Noyes Academy Part 5
- Alisa Kline
- Feb 14
- 9 min read
Is it really breaking the law if a whole lot of us decide it's okay to do it and we have a good reason?
By the summer of 1834/35, Noyes Academy was a going concern. Classes, which had been taught by Reverend Fuller on an interim basis, were being taught by William Scales, who had finally finished his own schooling.
George Kimball had spent the winter locking down financing and gathering in Black students. This isn’t the post in which we will discuss the students, but it is worth noting that many of the students who spent a necessarily brief time at Noyes Academy went on to accomplish great things. The first Black this and the first Black that. It’s possible that their brief brush with Canaan conferred greatness upon them, but it is more likely that these were young men and women who were the best and brightest of their generation, brought together to support the success of the project.
But this is not their moment. This is where we are going to discuss what happens when the wrong side is winning. What are your obligations, as a citizen, to do something about the fact that the wrong side is very much advancing their cause? Right out in the open. This is what the opponents of the school had to come to terms with. They had lost. The school was open and running. All their fussing and fuming hadn’t accomplished anything.
Wallace includes a letter from the summer of 1835 that discusses the situation.
Page 266
A letter of June 10th says: “As yet only six ‘colored youths’ have arrived. Two of them black as night. Kimball boards them. This week is vacation. We cannot yet tell what the result of this school will be. Nothing but rare courage and devotion in the projectors to push their plans through good and evil reports will preserve it.
The fact that the whole slave population of the South are coming here, shocks the sensibilities of the toothless, eyeless, senseless part of the community. The old, superannuated dotards sigh at the coming events, and wish they had never been born. Because, forsooth, a black man has come among us.”
Rumors of the most absurd character were set afloat against the school and the people. The village was to be overrun with negroes from the South; the slaves were coming here to line the streets with their huts, and to inundate the industrious town with paupers and vagabonds. Other tales, too indecent to be reported, were circulated with wicked industry.
“Circulated with wicked industry.” In other words, a drumbeat of fear-mongering had produced enough anxiety in town that something had to give. Jacob Trussell and his cohort decided that the thing that had to give was the law.
The school was a private operation. It wasn’t owned by the town and the town had no jurisdiction over it. The school was also not doing any harm, except to the anxiety levels of people living in Canaan. The opponents of the school did not have any way to legally destroy the object of their disgust, which, for most of them, was what was at stake.
I choose the word “disgust” very deliberately. We are programmed to experience disgust. It is evolutionarily adaptive to avoid rotten food. We are naturally repulsed by anything putrid. We find it disgusting. We avoid it. It is so important, from an evolutionary standpoint, that we stay away from rotten food that we come equipped with a vomit-right-along-with-you gene. If you are in a tribe and one person eats and quickly vomits, it’s probably a good idea to vomit along with them if you ate the same thing. That’s adaptive. So adaptive that disgust got programmed into each of us by evolution.
This very adaptive response to bad smells and rotten comestibles is mediated by a host of organs and biological processes. These processes help keep us from eating stuff that might kill us. But the response can be stimulated even without the presence of rotting food. Mere images of foul conditions can set off a spasm of disgust. And this response can, through association, be connected to things unrelated entirely. Kind of like Pavlov and his dogs. Ring a bell at every meal time and eventually dogs will salivate simply at the sound of the bell. It just isn’t all that hard to convince people that some poorly understood shabby group of strangers carry disease and filth beyond reckoning. Racism, fear of foreigners, fear of difference are all enacted as forms of disgust. Defeating racism, fear of foreigners and difference is the process of decoupling the disgust response from the innocent stimulus.
That was what the founders of Noyes Academy were doing. They were trying to decouple the disgust response from the victims of slavery. The dreadful conditions that enslaved men and women endured prompted the disgust response and a fear of contagion. The sense of disgust was nurtured by Southern enslavers who traveled the North to regale groups with stories about the depravity of Black men and women. This should sound at least a bit familiar. Today, there is agitation about a class of people who are called “illegal,” whose imaginary crime is that they will contaminate society with their mere presence. We are human. We do not change.
So, with the winds of disgust at their backs, the school’s opponents tried to move from reasonable opposition to criminal enterprise. And lost their nerve.
Page 268
As the Fourth of July approached violence began to be threatened, and it was announced that on that day an attack was to be made on the house. The day arrived and hundreds of men assembled, some as actors, others as spectators. The building was approached in a threatening manner by a body of about seventy men, many of whom were from adjacent towns, armed with clubs and other missiles and uttering fierce threats and imprecations.
They drew up in front of the house. The leader of this brave band was Jacob Trussell, who announced to his followers that the object of their “virtuous wrath was before them.” Several approached and attempted the door.
There is in every man a sense of right and wrong which makes even the most hardened criminal hesitate to commit an unlawful act, even in the presence of his fellow conspirators. A sudden paralysis seemed to seize them. A window in the second story was suddenly thrown open and Dr. Timothy Tilton, a magistrate, appeared and after addressing a few words of warning, began to take down the names of the visitors in a loud voice. Thus he called the names of “Jacob Trussell. Daniel Pattee, Wesley P. Burpee, Daniel Pattee, Jr., Salmon P. Cobb, March Barber. Phineas Eastman,” and so on.
Then the band of rioters hesitated, fell back a little, and soon retreated, with undisguised speed, leaving behind them only their leader, who stood his ground valiantly for a while looking defiantly at the offensive building.
Trussell’s effort to foil the schemes of his tormentors failed. He was once again beaten by the anti-Mason, abolitionist scum he boiled to destroy. So he sought to stiffen the spine of his wavering troops by creating fictitious but reasonable-sounding legal cover for the criminal acts he wanted to lead. He called a town meeting for July 31, 1835.
Page 270
The 31st of July, 1835, is memorable in the annals of Canaan, memorable for the disorder it evolved as well as for the remarkable resolutions that were permitted to go upon its records, where they remain as a perpetual memento of the slow progress of public opinion.
Joseph L. Richardson was moderator. The house was crowded with men filled with rage, rum and riotous intentions. They had worked themselves into the belief that a “legal” town meeting could do lawfully what it was unlawful for an individual to do. They were willing to shift the odium of the outrage of what they were about to do upon the “legal” town meeting.
A committee was appointed to report a plan for the action of the town. After much labor, that committee presented a series of resolutions, embracing within their tortuous folds the plan that was to destroy the school, or rather as those who were seeking an excuse for their acts to “abate the public Nuisance.”
Public nuisance laws have been around since the middle ages. Originally, they were private suits involving someone interfering with a property owner’s use of their property. They evolved to cover what might be thought of as offenses to public decency. Public nuisance laws covered such things as houses of prostitution, opium dens and places selling alcohol. Not schools. No matter who they proposed to educate. And no matter how horrible anyone thought they were.
Trussell had gotten them stirred up and he didn't want to lose any of his momentum. He persuaded the assembled that they had to act with haste because if they did not get the Black men out of town quickly, there would be mixed-race babies before you knew it. This was the public nuisance that required abatement
Page 271
Therefore Resolved That from what our own eyes have seen and our ears have heard respecting the close intimacy that exists between some of the colored boys and white females, we believe if suffered to go on, it will not be long before we shall have living evidence of an amalgamation of blood. Resolved That we consider the Colored School in this town a Public Nuisance and that it is the duty of the town to take immediate measures to remove said nuisance.
That was the fictitious legal cover. But the timid among them knew this was still not quite on the right side of the law. The drafters of these resolutions consulted some lawyers and learned too late what they already knew, that there was no legal ground to stand on. They were breaking the law.
Page 272
But the chiefs in this “legal” conspiracy, it is said, held a private conference in the hall that lasted until morning. Wherein they discussed the responsibilities they were assuming, and some of the more cautious desired that they might receive counsel from some eminent lawyer. They accordingly consulted Josiah Quincy of Rumney, but his views conformed so greatly to their own, that they suspected there might be more sympathy than law in his opinion.
They then consulted Ichabod Bartlett, who it was known was very outspoken against the Abolition excitement, but still was a careful and safe adviser. Mr. Bartlett’s opinion did not arrive, however, until it was too late to save the building, but it is said to have been of such a nature that many of those who were engaged in the outrage of moving the building were rather anxious that that act in their lives should be forgotten.
He told them, as I heard from the late Caleb Blodgett, Esq., who was high sheriff at the time, and had recently moved into town, that no vote of the town could “legalize” a mob ; that the outrage they were about, to commit was felony at common law; that each individual engaged in it was personally responsible for all the damage that might accrue, and that each and every man became lawless and criminal whenever he or they deprived others of their property or of the right to live peaceably in the community.
But, after all, he thought there was little danger to be feared from prosecutions, because in the then exasperated state of public opinion upon the slavery question, there was no jury in the state who would find them guilty; but all high excitements are reactionary, beware of the “second thought.” For this advice the town paid Mr. Bartlett $5. They had better have paid him thousands and sought his advice sooner.
I will close this post with Wallace’s naming of the committee formed that day to superintend the moving of the school (abating that nuisance) and the comments on each individual entered upon the town record well after the fact.
Voted the town take immediate measures to remove the house in which the colored school is kept.
Voted that the Selectmen select the spot on which to set said building.
Voted that a committee be chosen to superintend the moving of said building at the expense of the town.
Voted that a committee of 15 or 20 persons be chosen for said committee and the following were chosen viz.:
Jacob Trussell (still at 90 broken and defiant)
Chamberlain Packard Jr (killed by God)
Wm Campbell (a foolish old infidel)
Herod Richardson, Elijah R. Colby, Americus Gates (dead and rotten and now forgotten)
Daniel Pattee Jr (a blasphemous cripple)
Nathaniel Shepherd (Common drunkard)
Luther Kinne (Ossified legs)
Peter Stevens
Robert B. Clark (dead in his bed)
Salmon P. Cobb (an old witch too mean to live or die)
Daniel Campbell
James Pattee (a drunkard)
John Fales Jr (an idiot)
Wesley P. Burpee (an awful death from cancer)
Benj. W. Porter (drowned)
Bartlett Hoit (killed by God after having stolen money sent him to keep his wife’s father from starving or thrown on the town.)
March Barber (old foolish jealous and insane)
The words inclosed in the parentheses after each name are on the town records but were put there by someone afterwards.
The comments in parentheses were put there very far after the events of 1835. Trussell would have been 90 in 1870. Around the time Wallace was beginning his History. But you don’t imagine he would have…
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