Ebony and Ivy (42 page)

Students on numerous campuses rose up in defense of the abolitionist minority. At Colby College in Maine, the boys demanded that the governors recognize their antislavery society. Condemning the “most unwarrantable, virulent, and wicked prejudice” that restrained black people's access to jobs and schools, the founders of the Union College Anti-Slavery Society also took an expansive
view of the fight against slavery. More than forty students joined the association, declared themselves an auxiliary of the New York Anti-Slavery Society, committed to immediate emancipation, and refuted accusations of fanaticism. “I have put my name to the constitution of an Abolition society … which labors, which acts, and which has some efficiency in the great cause of Emancipation,” William Frederick Wallis, an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, proudly informed a friend. About 150 people joined the Dartmouth society, and, Wallis boasted, they were outfitting the library with abolitionist newspapers and books, and supporting antislavery work in the state.
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In 1834 the American Colonization Society held its annual meeting in the Hall of the United States Congress in Washington, D.C. Yale president Jeremiah Day served as a vice president of the convention under former United States president James Madison. The audience included justices of the United States Supreme Court, senators, congressmen, a large contingent of state and local officials, and a corps of scholars. That same year Chief Justice John Marshall loaned the ACS $500 of the $50,000 it sought to borrow to maintain solvency. The state and local auxiliaries were equally privileged, enjoying the patronage of politicians, ministers, and an academic elite. In Connecticut, for example, the governor, college presidents, numerous professors, the Episcopal bishop and leading clergy, and wealthy merchants headed the colonization movement.
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Shortly after the ACS closed its meetings in the United States Capitol, white mobs began attacking abolitionists and antislavery symbols, destroyed their property, and broke up their meetings. The height of the antiabolitionist and antiblack terror in the North came as academic influence on the colonization movement peaked. During a week of violence in New York City, gangs roamed the streets, assaulted black and white people, raided antislavery institutions, and sacked African American schools and churches. Columbia president William Alexander Duer—the heir of an old
West Indies plantation family—served as the founding president of the Colonization Society of the City of New York and was a delegate to the national ACS meetings. The affiliate's introductory appeal, which carried Duer's signature, advised that “a numerous free population of a distant and inferior race” threatened the nation's great cities, and the problem of slavery paled before the emergency of this menace.
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Meeting of the American Colonization Society in Washington, D.C
.
SOURCE: Bettmann/Corbis

Violence was not limited to the city streets. The ACS and its auxiliaries were directly involved in a string of wars upon African American students and abolitionist schools, part of a larger struggle to halt the development of free black communities. In the summer of 1831 Justice David Daggett, Congressman Ralph Ingersoll, and other public figures with close ties to Yale conspired to stop a planned black college, the first of its kind, from opening in New Haven. Two years later colonizationists targeted the abolitionist Prudence Crandall's school for African American girls and women in Canterbury, Connecticut. They engineered a sequence of criminal prosecutions, convicted her in a trial presided over by Judge Daggett, and physically destroyed the school. In 1835 New England colonizationists plotted against Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire, a new school open to both genders and all races.
A mob of three hundred people hunted black students with guns and a cannon, then used oxen and horses to pull the academy's building from its foundations and drag it through town.
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Just two weeks after the riot at Noyes Academy, antiabolitionist violence shocked Amherst College. As the undergraduate classes marched to the August 1835 commencement prayers, Robert C. McNairy, a sophomore from Tennessee, took a heavy club and began bludgeoning John L. Ashby, a junior and abolitionist from New Hampshire. At the time, Rev. Gurley of the ACS was in New England lecturing on the dangers of abolitionism and praising the progress of the colonizationist cause. Moreover, Edward Everett was on the Amherst campus. He was addressing the students on the importance of academic institutions and public education to the diffusion of arts and sciences that sustained the unprecedented liberty of the American people. In the wake of a wave of assaults on African American schools, black students, and abolitionists, Everett prayed that “freedom and knowledge and morals and religion … be the birthright of our children to the end of time!”
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American scholars who stoked fears of a multiracial future provided a compelling intellectual justification for violence. Academics cannibalized their wayward colleagues and silenced their obstinate students. Professor Benjamin Silliman of Yale cautioned a New Haven audience about the demographic threats underlying the “national anxiety” over slavery. “Who can then, without dismay, contemplate the character of this overwhelming [black] population,” Silliman projected, before suggesting inevitable race war and black rule. Silliman blamed abolitionists for the political fracture and pointed to the removal of black people as the most practical solution to the nation's racial dilemma.
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The great majority of the crusade's adherents had serious doubts about the spiritual capacity and social potential of black peoples, African or American. Their insistence upon removal revealed a declining faith in Christianity's ability to transform nonwhite peoples, a position bolstered by the popular belief that human beings occupied fixed racial categories with biologically determined fates. Academics were well positioned to make this argument.

In the decades before the Civil War, American scholars claimed
a new public role as the racial guardians of the United States. They interpreted race science into national social policy to construct the biological basis of citizenship and to assert that the very presence of nonwhite and non-Christian peoples threatened the republic. They laid the intellectual foundations for a century of exclusion and removal campaigns. The intellectual roots of the cyclical political and social assaults upon Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, Irish, and Asians can be traced back to this scholarly obsession with race.

Of one thing, my friends, you may be sure, that the

diploma which you expect to carry home with you

from this literary institution, though delivered to you

in the most authentic form, unless it be countersigned

and attested in the inner court of the mind and heart

of the receiver, will be nothing to you but a certificate

of a square of years passed within the college walls,

sufficient to prove an
alibi
in a court of justice, but not

sufficient to establish the competency of the bearer to

meet the demands which society has upon every

graduate of Harvard College.

—PROFESSOR CHARLES FOLLEN, SERMON TO
THE STUDENTS OF HARVARD, CA. 1835

Mourn, Christians—mourn—a brother loved

Is stricken from your sight,

Follen, the good—the wise—the pure—

Has heavenward ta'en his flight.

—“THE BURNING OF THE LEXINGTON,”
LIBERATOR
, FEBRUARY 21, 1840

Cotton Comes to Harvard

On January 13, 1840, “Rev. Dr. Follen, of Harvard College,” sat among 150 passengers aboard the
Lexington
. At 3:00 P.M. the ship left Long Island for Stonington on Connecticut's eastern shore carrying a large cargo of cotton on its upper deck. On any other day it would have been a routine commercial voyage. However, the cotton had been loaded near a smoke pipe, and around 7:00 P.M. it caught fire. Flames swept the ship. The engine failed. Safety boats were lost or flooded as the crew and passengers panicked. The
Lexington
drifted eastward for hours. At about 3:00 A.M. it sank in the waters south of New England. All but a few of the people on board perished in the fire or drowned in Long Island Sound; the three survivors had clung to debris or tied themselves to bales of cotton. Northern businessmen accounted for many but not all of the fatalities. Alice Winslow, a recent widow escorting her husband's corpse back to Providence, Rhode Island, died with her family that night. The Reverend Charles Follen also perished. “I picture him as he ever was in life, calm and resolute amid that scene of danger and death,” the Reverend John Pierpont cried. “The flames surround him! the cold depths are below!”
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In 1824 Congress had invited the Marquis de Lafayette, the
French general who had fought with the colonists during the American Revolution, to return to the United States in anticipation of the fiftieth anniversary of independence. During this extended celebratory tour, General Lafayette received a letter from Charles Follen in Philadelphia, where the German refugee was studying English and looking to begin his career anew. Five years earlier, in Mannheim, Germany, a young theology student named Karl Ludwig Sand had stabbed the dramatist August von Kotzebue with a dagger in retaliation for the artist's editorial attacks upon political liberalism and academic freedom in the universities. During the investigations into the murder, authorities questioned, arrested, and jailed activists and academics. An open supporter of political and intellectual freedom, Charles Follen was rounded up and driven from the University of Jena. He fled Germany under threat of imprisonment, and eventually left for the United States.
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General Lafayette interrupted the national commemoration to introduce the refugee to George Ticknor, Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard and Lafayette's biographer. Ticknor brought Follen to Cambridge, where he was appointed instructor in German. As a teenager Follen had left the University of Giesen to fight against Napoleon. In America, he was immediately attracted to the antislavery movement. He read William Lloyd Garrison's
Liberator
, and then dropped in to meet the editor at his upstairs office in Merchants' Hall, Boston. By 1833 Follen was serving as vice president of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, and the following year he helped organize its first convention in Boston. As mob violence and government intimidation threatened to stall antislavery, Follen argued that morality had to persevere in the face of sin, he rejected the accusation that abolitionists had invited violence, and he pushed the boundaries of radicalism by calling for the equal treatment of black people in antislavery circles. When southern politicians demanded that the New England states silence and outlaw antislavery associations, Follen defended abolitionism before the Massachusetts legislature.
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