James Roosevelt Bayley

Bayley's paternal grandfather, Dr. Richard Bayley, was a professor at Columbia College who created New York's quarantine system. Dr. Bayley had three children by his first wife, among whom was Elizabeth Ann Seton, who was canonized in 1975 as the first American-born Catholic saint. After his first wife's death, Dr. Bayley married Charlotte Amelia Barclay, a member of the Roosevelt family, and the couple had seven children, the sixth of whom was Archbishop Bayley's father, Guy Carleton Bayley, born in 1786. Guy Carleton Bayley, a physician like his father, married his second cousin Grace Roosevelt, six years his junior, on November 4, 1813. Grace Roosevelt was the daughter of Jacobus Roosevelt and Maria Eliza Walton, and her brother, Isaac Roosevelt, was the grandfather of future President Franklin D. Roosevelt, making Archbishop Bayley a first cousin to President Roosevelt's father James Roosevelt I, and a fourth cousin twice removed of future President Theodore Roosevelt.

Bayley was the couple's first child, born at their home at 65 Chambers Street, New York City, on August 23, 1814, and baptized at Trinity Church on September 21. A brother Richard was born on October 25, 1816, while the family was living at 331 Pearl Street, beside Grandfather Roosevelt's place of business at 333 Pearl Street. The following year, Dr. Bayley, probably desiring more healthful surroundings for his family than the city, purchased three pieces of land in Mamaroneck in Westchester County, and the family made their new home on one of these, a fifty-acre plot known as Nelson Hill. In this home, three other children were born: Carleton in November 1818, William Augustus in May 1821, and the only daughter, Maria Eliza, on March 1, 1823.

One writer asserts that Bayley's early school days were spent at Mendham Township, New Jersey. Another relates that he received a fair elementary education in the "public schools" of New York and displayed great studiousness and "an extraordinary love of miscellaneous reading." This may have referred to the schools in Mamaroneck or in New York City, where he may have lived with his grandfather. A later biographer infers he may have begun his earliest education in New Jersey and continued it in New York.

Bayley's mother died on March 28, 1828, and by 1830 the Bayleys had left their home at Mamaroneck and had moved back to New York, or at least nearer to it. In the autumn of 1828 or 1829, Bayley left for boarding school, spending some time at the Mount Pleasant Classical Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts. A classmate there later recalled, "he then had a great fancy for the sea, and actually obtained a commission of midshipman in the navy. When he appeared before us in his uniform preparatory to leaving school, I well remember our admiration and envy of the naval hero. But upon mature deliberation he reconsidered the matter, packed his uniform away, and devoted himself to his studies more earnestly than ever." For many years after, his friends called him by the nickname "the commodore." The same classmate recalled that "I do not remember that the commodore was ever counted in when there was a quarrel, for he was everybody's friend." Bayley kept up his friendships from this school until the end of his life, and regularly sent letters to class reunions even when he could not attend in person.

In 1831, Bayley matriculated at Amherst College, studying there for two years. A classmate later recalled that he "sustained good rank as a scholar" and "possessed decided talent." There, he became an active member of the Alexandrian Literary Society, in which he was given an opportunity to practice public speaking as a participant in its debates. After leaving Amherst, Bayley matriculated in the fall of 1833 at Washington College in Hartford, Connecticut, a young institution with only seven undergraduates in Bayley's senior class. His classmate Robert Tomes, expressing surprise at Bayley's subsequent position as an archbishop, recalled of Bayley: "[He] was no student, and, in fact, seemed to think of nothing but the care, inside and out, of his own lusty, handsome person, and of the cigar he was perpetually puffing. He had a broad and ruddy face, and was always of a jovial humor." Shortly after his matriculation at Washington College, Bayley became a member of another literary society, the Athenaeum, and during his years there, he helped found a literary and social society, the I.K.A. Bayley's final examinations lasted twenty hours, distributed as follows as recorded by Bayley in a notebook: four hours devoted to the classics—Livy, Cicero, Homer, Tacitus, Juvenal; seven to mathematics and natural science, including navigation, surveying, conic sections, mechanics, chemistry, astronomy, and optics; three to moral and intellectual philosophy and political economy; four to belles-lettres and rhetoric; and one each to jurisprudence (James Kent's Commentaries on American Law) and to Christian evidences (William Paley's). Bayley received his bachelor's degree on August 6, 1835. He had decided to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather by studying medicine.

Bayley returned to Hartford as a resident graduate to begin his medical studies. However, he subsequently changed his mind and began studying under the Rev. Samuel Farmar Jarvis to enter the Episcopal ministry. It is not certain what was the determining factor in this change in the course of his studies. In his autobiographical sketch, Bayley stated simply: "Studied medicine one year & then Theology with the Revd. Dr. Saml. Farmar Jarvis, at Middletown." He spent several happy, profitable years there studying under an eminent clergyman who was an authority on ecclesiastical history and antiquities, and allowed his students free access to his personal library of 10,000 volumes. He became acquainted with "the elegant Oxford edition of the Fathers and the more erudite French and Italian editions of the same and other important works" and "waded through the literature of the middle ages," such as the works of Peter of Blois and Vincent of Beauvais which served to remove from his mental vision the scales of prejudice against the misnamed Dark Ages.

During these studies, Bayley began to question the claims of the Protestant Episcopal Church to be the Catholic Church founded by Jesus and the consequent contention that the "Romish" Church was the dissenting and heretical one. Archbishop Robert Seton (a grandson of Mother Seton, and Bayley's first cousin once removed) recalled Bayley's once telling him that "his earliest attraction to the Faith was received while reading the works of Saint Jerome, and was strengthened in it by the study of Christian antiquities." Bayley recalled in 1876 that in the preparation of an essay for Dr. Jarvis on the apostolic canons which obliged him to study the ancient councils and the fathers of the Church, he had become convinced "that the Pope had much more to do with the government of the Church, than we were willing to allow." In 1842, Bayley wrote to his Washington College classmate and friend John Williams concerning Jarvis' influence upon him, "when he saw the bias of my mind he used all his endeavors to turn it, from what he believed to be dangerous error, and I am convinced, that it was with a sincere and lively sorrow that he found his arguments, and I may say entreaties were likely to prove useless... But if I be asked whether the principles which I learned under his roof, and I may say general instruction, inclined me to join the Church in communion with Rome, I... positively answer, Yes—I... assert, that high-Churchmanship led me to Rome, as it has led and is likely to lead many others—It was the respect for Antiquity, and the testimony of the Fathers, which I learned in the course of instruction recommended by him that first inclined me to seek and at last enabled me to find a refuge from doubt and uncertainty, in the fixed, unalterable Catholic, or if you will, Roman or Papal faith". However, he must have temporarily allayed such doubts as proceeding from an immature mind, which, as compared with the ripe and seasoned scholarship of such as Dr. Jarvis, could not be depended upon to pass judgment on such an important matter.