Noyes Academy, Part 3
- Alisa Kline
- Jan 31
- 8 min read
Perjured Masons
So here we are, in Canaan, NH. It’s winter, 1834. The most amazing school is being assembled in our frankly destitute town. For the abolitionists among us, this is a time of dreaming and delight. They have a new project. Our new country, founded on the principles of All Men are Created Equal, is blighted in the eyes of God because we permit the evil of slavery to persist. It must end. It must end now. The enslaved must be set free!
But how to do it? Education! The abolitionist movement planned to educate America out of slavery. They were going to teach America that people with black skin were not in any way less human than those with white skin. (This was not universally accepted truth in 1834.) What they needed was a demonstration of the potential of the Black race.
This was Noyes Academy. The demonstration project. From the point of view of Canaan, a gift from the heavens. A well-endowed school that would put Canaan on the map. Sure, the influx of Black students might make the white population of Canaan uneasy, but they would get over it because of all the benefits of this amazing school that was going to be located, believe it or not, in Canaan!
This is where that “perjured Masons” muttering by Jacob Trussell that we closed with last week becomes important, because Wallace wants to suggest that Noyes Academy might have succeeded. Succeeded not in the sense that it might have ended slavery. Wallace was writing this in the decades after the Civil War. He knew what it would take to end slavery, and Noyes Academy wasn’t even close. But to have had such a school in Canaan. That was the dream that died at the hands of Jacob Trussell.
And the irony that Wallace wants to make clear is that Trussell wasn’t motivated simply because he hated the idea of the school. He did hate it. But would that have been enough, on its own, to cause him to expend this level of energy? Wallace seems to think maybe it wouldn’t. But Trussell had another axe to grind. Wallace states several times in his History that the destruction of Noyes Academy came down to Jacob Trussell being outraged that Nathaniel Currier, George Kimball and Hubbard Harris (Noyes founders) were Anti-Masons and that Currier and Harris had left the Masons on this account. They were the “perjured Masons” Trussell was muttering about.
In his telling of Noyes, Wallace includes the thoughts of a letter writer who was present during the events of 1834/35. Wallace was not. The writer believes that Canaan, on her own, would not have destroyed the school. And there is reason for these thoughts. Trussell tried and failed twice to rile a Canaan mob. It was only after he included residents of surrounding towns that Noyes Academy was destroyed.
Page 279
It is not yet in evidence that the men of Canaan are brave or persistent in wrong doing. Knowing our own people as well as we do, all through their lives, these men of brag, our fears were not excited when they threatened, Richardson, Flanders, Burpee, Cobb, the Pattees or old Campbell, and all the rest of them with Trussell added, would never have caused us anything but regrets.
Above, the writer listed some of the prominent men in Canaan who opposed the school. It is his opinion that none of them, even adding Trussell to the mix, would have resorted to violence.
Had the lawless and reckless people of Enfield, who volunteered to assist in this disagreeable affair stayed at home, we should not now see Trussell and his tail now triumphing over us. The high minded people of Enfield would hardly esteem it an honor to have participated in this outrage, could they see that they have simply been used by Trussell to avenge a private pique of several years standing.
The mob that assembled to destroy Noyes Academy believed they were acting on noble principles. They were preserving the Union! They were protecting their womenfolk from the horrors of amalgamation (which is what they called race mixing in their time and I am not sure we really have a word for it in ours. Race mixing, the one I came up with, sounds very 1968, but I could not think of a more current term. We seem not to need to note this as much.) The letter writer is saying that they might not feel so good about themselves if they knew they were simply pawns in a larger game.
Had it not been for Trussell and the foreign element which rode over and insulted us for two days, we know that the Academy would never have been touched. Jacob Trussell is an intolerant bigot, opinionated, unforgiving, not a drop of warm blood in his veins except what is warmed by the passions that animate him. He never forgave an injury and he never had a friend. He never performed an act of pure charity, and he never forgot to be selfish. He is a member of the Congregational Church and of the Lodge of Masons here, and into each of these memberships he carries the obdurate obstinacy of his nature.
His hatred of George Kimball, Nat Currier and Hubbard Harris, is an unquenchable fire in his breast. These men are all Anti-masons, the two last are seceding Masons. And here is the secret of the destruction of our Academy. He has been the moving spirit through it all.
Wallace is clearly stating that if Trussell hadn't gone to such great lengths to satisfy his rage, Noyes Academy might have survived, because the men of Canaan would not have taken such steps alone. Is he right? We don't know. But he believes it.
Anti-Masonry, which is what got Jacob Trussell so agitated, was a very overwrought political movement that was deeply suspicious of elites in society. I went into the details of Anti-Masonry earlier here. To recap briefly, in the late 1820s, the Masons fell under great suspicion because wealthy men met there in secret. A man who threatened to publish secrets of the Masons, the orders, handshakes, etc. disappeared and was presumed killed by the Masons. He might well have been. This suspicion coalesced into a political party, the Anti-Masons, which morphed into the Whigs who morphed into the Republicans. So they were not without impact.
When Harris and Currier became Anti-Masons and withdrew from the Masonic Lodge in Canaan, Trussell lost it. And you have to admit, it seems kind of ridiculous. Harris and Currier were Masons. They knew the secrets. They knew that the members (we assume) weren’t plotting evil. And yet they followed N.P. Rogers and George Kimball, rejecting their neighbors and friends, basically accusing them of doing bad things.
Page 322
The anti-Masonic wave, which started from Buffalo in 1826, reached through New Hampshire in 1829. With his friend, Rogers [noted abolitionist Nathanial Peabody Rogers], he [George Kimball] plunged enthusiastically into its seething vortex and though not a Mason, he successfully talked about the “wicked deeds of that horrible institution, that was afraid of the light,” and through his influence, Nathaniel Currier, John Shepherd and Hubbard Harris, were induced to make public renunciation of their Masonic obligations. This greatly enraged the Masons, and Jacob Trussell and Elijah Blaisdell said “they might just as well have renounced everything else, for although members of the lodge, neither of them could explain what they had renounced.”
Wallace also took issue with the anti-Mason enthusiasm, describing Kimball, Currier and Harris as near hysterics. Wallace was a Mason.
Page 264
In those days there existed a class of men whose minds were constantly seizing upon new and unheard of horrors, with which to influence and arouse the indignation of such as are always shocked at the recital of outrage and wrong. This class of persons like to pass from one state of indignation into another with abruptness, and always find the succeeding condition more intense than the preceding.
In other words, there were people in the world who could work themselves into a state without very much help. Still true, by the way.
This morbid feeling had been strained to a high tension, by the recital of the outrages and murder committed upon William Morgan, by the Masons of New York, and by the revelations of imaginary horrors, that were daily transpiring, within the guarded recesses of the lodge room.
It was not difficult to transfer the sympathies of these awful imaginings to the actual horrors which were being daily recited, in relation to the black slaves. Their wrongs were visible, tangible realities, and seemed to cry to Heaven for redress. That cry was heard in every hamlet and village in New England, and awoke the sympathies of philanthropists into sudden and sometimes unhealthy activity.
What exactly is Wallace considering sudden and unhealthy activity? At first, I was afraid Wallace was referring to the very establishment of the school. But with a great deal more understanding of Wallace’s writing, I realize that he feels the founders of the school did not play their hand well. He believes had they been better politicians, they might have kept their school.
His complaints were twofold. The first is that Harris and Currier did seem very much like a bunch of hotheads, turning on the Masons, of all things. His second complaint is that social embrace of the Black students created a level of outrage that fueled the fire. It could have been avoided. He allows the sainted Reverent Amos Foster, who left Canaan in 1833, to make this point. Foster lived until 1884, from context we know it was written many years after the events of 1835, likely after the Civil War. It is the last entry in Wallace's chapter on Noyes Academy. It seems a fitting epigraph.
Page 296
But from some things I heard, I judge that some friends of the school were rather indiscreet and pursued a course which provoked the indignation of those on the other side. I refer to the partiality showed to the colored students and the positions given them at the social gatherings. Certainly they should have been treated kindly, but whether it was wise to invite them or any of the Academy students to their social parties is, at least, doubtful.
But I do not say that by way of apology for those engaged in the crime of removing the Academy. That terrible act yet dwells in the memory of many now living, and the records of it will be read by hundreds who will have a being in future years, and who, we may ask, will there be to justify so outrageous an act?
"The records of it will be ready by hundreds who will have being in future years." If not for the work of Canaan Town Historian Donna Zani Dunkerton, the story might not have reached the hundreds imagined by Reverend Foster so long ago. The Wallace History, the only real record of the events surrounding Noyes Academy, did not set the world on fire. In fact, upon first encounter, it seems designed to send you packing. Thanks to the efforts of Dunkerton, the story was resurfaced for a new generation. Foster continues:
The moral sentiments of the people will be so changed, I may say, so corrected, and the colored race will be brought to sustain such a position among their fellow beings, that the matter of wonder will be that there could once have been a class of people in the world, as should commit such a crime as breaking up an institution for the education of youth, both black and white.
And God bless Amos Foster.
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