St. Louis Cultural History Project—Spring 2019

Walter Hill, S.J. (1822-1907): Philosopher and Historian
By John Waide, M.A.

In 2018, Saint Louis University celebrated the 200th anniversary of its founding with a series of bicentennial events, including the publication of a bicentennial history book. The University traces its origins to 1818 when Bishop Louis William Du Bourg established the St. Louis Academy as a school for young men on the St. Louis riverfront. At the invitation of Bishop Du Bourg, a group of Jesuit priests and seminarians came to St. Louis in 1823 to begin a small school to teach English to local Native American boys. In 1829, these same Jesuits assumed the operation of the school Du Bourg had started. This school, then known as St. Louis College, formally became Saint Louis University in 1832 when the State of Missouri granted the school a university charter.

But for years, Saint Louis University usually considered 1829, the year when the Jesuits assumed control of St. Louis College, as the beginning date for the school’s history. In 1904, at the time of the celebration of the World’s Fair in St. Louis, Saint Louis University was also celebrating its diamond jubilee or 75th anniversary. Among the celebratory activities marking this anniversary was an award-winning exhibition at the World’s Fair and the publication of a 75-year history book called Memorial Volume of the Diamond Jubilee of St. Louis University. In 1908, however, the Jesuits at the University reconsidered the early history of the school, especially the actions of Bishop Du Bourg in opening the St. Louis Academy as a school for young men in 1818. At that point, Saint Louis University decided that it would be appropriate to consider 1818 as the true founding date of the University. Thus, the University celebrated its centennial in 1918, albeit during World War I, its sesquicentennial in 1968, and its bicentennial in 2018.

But the celebration of the University’s diamond jubilee in 1904 was not the first remembrance of the University’s history, nor was the publication of the University history book at that time the school’s first published history. For in 1879, Saint Louis University celebrated the 50th or golden anniversary of the school being directed by the men of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). Among the celebratory events was the publication of a golden jubilee history book.

The title of this history was Historical Sketch of St. Louis University: The Celebration of Its Fiftieth Anniversary or Golden Jubilee, on June 24, 1879, and its author was Father Walter H. Hill, S. J. At the time, Father Hill was a Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy on the Saint Louis University faculty. In this 260-page volume, Father Hill provides a detailed history of the school from its earliest days as Bishop Du Bourg’s academy in 1818, through the Jesuits arrival in 1823 and their assumption of the school’s management in 1829. The book contains eight chapters with details about various periods in the University’s history between 1829 and 1879. Following these historical chapters, there is a chapter describing the various events of the University’s golden jubilee celebration and another chapter describing the Jesuit’s Ratio Studiorum or plan of studies used at their colleges. Father Hill’s book also provides a list of administrators and faculty at the school.

The story of how Father Hill came to Saint Louis University and to writing the school’s first history begins more than a half-century earlier on a small farm near the town of Lebanon, Kentucky, about 70 miles southeast of Louisville. It was on this farm on January 21, 1822, that Walter Henry Hill (Henry Walter Hill) was born the 14th of 17 children of Clement and Mary Hill. The Hill family of Kentucky was one of the most distinguished Catholic families in the United States. Walter Hill’s grandfather, Thomas, had emigrated from England to Southern Maryland around 1750. The Maryland colony had remained a Catholic stronghold among the early colonies. In 1753, Thomas Hill married Rebecca Miles, the great-aunt of the Jesuit Father Thomas Miles. Hill's family came in 1787 to the Kentucky territory where a growing Catholic population had drawn French Jesuits from New Orleans to serve them.

By 1835, both of Walter Hill’s parents had passed away as he began attending the local Catholic school. St. Mary’s College. The college had been founded in 1821 by two local Catholic gentlemen, and the Jesuit fathers began teaching at St. Mary’s in 1831, a few years before Hill became a student there. As he was an orphan, Walter found studying at St. Mary's difficult. In his autobiography, Hill would later write:

My sister having made for me with her own hand a new jeans jacket and a pair of pantaloons I went to St. Mary's, between Christmas and New Year's Day 1835, and was put into a grammar and arithmetic class in which I had no great success. ... Most of the students were of aristocratic families, but in general they treated me well, better than I merited.

The young Hill worked his way through St. Mary’s. He later wrote: In the Spring of 1837, I again was put to work on the farm, taking my meals and rest along with the hired men; during all the time I worked, I was under an overseer. He worked for a time in the college’s flour mill, but by 1838, he had been placed in charge of the school’s sawmill, and he earned praise for his skills in managing the teams of oxen that carried the large logs down the hills of the local forests to the mill. Hill began the regular classical course at St. Mary’s in 1839 and he received his A.B. degree in 1843.

He immediately began his graduate studies at St. Mary’s. While studying for his Master's degree, Hill taught classes at St. Mary's and wrote numerous plays for student productions. Unfortunately, Mr. Hill destroyed these dramatic efforts after the plays were performed. He earned his A. M. degree from St. Mary’s in 1846. At that time, the Jesuits who were operating St. Mary’s, decided to leave Kentucky when New York’s Archbishop John Hughes offered them the Rose Hill property in New York. The school at Rose Hill would soon be known as Fordham University. Hill would later write: They [the Jesuits] determined to quit the diocese of Kentucky for more genial fields of labor.

It was while Hill was a student at St. Mary’s in Kentucky that he met Louis Charles Boisliniere, who would later become a distinguished Doctor of Medicine in St. Louis, and Dr. Moses Linton, a prominent Kentucky physician. Mr. Boisliniere was a graduate in law of the University of Paris, but for a variety of reasons he resolved to take up the profession of medicine. Hill taught Boisliniere English, while the latter taught Mr. Hill music. Hill would become quite knowledgeable in music.

Dr. Linton left Kentucky in 1846 for St. Louis where he became a distinguished member of the faculty for Saint Louis University’s Department of Medicine. Dr. Linton convinced the young Hill to forgo following the Jesuits to Fordham in New York, and so Hill went to St. Louis to study medicine at Saint Louis University. Soon, however, Hill became disenchanted with his medical studies. Engaged to be married, but also uncertain as to what he should do with his life now that he had quit medical studies, Hill was encouraged to make a spiritual retreat in St. Louis with the Jesuits.

I made up a little parcel of linen and walked up the then dreary, muddy, unpaved, and lonely Washington Avenue to the college to begin a Retreat, oppressed in spirit, and in a dark, uncertain struggle of soul, Hill wrote later in his autobiography. Soon after completing the retreat, Hill decided that the religious life was the direction in which he should move, and so he decided to enter the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). On February 3, 1847, Hill rode in an open wagon to the Jesuit’s St. Stanislaus Seminary in Florissant, Missouri. Hill later recalled: The roads were rough, covered with snow, the country wild, and but sparsely settled.

The St. Stanislaus novitiate at Florissant was housed in the original cabin first occupied by the Jesuit pioneers who came in 1823, with some additions not less rude which had been made to it at different times. But the foundation of the present stone building had been laid in the [previous] year, or perhaps in 1844, and was up to the top of the basement, or nearly so. Hill and another young man were the only scholastic novices, and Fr. James Van de Velde, who had been the president of Saint Louis University and was soon to become the first bishop of Chicago, was the novice master.

Probably the most remarkable thing about Walter Hill's novitiate was its ending. Six months before Hill would have completed the normal two-year period of initial religious formation, Father Van de Velde informed Hill that he would be leaving the next morning with a group of five Jesuits for Bardstown, Kentucky. The bishop in Kentucky was turning over St. Joseph's College in Bardstown to the Jesuits. Remember that the Jesuits had just left St. Mary’s College in Kentucky for New York a few years earlier. Although only a novice, Hill learned that he would be leading the group of Jesuits on the three-day trip to Louisville by riverboat, presumably because of his knowledge of Kentucky. He was only 27 years old when he moved from novitiate to his first apostolic assignment. He would not take his first Jesuit vows for another eight months.

While at St. Joseph’s in Bardstown, Hill served as prefect of studies and he taught various subjects, including higher mathematics. Most of the young men attending St. Joseph’s were from the South. Among his tasks at St. Joseph’s was helping to recruit students for the school. On one of his recruiting trips, he became ill with yellow fever at St. Charles College in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, along with nine other Jesuits. Sadly, four of these nine other Jesuits died.

Hill remained at Bardstown until 1855 when he returned to his studies at St. Louis. He completed his philosophy by 1857, and immediately began his course in theology. The first three years of Hill’s theology was taken in St. Louis while he studied in Boston for the fourth year. Upon his return to St. Louis in May, 1861, Hill witnessed a key moment of the Civil War as it occurred in St. Louis. Hill later wrote: As I reached the college, the open lot 7 to 8th Green to Morgan Sts. was filled with laborers whom the mayor was to meet and give them work: a raw German regiment passed a few minutes later, and were frightened; when they reached Olive and 7th being still badly scared, they fired on a crowd standing about the stable door, killing and wounding quite a number by this cowardly act. This skirmish would later be called The Camp Jackson Affair.

Although Missouri remained in the Union, it was a slave state and it stood on the frontier of Southern territorial expansion. St. Louis was a key strategic asset for the Union, but Saint Louis University attracted a number of students from the South, mostly French-speaking sons of wealthy families. The Civil War had an immediate impact on the colleges. Our boarders here (St. Louis) and at Bardstown are Southerners or secessionists, whom we shall be forced soon to send back some way or other to their families, said Fr. William Stack Murphy, who believed the South had a right to secede.

The city of St. Louis is in great danger of being sacked and burned in case the secessionists get the upper hand in Missouri, Father Peter De Smet wrote in a letter to the Jesuit Father General in October, 1861. Several of Ours without regard to the instructions of your Paternity, as published by the Provincial, continue to manifest secessionist sentiments, at least in the house. No good and much harm can result from manifestations of this sort. Indiscretions are filling the prisons more and more every day. Walter Hill and other young Jesuits might have been in military uniform had De Smet not used his Washington political connections to win Jesuit scholastics an exemption from military service.

Walter Hill became Father Walter Hill on August 24, 1861, when St. Louis Archbishop Peter Kenrick ordained him to the Catholic priesthood n the St. Louis Cathedral near on the riverfront. Two years later, Father Hill was sent to Frederick, Maryland for his tertianship, the final year of Jesuit formation. Even though he escaped the army, Father Hill once again could not avoid the Civil War. Hill wrote: In going to and from Hagerstown I passed the scene of the battle at South Mountain; the trees were riven and torn to pieces by cannon balls and bombshell, and the ground was covered with the debris of a camp. Near Hagerstown is the Antietam, a stream about a hundred yards wide, and of a lively current. A great battle was fought a few miles down it.

Near the end of Father Hill’s tertianship year, his final spiritual retreat was interrupted by war when Confederate General Jubal Early's men advanced toward Washington.

The Monocosy Junction [the Battle of Monocacy Junction, July 9, 1864] was then held by the union troops to the number of ten thousand; during our retreat General Early with forty thousand troops advanced from the Shenandoah Valley and attacked the town; we could see his men on South Mtn. three miles off; their shells struck a protestant church, aimed at people in the cupola supposed to be there to reconnoiter: the shells flew for 2 days. Almost incessant, their peculiar droning sound had a saddening effect.

When the Civil War ended, the Jesuits were faced with difficult decisions. During the War, they had closed St. Joseph’s College temporarily because most of the students could not get to Bardstown due to the fighting. But should they reopen it now that the war was over? Saint Louis University also had many students from the southern states, but Saint Louis was not totally dependent on having these southern young men to remain viable. And then there was St. Charles College in Louisiana to consider. Eventually, the Jesuits decided not to reopen St. Joseph’s in Bardstown after the Civil War.

After Hill’s tertianship was finished in Maryland in 1864, he returned to St. Louis and Saint Louis University where he began to teach philosophy, which would become his major interest during his career. But the following year, Fr. Ferdinand Coosemans, the Missouri provincial, named appointed the 45-year-old Walter Hill the sixth president of St. Xavier College (now Xavier University) in Cincinnati, Ohio. Among his many accomplishments during his four years as Xavier’s president, he was able to build a large four-story office and classroom building which contributed to the school’s growth.

In 1869, Father Coosemans once again came to Father Hill and asked him to serve as his secretary or socius. At Father Coosemans direction, Hill worked to obtain a charter for the new St. Mary's College, which the Missouri Province wanted to open in Kansas. Father Hill was able to persuade Kansas authorities to give the school tax-exempt status and academic standing

But after two years of work as an administrator for the Missouri Province, Father Hill returned to teaching philosophy at Saint Louis University. For 13 years, until 1884, Father Hill served as a professor of philosophy at the University. During those years, Hill wrote two textbooks. The first book, Elements of Philosophy was published in 1874 while the second, Ethics was published in 1879. These two texts were among the first attempts to make the principles of scholastic philosophy available to American students in English rather than in Latin. Father Hill’s Elements of Philosophy became the accepted textbook of metaphysics in the English-speaking, Catholic world, and both books were used extensively in Catholic academic circles. On writing the Ethics book, Father Hill humorously said: It is a hard, dreary undertaking. I barely have courage to finish it

While his philosophical texts would gradually become dated, the historical writings which father Hill undertook would live on even until the present. Up to the time Father Hill began to write about them, there were no histories of the early activities of the Jesuits of the Midwest, except for Father De Smet's accounts of the Rocky Mountain Mission. As the 19th century moved on, the early founders of the Province began to die. As this living history perished, Father Hill took it upon himself to memorialize these men and their works. As was mentioned at the beginning, in 1879 Father Hill published his Historical Sketch of St. Louis University to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Jesuits' teaching at the school. This wonderful book provides exquisite detail about all of the efforts of those first men in St. Louis.

But going beyond this history of the University, and possibly of even more importance, Father Hill wrote numerous historical articles on pioneer Jesuit institutions and biographical sketches of his fellow Jesuits for the Jesuit’s Woodstock Letters. In his writings, Hill looked beyond the better known Jesuits, such as Father De Smet and Father Verhaegen, to remind readers that a man like Father Judochus Van Assche possessed a remarkable goodness and that Father John Baptist Druyts was the most loved superior.

In 1884, Father Hill’s provincial asked him to step aside from his teaching of philosophy and spend time in pastoral work. Father Hill was assigned to the Sacred Heart Parish in Chicago, but then he suffered an accident which hindered his eyesight and prevented him from doing much more parochial work. He left Chicago in 1896 and returned to St. Louis where he continued his philosophical thinking and writing, remaining an active member of the University community until he passed away on May 18, 1907, at the age of 85.

In many ways, the life and work of Father Walter H. Hill may serve as a guide to the exciting years of the 19th century in which the Jesuits of the Missouri Province established their roots and made their mark in the middle of the United States. Father Gilbert Garraghan, the early 20th century historian of these early Jesuits wrote this about Father Hill:

He was a man of medium height, stockily built and of uniform good health, living to the ripe age of 85. He was a vigorous, stalwart personality, an enemy of all pretension and sham, and had qualities of mind and heart that won him numerous friends.

One of his friends was the prominent St. Louis physician Dr. Louis Boisliniere. Earlier it was mentioned that Hill and Boisliniere had met in Kentucky. Boisliniere later wrote of his Jesuit friend:

Fr. Walter Hill was the best teacher I have ever known. He was methodical and direct. ...His clear arrangement of the subject matter enabled the members of the class to understand the subject as a whole and the component parts in their interrelation.

John Ireland, the famous Catholic Archbishop of Minnesota was another of Father Hill’s friends and admirers. Archbishop Ireland once wrote to Hill:

That I have been able to secure and enjoy your very special regard is one of my great comforts of mind I cannot have gone very wrong, I am able to say to myself, since Father Hill is so willing to number me among his good friends. I rejoice to hear now and then from friends who meet you that though bending under the weight of years, you are still bright of thought and gay of heart.

When Archbishop Ireland learned of Father Hill’s passing, he wrote to Father Hill’s friends in St. Louis: Father Hill has seen the allotted course of years and his passing away cannot be a surprise, yet it brings to his many friends, among whom I am happy to number myself, a pang of deep sorrow. He was such a good man, such a devoted friend, it was such a delight to see him face to face, to meet him mind to mind. He was one of my best and sweetest friends. Few there are, if any, from whose company I derived so much joy, so much light, and guidance. As I look back over the last thirty years, I consider it one of my great privileges to have known him, to have loved him and to have been loved by him.

Finally, probably the most touching tribute given to Father Hill was written upon his death by Father David Phelan, the fiery editor of the St. Louis Catholic newspaper, The Western Watchman.. Phelan wrote: He {Father Hill] is the greatest priest this generation of American ecclesiastics has produced. He resembled St. Paul in that he never taught aught but the plain and simple truths of the Catholic church.

Copyright 2020 John Waide