Noyes Academy Part 8
- Alisa Kline
- Mar 7
- 10 min read
Of Cannons and Broken Glass
On August 10 and 11, 1835, the building that housed Noyes Academy was dragged nearly a mile down Canaan Street and deposited in front of the Meeting House. The destroyers of the school announced their plan to return one month later, on September 10, to move the building wherever the selectmen instructed. They were operating under a self-created fiction that destroying the school was something sanctioned by the town.
A town cannot sanction the destruction of private property. Even a properly held town meeting can do no such thing and every one party to the destruction of Noyes knew that. They were just so relieved not to have black people moving to Canaan that they were more than happy to go along with the game.
Page 267
[From a letter dated June 10, 1835] 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.
The abolitionist movement presented the country with a problem. By the 1830s, it wasn’t news to anyone that chattel slavery was evil. The importation of new slaves was already barred. The practice was already illegal in most of Europe and most of the North. But people were making a lot of money. I mean a lot of money because of slavery. And it wasn’t just the enslavers. Slavery was in support of cotton and cotton was one of the greatest economic engines the world has seen. Much more on this here. And the abolitionists said it all had to stop. Or at least get a lot less profitable.
Not to mention that those enslaved men and women were worth a fortune. When a plantation owner needed money, he did not mortgage his house or his fields. He mortgaged his slaves. They were his wealth.
No one walks away from that kind of money. Or at least very few. Those were the abolitionists. They had one position, that slavery was wrong and it had to end. Now.
The South had been clear from the start that if the North wanted to join together to make a new country and fight the British for independence, the North had to accept that the South had slaves and the North was to say nothing about it. The South’s economic strength relative to the North was on full display when the Constitution was written. Otherwise, why on earth did the North ever agree to the three-fifths clause. What this clause said was that slaves, who weren't people, should each count as 3/5 of an actual person in the census. This inflated the number of people in the South, giving slave states more electoral college votes and more congressional seats.
You think the North was completely cool with that? Do you imagine that the North was eager to give up political strength? They weren’t. They were just so weak compared with the South that they would take even a bad deal rather than no new country.
They came to think of Southerners as their betters. This is a very human response. We tend to respect money; the mere possession of it confers upon the bearer status in direct proportion to the amount of money involved. If someone has more money than you, and more power than you, you might try very hard to make that person a friend and not an enemy. It’s called sucking up. And the citizens of Canaan and New England in general were, at that point, sucking up to the South big time.
Abolitionists were not popular. They were never popular. They were party-poopers. That’s not how we think of them now. We think they were the good guys. And they were. Just not at any point when they were actually alive. As much as the North hated slavery, and they did, they weren’t willing to do anything about it until they had enough money themselves that they no longer needed the South to survive.
No one (please let that still be true) defends slavery today. When we think of relations between the races we think in terms of degree of equality. We take note of where things still seem unequal and we debate where we should go from here. In 1835, Black people had no rights. They were not considered fully human. They were at best a curiosity and at worst and deadly threat. Mostly, they were unknown.
The men who pulled Noyes academy were certainly bigots in so far as they had preconceived negative ideas about Black people and their fear of them was something the South actively encouraged. But they were not wrong in their sense of the politics. The South was willing to tear the country in two rather than end slavery. In 1835, the North stood no chance in such a war.
But did they have to have such a damned good time dragging that cannon up and down the Street?
Page 280
There is no evidence that personal insults were offered on this occasion [August 10, 1835]. They proceeded promptly as if the business they were about were a pleasure, and with loud cries to the work, all the forenoon, five hours, with all their cattle, they labored to haul the building across the road, and locate it in the corner of the Baptist Parsonage field.
Then at twelve o’clock it was placed upon the spot. The cannon was then dragged through the street, and discharged at the house of every Abolitionist, breaking glass in abundance at every discharge.
Where did they get the cannon? I did not imagine that Canaan had possessed a cannon. But they did. New Hampshire had a militia system under which towns were organized into regiments with men ready to fight off a British invasion or other act of war. Wallace discusses it in his chapter on Soldiers.
Page 361
An artillery company was organized in 1820. The militia system of New Hampshire was then doing its level best to make citizen soldiers of every man. It was complete in all arms but one. They lacked a six-pounder gun — brass one. They wanted it badly.
At the date above named a meeting was called of all interested, to assemble in the hall of Capt. Joshua Harris’ Tavern on the Street, to organize an artillery company and to appoint a commission to ask the state to loan them a gun. […] The application to Governor Bell was successful. […]Thus those citizens obtained their gun and were proud of it.
They used upon occasion to exhibit their delighted patriotism by dragging it up and down the Street, and make a thundering noise firing off blank cartridges wadded with green grass. They kept this up for eighteen years, and about the last use they made of it was in the grievous days when liberty of speech was believed to be a crime, and that the ladies ought not to be allowed to meet together even in secret, to pray against slavery and oppression.
So they were accustomed to firing it off just for fun. Most of this fun likely took place on muster days. Every town in New Hampshire was supposed to have an annual muster day so the troops could practice trooping. In practice, muster days were opportunities for men to get even drunker than usual. And they were usually very drunk. In a spectacular failure to think things through, the day men met to parade around with weapons was also the drunkest day of the year.
Page 358
That there were muster days is evident by the vote of the town in August, 1808, which is the first vote on the records to refer to the militia. […] It was customary on muster days to drink as much rum as possible, and booths were set up along Broad Street where the thirsty might obtain strong drink.
It turns out that muster day for 1835 was September 11. One day after the ruins of Noyes were to be dragged across the street and situated where the Historical Museum is today. This cannot have been accidental. Trussell chose thirty days as the interval between the “hauling” and the final situating. He knew that would coincide with muster day, meaning he would have troops from all the neighboring towns to be his helpers and his audience.
It also meant he’d have the cannon.
Page 280
Another letter of September 9, 1835, “Tomorrow is the day for locating the Academy. Yesterday was preparatory drill. Muster takes place the 11th. Those who come to assist in moving the Academy will probably not go home.”
They certainly did not go home. Twice the day of September 10, they hauled that cannon down Canaan Street and broke the windows from the home of every abolitionist they passed.
Page 361
They would harness themselves to it and drag it through the Street, and fire if off at the closed doors of the offending abolitionists, yelling like wild Indians as the glass rattled from the sash
The homes of the abolitionists had quite a goodly amount of front-facing glass windows. The Harris House has nine, each with 12 panes of glass, with five more windows close enough to break. The Currier House about the same. What would it cost to replace window glass in 1835?
This isn’t the only instance of malicious glass breaking in the Wallace History. Three years after Noyes was moved, all the window glass in the building was broken one night.
Page 288
On the morning of December 31, 1838, it was found that seven windows had been removed the night before. Search was made for them; a pile of fragments of sash and broken glass, pounded almost to powder, were found on the shore of the pond.[…]
This outrage was believed to have been committed by George Drake, who took this method to receipt a blacksmithing bill, which he had against the present owners of the Academy.
People in the time of Noyes expended much more physical effort in their vengence than we do today.
No one in town was making window glass. If they were, Wallace would no doubt have mentioned it. And it might have made mention in other histories as well. Glass making was no small feat in 1834. Windows were precious. Breaking so many was more than mere mischief. It inflicted real harm on the abolitionists.
Page 282
After the tumultuous applause which followed the delivery of the “Farewell Address,” had subsided, they again assembled for labor, and the building was placed in order for underpinning.
About sunset the work was accomplished, when the procession was again formed, with cannon in front and was paraded through the Street, accompanied by the stirring peal of fifes and drums.
As before the cannon was discharged at the house of every Abolitionist. At each discharge the broken glass jingled in unison with the yell of triumph that went up from the crowd, the firing and shouting was kept up until late at night.
Just before night one chivalrous fellow ascended the cupola of the Academy, painted the black ball thereon white and nailed a white flag to the spire. And the spirited people of Canaan and Enfield caused this history!
I’m not sure it will come through to someone not accustomed to Wallace’s writing, but the above paragraphs are dripping with malice and irony. Wallace has previously referenced this “Farewell Address” and we will get to the substance of it next week. But Wallace clearly thought Trussell a puffed up ass. His description of the address is masterful snark.
Page 281
Mr. Trussell, it seems, could not trust himself to do justice to his subject in an extempore manner. Its great magnitude and importance required thought. So he put his thought upon paper and headed it “Farewell Address.”
The manuscript was for years hidden away in the archives of the author. But death often discloses lost gems. This eloquent piece of thankfulness was thus restored to light that it might be preserved as part of this veracious history.
Jacob Trussell lived until 1871, dying at the ripe old age of 91. Wallace was 56 when Trussell died. Trussell had been a contemporary of Wallace’s father. When Wallace impulsively decided to return to Canaan after having lived away since the age of 15, the first thing he did was to contact Jacob Trussell for a referral to the Masons. That referral was the rabbit hole I’ve been chasing down ever since.
But when Wallace writes about Noyes Academy, he is carried beyond whatever respect he might have once had for his father’s friend. He just had to wait for the guy to die before he wrote about it.
A peek into Gary's process
Each week, I get to visit Gary Hamel in his studio and we talk about artwork for the blog post. He also tells me stories. Stories about the art, stories about growing up in New Hampshire, stories about people who grew up in New Hampshire long before either of us was born.
To better understand those people who grew up in New Hampshire long before either of us was born, Gary went to live, as a young man, on a working Vermont dairy farm. Gary wanted to better understand the animals and processes that were such a basic fact of everyone's life but were never represented in photos. At that time, Gary worked from photos. He still does.
Now, we take photos of animals all the time, but when photography was new, no one was going to spend that amount of time and money photographing a cow, unless it was very special. And they didn't lug those huge cameras out into the field until many years later, so there are very few images of working farms. Images of horses drawing plows, images of oxen pulling buildings down the street.
So, Gary did the next best thing. He had won an art prize that would allow him to live without working for some months. He used that time to visit a Vermont dairy farm that was still using old methods. He took his own photos.
The two unfinished works that Gary suggested accompany this post about windows are based on photographs he took on that Vermont farm. He still has the photos. He still has everything, I think. I forgot to ask him when these paintings were started. The photos are old and have a reddish hue I remember from film photography in the 1970s and 80s. Gary thought it would be cool to show the photo and the painting together. I thought so, too, but I wasn't going to just plop the photo onto the painting without any explanation. So this was the explanation and the photo-plopped artwork!
The image above is particularly timely because Gary pointed out that you should start your tomato seedlings in the window on Town Meeting day.
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