At the time of the meeting, Noah Porter was even more famous as the illustrious president of Yale University. He was at the height of an academic and ministerial career that spanned over sixty years. A nephew and protégé of Heman Humphrey, Porter was already respected as a preacher and biblical scholar by the time of his graduation from Yale in 1828.
Reverend Porter’s sermons, which spoke eloquently against slavery and in favor of civil liberties, received wide distribution. He feared an oppressive government more than individual lawbreaking and advocated repeatedly for the legal protections of habeas corpus and a trial with all the other safeguards the law offered. After pastorates in New Milford and Farmington, Connecticut; and in Springfield, Massachusetts, he had returned to the faculty at Yale and was elected president in 1871. An author of scores of essays, books and articles, he gained worldwide notice as the editor of numerous editions and revisions of Webster’s dictionary.6
Two other notables completed the core group. One was Dr. Joseph Cummings, who had just completed seventeen years as the president of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Cummings succeeded Judge Barbour in June as the CPA’s second president. Like his predecessor, he also served for a brief time, only four months, but his departure was due to political rather than medical reasons. In 1876 he would make an unsuccessful bid to be governor of Connecticut. After his defeat, he resumed his former calling as a Methodist pastor and served in several churches of the region. Although he absented himself from the Prisoners’ Friend Association, the backing he gave as an academic, a clergyman, and a political leader was influential in encouraging support for the organization from those who were still on the fence about the venture.7
Without doubt, the most important founder in terms of longevity with the CPA was Judge Francis Wayland. He succeeded Cummings as the president of the Prisoners’ Friend Association in the fall of 1875. Wayland had not been present during the initial planning sessions, but once he joined in the formation of the group, he brought a sense of stability and energy into it that was essential to its survival during the early years.
Literally and figuratively, Wayland became the public image of the agency over the course of the next twenty-nine years. Already an established political and legal presence in the state, Francis Wayland was a man to be reckoned with. He not only added credibility by dint of his own reputation; he also took over the reins of the organization as a leader who knew how to get things done, in the community and in the legislature.8
Wayland had been a probate court judge for the New Haven district for five years, from 1859 to 1864. He was elected lieutenant governor of Connecticut in 1869. He returned to academia when Yale University Law School called him to be a professor in 1872. Subsequently, Wayland was named dean of the Law School, a position he held throughout his long tenure with CPA. In the state, region, and nation, Wayland was involved in public service continually. Invariably, he seems to have risen to the presidency of all the organizations with which he was connected. In addition to serving as president of CPA for three decades, he was also the president at one time or another of the Board of Directors of the Connecticut State Prison, the National Prison Association, the Organized Charities of New Haven, Connecticut General Hospital in New Haven, and the two military academies at West Point and Annapolis.
It is no exaggeration to conjecture that few people were better known in New England, or more involved in more levels of the community, than Francis Wayland between 1870 and the time of his death in 1904. While Porter and Cummings added considerable luster to the new agency, Wayland also added stability, legal expertise and political savvy.
Newspaper accounts and the annual reports available from 1889 indicate that scores of other prominent citizens were attracted to the CPA’s cause. Charles Dudley Warner, owner and publisher of the Hartford Courant and a close friend of Mark Twain’s, became deeply involved. Former governor James E. English of New Haven also showed more than passing interest in the new group. In sum, at the center of the organizational process was an impressive array of church leaders, lawyers, civic leaders, attorneys, and judges from all corners of Connecticut.9
By six at night, on March 9, 1875, the organization had been officially formed. Bylaws had been adopted, officers had been chosen, and an executive committee appointed. It included representatives from the counties of Hartford, New Haven, New London, Litchfield, Tolland, Windham, and Middletown and some representatives from individual towns such as Farmington, Vernon, Danbury, and Milford. Later, as the legal technicalities were worked out, it would be referred to as the Prisoners’ Friend Corporation.
When the meeting at Center Church ended around suppertime, the objectives of the group had been agreed to and the initial shape of the agency designed. The members undoubtedly went away to their separate homes with some unanswered questions, but with a genuine sense of satisfaction. They had gotten the process of organization underway with a level of enthusiasm and creativity that has dimmed from time to time but never abated.
THE FIRST CRITICAL CHOICE: JOHN C. TAYLOR AS AGENT
After months of planning and organizational meetings, the CPA’s founding group made its first personnel decision. There is no record of any conversations about the process with the Boston Prison Discipline Society or with the other similar agencies that had been formed in New York, Maryland, and Philadelphia. The new agency’s leaders had talked with John Augustus, the legendary Boston boot maker who even then was considered the “father of probation.” Also in their midst were two people who had attended the big 1870 American Prison Reform Congress in Cincinnati, described in the second chapter. At least one member of the founding group, Francis Wayland, was a director of the Wethersfield State Prison at the time and had been active on behalf of the legislature in assessing prison conditions. Among the founders themselves, as judges and clergy, some probably had other contacts within judicial and clergy networks from whom they garnered advice on the kind of person they needed to run the Prisoners’ Friend Association. It would have been fascinating to listen to their discussions, arguments, and recommendations as they made their choice.
Without any fanfare, a man named John C. Taylor was hired as its first agent and its secretary on March 11, 1875. Nothing is recorded about why he was chosen, what qualities he had that made him stand out, or whether he was the only person considered for the position. It is entirely possible, given the nature of the work to be undertaken and the novelty of it for the times, that few others wanted the job. Since a military form of discipline was considered at the time to be the appropriate regimen for a prison, what led the founders to choose him most likely lay in Taylor’s established character as a military veteran. There is no information about what might have made the job appealing to him except that he had recently returned from California and was searching for a career.
Like almost all who would eventually follow in his footsteps for the next fifty years, Taylor was a complete novice in criminal justice. He had never worked around or with offenders before. Although relatively young (thirty years old at the time of his hiring), he had undoubtedly matured beyond his years thanks to his participation in the war. Like many other veterans who survived, he had come away with a vivid experience of both the good and the evil of which humanity was capable.
What we know of his parents and early childhood is found in the brief biography that appeared in the souvenir booklet printed at the 1902 dedication of the Civil War cannon from Taylor’s regiment that sits outside the state capital building to this day. His father was engaged in business in New York City, and it was there that John Taylor was born on March 24, 1845. His family moved to Bethel, Connecticut, when he was a young boy. Since his army records list him as a resident of Bethel, it can safely be presumed that he spent his adolescence and teen years in that town. The brief biography in the cannon dedication brochure indicates that his first teacher was “ex-Governor George E. Loundsbury” (elected for a one-year term in 1899), who had taught school in western Connecticut before entering Yale Divinity School.10
Taylor was sixteen in the fall
