Page 560

In 1835, leaders of a still-young abolitionist movement created the nation’s first, co-ed integrated school. This new Academy would teach black and white students together and prove to the world that blacks were capable of being not only civilized, but erudite.

Things did not go as planned.

In the 1860s, after the Civil War, a newspaperman, recently returned home from a career in California, began writing a book that contained the story of how that Academy was founded and destroyed back in 1835. That didn’t go as planned, either.

The school was Noyes Academy, the town was Canaan, New Hampshire, and the newspaperman was William Allen Wallace. His account is strewn throughout an 800-page History of Canaan New Hampshire produced by William Wallace’s son, James long after his father’s death.

In 1835, most people in New England hated slavery but were terrified of slaves. This was a reasonable position. The enslaved out-numbered them. They also knew that if they wanted their new country to hold together, they had to keep their mouths shut about slavery because the South, which had all the money, only agreed to the Union under those terms. We were just sixty years past the Revolutionary War.

The abolitionist movement argued that the way to end slavery was simply to end it. This was their moral and religious proposition and anything short was unacceptable. Almost no one in 1835 agreed with them. Most Northerners were in favor of shipping blacks back to Liberia. But not the enslaved ones. The idea was called colonialism and we’ll get into it. But that was the solution preferred by everyone who really didn’t want to take on the South. Which was everyone but the abolitionists.

The abolitionist movement continued to make its case for the next thirty years, and not only did they not win their argument, they made very few friends. But they did manage to convince many people that the enslaved weren’t actually dangerous.

The Civil War was the war to end slavery in the sense that there were four million enslaved people when it started and none when it ended. And while the North entered the war firmly in opposition to slavery, ending slavery was not really on the agenda. When, during the course of the war, Lincoln saw the opportunity to strike a devastating blow, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln could never have done this if the abolitionists hadn’t spent thirty years explaining to anyone who would listen that it really would be okay to simply end slavery.

For the abolitionists, the end of slavery was an unexpected and stunning victory.

It was in the heady joy of that victory that Wallace decided to tell the story of Noyes Academy. Which can best be described as an early misstep in the early years of the abolitionist movement. We know this because he wrote about it in a letter to William Lloyd Garrison in 1868. He wrote,

I am desirious of writing a sketch of the old Academy in this town. It seems too bad to have all the rare events connected therewith pass into oblivion. I at any rate should like to have my boy understand the spirit of old slavery, and there never was a better illustration of it than existed here in Canaan and throughout this state during those years

In 1868, Wallace’s son James, who would go on to produce his father’s book, was two. Wallace himself was 53.

William Wallace was born into one world. His son was born into an entirely different one. Further confusing the matter, the people Wallace was writing about were men he encountered in his youth. These were the men of his father’s generation.

As if that variety of perspectives doesn’t make the book hard enough to understand, we have the additional problem that Wallace Sr. didn’t entirely write it. He wrote chapters and took endless notes, but he didn’t write a book. His son cobbled together his father’s writing into a chaotic volume organized into categories rather than narratives.

Wallace was a very good writer, although you would never know that from the book that he wrote. His writing in California is still available on the Internet. In his history of Canaan, there are sections that he clearly composed and they sparkle. You don’t have to understand anything about the context to get Wallace’s pointed humor in this passage from the chapter on Noyes Academy:

Page 270

From the other side we learn that Mrs. Hubbard Harris had a tea party, and invited the blacks – they attended. This was very shocking to several who attended. This party gave occasion to much very bad scandal. Mrs. Wallace had a tea party, and did not invite the blacks. Kimball and wife, Mr. Scales and a score more were present. Mrs. Flanders was also invited. “What an insult!” exclaimed Mrs. Flanders, supposing the blacks had had an invitation. She declared “she was so mad she was insane for half an hour,” the which no one doubted who knew her.

In its day, that was massive shade.

But the passage also highlights what makes the book such a challenge.

Let’s start with the easy stuff. You run into this story on page 270 of Wallace’s volume. You have no real idea who any of the people mentioned are. The book does contain enough information about each of the people in this story to make it comprehensible, just not particularly near this story. I didn’t realize until my second or third reading that the Mrs. Wallace in question is our author’s mother!

But then, we run into something much more challenging. This amusing anecdote is presented in response to a starkly racist account in The New Hampshire Patriot, the main newspaper of the day, of that first party held by Mrs. Hubbard Harris.

page 220

[From the New Hampshire Patriot] It is said that one of the principal agitators of the slave question in this state, George Kimball, Esq., and his family, sit at table with a half dozen colored people, while a white girl attends upon them as servant.

Wallace writes that he is sharing the article so his audience can understand the attitudes towards blacks that were commonplace in those days.

And his response is snarky humor?

The whole telling of Noyes Academy by Wallace bristles with problems of tone. Today, when writing about slavery and the run-up to the Civil War, you are not supposed to tell the story as local gossip. You might be telling local gossip about it, but you at least acknowledge the gravity of the larger issue. But the tone Wallace takes throughout can best be described as “behind the scenes,” or the “truth can finally be told.” And despite being a profound abolitionist, he can find sympathy for both sides of the Noyes Academy debacle.

The reason for this weird disconnect is that Wallace was writing after the Civil War had ended about an event that took place long before anyone seriously contemplated ending slavery.

The North talked endlessly about the horrors of slavery, but the money was in the South and the Constitution was rigged (three-fifths clause) to give enslavers extra votes because of who they owned. In 1834, the newly organized abolitionist movement was a Utopian dream. Even on the eve of the Civil War, the abolitionists were thought too extreme to be included in government.

Noyes Academy was an early mis-step at the beginning of a movement that won without ever becoming popular. Wallace’s point in writing, as best I can tell from very close reading, is to let everyone in on the laugh that Noyes Academy was taken down by a man who was pissed off about something else entirely.

That man was Jacob Trussell and what stirred him up had to do with the Masons. We will get into the details, but not here. Wallace’s book, over and over, says that Jacob Trussell, in a fit of cruel anger, destroyed the school.

So I was caught short when I read that, in 1860, Wallace, who had been living in California for decades, impulsively decided to remain in Canaan and called upon Jacob Trussell!

Page 560

He [William Wallace]returned to Canaan and on the 14th [March 14, 1860] bade good-by to his mother, intending to return to California. He got as far as the depot and came back. He had made up his mind to join the Mason’s and called upon Jacob Trussell, who gave him a letter to the lodge in Enfield.

Jacob Trussell is the villain of Noyes Academy. It was Jacob Trussell that inflamed the mob. It was Jacob Trussel who called the town meeting to create the legal fictional that allowed the mob to pull the Academy building from its foundation. It was Jacob Trussell who swung an axe. It was Jacob Trussell who was excommunicated by the Congregationalist Church in Canaan that he helped found. It was Jacob Trussell who was so reviled for his part in the Noyes Academy affair that he had to move to Lebanon for a number of years.

On page 560, Wallace has a polite social encounter with the evilest man who ever lived.

The reason William Allen Wallace could comfortably call upon Jacob Trussell is that it was 1860. This was 25 years after Noyes. By then, Canaan spoke almost as one, and it was for the North. Wallace and Trussell were no longer estranged, although I doubt Trussell became an abolitionist.

I imagine that’s the same reason he felt free, once the War was over (and Trussell dead in 1871), to now tell the dirty details of that early event.

Violent events like those surrounding Noyes weren’t that uncommon in the North. Dramatic, yes. Uncommon, not so much. The New Hampshire legislature was once held in place by a violent mob insisting on paper money. Within Wallace’s book is a harrowing tale of a man “hanged” because  his politics were unpopular. And another in which Daniel Blaisdell, one of Canaan’s first leading lights, is challenged to a fist fight by the Governor of New Hampshire. It was a very violent time and politics was a very violent endeavor. Jacob Trussell was a terrible human being, but he hadn’t held back the tide of history with his antics. He was just part of the rough and tumble of his time and his concerns were different than I expected.

The more I untangled Wallace’s book, the more I began to see it as a memoir about growing up among extraordinary people. But Wallace does not provide a great deal to help his reader. He assumes you know everyone already. He assumes you know where everything is. He assumes you know the political winds of his day. And greatest of all, he assumes he will get back to all this one of these days.

Well, his son did. Sort of.

I learned that I had very little idea of what was going on in the North in the lead up to the Civil War. I had never stopped to consider how wealthy the South was in comparison to the North. And how the dry theologists of New England, knew all about slavery when they fought the Revolutionary War. They just agreed to look the other way. And they continued to do so as long as possible.

In the course of this blog, I will try to consolidate the material Wallace provided about the people involved in the events surrounding Noyes Academy and create from it a readable narrative that captures his tone as well as the context within which these people acted as they did. I will also try to use Wallace’s writing to give a glimpse into the lives of amazing people who wrestled, in the moment, with the issues that defined our country. In the hands of Wallace’s observational wit, they sound exactly like everyone you’ve ever met who got swept up in politics.

That’s going to be a slow process, so if you aren’t already familiar with the events surrounding Noyes Academy, I recommend you take a look at a very comprehensive retelling by Canaan Town Historian Donna Zani Dunkerton. She is the only person other than myself I believe has read the book cover to cover more than once. I don’t know what my excuse is, but she’s a Currier. The book is about her family.