Ovid Butler
Ovid
Butler was born on the 7th of February, 1801, in Augusta, N.Y., and
died at Indianapolis, Ind., on the 12th of July, 1881. His father,
the Rev. Chauncey Butler, was the first pastor of the Disciples'
Church in this city. He died in 1840. His grandfather, Capt. Joel
Butler, was a Revolutionary soldier, and served in the disastrous Quebec
expedition. He died in 1822. In 1817 the family removed from the
home in New York to Jennings County, in this State, where Ovid Butler resided
until he arrived at the years of manhood. Here he taught school for a few
years and studied law. In 1825 he settled at Shelbyville, where he
practiced his profession until 1836, when he removed to Indianapolis, which
became his permanent residence. He continued in his practice here, having
as partners at different time Calvin Fletcher, Simon Yandes,
and Horatio C. Newcomb, among the ablest and most prominent
lawyers of the State. His business was extensive and very lucrative, but
owing to impaired health he retired from the bar in 1849.
He was
married in 1827 to Cordelia Cole, who lived until the year
1838. He was again married, to Mrs. Elizabeth A. Elgin,
daughter of the late Thomas McOuat, in 1840, who survived him one
year. No man was more fortunate in his domestic relations. As a
lawyer Mr. Butler excelled in the office. In the argument of legal
questions and the preparation of pleadings he was laborious and
indefatigable. With firmness, perseverance, clearness of purpose, and
tenacity without a parallel he pushed his legal business through the
courts. With not many of the graces of the orator, he surpassed, by dint
of great exertion in the preparation of his cases, those who relied upon
persuasive eloquence or sudden strategy at the bar. Plain, quiet, gentle,
modest, but solid and immovable, he was a formidable antagonist in the greatest
cases that were tried during his practice. His style was strong and
sententious; without ornament, without humor, without elegance, but logical and
convincing. His clients always got his best ability in the preparation and
trial of their cases. His legal knowledge was general and comprehensive,
his judgment sound, and his reasoning powers vigorous. He met few
competitors at the bar combining so much industry, strength, perseverance, and
culture. He had the unbounded confidence of the community in his common
sense, integrity, and general capability in his profession.
After his
retirement from the bar he devoted his life mainly to the interests of the
Christian Church and of the Northwestern Christian University. But for a
few years after the close of the Mexican war, while the questions as to the
extension of slavery into the territories acquired were being agitated, he took
an active part in politics. In 1848 he established a newspaper in
Indianapolis called The Free Soil Banner, which took
radical ground against the extension of slavery and against slavery
itself. The motto was "Free soil, free States, free
men." He had been previously a Democrat. He served upon the
Free Soil electoral ticket and upon important political committees, and took the
stump in advocacy of his principles in the Presidential campaigns of 1848 and
1852.
In 1852 he
contributed the funds, in a great measure, to establish The Free Soil
Democrat, a newspaper for the dissemination of his cherished views
upon these questions. This was finally merged in The Indianapolis
Journal in the year 1854, Mr. Butler having purchased a controlling
interest in that newspaper. In the year 1854 the Republican party was
organized out of the anti-slavery men of all parties, and took bold ground upon
the subject, and the Journal became its organ. The
influence Mr. Butler exerted upon public sentiment was great and
beneficent. He ranged in the higher walks of politics, steadfastly and
intelligently advancing the great ideas, then unpopular, which have since become
the universal policy of the nation. He lived to see his principles written
upon the banners of our armies and gleaming in the lightning of a thousand
battles, to see them embodied in the Constitution and hailed with delight
wherever free government has an advocate.
Mr. Butler
gave further evidence of devotion to his principles by aiding in the
establishment of a free-soil paper in Cincinnati, and taking a wider range when
Kossuth came preaching the gospel of liberty for down-trodden Hungary, he again
opened his liberal purse of humanity.
But he sought
quiet and retirement. Many years ago he removed his residence from his old
home in town to his farm north of and beyond its limits. Here, among and
in the shade of the great walnut-, ash-, sugar-, and elm-trees, he built his
house, and here he spent the remainer of his years. Here, walking or
sitting beneath these grand representatives of the primeval forest, might be
seen his venerable form fitly protected by their shadows. Here he received
his friends and welcomed them to his hospitable board. Here his family
assembled, his children and his children's children, to enjoy his society and to
pay respect to his wishes.
The appearance of Mr.
Butler was not striking. Of about the average height, as he walked he
leaned forward, as if in thought. His eye was bright and cheerful, and the
expression of his countenance was sedate, indicative of sound judgment, strong
common sense, an unruffled temper, a fixedness of purpose, and kindness of
heart. His voice was not powerful or clear, his delivery was slow and
somewhat hesitating; but such was the matter of his speech, so clear, cogent,
apt, and striking, that he compelled the attention of his hearers. The
weight of his character, the power of his example, the charm of a life of
rectitude and purity gave a force to his words which, coming from an ordinary
man might not have been so carefully heeded. Emerson says, "it makes
a great difference to the sentence whether there be a man behind it or
not." He was a little shy and unobtrusive in his manners, especially
among strangers, but to his old friends cordial, winning, and confiding.
He avoided controversies, kept quiet when they were impending, and conciliated
by his decorous forbearance those who, by active opposition, would have been
roused to hostility.
Stronger than
all other features of his character was his unaffected piety. For many
years of his life he was an humble and devoted Christian, illustrating in his
daily walk and conversation the principles he professed. Devout without
display, zealous and charitable, he placed before and above all other personal
objects and considerations his own spiritual culture; looking to that true and
ultimate refinement which, begun on earth, is completed in heaven.
The great and
memorable work of Mr. Butler was connected with the Northwestern Christian
University, now called "Butler University." He, with many
friends, had for some years contemplated the establishment of this institution,
and in the winter of 1849-50 obtained the passage of a charter through the
Legislature of this State. Mr. Butler drafter it, and had the credit of
giving expression it it to the peculiar objects of the University. The
language of the section defining them is as follows: "An institution
of learning of the highest class for the education of the youth of all parts of
the United States and of the Northwest; to establish in said institution
departments or colleges for the instruction of the students in every branch of
liberal and professional education; to educate and prepare suitable teachers for
the common schools of the country; to teach and inculcate the Christian faith
and Christian morality as taught in the sacred Scriptures, discarding as
uninspired and without authority all writing, formulas, creeds, and articles of
faith subsequent thereto, and for the promotion of the sciences and
arts." As to intellectual training, this calls for a high
standard. As to religious teaching, it is radically liberal.
But Mr.
Butler was not an aggressive reformer. His gentle nature had no taint of
acrimony or intolerance in it. While he entertained, announced, and
adhered to his own views with unalterable tenacity, he exercised toward all who
disagreed with him an ample Christian charity. He was not a sectarian in
the narrow and offensive sense. He was willing to wait patiently for the
gradual and slow changes of public opinion as truth was developed.
For twenty
years he served as president of the board of directors of the University, and in
1871, at the age of seventy, he retired from the office, saying in his letter of
resignation, "I have given to the institution what I had to offer of
care, of counsel, of labor, and of means, for the purpose of building up not
merely a literary institution, but for the purpose of building up a collegiate
institution of the highest class, in which the divine character and the supreme
Lordship of Jesus, the Christ, should be fully recognized and carefully taught
to all the students, together with the science of Christian morality, as taught
in the Christian Scriptures, and to place such an institution in the front ranks
of human progress and Christian civilization as the advocate and exponent of the
common and equal rights of humanity, without distinction of sex, race or
color."
He fought the
good fight, he had adhered to his purpose, he had not labored in vain. But
for ten years more, and until his death, he gave the University his attention
and his best thought. He had devoted so many years of his life and so much
of his energy to this purpose that it had become the habit of his being to
promote and protect the interests of the University. His influence and his
spirit are still as powerful as ever there. Absence, silence, and death
have no power over them.
He did not
run to the mountains, or the seaside, or Saratoga for happiness. His
residence, his carriage, and his dress were plain. He gratified his taste,
but it was an exalted one. The campus of a college, his gift to men, was
to him a finer show than deer-arks or pleasure-grounds. The solid walls of
the University were more pleasing than a palace carved and polished and
decorated for his own comfort. He delighted to look upon well-trained men
and women rather than pictures and statuary. He preferred to gather the
young and docile of the human race, and put them on exhibition, rather than
short-horns or Morgan horses, and yet he did not despise or underrate these
other good things. He gratified a refined and ennobled taste when he
selected the man for culture and not the animal. But it was not all a
matter of taste; he looked much farther than that. He loved cultivated men
and women for their uses; for their power and capability to do good; to teach
the truth, to set examples; to lead men from vice and ignorance; and to give
them strength and encouragement. And so he put forth, for many of the best
years of his life, his constant exertions to build up a great institution of
learning, in which the principles of human freedom and of Christianity should be
taught forever. He did not die without the sight. He inspired many
to unite with him in the work, and has laid a foundation in a place and in a way
that, so far as can be seen, will be perpetual for great good.
History of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana, by B. R. Sulgrove,
Philadelphia: L. H. Everts & Co., 1884, page 175-77.
Contributed
by Phyllis Miller Fleming
Biography Index
Main Page