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Rev. James Manning

Rev. James Manning

(1738-1791) ~ Inducted 1999

 

Manning, James, 1738-1791

Baptist clergyman and founding president of Rhode Island College (now Brown University), was born in Elizabeth Township, New Jersey. He attended Hopewell Academy, a Baptist grammar school, and the College of New Jersey (now Princeton). In 1764, after ordination as a Baptist minister, Manning and his wife Margaret Stiles, moved to Warren, Rhode Island, where he founded a Latin school and a Baptist church. 

When the region's Baptists decided, after much debate and controversy, to establish a college in Warren, they obtained a charter from the General Assembly in 1764. Shortly thereafter the fellows of Rhode Island College chose Reverend Manning as the school's first president. By 1770, the college's financial problems and the persuasion of Providence civic leaders led to its relocation, and Manning moved with it to Providence.

As a Calvinist with an evangelical spirit, Manning was more suited to action than to scholarship. However, he taught classical languages, moral philosophy, and rhetoric to his students. Under Manning's leadership, his college attracted and accommodated several religious minorities including Quakers and Jews.

Manning's arrival in Providence caused a temporary schism in the First Baptist Church. When the pastor and some of the congregation withdrew, Manning became the pastor, a position he held from 1770 until 1791. Under his leadership, the church introduced congregational singing, expanded the terms of communion to include more Baptists, and moved to a more stringent Calvinistic theology.

During his twenty-one year tenure in Providence, Manning became a prominent civic leader and even served Rhode Island in the Confederation Congress as a delegate. Although he was a reluctant revolutionary, Manning became a staunch advocate of the federal Constitution, and he was instrumental in securing support for ratification from Baptists in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Manning was one of the earliest New England Baptists to become involved in the abolitionist movement joining an anti-slavery society formed by Moses Brown.

In April, 1791 Manning resigned as pastor of the First Baptist Church and requested that the college find a new president. He was still serving in the latter capacity when he suffered a fatal stroke in July, 1791. According to his biographers, Manning's greatest significance lies in his contributions to the institutional development of the Baptist denomination. While the college became a focus of Baptist identity, Manning worked to develop his denomination in other ways, and his influence helped reestablish Calvinism as the theological standard among New England Baptists. This Calvinism, says biographer Charles Dunn, “was not a theological straightjacket, but served as a common reference around which disparate New England Baptists could coalesce and from which they could evolve.”


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