Ebony and Ivy

by Craig Steven Wilder

  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

  Epilogue

  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!”1

  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.2

  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.3

  During the 1834 New England Anti-Slavery Society Convention, Professor Follen chaired the committee charged with writing an “Address to the People of the United States,” drafted their statement, and appeared first among its signatories. That public document confronted the critics of abolitionism and the defenders of slavery. It judged slavery incompatible with Christian principle and offensive to the basic tenets of republicanism and democracy. Slavery deflated the moral culture of the nation. It encouraged arrogance and fed upon violence. It hid sin under the guise of supremacy. “The law of the land which declares the house of the white man his ‘castle,’ and guards it against the threats of intruders by imprisonment and death,” Follen challenged the nation, “admits to the unguarded dwelling of the colored man, every selfish and brutal passion, if it bears the color of legalized oppression; it licenses the profanation of all that is sacred and dear to the wretched victim of avarice and prejudice.”4

  Charles Follen

  SOURCE: New York Public Library

  Charles Follen was equally resolute in the classroom, and Harvard boys judged him quite favorably. “Dr. Follen was the best of teachers,” recalled the Reverend Andrew Preston Peabody, an upperclassman when Follen arrived. “One fact is worthy of notice which is that they were negroes—of this there can be no doubt,” reads Henry Watson Jr.’s notebook from an 1829 course on ancient history. This future cotton planter also wrote that the ancient Egyptians had the curly hair and other features of the African race and that contemporary Egyptians were only lighter in complexion because of centuries of mixing with Europeans. Professor Follen did not leave it to his students to infer that black Africans cradled civilization. “This fact refutes all the false theories so often advanced in favor of slavery,” Follen concluded for them, “since they cannot be so inferior when all we know is due to the superiority of the so much despised Blacks.” In 1831 the college collected donations for a new professorship in German. That year Thomas Wigglesworth took a course on moral philosophy in which Follen used the lives of the Christian martyrs to demonstrate the heavy burden of a free will, a rational mind, and a loving but demanding God. “Conscience cannot be considered … the creature of circumstances,” Wigglesworth recorded at the beginning of one lecture.5

  But the exile again became a political liability to his institution. Follen had sympathized with student protests of the governance and curriculum, publicly supported abolition, and criticized the administration. Political antislavery was not the only cause of the subsequent backlash, but it was the part of the story that the governors tried to hide. Harvard president Josiah Quincy later admitted that there was little tolerance for antislavery discourse on the Harvard campus during his sixteen-year term. �
��Harvard College once trampled on Dr. Follen for his anti-slavery principles, and in their pride of place and power, they did it successfully,” Wendell Phillips angrily remembered, adding that the Harvard Corporation later worked feverishly to cover up its role in the persecution.6

  The funds for Follen’s professorship came from sensitive sources: the merchant Thomas H. Perkins, whose well-armed ships carried thousands of enslaved people from Africa to the Americas and tons of opium to Asia; Samuel Cabot, a merchant and shipping heir who arranged the appointment; and the merchant Jonathan Phillips, to whom Harvard awarded an honorary degree and whose family gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the college, the Boston Public Library, Phillips Andover Academy, Massachusetts General Hospital, and other institutions. The donors had more than financial connections to Harvard. President John Thornton Kirkland, who appointed Follen, was married to Elizabeth Cabot, the daughter of George Cabot of the Perkins and Cabot firm. Josiah Quincy, his successor, was married to Eliza Morton, the daughter of the wealthy New York merchant John Morton. From the end of the Revolution to the outbreak of the Civil War, the presidents of Harvard were almost always the sons or sons-in-law of the commercial elite—beginning with Joseph Willard, who wedded Mary Sheafe, the daughter of a rich West Indies supplier in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and ending with Cornelius Conway Felton, who married Mary Louisa Cary, the granddaughter of Thomas H. Perkins.7

  The reaction was swift. In February 1835 the governors discussed the situation. Their March minutes read: “Dr. Follen resigns his Prof[esso]r[ship] Of German Lit[erature].” The donors withdrew their subscriptions, and President Quincy and the officers discontinued his chair. The minutes of a meeting several weeks later include another announcement: “Prof. Ticknor resigns Smith Prof[essorship].” Ticknor’s decision to leave responded to the death of his son, the marginalization of his field, and the burdens of the recent upheavals on campus. “We differ, however, very largely, both as to what the College can be, and what it ought to be,” Ticknor admitted to a friend. “We therefore separate, as men who go different roads, though proposing the same end, each persuaded the one he prefers is the best, the pleasantest, and the shortest.”8

  In 1828 Eliza Lee Cabot, a childhood neighbor of the Quincys, had married Charles Follen. After her family and friends conspired to end her husband’s academic career, she began tutoring boys for entrance to Harvard to support the family. She wrote children’s books, contributed to abolitionist journals, and joined the antislavery movement. Follen eventually accepted the pulpit of the First Unitarian Church in New York City—likely with the assistance of the Unitarian cabal within the abolitionist movement—where he was also elected to the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society.9

  The idea that human slavery was wrong was not new to Harvard Yard. In 1829 the governors appointed the younger Henry Ware to a professorship in the Divinity School despite his advocacy of abolition. Ware was a founder and president of the Cambridge Anti-Slavery Society. Follen had regularly dined at the home of the elder Henry Ware, the Hollis Professor of Divinity, during his early days in Cambridge. The Boston newspapers accused Ware of undermining his value as a teacher and jeopardizing Harvard. Follen also befriended the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, the Harvard-trained pastor of Federal Street Church in Boston, who encouraged him to study for the ministry. During his father’s presidency of Harvard, Edmund Quincy served as a guest editor of the Liberator and an officer of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society—which replaced the New England organization in 1835. Charles Follen, William Lloyd Garrison, Maria Chapman, Charles Stuart, and Sarah and Angelina Grimké were founders.10 Follen did not enjoy the freedom afforded the son of the man occupying the most prestigious faculty chair at Harvard or the son of its president, but that was not his only vulnerability.

  THE AGE OF EUPHEMISM

  The northern elite was cleansing the stain of human slavery from the story of its prosperity. Some of the best-educated people in the nation were revising history to romanticize and sanitize their relationship to bondage. They erased their pasts as masters or reimagined their slaves as a lower order of adopted family—trusted, faithful, and beloved servants whom they had treated with dignity and human sympathy. They recast their enslavement of Africans into a tale of decorative servitude.

  The descendants of Thomas Perkins took pride in the story of his rescuing a dying African from a brutal slave dealer in Saint-Domingue, getting this man to the hospital, and then giving him to his sister-in-law, with whom he lived a full life. Mousse (Perkins) helped the Perkins family escape the island during the Haitian Revolution, and served them loyally in New England. He was buried in the Perkins family vault at St. Paul’s Church. This is a peculiar act of mercy when examined in conjunction with the history of the Perkinses’ eighteenth-century slaving voyages, which killed hundreds of human beings and continued after public opinion had turned against the slave trade. The Perkinses soon graduated into the opium trade with the backing of prominent New Englanders such as Massachusetts governor James Bowdoin.11

  The great families distanced themselves rhetorically from the planters of the West Indies and the South—despite numerous shared surnames—by claiming histories as merchants, investors, and insurers, and then elevating underwriting, finance, and trade to high arts. Slave traders became Atlantic merchants, and the biggest firms received the greatest praise. It was an age of euphemism, populated with fragile lies, half-truths, and deflections.

  If most white northerners found it difficult to tolerate antislavery zealots pointing fingers at the South, they also dreaded the abolitionists’ critique of the social order of New England and the Mid-Atlantic. The shipping, finance, and manufacturing economies of New England and the Mid-Atlantic remained firmly tied to human slavery long after the retreat of slaveholding in the northern states. The elite encouraged the antiabolitionist violence that began in New York City in the summer of 1834 and continued through the burning of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia four years later. During a memorial for Follen, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May described the 1835 riot in Boston:

  The doors of Faneuil Hall were thrown open, that the gentlemen of property and standing might crowd that sacred place to execrate the cause of liberty, and prepare their creatures to inflict that indelible stain upon the fair fame of our city, the mob of October 21, five thousand strong, which broke up a meeting of Anti-Slavery women—tore down the signs of our Anti-Slavery office—and dragged the Editor of an Anti-Slavery paper through the streets with a halter about him. Almost every one of the clergy stood aloof. Some held the garments of those who were stoning us.12

  The “sacred” status of Faneuil Hall itself came from cycles of mythmaking. It was hardly an inappropriate site for an attack upon abolitionism.

  A wealthy trader with a taste for grandeur, Peter Faneuil built the hall in 1742. Using a significant inheritance from his merchant uncle, Faneuil had put several slave ships to sea, including the not so modestly named Jolly Bachelor. The same year that Faneuil Hall opened, the Jolly Bachelor made a fatal trip to the Guinea coast, where the captain and several crewmen were killed in an attack. A skeleton crew completed emergency repairs to the ship and sailed back to Newport, Rhode Island, with twenty enslaved people on board. This too became a story of adventure and progress that obscured the heinous details. Two centuries later, a biographer described Peter Faneuil as a beneficiary of the “race growth” that occurred in the rugged Protestant culture of New England and an exemplar of the superior “racial development” that formed the spine of American history.13

  The affluent and the powerful did discredit abolitionism, but they failed to stop it. On November 7, 1837, a mob in Alton, Illinois, murdered Elijah P. Lovejoy, editor of the abolitionist Observer. The “first martyr” of white abolitionism created a moral stir that shook the nation. In the wake of the Lovejoy killing, undergraduates at Amherst accused the faculty of censoring free thought,
while an even larger group of Amherst students demanded the right to reestablish their campus antislavery society. Students at numerous schools charged that “free discussion was forbidden in northern colleges.” In the aftermath of the murder, Jonathan Phillips, one of the donors for Follen’s professorship, chaired an antislavery gathering at which Wendell Phillips, a distant relative, delivered an impassioned call for immediate emancipation. Amherst’s faculty acceded to the students’ demand to form an auxiliary of the American Anti-Slavery Society. President Heman Humphrey also reduced, briefly, his public connections to the colonization cause, and by January 1838 the student antislavery society reopened with about sixty members. “I believe we shall all have to become abolitionists, after all,” President Humphrey sighed.14

  Violence against prominent white men aggravated the sectional divide. “My heart has been always much more affected by the slavery to which the Free States have been subjected, than with that of the negro,” President Quincy once confessed. In May 1856 Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina viciously beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in the United States Capitol after Sumner delivered a forceful antislavery address. A former congressman, Quincy blasted southerners for stamping out freedom of speech in the capital and threatening the lives of any who opposed the Slave Power. “Their boastful chivalric bravery is, in truth, only disguised cowardice,” Quincy continued, while accusing southern politicians of undermining democracy with everything from fawning to bullying.15

  Although Quincy was genuinely shaken, he acknowledged only a portion of the sin. The issue was quite a bit worse than northern ambivalence toward southern slavery, the ubiquitous call to elevate the union over the question of human suffering, and the cozy relations of the northern, southern, and West Indian aristocracies. The problem of slavery in the antebellum North, like the problem of slavery at Harvard, could not be solved by rhetoric or emotion. It was located in the entangled economies, histories, institutions, and lineages of the South, the free states, Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa. It was a problem so ugly and so personal that it invited dishonesty.