In 1877 some concerned citizens of Wheaton, Illinois, decided that they needed to do something about the strange little college that stood in the midst of their town. It had been there since the early 1850s, first as a Wesleyan school called the Illinois Institute and then—reinvented by Jonathan Blanchard, a Congregationalist minister, abolitionist, sworn enemy of “secret societies,” and former president of downstate Galesburg’s Knox College—as Wheaton College. On almost every conceivable political or social issue Blanchard was a radical, and he worried the local burghers.
So they turned to the Congregational Association for help. Blanchard, they said, was guilty of “narrowing [the college’s] constituency to a small class of men of extreme views.” He needed to be shown that the more moderate and hence wiser path was to offer “a broad, generous, liberal education under moral and religious influences.” All denominational and doctrinal extremities were to be shunned; Blanchard and his red-hot revivalist fanatics needed to be submerged in the lukewarm bath of mere “moral and religious influences.” The Congregationalist authorities, having long been frustrated with Blanchard anyway, were more than happy to do their part: They declared that Blanchard was no longer a Congregationalist minister and Wheaton no longer a Congregationalist college. Blanchard ignored them and continued on his chosen path—and Wheaton has been an interdenominational college ever since.
