The College celebrated Founders Day in late February by recounting its role during the abolitionist movement and the Civil War and by unveiling a portrait painting of one of Union’s notable historical figures.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author James M. McPherson, in the keynote address at Memorial Chapel, 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 is a professor emeritus at Princeton University and author of 11 books including Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, which received the Pulitzer Prize.
McPherson cited Nott’s baccalaureate address 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, 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 was featured in the Old Union section in the Winter 2008 Union College magazine.
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, including childhood friend Hank Aaron. As a young man, Knox’s promising baseball career was cut short by an eye injury. During recovery he discovered a talent for drawing and painting and later earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in fine arts.
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.
Founders Day commemorates the 214th anniversary of the granting of the College’s charter from the New York State Board of Regents.
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 was the first in a series of events to commemorate Union’s role in the abolitionist movement. The College hosted “The Underground Railroad, Its Legacies and Our Communities,” the eighth annual Underground Railroad History Conference, at College Park Hall in February.
In addition, a Schaffer Library exhibit, “Abolitionism and the Struggle for African-American Freedom: The Union College Experience,” chronicled the College’s involvement in the struggle for African-American freedom. It included 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.
Nott and the Civil War
Prior to the Civil War, President Eliphalet Nott opposed slavery and supported Abraham Lincoln’s bid for the presidency, yet publicly worked to quell the passionate debates flaring up between Southern and Northern students. Nott feared that such activities would stir passions that would set back the cause, or bring violence, according to author, historian and Founders Day speaker James M. McPherson.
McPherson outlined Nott’s views and highlighted pieces of the war’s impact on the College in a keynote speech in Memorial Chapel during Founders Day. As McPherson notes in the excerpt of his address printed here, 61 former Union College students and graduates died in Union service. Six died in service to the Confederate Army.
Overall, nearly 570 one-time Union College students fought in the Civil War, according to the Encyclopedia of Union College History. Roughly 520 served in the Union Army or related military divisions and 46 served in the Confederate Army.
Keynote excerpts
Following are excerpts from McPherson’s address at Founders Day:
The real character of Union College was established by its fourth president, Eliphalet Nott, one of the most famous college presidents in the 19th century whose 62-year tenure at Union will surely never be equaled.
Nott held strong anti-slavery convictions. In his Baccalaureate Address in 1811, [Nott] praised the British anti-slavery leaders who had succeeded, after a long struggle, in abolishing the African slave trade. Their fame, said Nott, “I had rather inherit than Ceasar’s.” In the same speech he predicted that, “Africa will rise if there be any truth in God.”
Yet Nott never affiliated with the organized anti-slavery movement. He considered himself a man of reason and rational discourse, while he believed that the abolitionists appealed to the passions of humankind and would only provoke a Southern and conservative backlash that would set back the anti-slavery cause. As president of an institution that depended on the support and goodwill of the community, he also felt that he must keep the militant abolitionists at bay. Union College had a substantial number of Southern students – more, evidently, than almost any other Northern college of its size.
Nott was fond of expounding upon what he called a “higher law” than the laws of man, which would ultimately bring slavery to an end. New York Senator William H. Seward, Union Class of 1820, made this “higher law” famous in his speech against the Compromise of 1850, in which he declared that “there is a higher law than the Constitution,” the law under which all man are free and equal in His sight.
Eliphalet Nott could not have agreed more with his former student. Perhaps that is why he looked the other way when the Philomathean Society invited Wendell Phillips, the most radical of abolitionists, to speak in 1854 at the same time the College Trustees were meeting to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Nott’s installation as president. Nott was quite clever about manifesting his anti-slavery attitudes by indirection.
By 1860, Nott was no longer confident that slaves would be disenthralled by the diffusion of science or the progress of society. As Southern states prepared to secede after Abraham Lincoln’s election as president in 1860, Nott wrote to a friend, “that odious bondage may have to be swept away in blood.”
It was indeed swept away in blood during the next five years. Union College alumni and students made an important contribution to Union victory in the war, but at great cost to the College. The war reduced enrollment by half as many students enlisted, led by the few Southern students still remaining in 1860, who departed for their home states after Lincoln’s election. Combined with a series of strokes suffered by Nott … the College was devastated by the war and took a long time to recover. Sixty-one Union College alumni and students, including 23 from the classes of 1861 to 1864, gave this last full measure of devotion so that the nation might experience a new birth of freedom. It is a record of which this institution may be justly proud.
Dispatch from the battlefield
In addition to McPherson’s remarks, Union College magazine pulled from the College archives several Civil War personal items belonging to Maj. Charles E. Pease, Class of 1856, and member of the Army of the Potomac.
In April 1865, Pease carried the terms of surrender drafted by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, which led to the formal meeting between the two at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. Pease is one of several notable Union men to serve in the war, including Maj. Gen Daniel Butterfield, Class of 1844 and composer of “Taps,” and Maj. Henry Reed Rathbone, Class of 1857, who grappled with John Wilkes Booth during the assassination of Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre.
The College’s Special Collections houses Pease’s uniform patches, a War Department appointment as a Union Army officer, and a letter from Pease to his wife, Kitty, about an incident on Feb. 6, 1865. On that day, Pease’s horse was shot and wounded as he rode. He later recovered the bullet that felled his horse, which is shown here with his letter.
Pease volunteered for the Union Army in September 1861 and served until the war’s end in 1865. After a series of promotions, he became a major under the command of Gen. George Mead. Pease was at Grant’s Appomattox headquarters when a letter from Lee addressed to the “General Commanding of the Armies of the United States” was delivered, according to March 27, 1886 obituary in the New York Tribune. Pease and two others set out at night and tracked Grant down near the site of the Battle of Five Forks. Grant selected Pease to join him at the famous meeting with Lee at the Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865.
According to the Tribune obituary, Lee sketched a path for Pease to ride from the courthouse to Grant’s headquarters to deliver news of the surrender.
“The shortest way led through Rebel lines and Lee rapidly penciled a pass and gave it to the major, who rode back through the discomfited army and was the first to announce the long-hoped-for tidings to the Army of the Potomac,” reads a March 27, 1886 obituary in the N.Y. Tribune:
In the letter held in the College archives, Pease wrote:
My dear Kitty,
I have just come in from a hard days work and fight safe and sound. My horse was shot under me and I had many narrow escapes but fortunately escaped – was fighting six hours and have been in the saddle since daylight. So that’s [why] I am not in very good condition to write but thought I would just write you a letter before I went to bed. Fred Tremaine of Albany was hit and is feared fatally wounded and our loss in officers and men has been severe. I will write you more soon. I pray you are well and that one of your good letters will reach me soon.
As ever yours,
Charley