The Ties that Bind: Slavery and Dartmouth

Commencement poet and journalist Charles T. Congdon highlights slavery’s paradoxes, stating “[t]he problem’s solved by something quite absurd…Freedom is Slavery, and slaves are free…”

On September 26, 1864, members of Dartmouth’s United Fraternity approved anti-slavery minister Henry Ward Beecher as their first choice of orator for upcoming commencement exercises. Alternates included pro-Union attorney Caleb Cushing, abolitionist poet Anna Dickens, and radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

The Social Friends Literary Society debated current issues such as the fugitive slave bill. Social Friends member Jonathan C. Gibbs (Class of 1852) was one of the few black students attending Dartmouth at the time and later became Florida’s first black Secretary of State during the Reconstruction period.

The Social Friends and United Fraternity Literary Societies’ members received personally engraved “keys” that were typically worn on watch chains.

This song was dedicated to Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, Dartmouth Class of 1816, "As a mark of esteem for his intrepidity in the cause of Human Rights." Rodgers was the editor of an abolitionist newspaper, Herald of Freedom in Concord, NH. He also served as a station-master on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves heading to Canada, and a delegate to the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. He is notable because he withdrew from the Convention when women delegates were not seated. Rogers was also a co-founder of the racially integrated, co-ed Noyes Academy in nearby Canaan, N.H. The academy was short-lived, however. In 1935, a mob of five hundred, including some from Hanover, used seventy oxen to pull the building from its foundation, and later burned it. Several prominent future African American leaders were among the students who attended Noyes: Alexander Crummell, Henry Highland Garnet, Julia Williams, and Thomas Paul, Jr., Dartmouth Class of 1841.

In this letter, William Wallis (Class of 1841) reported that he had joined an Abolition society which engaged the "best portion of the students" and that "[m]ost of the faculty here are warm abolitionists." Perhaps Willis is alluding to their membership in the American Colonization Society.

Roger Moses Sargent (Class of 1846) writes of anti-slavery meetings in his hometown Lowell, Massachusetts, stating: "I do not agree with the measures of some who would make their antislavery meetings places to...slander the church…"

David Youngman Jr., Class of 1839, wrote a letter to his father David Youngman Sr. in 1837. He informs his father that he has become an abolitionist. Youngman Sr. was a slaveowner living in Tennessee at the time.

David Youngman Sr. wrote this letter in response to his son, informing him of God’s divine justification for slavery. He continues on to write about the 3 new slaves he recently acquired.