Confederates in Harvard's Memorial Hall

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With the advent of the sesquicentennial, there has been a surge of interest in all things related to the Civil War. At Harvard, this has taken the form of intensified debates over the inclusion of Harvard's Confederate dead in Memorial Hall.

Memorial Hall via Wikipedia

Harvard's Memorial Hall was built in the 1870s as a monument to Harvard's Union war dead. It is a huge, gothic building that houses Annenberg Dining Hall, Sanders Theatre, and a memorial corridor lined with marble plaques that bear the names of 136 Harvard graduates who died while serving with the Union army. The plaque in the center of the transept declares,

This hall commemorates the patriotism of the graduates and student of this university who served in the Army and Navy of the United States during the war for the preservation of the Union and upon these tablets are inscribed the names of those among them who died in that service.

The controversy arises from the fact that the 71 Harvard graduates who died in the Confederate armed forces are not included in this memorial. When the cornerstone for the building was laid (1870), the prevailing sentiment was toward honoring only those soldiers who had fought against treason. During the reconstruction era, Cambridge was still proud to characterize the war as a sacred struggle over both union and slavery, as demonstrated in the sphinx monument at Mount Auburn Cemetery (1872), which bears the text,

AMERICAN UNION PRESERVED
AFRICAN SLAVERY DESTROYED
BY THE UPRISING OF A GREAT PEOPLE
BY THE BLOOD OF FALLEN HEROES

Yet, the reconciliationist narrative came to Cambridge as surely as it swept over the rest of the nation. By the time the 50-year celebrations rolled around, there were active efforts to include the names of Harvard's Confederate dead at Memorial Hall. Monuments erected at Yale and Princeton during this era jumbled the names of Union and Confederate dead and honored all as patriots.

In the past year, the campaign to include the Confederate dead in Memorial Hall has ramped up again. Many pro-memorialization advocates have latched onto the fact that Memorial Church (a different building on campus, built in 1932 to commemorate the WWI dead) lists the names of several Harvard men who died serving in the German army in WWI and one Divinity School graduate who died in WWII. Last fall, the Harvard Crimson ran a long article about the differences between the Memorial Hall and Memorial Church commemoration philosophies, in which it quoted Prof. Alan Dershowitz as saying,

The University needs to adopt a policy one way or the other. The current inconsistent standard is unacceptable, and it’s particularly unfortunate that the exception seems to be for a member of the Nazi army, one of the darkest regimes in human history, and a regime with which Harvard had too cozy a relationship.

While I tend to think that Prof. Dershowitz would probably rather see the deletion of German soldiers from Memorial Church than the addition of Confederates to Memorial Hall, others have come to the opposite conclusion. The Harvard Confederate Memorial Initiative is a small, but vocal organization dedicated to advocating for a Confederate memorial at Harvard. You can view their intro video here. Their cause has been getting some attention, not just from the Crimson, but from conservative media outlets like World Net Daily. Last summer, a WND reporter confronted White House press secretary Robert Gibbs over the Memorial Hall issue — Gibbs had no comment. The HCMI also has a Facebook petition (currently rather pathetic at about 130 "likes"). Executive Director Roger McCredie told the Crimson that the HCMI's goal is to correct the historical narrative of "South equal bad. North equal good":

If you want to talk slavery, we can talk slavery all day long and about how no one’s hands are clean from it—including the Fanueil family and the Brown family, both of whom made fortunes on the slave trade. This extremely skewed view of history and of historical perspective has become pandemic—it does not infect merely Harvard; it infects the entire educated and cultural edifice of the United States these days.

Now, I know Mr. McCredie has a particular political agenda to advance, but this sort of thing is rage-inducing. He seems to be confusing Harvard with a mediocre elementary school circa 1990. The Harvard curriculum is hardly trying to cover up Northern complicity in American slavery with courses like Sven Beckert's "Harvard and Slavery" or faculty research like Jill Lepore's New York Burning or events like last month's joint conference with Brown, which was called "Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development" and focused on slavery's role in national economic development after the Revolution. When someone claims that academic historians are ignoring or trying to cover up Northern slavery, I know that I can safely disregard everything else in his/her manifesto because he/she clearly has no grasp of what academic historians do. Northern slavery is one of the hottest things going in Early American history at the moment. People who pretend otherwise are willfully ignorant in service of their neo-Confederate politics.

Yet, admittedly, academic historians are notoriously awful about getting the word out about our work. Part of that is our fault (we generally for one another rather than for a wide audience and punish colleagues who try to engage with the public), part is the fault of the structure of history education at the k-12 level (holiday history controlled by politicized state committees and useless AP-driven fact cram later on), part is the fault of public figures who appeal to history as a cover for their own biases (see the entire Scalia oeuvre), and part is the fault of an incurious general public that can't be bothered to read anything more challenging than a David McCullough biography. As an historian with a commitment to public history, I think it would be a great idea to do some public outreach regarding Harvard's role in American slavery and its considerable ties to the Confederacy.

Therefore, I propose the following exhibit:

Remembrance

In the transept of Memorial Hall, two rows of rectangular display pedestals will stand along the East and West walls, each directly under a memorial panel and mirroring the panel in shape and size, though tipped at a slight angle so that visitors can view the contents easily. Each pedestal will display an object or text relating to Harvard's multifaceted role in creating, sustaining, and challenging American slavery and the war that ended it. A final pedestal will stand at the North end of the transept, under the stained glass window, bearing the names of the 71 Harvard students and alumni who gave their lives in support of the Confederacy and its cause — not in violation of their position as Harvard men, but in fulfillment of it.

Examples of objects that would go into these cases:

• J.T. Zealy / Louis Agassiz Daguerreotypes:

• In 1850, Harvard's most celebrated naturalist, Louis Agassiz, traveled to South Carolina, where he commissioned a series of photographs of African-born slaves and first-generation African-Americans in an attempt to gather evidence about racial types. Agassiz believed that various races were created separately, and his use of scientific methods, including these photographs, lent his ideas intellectual weight in antebellum America. The daguerreotypes — many of them depicting their subjects nude, in the poses now familiar to us from mug shots — are held by Harvard's Peabody Museum. They are not on display, partly because they are fragile and partly because they are ghastly. For more information, see Molly Rogers' Delia's Tears: Race, Science and Photography in 19th-Century America. This book reprints all of the images in full, something I would not do here, even if I had permission.
• Portrait of Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Frank Weston Benton (1893)

• Higginson, a fiery abolitionist who contributed openly to John Brown's cause, was a member of the class of 1841. He was a true radical and found that the reforms brought about by the Civil War fell far short of his hopes for racial justice. In 1904, he gave a Decoration Day speech in Sanders Theatre in which he suggested that Confederates might be included in the tablets in the transept. While some historians (David Blight) have argued that Higginson represents the erasure of abolitionism from Civil War memory, others (W. Scott Poole) argue that Higginson's remarks in 1904 "speak to his own disillusion about the possibilities of nationalism and his doubts about whether or not it could serve as a force for racial justice." Higginson's portrait (along with various quotations) would provide an unparalleled example of the complexity of Harvard's relationships with abolitionism and Civil War memory.
• Samples of "Negro Cloth" from Rhode Island 1839-1850 from Baker Library (Harvard Business School)
•  Many Harvard alumni and donors (ex: Francis Cabot Lowell, class of 1793) were industrialists who turned slave-grown Southern cotton into cheap cloth. Some of this material, like the samples above, were manufactured in order to be sent back to Southern plantations to clothe those same slaves. Several cases in this exhibit would be devoted to the Harvard/factory/plantation nexus.

Other cases would showcase other items related to Harvard's historical support of and entanglement with slavery — receipts for gifts from slaveowning or slave-industry alumni, a replica of the gravestone dedicated to Cecily (d. 1713, 13-year-old slave to William Brattle, class of 1680), a fragment of brick from an 18th-century college building built using slave labor, etc. An exhibit like this would probably be the fruit of research conducted in undergraduate seminars (like Prof. Beckert's) and by professors and community members as part of a commission similar to Brown's Committee on Slavery and Justice. Its catalog would probably go on to form part of a larger report by the commission laying bare Harvard's complicity. I know that a report from a steering committee doesn't sound like a very friendly way to get the word out, but there was plenty of interest in Brown's report, and Harvard's would make a bigger splash. People might not read the report, but they would read the NYT article about the report.

In this way, Harvard could engage in meaningful reflection on its institutional history. I think that a public exhibit in Memorial Hall would be a powerful way to write Harvard's Confederate dead back into its story, not with celebration, but with conscience. The point would be to bring context to the names already on the walls in the transept. They were the memorial that Harvard needed in 1870, but we need something more in 2011.

Roger McCredie and others who call for the names of Harvard's Confederate dead to be added to the rolls of honor in Memorial Hall argue that Harvard should acknowledge its role in the development and maintenance of American slavery. I agree. But simply adding the names of Harvard's Confederates would not just acknowledge that role — it would perpetuate it. If Harvard were to take such a bold and public step in favor of a reconciliationist narrative that argues that the Civil War was about personal valor and sacrifice, rather than a struggle over treason in defense of slavery, the institution will have lent its considerable cultural capital to the mythology of the Lost Cause. It will have arrayed what arms it has on the side of a white supremacist, anti-intellectual movement that is stuck in the mindset of the 50th anniversary while the rest of the nation observes the 150th. Luckily, I think there is very little chance that this will happen, particularly under the administration of President Faust, who is, after all, a scholar of the Civil War with a particular interest in memorialization. If the names of Harvard's Confederate dead are added to Memorial Hall — and I hope they are — they must be part of an effort to confront Harvard's institutional complicity, not an attempt to prolong it.

Charles Torrey, "Martyr for Liberty"

I've been watching Ken Burns' The Civil War this week as I update and revise my book lists for my general exams. Even though I know that Burns' reconciliationist narrative doesn't really fly with academic historians, I still enjoy the program. At the very least, it beats reading Battle Cry of Freedom again.

This time, as I watched, I reflected on how much Burns has shaped what I (and many others) know about the Civil War. For example, the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy is a well-known incident in antebellum abolitionism that has undoubtedly enjoyed a resurgence in notoriety due to Burns' PBS series. Lovejoy was not the only abolitionist martyr of the antebellum period, but his inclusion in The Civil War has given his story new prominence in the minds of modern Americans.

Burns could just as easily have chosen to include the story of Rev. Charles Torrey in his documentary. I had never heard of Charles Torrey before I stumbled across his grave at Mount Auburn, but his epitaph made me think that I probably should have.

It reads:

Reverend

CH'S T. Torrey

Born at Scituate

Nov. 21, 1813.

Graduated at Yale College

Aug. 1833.

Ordained at Providence

March 1837.

Arrested at Baltimore

June 24, 1844.

Died in the Penitentiary

of that City

May 9, 1846.

The friends of the

American Slave

erect this stone

to his memory

as a Martyr for Liberty.

Yale-trained minister dies in Southern jail as "Martyr for Liberty"? That seemed like something I should hae heard about.

Turns out that Torrey was actually jailed several times for crimes such as attending a slaveholder's convention as an undercover reporter and assisting the escape of nearly 400 slaves from Maryland and Northern Virginia. He was sentenced to six years of hard labor in Baltimore, but died of tuberculosis in 1846. You can read his memoirs and letters on Google Books.

Torrey's impressive obelisk has its own island in the middle of one of Mount Auburn Cemetery's internal roads, where it is surrounded by flowers. A bas relief of Torrey's bust (toga-clad, natch) embellishes the monument. Though the marble is cracking, it is still quite beautiful. 

A quotation of Torrey's is engraved above the bust. When he was offered a pardon in return for a public apology, Torrey reportedly told his lawyers,

It is better to die in prison with the peace of God in our breasts than to live in freedom with a polluted conscience.

Whoever erected the monument wanted to make extra certain that viewers understood that Torrey was a MARTYR, so he/she/they topped it off with a crown of thorns.

Though largely forgotten in our day, Torrey was a celebrated figure in New England's abolitionist circles. Rev. Amos Beman, an African-American minister from New Haven had a grandson named Charles Torrey Beman who fought with the 5th MA Cavalry in the Civil War (and kept a journal). I don't know whether Charles Torrey Simpson, celebrated botanist, was named for the abolitionist, but since he was born in June of 1846, I think there's a good chance that he was.

Maybe I can find some way to slip this into my general exams . . . it might convince certain of my examiners that I'm not just wasting my time wandering around old graveyards.

William and Rachel Smith, Abolitionists

I am endlessly fascinated by people who name their children after public figures, especially when those names reveal a particular political or religious commitment.

In the case of William and Rachel Smith of Wrentham, Massachusetts, that commitment was the abolition of slavery. Of their (at least) twelve children, three are sons named Frederick Douglass (b. 1851), John Brown (b. 1862), and Abraham Lincoln (b. 1866).

The Smiths, one of the few black families living in a rural town near the Rhode Island border, owned a modest farm worth $350 in 1870 (their white neighbors' farms were generally worth $700–$2,000). Both William and Rachel were born free in Massachusetts in the 1820s.

"Tho' He Lived in a Land of Liberty, He Lived a Slave"

I was in Concord on Monday and visited the famous John Jack stone on Old Burial Hill. This is one of the most visited, most quoted African-American gravestones in New England (it is a replica of the original stone).

According to Joanne Braxton and Maria Diedrich in Monuments of the Black Atlantic, John Jack was once owned by Benjamin Barron of Concord. He bought his freedom and a small farm in 1761. Jack's wonderful epitaph was written by Daniel Bliss, a noted Tory and abolitionist who was forced to flee Massachusetts during the Revolution. John Jack's epitaph reads:

God wills us free, man wills us slaves.

I will as God wills Gods will be done.

Here lies the body of

JOHN JACK,

A native of Africa who died

March 1773. aged about 60 years

Tho' born in a land of slavery,

He was born free.

Tho' he lived in a land of liberty,

He lived a slave,

Till by his honest, tho' stolen labors,

He acquired the source of slavery,

Which gave him his freedom;

Tho' not long before

Death the grand tyrant,

Gave him his final emancipation,

And set him on a footing with kings.

Tho' a slave to vice,

He practised those virtues

Without which kings are but slaves.

Progressivism, Allies, and Privilege

In light of the outcry in response to Amanda Marcotte's apparent appropriation of the ideas and words of another blogger, brownfemipower (who has suspended her blog, which is why there's no link), in a recent article, I thought I would take a few moments to reflect on studying history with an eye toward exposing the progressive legacy of privilege.

Of course, the insidious nature of privilege often makes it invisible to the privileged. That's why people who consider themselves progressives to be purposeful about reflecting not only on their own privilege, but also on the history of progressivism and its not-so-nice sides.

I think it's fair to think of modern progressivism as getting its start in the mid-19th century with social movements such as abolitionism and the first women's rights movement. While abolition is often held up as a sterling example of progressive change, there are several problems with the story as it is generally told:

• The Garrison-Stowe-Lincoln Narrative: Here's how this one generally goes: In the 1830s, William Lloyd Garrison published The Liberator, which introduced the country to the idea that slavery is bad. Then, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, which made everybody cry and realize that slavery was really bad. Next, we fought the Civil War and Lincoln freed the slaves.
• Problems: This narrative drastically underplays the role that enslaved people played in their own emancipation. Men and women in chains did not need Garrison to tell them that slavery was wrong, and, when the Civil War broke out, they did not wait for Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Instead, hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children sought the protection of the Union armies (which often failed to offer any protection at all - even selling some slaves back to the South early in the war). The mass movement of self-emancipation, as much as any other factor, forced the Federal Government to approve legal emancipation. Black men then fought to uphold the gains they had made. By the end of the war, about 180,000 African-Americans had served in the US army. Their struggle to gain respect and fair treatment is well known.
• Abolitionists as Benevolent Christians: The abolition movement we remember best is the evangelical movement that talked a lot about the evils of breaking up slave families, and the wickedness of unChristian slaveowners. In this telling, elite, white Northerners agreed that Jesus wanted the slaves to go free and it was their duty to fight for the right of every man to be a husband, every woman to be a genteel mother, and every child to grow up a Christian. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Julia Ward Howe, Quakers, etc.
  
• Problems: The evangelical abolition movement was only one strand of abolitionism. See Eric Foner's book, Politics and Ideology in the Era of the Civil War to learn about the labor movement's abolitionism, which advanced an argument about how industrialists and slaveowners were allied in an effort to consolidate a permanent, hereditary, exploited laboring class composed of both black slaves and white wage-slaves. This ideology was somewhat Jeffersonian, in that it conceived of every man as an independent citizen and imagined wage labor as a temporary step toward land ownership. Instead of addressing the concerns of white labor leaders, the Republican party made slavery the ultimate enemy and silenced Northern laborers' critique of the symbiotic relationship of slavery/industrial capitalist machine. Also, the evangelical abolitionists didn't want racial equality, (neither did the labor movement).
  
• Modern Scholars and W.E.B. DuBois: For a loooong time, historians had no problem with the U.B. Phillips version of the Civil War. Recently, pretty much all academic historians have accepted the narrative of black self-liberation and the war as a labor struggle. Which means that they're about 70 years slower than W.E.B. DuBois, who came up with that argument in Black Reconstruction in 1935. (btw, shoutout to Prof. Susan O'Donovan on most of this stuff - I hope she'll forgive the paraphrasing in light of the fact that I was actually listening.)

It's not just abolitionism that has a legacy of upholding privilege. The Women's Suffrage movement campaigned pretty hard on the "I can't believe that black men can vote and I can't" angle. The temperance movement was explicitly anti-immigrant. Hell, even the introduction of secret ballots over party tickets introduced a literacy requirement for voting since you couldn't just pick the Republican ticket anymore - you had to actually be able to read the names (and there were laws against asking for help). Education reform almost always finds a way to hurt kids who aren't white and middle-class.

All of this is just to say that "progressive" movements have a long history of pursuing that progress at the expense of the people of color and other workers. Just because someone is a liberal doesn't make him a saint or place her outside of this nasty web of embedded racism. I identify as a liberal and hope I can be an ally, but I say and do privileged, racist things all the time. I hope that continuing to study this history with an eye toward social justice, even when it means that liberal heroes aren't quite as marble statue-y, continues to enable me to reflect on my own biases and privilege.