Chamberlain served as a Presbyterian missionary in the Southwest in 1817.[1][2] The following year, he began serving as a Presbyterian minister in Bedford, Pennsylvania.[1][2]
He served as president of Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, from 1822 to 1825.[1][2] The college was in grave financial straits.[2] To improve the situation, Chamberlain negotiated for the control of the college to be relinquished by the state to the Presbyterian Church, which was effected in 1824.[2] The Presbyterian Church was responsible for the election of the Board of Trustees and the finances of the college.[2]
That year, in 1828, he attempted to found a new Presbyterian academy in Mississippi.[1][2] Meanwhile, he served as the minister at Bethel Presbyterian Church in Alcorn.[3]
Two years later, in 1830, Chamberlain was appointed as the president of Oakland College near Rodney, Mississippi.[1][2] The college closed down in 1861 because of the outbreak of the American Civil War, as its students left for war.[1][2] Never recovering after the war, the administrators sold the property to the state in 1870. The state legislature established Alcorn University there, the first black land grant institution in the country. The old Oakland Memorial Chapel, built in 1838, remains on its campus.[1][2] Oakland College was reopened as a secondary boys' school in nearby Port Gibson in 1879 and named Chamberlain-Hunt Academy (CHA) after the Oakland Founder and Mr. David Hunt, a local planter and the most generous benefactor of Oakland. C.H.A. was a college preparatory school until 2014, when it closed its doors.
Map of Liberia in the 1830s, where the Mississippi and other state-sponsored colonies are identified.
Isabella Chamberlain (1825–1846).[7] She married William S. Hyland in 1844.[7]
Rebecca Clarissa Chamberlain (1827–1857).[7] She married Fabius H. Sleeper in 1851.[7]
Death
On September 5, 1851, Chamberlain was stabbed to death by George A. Briscoe, a pro-slavery planter, after he spoke out against the "peculiar institution."[1][2] He was buried in a cemetery on the campus of Oakland College. A week after the attack, his killer Briscoe committed suicide.[2] Chamberlain's grave and a memorial obelisk still stand on what is now the campus of Alcorn State University. His wife and four daughters were later buried beside him.[7]
^ abcdefghWilliam L. Sanders, Carved in Stone: Cemeteries of Claiborne County, Mississippi, Dorrance Publishing, 2014, pp. 11–13 [3]
^Mary Carol Miller, Must See Mississippi: 50 Favorite Places, Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2007, p. 135 [4]
^Samuel J. Rogal, The American Pre-College Military School: A History and Comprehensive Catalog of Institutions, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2009, p. 163 [5]
