Date of Birth: January 29, 1812
Birth Location: Coshocton, OH, USA
Major Study: Law
Graduation Year(s): 1836, 1851
Degree(s) Earned: Bachelors, Doctor of Divinity (honorary)
Date of Death: February 5, 1877
Death Location: New Orleans, LA, USA
William Mitchel Daily was born in Ohio in 1812. That same year, his family moved to the Indiana Territory and settled on a farm near Brookville, the Franklin County seat. He spent his childhood years there, and attended the country school when it was open. He was baptized and grew up in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Having a frail constitution since birth, he was told that he would never be fit for manual labor. However, this was not an issue since his father was well-to-do and could support him comfortably.
Daily, however, had other plans. He had a calling to the ministry. After Daily attended a Brookville school, Theophilus Wylie (Presbyterian minister, college professor, and cousin of IU’s first president, Andrew Wylie) wrote, “he learned all that was taught there.” Daily left home at age fifteen to take charge of a school in an adjoining county and made his own income. At age sixteen, he was exhorting and preaching, being called “the boy preacher.” People would come from miles around to hear him preach. At age nineteen, he joined the Methodist Episcopal Conference. Two years later, he was ordained a deacon and then an elder two years after that. In 1835, he was sent to minister in Bloomington, Indiana, as a pastor. At that same time, he began his studies at IU, graduating the following year with his bachelor’s degree. In 1837, he was an agent of the Preacher’s Aid Society. In 1838, he was transferred to the Missouri Methodist Conference located in Saint Louis. He was also elected a professor at Saint Charles College in Missouri.
After less than two years of his professorship, Daily’s health broke. He suffered a hemorrhage in his lungs, and he moved back to Indiana. For the next three years, he recovered his health. Then he was called by Bishop Ames
to take charge of a congregation in Madison, Indiana. The next year, he served as chaplain of the U.S. Congress in Washington, DC. A volume of his sermons was published in Cincinnati, Discourses from the Pulpit, in 1845, its third edition being released in 1865, and is still being sold publish-on-demand. Daily returned from the nation’s capital to Indiana as a minister, stationed in Evansville and Rising Sun. He took on the additional roles of presiding elder of the Bloomington and Madison Districts and agent of Indiana Asbury University (now DePauw). He received an honorary Doctor of Divinity from IU in 1851. That same year, he preached the funeral of IU’s first President, Andrew Wylie. He was a member of the 1852 General Methodist Conference.
In 1853, Daily was elected the third president of IU. In December 1854, Daily was elected the first president of the Indiana State Teachers Association. Daily spent a busy five years at the helm of IU, helping rebuild and keep the university afloat after a devastating fire, including lobbying with the state legislature for funding, counseling students, and teaching classes, while continuing to minister and support his family. His literary publications showed breadth and depth of knowledge, dispelling notions that this country minister could never be up to college leadership. The graduating class of 1856 pooled together to publish his baccalaureate address, The Banner, for general distribution. Much of his surviving correspondence often includes the phrase “in haste,” as he was always coming or going.
Daily seemed wholly unaware of the gathering jealousy of a faction opposed to his being a Methodist amidst Presbyterian colleagues. He was blindsided when, in the summer of 1858, Dr. Alexander Murphy filed charges against him for supposed incompetence, infidelity, and drunkenness. The accuser dropped the charges after the Board of Trustees asked him to produce a list of witnesses. Daily was shaken by the apparent rejection of his loyal service to IU. Believing the negative publicity would harm IU’s prosperity, he resigned in January 1859, saying, “Pursued as I have been, and still am...I shall withdraw from the strife, and leave the field for a more quiet home.” He signed it “With a bleeding heart...Wm. M. Daily.” When Daily was allowed to return to give his farewell address in February, he found himself prevented from using the university chapel that he himself had helped fund and build from the ashes, the explanation being given (but not until after the speech) that there were fears of rioting and unrest by the students. In the heat of emotion, he made a fiery diatribe of uncharacteristic disgrace, which received negative publicity and did not endear him to the faculty. Theophilus Wylie soon reconciled with him and later wrote gratefully of his sacrifices for IU. Nevertheless, Wylie’s transcript of the speech preserved Daily’s infamous rant. Several students withdrew their admission from IU after Daily’s resignation, protesting his removal. Daily said of those who had tried to destroy him, “I do feel maligned, I am humbled, but I will rise again....Father forgive them for they know not what they do for want of sense.”
Daily returned to Madison in 1859, still a minister. In October of that year, the Indiana Methodist Conference expelled him from all connection with the conference, with no recorded minutes of the closed meeting, but apparently for political reasons. He still had to support his family and found work with the Illinois Methodists, traveling and preaching. In 1861, he became principal of Indiana’s Rome Academy in Perry County. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln appointed him hospital chaplain in Saint Louis, and he resigned his principalship to move to Missouri. He continued to travel to minister to barracks and military camps throughout the war in addition to his hospital service. After the war’s end, General Yates appointed him special mail agent in the South.
Daily received an honorary bachelor’s degree from Augusta College in Kentucky during the presidency of Bishop Henry Bascom. He also received an honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Louisville. In 1869, he became associated with the Louisiana Methodist Conference and was appointed to the Baton Rouge District for four years, the Upper Coast District for four years, and the North New Orleans District, where he served until his death. For all the years after his exit from IU, he expressed to his brother in letters his desire to someday return to Indiana (“Indiana is my home...O it is hard to give up Indiana...give me all the news in the way of Indiana items”). He kept a house there for a while, but he never permanently returned there. His remains were moved to Madison, Indiana, after his death.
Daily married Permelia A. Northcraft in 1843. They had two children, Lizzie and Willie. Lizzie graduated from a private academy and traveled widely. Daily wrote that Willie “has not the constitution for hard study.” He was concerned up until his death about Willie being able to make his own living, but eventually Willie found work, lived on a plantation, had a wife and daughter, and died in 1893. Permelia died in 1898. Lizzie had a husband and daughter, and died in 1910. Most of Daily’s personal effects and papers were lost in a flood of Willie’s home around 1880; the few we have today are mainly due to Lizzie’s collection.
On April 11, 1854, when Daily had been President for only a year, the new Indiana University college building burned. The fire occurred at night during a vacation, when no one was in the building. No one became aware a fire had occurred until the next morning. The chapel, meeting halls, furniture, and a small, valuable library had been reduced to ashes in hours. When asked, “What shall we do?” Theophilus Wylie said, “the unanimous answer from Trustees, Faculty, students and citizens was ‘Rebuild, and put the University in a better condition than it ever was before.’” Thirty-one months after the fire, the new building was completed. Daily formally dedicated it on November 30, 1856. Daily was “indefatigable in his efforts to rebuild and maintain the standing of the University,” Wylie wrote years later.
