Noyes Academy, part 1
- Alisa Kline
- Jan 17
- 8 min read
I began this project 26 weeks ago as an exploration of William Allen Wallace’s History of Canaan. Or I began it three and a half years ago when Town Historian Donna Zani Dunkerton answered my every question with a reminder that there was a book about all of this, before going on to tell me everything, in detail, with flourishes.
I had some surprising context for what I found there. Without setting out to be a Civil War enthusiast, I had ended up learning great deal about slavery and the South in the lead-up to that conflict. Houston, my former home, was founded the year after Noyes was destroyed. While there, I conducted walking tours discussing Houston's history from the point of view of geology and ecology, with an emphasis on cotton and slavery. When I began the Wallace book, I realized that I was reading the same story from the other side.
I’m not quite sure why I decided to think about these things in public, which is what this blog has been. Partly, it was because I liked the challenge of writing something every week and I knew I would not have stuck with it without a reason. Maintaining the schedule was a reason. And then I asked Gary Hamel if he would let me use his gorgeous artwork in the blog because it all seemed to go together, and my thinking out loud became about more than just my voice.
But now, I am done thinking about this story. I want to tell it, in its entirety as best I can.
The Context
The United States began as a business. People in Europe were on the hunt for money-making opportunities. They sailed around the world looking stuff to sell back home. We learned about this as the "Age of Exploration," but when you boil it down, it really about people looking for money. The land that Columbus bumped into on his journey to India turned out not to offer gold and spices. Instead, it had a whole bunch of trees (most of which had been cut down already back home) and a lot of land that could grow stuff.
The stuff Europeans were interested in growing was not food. Remember, in the beginning, they wern't looking for a place to live. They were looking for money. If they moved in, it was only to oversee their investment.
So here was this fertile, boundless land. It was perfect. Money awaited. The only thing missing was a labor force. The crops that were most profitable were tobacco and sugar. Big money in tobacco and sugar. Each of those crops required a lot of labor to bring in. We all know how they solved the labor problem. They enslaved Africans.
Sugar and tobacco, were soon surpassed by cotton which remade the world and enriched the South.
Of course, plantations were not the only thing that sprung up in the place Columbus stumbled on. Anyone who came to this new continent could own land, free and clear. It was a chance for actual freedom rather than everlasting servitude. This was not the case in England, where all the land was already spoken for. Here was a new place where ordinary men could own land and farm and not pay rent. This new land also looked pretty good to a bunch of break-away Christian sects not at all happy with the established church back home. All of this sprawled onto the new Jerusalem.
It seems a complete hodge podge, but there was a surprising thread of unity. Both the religious fanatics in the North and the enslavers of the South were creatures of the Enlightenment. The writings of luminaries of freedom such as Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke guided and informed them both. They sang with one voice of equality and dignity and the rights of men. And we must reconcile with ourselves that the men who set a nation on fire with the words All Men are Created Equal were themselves lords of the unfree.
The Union held. The South, which began with more wealth than the North, grew even richer as cotton became the greatest engine of wealth-creation the world had seen. Everyone, North and South, was making money from cotton. But things were beginning to shift.
In 1834, the Revolutionary War was not completely in the rear-view miror. At fifty years past, it was far distant from those alive at the time of Noyes as the War in Viet Nam is for us today. Which is to say not distant at all. We still fly POW/MIA flags for the missing of that war. We still argue about what it all meant. In 1834, the cause of the Union was one of glory and freedom. It was the story of a brotherhood forged in arms. But it was not at all guaranteed to hold.
There were rules, silent agreements: The North was not to limit the South's practice of slavery. To do so was to break the promise made at the Continental Congress that the South and North would form one country. One country already containing many, many enslaved people. The North knew this and agreed, because without the South and its money, there was no country to be had.
By the 1830s, The South was very much on edge. Thirty years prior, the enslaved of Haiti rose up, murdered their enslavers and declared independence. In 1831, things hit closer to home. Nat Turner was an enslaved man in Virginia. He was educated and he preached to his fellow enslaved. In August of 1831, he led an uprising with 75 other slaves. They killed 55 white people before being killed themselves along with 500 other Blacks for good measure.
The terrified South, with Haiti always front of mind, passed laws that forbid anyone to teach an enslaved person to read. It was believed that being literate enabled Turner to organize and they were not going to allow any repeat performances.
Forbidding the enslaved from reading hit religious New England like a sledge hammer. Literacy was the key to morality because they believed fervently that salvation lay in the bible. If you could not read the bible, you could not hope to enter heaven. Such laws damned to hell the entire Black race.
The abolitionist movement began to coalesce. It had a mission, to end slavery right now and free all the enslaved. This was a simple request and obviously the correct path. All they had to do was to persuade the enslavers to go along. Their weapons were endless sermonizing and the printing press.
Freidrich Koenig, invented the steam-driven printing press in 1811, and with it, printing became almost easy. So easy that abolitionists, in the early 1830s began printing quantities of pamphlets and newspapers arguing that the slaves must be freed. Right this very moment. Because God knows that it is evil and so do you! They sent these missives by mail to individual slaveholders in the South, to all the elected leaders in Southern townships, to everyone they could think of. This began a phase of U.S. politics where the office of Postmaster became very contentious.
The abolitionists were on a mission of persuasion. Only if the people of the South could be brought to understand that Blacks were human and slavery was the worst form of evil could our very nation itself be saved from damnation. The stakes were high for the abolitionists. But for the South, they were higher.
The South was by now holding two million brutally enslaved Black men and women. In their imagination, the only result of freeing them would be their own violent death. Those religions zealots from the North were advocating suicide, were plotting the rape of their women and the slaughter of their offspring. They got worked up. And not for the first time, threatened to bust right out of this Union.
The abolitionists came up with a new idea. Something more modest, less threatening. They would create an institution of higher education. Something to rival the best universities in the country. They would matriculate both White students and Black students and then, no one could continue to argue that Blacks were not human, not to be trusted with freedom.
A demonstration project was born.
This is not how news of a project to educate Blacks was received among enslavers. You might as well have told them that you were forming a hundred brigades of the enslaved, each with their own Nat Turner at the head. As it always did when slavery was in any way questioned, the South threatened to break up the union. To secede. And the North, economically dependent not only on merchant trade with the South, but also on the slave-driven cotton industry, hastened to placate them.
That school was Noyes Academy, the still-born child of the early abolitionists. The irony of the events surrounding the doomed school is that it might have worked but for the machinations of one mean man who had a score to settle. And imagine what might have been if it had succeeded.
This is a description of Noyes Academy offered, I believe in The Liberator, by David L. Child and Samuel E. Sewell, two early leaders of the abolitionist movement, in February of 1835. They were trustees of the school and were describing the course of study on offer.
In English. The general course of studies will be a follows — Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Book-keeping, Geometry, Algebra, Geography, Algebra, Trigonometry, Surveying, Navigation, Astronomy, Geography and the construction and use of Maps, Charts and Mathematical Instruments; Natural History, General History, History and Constitution of the United State and of the several States, Grammar, Logic, Intellectual and Moral Philosophy, Ecclesiastical History, Political Economy Exercises in Composition and Elocution, Manners, Customs, Races and Religions of the different nations of the earth.
In the Ancient Languages and Classics […] Ancient Geography, Grecian, Roman, Egyptian and Jewish Antiquities, Heathen Mythology and Biography together with all or such portions of the English Course as may be best adapted to the particular ends which Students may propose to themselves or their parents and guardians prescribe.
All this to be taught by the one instructor, Mr. William Scales, recently graduated himself from university, with whatever books the students themselves could cobble together.
The first time I ran into this description, I thought they were all delusional. Did they know what Canaan was capable of in 1834? But as I read more and thought more deeply about what the country was doing in 1834, the more I began to share with Wallace, the wistful notion of what might have been.
Wallace, from the vantage point of the 1880, lamented:
Page 295
New England at that time was degenerated into guilty and dastardly servility to the South. She was enslaved by her prejudices until she trampled her own laws and peace under foot. The descendants of the founders of Puritan Seminaries broke up the free school.
And such a school! Had it been undisturbed it would have taken the lead of all others in the country, and enjoyed patronage unknown to any other. Abolitionists everywhere would have sent their sons and daughters, animated by the high toned principle and lofty purpose that distinguished them from their abusers. The flower of the colored youth would have found their way to it from every part of the country.
God would have blessed it with his abundant favor. Its breaking up and dispersion left the quiet and beautiful village to the bats and owls. The stillness of the desert succeeded.
Given the patronage the school had, and the veritable isolation Canaan offered, there really was a chance for Noyes Academy to have succeeded. Its success would probably not have hastened the end of slavery. That was still 25 years in the future and accomplished not through persuasion but through the South finally carrying through on their endless threat to secede. If Noyes had been provocation enough to drive the South to succession in 1834, the North would not have won the war and slavery would not have ended.
In the weeks following. I will detail the events of Noyes as Wallace presents them. Wallace’s is the only version we have. Where obvious issues arise in Wallace’s telling, I will look at those, as well.
For anyone who has kept up with this blog, we will revisit some territory already covered and where possible, I will point readers to these earlier discussions of topics that might contain further details.
Gary’s Paintings
I have been looking at the series of winter scenes that acompany this post since Gary painted them months ago. The cow polka-dotted by snow makes me happy every time I see it. Sometimes I make Gary find it so I can just look at it. There is no particular reason for using this series now except, look outside!
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