Ebony and Ivy

by Craig Steven Wilder

  40. Sean Wilentz, “Princeton and the Controversy over Slavery,” Journal of Presbyterian History, Fall/Winter 2007; Catalogue of All Who Have Held Office in or Have Received Degrees from the College of New Jersey at Princeton in the State of New Jersey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1896); African Repository and Colonial Journal, February 1831, October 1845, December 1846, March 1848, February 1849; Theodore Ledyard Cuyler, Recollections of a Long Life: An Autobiography (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1902), 9.

  41. Proceedings of a Meeting Held at Princeton, New-Jersey, July 14, 1824, 12–26.

  42. Frelinghuysen, An Oration: Delivered at Princeton, New Jersey, Nov. 16, 1824, 6–14; Literary and Theological Review, January 1834; “Address of the Honorable Theodore Frelinghuysen Before the New Jersey Colonization Society, at Princeton,” Western New York Baptist Magazine, February 1825.

  43. Liberator, 12 March 1831; Everett, Address of the Hon. Edward Everett, Secretary of State, at the Anniversary of the Am. Col. Society, 18th Jan., 1853, 7–8; Edward Everett to John Thornton Kirkland, 30 November 1818 and 1 December 1818, and Edward Everett to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, 22 December 1818, with inserted letter following Blumenbach’s death, dated 15 March 1840, “Edward Everett Letterbook, 1818–1819,” Special Collections, Houghton Library, Harvard College; Edward Everett to the Earl of Aberdeen, 30 December 1843, African Repository and Colonial Journal, June 1844; “William Lincoln, Notes, 1821, B[ook] II, Mr. Everetts Greek Lectures,” esp. 34–41, Lincoln Family Papers, 1667–1937, American Antiquarian Society.

  44. The Ivy League is an athletic conference organized in the early twentieth century. It includes Cornell University (1865) in New York State, which is not included here. The institutional and individual affiliations were checked against the records and periodicals of the ACS and its auxiliaries. Frederick Rudolph, Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study, Since 1636 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977), 29. “Statistics of Colleges and Theological Seminaries in the United States,” The American, August 1840; Joseph Caldwell, University of North Carolina, 15 April 1831, American Colonization Society Papers, reel 10, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress; Donald G. Tewksbury, The Founding of American Colleges and Universities Before the Civil War, with Particular Reference to the Religious Influences Bearing upon the College Movement (New York: Teachers College, 1932), 32–42; Memorial of the Semi-Centennial Anniversary of the American Colonization Society, Celebrated at Washington, January 15, 1867 (Washington, DC: Colonization Society Building, 1867), 182–90; Jeffrey B. Allen, “‘All of Us Are Highly Pleased with the Country’: Black and White Kentuckians on Liberian Colonization,” Phylon, Summer 1982, 109.

  45. Abridgment of the Debates of Congress, from 1789 to 1856, from Gales and Seaton’s Annals of Congress, from Their Register of Debates, and from the Official Reported Debates, by John C. Rives. By the Author of the Thirty Years’ View (New York: D. Appleton, 1857), IV:112; Alice Dana Adams, The Neglected Period of Anti-Slavery in America (1808–1831) (Cambridge, MA: Radcliffe College, 1908), 140–41; Genius of Universal Emancipation, 1 July 1826, 27 January 1827, 13 September 1828; African Repository and Colonial Journal, September 1827, November 1829, October 1832.

  46. Edward Hitchcock, Reminiscences of Amherst College, Historical, Scientific, Biographical, and Autobiographical; Also, of Other Wider Life Experiences (Northampton, MA: Bridgman and Childs, 1863), 29; African Repository and Colonial Journal, July 1829, March 1830, March 1831, October 1832, January 1833, March 1839, July 1844; Claude Moore Fuess, Amherst: The Story of a New England College (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), 110.

  47. Ralph Randolph Gurley, Boston, to Joseph Gales, treasurer, ACS, Washington, DC, 3 October 1835, and Gurley’s travel and lecture information, American Colonization Society Papers, reel 24, Library of Congress.

  48. As on many campuses, abolition could take root without black people being welcomed. In 1835 John Brown’s father, Owen Brown, became a trustee of Oberlin College. He had left the board of Western Reserve when the college refused admission to a black student. Several years later the theology school admitted a black scholar, who later became a compatriot of John Brown.

  Several of Lane’s southern students began Sunday schools for local black communities. James Thome, a student from a slaveholding family in Kentucky, was dispatched to represent Lane at the American Anti-Slavery Society meeting in New York City. In the final debate, the attendees overwhelmingly decided that Christians could not support the ACS; only one person dissented.

  John Greenleaf Whittier, “To the Memory of Charles B. Storrs, Late President of Western Reserve College,” Anti-Slavery Reporter, November 1833; “Anti-Slavery Society in Oneida Institute,” The Abolitionist: or Record of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, August 1833; Milton C. Sernett, Abolition’s Axe: Beriah Green, Oneida Institute, and the Black Freedom Struggle (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 47; Debate at the Lane Seminary, Cincinnati: Speech of James A. Thome, of Kentucky, Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, May 6, 1834. Letter of the Rev. Dr. Samuel H. Cox, Against the American Colonization Society (Boston: Garrison and Knapp, 1834), 3–16; “Western Reserve Anti-Slavery Society,” Liberator, 21 September 1833; “Light in the West!” The Abolitionist: or Record of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, February 1833, October 1833; Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800–1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 46; Asaph Whittlesey to the Rev. R. R. Gurley, 19 July 1833, African Repository and Colonial Journal, August 1833; Arnold Buffum to the New England Anti-Slavery Society, Liberator, 14 September 1833.

  49. “Value of Young Men,” Liberator, 26 May 1837; “Education and Slavery,” Western Monthly Magazine, and Literary Journal, May 1834.

  50. Fuess, Amherst, 110–11; W. S. Tyler, History of Amherst College During Its First Half Century, 1821–1871 (Springfield, MA: Clark W. Bryan, 1873), 86–87; “Anti-Slavery Society at Amherst College,” The Abolitionist: or Record of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, July 1833, August 1833.

  51. Arnold Buffum to the Board of Managers of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, in Liberator, 14 September 1833; Fuess, Amherst, 110–11; New York Evangelist, 17 January 1835.

  52. Philanthropist, 1 April 1836, 8 April 1836.

  53. New York Evangelist, 17 January 1835, 14 November 1835, 3 June 1837; Fuess, Amherst, 110–11.

  54. The class that entered Dartmouth in the fall of 1835 included fourteen students who had formed an antislavery society at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

  “To the Honourable Board of Trustees of Waterville College,” 23 September 1833, Colby College Special Collections, Maine Memory Network; “Union College A.S. Society,” Liberator, 23 July 1836; William F[rederick] Wallis to Lewis Sawyer, 17 October 1838, #838554, Rauner Library, Dartmouth College; see the constitution of the Dartmouth Anti-Slavery Society, Herald of Freedom, 2 April 1836; John King Lord, A History of Dartmouth College, 1815–1909. (Concord, NH: Rumford Press, 1913), 251–52, 315–32; Lewis Tappan to John Scoble, Esqr., 1 March 1843, in Annie Heloise Abel and Frank J. Klingberg, eds., A Side-Light on Anglo-American Relations, 1839–1858: Furnished by the Correspondence of Lewis Tappan and Others with the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (Lancaster, PA: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1927), 113–21.

  55. Promissory note from the American Colonization Society to Chief Justice Marshall, 1 April 1834, American Colonization Society Papers, reel 251, Library of Congress; Early Lee Fox, “The American Colonization Society 1817–1840,” Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1917, 50–51, 73; “Meeting of the Connecticut Colonization Society,” Connecticut Courant, 26 May 1829; “American Colonization Society,” Colonizationist and Journal of Freedom, March 1834; African Repository and Colonial Journal, May 1827, April 1833, May 1838.

  56. John Duer, his grandfather, was a British councilor to Antigua, where William Alexander Duer’s father, Colonel William Du
er, was born. His grandmother, Frances Frye, was the daughter of the island’s president. Both families were tied to the Royal African Company, owned large plantations in Dominica and Antigua, and traded slaves. The colonel inherited the Dominica estate and then settled in New York, purchasing land along the Hudson, competing for lumber contacts for the British Navy, and opening a Bronx cotton mill that was among the first in the United States. He created a large investment firm built on wildly speculative bank and land schemes that collapsed in 1792, helping to usher in a general financial panic and leading to his own imprisonment.

  New-York Commercial Advertiser, 10 July 1834; Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 162–70; Leonard L. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolitionist Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 20–81; Amos J. Beyan, The American Colonization Society and the Creation of the Liberian State: A Historical Perspective, 1822–1900 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991), 79; Christian Advocate and Journal and Zion’s Herald, 7 January 1831; African Repository and Colonial Journal, April 1832; William A. Duer, “Address,” The Religious Intelligencer, 1 March 1834; William A. Duer, “New York Colonization Society,” Colonizationist and Journal of Freedom, March 1834; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 556–60. William Alexander Duer, Biographical Account of Col. William Duer, Duer Family Papers, Box 1, Folder 26, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University; William A. Duer, Reminiscences of an Old Yorker (New York: W. L. Andrews, 1867), 78–81; “Colonel William Duer,” The Knickerbocker; or New York Monthly Magazine, August 1852; Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1930–35) II:36, 39, 126–27.

  57. Craig Steven Wilder, “‘Driven … from the School of the Prophets’: The Colonizationist Ascendance at General Theological Seminary,” New York History, Summer 2012.

  58. Three years later, Sylvester Hovey, professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Amherst and a former professor and tutor at Williams and Yale, respectively, finished the final notes on a report to the American Union for the Relief and Improvement of the Colored Race. From 1835 to 1837 Hovey traveled through the Caribbean pursuing his interest in emancipation policy. Taking advantage of his tour, the American Union deputized him to document the condition of free, apprenticed, and enslaved black people in the West Indies and to report on the results of various emancipation processes. The Amherst campus was still in turmoil when Professor Hovey returned. Fuess, Amherst, 111; R. R. Gurley (from Portland, Maine) to Joseph Gates, 18 September 1835, American Colonization Society Papers, reel 24, Library of Congress; Edward Everett, An Address Delivered Before the Literary Societies of Amherst College, August 25, 1835 (Boston: Russell, Shattuck, and Williams, 1835), esp. 35; Sylvester Hovey, Letters from the West Indies: Relating Especially to the Danish Island St. Croix, and to the British Islands Antigua, Barbadoes and Jamaica (New York: Gould and Newman, 1838); James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 72; Liberator, 9 February 1838, 16 February 1838, 30 October 1840.

  59. Benjamin Silliman, “Some Causes of the National Anxiety: An Address Delivered in the Centre Church in New Haven, July 4th, 1832,” African Repository and Colonial Journal, August 1832.

  EPILOGUE: COTTON COMES TO HARVARD

  1. “Burning of the Lexington,” Christian Reflector, 22 January 1840; “Remarks on the Death of Dr. Follen,” Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society Annual Meeting, Liberator, 7 February 1840.

  2. Edmund Spevack, Charles Follen’s Search for Nationality and Freedom: Germany and America, 1796–1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 46–165; Eliza Lee Cabot Follen, The Life of Charles Follen (Boston: Thomas H. Webb, 1844), 44–104; A Memoir of Charles Louis Sand; Including a Narrative of the Circumstances Attending the Death of Augustus Von Kotzebue: Also, a Defence of the German Universities (London: G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1819), esp. 3–34; William E. Channing, A Discourse Occasioned by the Death of the Rev. Dr. Follen (Cambridge: Metcalf, Torry, and Ballou, 1840); Alexandre Dumas, Celebrated Crimes, trans. I. G. Burnham (London: H. S. Nichols, 1895), III:71–150.

  3. Follen, Life of Charles Follen, 91–97; George Ticknor, Outlines of the Principal Events in the Life of General Lafayette (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, 1825); Samuel J. May, Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1869), 248–54; Samuel J. May, Discourse on the Life and Character of the Rev. Charles Follen, L.L.D. Who Perished, Jan. 13, 1840, in the Conflagration of the Lexington. Delivered Before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, in the Marlborough Chapel, Boston, April 17, 1840 (Boston: Henry L. Devereux, 1840), 7–22; “Biographical Notices of the Late Dr. Charles Follen,” Monthly Miscellany of Religion and Letters, February 1840.

  4. Charles Follen, Cyrus Pitt Grosvenor, John G. Whittier, D. Helps, and Joshua V. Himes, “Address to the People of the United States,” in Proceedings of the New-England Anti-Slavery Convention, Held in Boston on the 27th, 28th, and 29th of May, 1834 (Boston: Garrison and Knapp, 1834), 59–72.

  5. Andrew Preston Peabody, Harvard Reminiscences (Boston: Ticknor, 1888), 119–23; May, Discourse on the Life and Character of the Rev. Charles Follen, 9–10; Henry Watson Jr., “Notes of Lectures on Ancient History by Charles Follen … 1829” in Henry Watson Lecture Notes, 1829, I:206–7, Rare Books and Special Collections, Neilson Library, Smith College; Thomas Wigglesworth, “Student Notes, 1830–1832,” vol. 1, Harvard University Archives.

  6. Josiah Quincy, “Address Illustrative of the Nature and Power of the Slave States, and the Duties of the Free States; Delivered at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Quincy, Mass., on Thursday, June 5, 1856” (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1856), 4; “Proceedings of the New England Anti-Slavery Convention,” Liberator, 21 June 1850; Follen, Life of Charles Follen, 256–70; May, Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict, 254–55.

  7. Spevack, Charles Follen’s Search for Nationality and Freedom, 145, 160–61; L. Vernon Briggs, History and Genealogy of the Cabot Family, 1475–1927 (Boston: Charles E. Goodspeed, 1927), II:466–594; Carl Seaburg and Stanley Paterson, Merchant Prince of Boston: Colonel T. H. Perkins, 1764–1854 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Claude Moore Fuess, An Old New England School: A History of Phillips Academy Andover (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 188; Other Merchants and Sea Captains of Old Boston (Boston: State Street Trust Company, 1919), 38; William Richard Cutter, ed., Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of the State of Massachusetts (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1910), IV:2191–94; Josiah Quincy, The History of Harvard University (Cambridge, MA: J. Owen, 1840), II:384–85.

  8. Entries for 10 February, 25 March, and 7 May 1835, in the “Meeting Minutes, 1825–1847,” Josiah Quincy Papers, Box 6, Harvard University Archives; John A. Walz, “The Early Days of the German Department,” Harvard Alumni Bulletin, 20 May 1914, 528–30; George Washington Spindler, The Life of Karl Follen: A Study in German-American Cultural Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917), 110–11; George Ticknor, Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1876), I:400–401.

  9. Edmund Quincy, Life of Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867), 360; Briggs, History and Genealogy of the Cabot Family, II:595–96; Donnarae MacCann, White Supremacy in Children’s Literature: Characterizations of African Americans, 1830–1900 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 56–57; Eliza Lee Cabot Follen, The Skeptic (Cambridge: J. Munroe, 1835); Eliza Lee Cabot Follen, Sketches of Married Life (Boston: Hilliard Gray, 1838).

  10. Channing also directed an open letter on slavery to the merchant Jonathan Phillips—a second cousin of Wendell Phillips—one of the donors to Follen’s professorship. Samuel Eliot Morison, Three C
enturies of Harvard, 1636–1936 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 254–55; Follen, Life of Charles Follen, 104–10; William Ellery Channing, On the Evils of Slavery (Richmond, IN: Central Book and Tract Committee of Friends, n.d.); William Ellery Channing, Slavery (Boston, 1835); William Ellery Channing, “Remarks on the Slavery Question, in a Letter to Jonathan Phillips, Esq.,” The Works of William E. Channing, D.D. (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1875), 782–820; George Willis Cooke, Unitarianism in America: A History of Its Origin and Development (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1902), esp. 359; Proceedings of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, at Its Seventh Annual Meeting, Held in Boston, January 23, 1838, printed in the Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Mass[achusetts]. Anti-Slavery Society. Presented January 24, 1839 (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1839).

  11. Briggs, History and Genealogy of the Cabot Family, esp. I:342, II:489–90; David Richardson, ed., Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth Century Slave Trade to America (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 1986–1996), II:128, 141, III:14, 18; Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1930–35), III:88, 99n–100n, IV:631; Frank Edward Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, James Bowdoin and the Patriot Philosophers (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2004), 240.

  12. Emphasis added. May, Discourse on the Life and Character of the Rev. Charles Follen, 17.

  13. William B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, 1620–1789 (New York: Hillary House, 1963), esp. II:466–72, 607–9.

  14. Joseph C. and Owen Lovejoy, Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy; Who Was Murdered in Defence of the Liberty of the Press, at Alton, Illinois, Nov. 7, 1837, with an introduction by John Quincy Adams (New York: John S. Taylor, 1838); Eliza Wigham, The Anti-Slavery Cause in America and Its Martyrs (London: A. W. Bennett, 1863), 37–45; James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 72; John Langdon Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Charles William Sever, 1873–), I:221–27; Liberator, 9 February 1838, 16 February 1838, 30 October 1840.