. Since his deafness would be a hindranceto his becoming an evangelist, he was trained as a printer andsent by the British Church Missionary Society to Malta, wherethey had printing presses turning out books and tracts in Greek,Arabic, Maltese, and Italian for circulation throughout the easternMediterranean. In connection with his deafness, Kitto had developeda growing reluctance to speak, and carried around pencil andpaper to conduct his conversations with others by writing. Notusing his vocal organs nearly led to the inability to use them altogether.It was on the voyage to Malta in early summer 1827 thatKitto met Jadownicky (who was perhaps on his way to Palestine)and who, together with another traveling companion, did hima singular favor that was to make a major difference for the restof his life. Kitto tells the story as follows:

spring/summer 2008“When I first went to the Mediterranean, the companions ofmy outward voyage were Dr. Korch, a German physician, who hadlately taken orders in the Anglican church, and Mr. Jadownicky,a converted Polish Jew, lately arrived from America, where he hadbeen completing his Christian education. These well-informed andkind-hearted men, being always with me, soon perceived how thematter really stood; and after much reasoning with me on thematter, they entered into a conspiracy in which the captain of theship joined, not to understand a word I said, otherwise than orally,throughout the voyage. In this they persevered to a marvel; and asI had much to ask, since I had not before been at sea, I made verygreat progress with my tongue during the six weeks’ voyage, and,by the time we reached our destination, had almost overcome thehabit of clutching a pen or pencil, to answer every question thatwas asked me.”This proved to be an important turning point for Kitto.He began using his voice more, first with close friends, then withacquaintances, and finally even with strangers. Later in life he wasable to write that “under the improvement which practice gave, myvoice was so much bettered, that the instances in which it was notreadily understood, gradually diminished; and, at the present day,I rarely find even a foreigner to whom my language is not clear.”Kitto also relates how on the voyage to Malta he wished one nightto sleep out under the stars and awake to view the sunrise, and howJadownicky had loaned him his “thick cloak” to use as beddingon the deck.Kitto went on to travel extensively in Bible lands, and returnedhome to England to write accounts of his travels. Eventuallyhe brought his knowledge of the Near East and its peoples andcustoms to bear in helping bring the Bible to life for lay readersin a series of lavishly illustrated, multi-volume aids for biblicalstudy. These included a four-volume pictorial Bible, giving thefull text of the Bible, illustrated with steel engravings and hundredsof woodcuts representing landscape scenes, natural history,costumes, and archaeological finds, together with explanatorynotes throughout giving historical and geographic background,describing in greater detail the plants and animals mentionedin the text, and providing literary and other illustrative materials.He also produced an illustrated Encyclopedia of Biblical Literatureand an eight-volume guide through the entire Bible giving suggestedtexts and informative background readings, one for each dayof the year, called Daily Bible Illustrations. These eight volumeswere especially designed for personal study or for reading aloudin the family, and the noted Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeonsaid of them that they were “more interesting than any novel thatwas ever written and as instructive as the heaviest theology.”After the Malta voyage with Kitto, we have little recordof Jadownicky and his travels. However a few years beforeJadownicky’s death at age sixty-three, Archibald Alexander Hodgementioned to an inquiring colleague that he had a “rather shakypersonal recollection” from his childhood of his father speakingof a Jewish student named “Jadownisky” who had studied at theSeminary in 1823–1824, about the time of his own birth, and thathe thought he remembered sometime when he was a teenager thatJadownicky had returned to Princeton Seminary for a visit andworshipped with the Hodge family in their pew at Miller Chapel.His memory was that Jadownicky had mentioned to CharlesHodge at that time that he was supporting himself by engagingin trade, especially in the West Indies and Cuba, but that he hadnever abandoned his Christian profession. A further note in PTSrecords suggests that Jadownicky may have returned to his nativePoland sometime before his death, which is recorded there asprobably about 1853.A final story worth telling here is the story of Guy Chew,a Native American of the Mohawk tribe. Converted toChristianity at age eighteen, he attended the Mission Schoolat Cornwall, Connecticut. This school had been set up by theCongregationalists with the help of a young Hawaiian, HenryObookiah, who had been brought to America at his own requestby a sea captain and was studying to be a missionary back to hisown people when he contracted typhus fever and died in early1818. Shortly after his death a book appeared in which Henrytells in his own words the story of his life and to which othersFrom 1817–1826 this school trained nearly 100 students from China, India,Hawaii and Polynesia, Malaysia, and several Native American tribes.added a few particulars, including an account of his death. His pleafor a mission to his people inspired the beginnings of Christianmissions to Hawaii in which a number of our own early PrincetonTheological Seminary graduates would participate. Also attendingthis school were Native Americans who wished to spread the gospelamong their people. Guy Chew studied at this school for threeyears “and became eminent for his benevolence, piety, and desireto proclaim the gospel to his countrymen.” He came to PrincetonSeminary in 1826, but as his gravestone (which may still be seen inPrinceton Cemetery) reads, he that same year “was by a MysteriousProvidence called away in the morning of his days,” the first NativeAmerican to attend Princeton Theological Seminary. ❚Kenneth W. Henke is the Seminary’s reference archivist.