Noyes Academy Part 9
- Alisa Kline
- Mar 14
- 8 min read
Updated: Mar 27
It was all a matter of ego
Jacob Trussell was mean and vindictive. Once roused, he did not relent until he had destroyed those who had provoked him. He moved men to engage in acts they came to regret. When he could not achieve his means through people from Canaan, he brought in men from nearby towns to attack his neighbors and brethren from the Congressional Church.
Trussell was enraged because the founders of Noyes Academy had been swept up in the politics of their time. Three of the men were anti-Masons, a political party that questioned the motives and activities of elites in society. Two of them were Masons who renounced Masonry. Trussell was a Mason. He was outraged that men he considered brothers could have become such fools as to renounce a benign organization of which they themselves were members because they suspected that organization of evil.
According to Wallace, this was what drove the destruction of Noyes Academy. One man’s pique. Wallace says this directly several times in his History, so I’m going to take him at his word. Wallace also says, several times, that the men of Canaan alone could never have summoned the venom and raucous delight in destruction required to break the law in broad daylight, confident that they had chosen a target so despised that no one would stop them. Wallace believed the men of Canaan to have been too cautious to have taken such a step. Trussell admitted as much.
Wallace provides several examples of Trussell trying to get the citizens of Canaan sufficiently riled up that they would throw off the restraints of reason and carry out his wishes. Each time Trussell brought his mob to the edge of getting some vengeance on the founders of the school, his army backed down. So he brought in outsiders.
It's a familiar story. A powerful man desires revenge. He tries to get public opinion on his side so that he is not seen as acting alone but as acting at the behest of the good and decent citizens. It's just cover. But it is necessary and effective. When you want to do something bad, the first task is getting public opinion on your side. The whole thing is like a magic trick, so I want to make sure we are keeping our eye on the ball.
Trussell’s first step was to get public opinion turned fully against admitting Black students to Noyes Academy. This isn’t what he really cared about, he really cared about hurting those who he believed hurt him. I’m sure Trussell was racist to his core and I’m sure he remained pro-slavery far too long. But he didn’t set out to destroy Noyes Academy for those reasons. He set out to destroy it because he had a score to settle.
It all was so unnessary. If Trussell had not been spurred to action, Noyes Academy might have come into being. The South wasn't going to seceed over it. The world wasn't going to end. Nothing bad was going to happen. Noyes was completely possible. They had the support, they had the funding.
This is the injury Wallace cannot forgive. In his writing, fifty years after the events, with Trussell finally dead at 91, Wallace laments the loss of a school that would have changed forever the fortunes of a town, Canaan, that he loved so dearly.
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.
That’s Trussell’s crime. Not the racism. Not the dastardly servility to the South. He stole Canaan’s future to satisfy his ego.
We are so caught up in the story of Black Americans’ trajectory from slavery to sort of equality that we are almost compelled to frame Wallace’s story in those terms. But that isn’t the story Wallace is telling. That story intersects this one. But it’s the background, not the foreground. Wallace knows much more clearly than modern readers that the antics of a small New Hampshire town had absolutely no bearing on the sweep of history. He knew what it took to provoke the Civil War. He reported on it from Washington, D.C. He understood what it had taken to undo slavery in 1863, and he knew that nothing going on in Canaan in 1835 was relevant.
The story Wallace is telling isn’t the story of how white people came to get comfortable with Black people, or the story of how slavery finally ended. It is the story of how a powerful man settled a personal score on the backs of the uninvolved. How very unfamiliar!
There were two strains of opposition to admitting Black students to Noyes Academy and Trussell played on them both. There was a widespread fear that given an opportunity, Black people would take revenge on whites for how they had been treated. In addition to the fear, there was the situation of almost complete unfamiliarity (there had been only two black people in Canaan prior to the founding of Noyes Academy) a void that was filled by the pro-slavery side with imaginary horrors.
Page 257
But the Christian men and women of those days were never ready to recognize his equality before God. And when the Congregational Church was built in 1828-29, that there might be no misunderstanding, as to the sentiment of the builders or projectors, a pew was built in the northwest corner of the gallery, and dedicated to the negro race as the “Negro Pen” and there it remains today, a witness to the prejudice that was to culminate in after years, in outrages and mobs all over the land, producing bitterness and wounds in society, that a whole generation has scarcely been able to heal.
The second strain of opposition to admitting Black students to Noyes Academy was the patriotic desire to preserve the Union, which was then not yet sixty years old. Anything that smacked of abolition sent the Southern states into a tizzy and they threatened to take their marbles (millions of enslaved men and women) and go home.
Page 258
There was another reason aside from the social aspect of the affair, that led them to a public expression of disapproval of the negro question in the school. The Southern politicians were getting excited at the spread of Abolition sentiments, and it was a fondly cherished belief of our good men, that they could contribute something towards soothing their Southern brethren, by passing resolutions, denouncing the Abolitionists, having them published in the New Hampshire Patriot, signed by the selectmen and clerk and then sending carefully marked copies to their senators and representatives in Congress.
Trussell first campaigned against the school, by appealing to patriotism and reason. He waved the hell out of the flag and beat the drum for the Union. He tried to give people a reason to oppose the school that was more than simply rank hatred of Black people. But it was never enough to tip people over the edge from opposing the school in principle, or being creeped out by Black people, to actually doing something to interrupt the functioning of a legal private institution.
To get people to commit violence, you have to get them worked up. The mob that was assembled on August 10, 1835, the mob that tore Noyes Academy from its foundations, was fed on rum and the red meat of racism. They were not just the men of Canaan, who might reasonably wish not to attack their own neighbors. They were men from surrounding towns here for the fun of letting their freak flags fly and whumping up on some abolitionists, a sport America did not tire of even on the eve of the Civil War.
September 10, 1835 found Trussell triumphant. The rabble had been roused, the school destroyed, and his anger avenged. Trussell was puffed up beyond measure congratulating himself and his men on their great accomplishment of having destroyed a school and run a bunch of kids out of town. And in his bluntness, he confirmed something Wallace asserted. These were not men of Canaan.
Page 280
Farewell Address of Jacob Trussell:
Gentlemen, the work is done! The object is attained! The contest has been severe, but the victory glorious! No sable son of Africa remains to darken our hemisphere! The Abolition Monster, that ascended out of the bottomless pit, is sent headlong to perdition, and the mourners go about the streets.
Yup, we ran those Black people and their enablers right out of town. Broke their windows and everything.
To you, Gentlemen, who have assisted in attaining this glorious victory, I present you hearty and sincere thanks, for your prompt attention and your unexampled exertions in repelling an enemy, far more to be dreaded, than the pestilence that walks in darkness, or the destruction that awaits at noonday. May the sun of liberty continue to shine on you with increasing splendor, and never be obstructed by the sable clouds of Africa.
“The pestilence that walks in darkness, or the destruction that awaits at noonday” is a reference to the 91st Psalm. Trussell is proclaiming that the destruction wrought by these men was in service of God and the perpetrators would thereafter enjoy His favor and protection.
Trussell was excommunicated from the Congregational Church for his actions.
And should it be your misfortune to be invaded by a similar foe, we pledge ourselves to unite our exertions with yours in putting down by all lawful exertions, every plot that threatens the subversion of our liberties, or disturbs the public tranquility.
This is the place where he tells us that the assembled were not entirely, or if Wallace is to be believed, even largely from Canaan. They came to have a party and break stuff because a very bad man not only gave them permission to be their worst selves, he downright encouraged it.
Page 291
It is in evidence that Canaan would not furnish the requisite team, so that cattle were invited from the neighboring towns, some volunteering, others being impressed. It is safe to say that had this same “public sentiment,” out of Canaan, stayed at home, and refrained from intermeddling, the school might have been in successful operation to this day.
So, having destroyed a school, busted out the windows of some of Canaan’s leading citizens, and generally abused the populace, the men who destroyed Noyes paused to figure a few things out.
Page 284
There did, however, question arise, in days afterwards, which somewhat puzzled them. They had taken the house from the proprietors, and now what should they do with it? There was talk of liabilities for personal damages, actions of trespass, etc., but the politicians, the men in office, the clergymen generally and the public mind, now all known to be so unfriendly to the proprietors, and especially to the color of their cause, that it was not deemed prudent to invoke the law, and there the case rests to this day.
The word color is italicized in the original. It was Wallace’s point to make. He wrote after Trussell had died. Wallace wrote that Jacob Trussell never regretted his actions around Noyes and remained unrepentant until his death 1871. The South lay in ruins and slavery had finally ended but Trussell never wavered.
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