The College celebrated Founders Day Thursday by recounting its role during the abolitionist movement and honoring one of the campus’s notable historical figures.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author James M. McPherson, in the keynote address, said the real character of the College was established by its longtime president, Eliphalet Nott. Though he never affiliated with the organized anti-slavery movement, Nott held strong anti-slavery convictions.
McPherson cited Nott’s baccalaureate adress in 1811, in which he praised the British anti-slavery leaders who had abolished the African slave trade.
Their fame, Nott said, “I had rather inherit than Caesar’s.” McPherson noted that in the same speech, Nott, whose son and grandson were named after British abolitionists, predicted that “Africa will rise if there be any truth in God.”
McPherson, a Civil War historian and the George Henry Davis ’86 Professor of American History Emeritus at Princeton University, paid homage to the hundreds of students and alumni who fought in the war, including 61 who died, as proof of the “devotion that the nation might experience a new birth of freedom.
“It is a record of which this institution may be justly proud.”
During the hour-long ceremony in Memorial Chapel, the College unveiled a portrait of Moses Viney, a runaway slave from Maryland who escaped to Schenectady on the Underground Railroad. Viney was a coachman, messenger and constant companion of Nott, who eventually secured his freedom.
Viney’s portrait was painted by Simmie Knox, a renowned African-American artist who painted the official White House portraits of former President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and other political and cultural figures.
President Stephen C. Ainlay praised Knox, who used a photograph from the College’s archives to complete the portrait. Borrowing the words of Jared Gourrier ’10, who spoke about Viney before the painting was uncovered, Ainlay told Knox he captured the “integrity, capability and intelligent humility” of one of the campus’s most central figures.”
Also at Founders Day, Daniel Frio, a history teacher at Wayland High School in Massachusetts, received the Gideon Hawley Teacher Recognition Award. Frio was nominated by Priscilla Wright ’12. The award is named for the 1809 graduate of Union who was New York state’s first superintendent of public education.
Seniors Adrienne Hart and Alexander Schlosberg received the Hollander Prize for Music. The pair provided a musical interlude, “All I Ask of You,” from “Phantom of the Opera.”
The Founders Day convocation is the first in a series of events to commemorate Union’s role in the abolitionist movement.
The College will host “The Underground Railroad, Its Legacies and Our Communities,” the eighth annual Underground Railroad History Conference, at College Park Hall Feb. 27-29.
In addition, a Schaffer Library exhibit, “Abolitionism and the Struggle for African-American Freedom: The Union College Experience,” chronicles the College’s involvement in the struggle for African-American freedom. It will include an 18th century sermon against the keeping of “negros” by Union College President Jonathan Edwards the Younger, photographs of Moses Viney, and copies of Union’s African-American student newspapers from the 1970s.
This exhibit will be on display through March 6.
Founders Day commemorates the 214th anniversary of the granting of the College’s charter from the New York State Board of Regents.