Chapter

Charles Follen, Henry Ware, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Abolitionist Faculty Members

Members of the Harvard faculty who worked to advance the abolitionist cause often faced particularly significant resistance from the University. In the 1830s, two abolitionist faculty members—Charles Follen (1825–1835), a professor of German, and Henry Ware Jr. (1829–1842; overseer, 1820–1830), a member of the faculty at the Divinity School—faced pressure to curtail their involvement with the newly founded Cambridge Anti-Slavery Society.⁠Go to footnote 342 detail Follen believed he lost his full-time teaching role at the University because of his abolitionist activities; he resigned rather than accept a demotion to part-time instructor.⁠Go to footnote 343 detail Ware, according to an 1846 biography written by his brother, was warned by friends and colleagues to limit his involvement with the society, and he eventually resigned from the organization.⁠Go to footnote 344 detail

Charles Follen was a professor of German and ethics, history, and ecclesiastical history at Harvard University. Follen believed he lost his full-time teaching role at the University because of his abolitionist activities; he resigned rather than accept a demotion to part-time instructor. Portrait of Charles Follen (1840)/Schlesinger Library

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures and Belles Lettres (1836–1854), straddled the social and professional networks that divided abolitionists and supporters of slavery.

Throughout his life, Longfellow maintained friendships with prominent abolitionists, including Richard Henry Dana Jr., James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.⁠Go to footnote 345 detail The firebrand Free Soil Party member and US Senator Charles Sumner (AB 1830; LLB 1834), whom Longfellow supported actively—if mostly in private correspondence—was among his closest friends.⁠Go to footnote 346 detail Yet so too was Louis Agassiz, the proponent of race science.⁠Go to footnote 347 detail

The US senator and Harvard alumnus Charles Sumner and the poet and Harvard Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were lifelong friends who each fought in his own way for abolition and equality for Black Americans: Sumner, a lawyer and politician, was a fiery abolitionist on the national stage, and while Longfellow limited his public advocacy to a single volume of poems, he quietly funded abolitionist causes behind the scenes. Alexander Gardner, "Politics and poetry of New England, Charles Sumner and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow," 1863/Digital Images & Slides Collection 1997.03510, Harvard Fine Arts Library

Longfellow’s most public stand against slavery came in 1842, when he published the volume Poems on Slavery, which described the horrors of slavery in painful detail and was popular among white audiences as well as Black.⁠Go to footnote 348 detail For the most part, however, he expressed his antislavery views privately—in his correspondence and his journals.⁠Go to footnote 349 detail Believing that slavery was “an unrighteous institution,”⁠Go to footnote 350 detail Longfellow donated to abolitionist causes, too: particularly after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, his records show numerous payments in support of escaped slaves, their families, and those who harbored them. He also supported Black schools and churches in the United States, Canada, and Haiti and gave money to purchase enslaved people’s freedom.⁠Go to footnote 351 detail

Longfellow wrote to Sumner that the goal of emancipation should be to place “the black man … upon the same footing as the white.”⁠Go to footnote 352 detail And he did so in his home, welcoming members of the Black community as guests. In 1846, the escaped slave Josiah Henson—widely known to be the model for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom—called on Longfellow in Cambridge in search of funds to support a school; Longfellow donated that day and would do so again many times over the next 30 years.⁠Go to footnote 353 detail At the height of the conflict over the Fugitive Slave Act, Longfellow hosted Lunsford Lane, an escaped slave and abolitionist from North Carolina, and Darby Vassall, the early advocate for free Black rights who was born in bondage at Longfellow’s very home in 1769, when it belonged to John Vassall.⁠Go to footnote 354 detail

“Cambridge Anti-Slavery Society Records,” Cambridge Public Library.
Eliza Lee Cabot Follen, The Life of Charles Follen (Boston, MA: Thomas H. Webb and Company, 1844), 227–237, https://books.google.com/books?id=5zCWAZzVRq4C.
John Ware, Memoir of the Life of Henry Ware Jr. (Boston, MA: James Munroe and Co, 1846), 361–362. See also Bosco, “Fugitive Slave Act,” 228–229; Wilder, Ebony & Ivy, 278–280.
Ware’s widow clearly believed her husband had been persecuted by Harvard administration because of his views: In an 1845 exchange with then former Harvard President Josiah Quincy she asked, “if at any time, during [my] husband’s connection with the University, he was required by the Corporation to suppress the expression of his opinion upon the subject of slavery as being a condition of holding his Professorship?” Quincy denied that this was the case. “Josiah Quincy to Miss Mary L. Ware, April 22, 1845.” Josiah Quincy to Mary L. Ware, April 22, 1845, box 4, Corporation Papers, 1845–46, Corporation Papers, 2nd ser., supplements to the Harvard College Papers, UAI 5.130, Harvard University Archives.
“Slavery and Abolition in the Longfellow Archives,” Longfellow House Washington’s Headquarters, National Park Service, accessed February 4, 2022, https://www.nps.gov/long/learn/historyculture/slavery-related-objects-at-longfellow-nhs.htm.
Frederick J. Blue, “The Poet and the Reformer: Longfellow, Sumner, and the Bonds of Male Friendship, 1837–1874,” Journal of the Early Republic 15, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 280–285.
Christoph Irmscher, who has written biographies of both men, characterizes Longfellow as “Agassiz’s closest friend.” Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 14–15, 18, 21, 25.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poems on Slavery, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: J. Owen, 1842), 23–25, https://books.google.com/books?id=DqxcAAAAcAAJ; Christoph Irmscher, Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 118.
“Longfellow and the Fugitive Slave Act,” Longfellow House Washington’s Headquarters, National Park Service, accessed February 4, 2022, https://www.nps.gov/long/learn/historyculture/henry-wadsworth-longfellow-abolitionist.htm.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to George Lunt, January 4, 1843, quoted in Irmscher, Public Poet, 113.
Bosco, “Fugitive Slave Act,” 238–239; Irmscher, Public Poet, 115–117; “Longfellow and the Fugitive Slave Act,” Longfellow House Washington’s Headquarters.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Charles Sumner, April 20, 1864, quoted in Irmscher, Public Poet, 114. Ellipsis in original.
Irmscher, Public Poet, 116–117; “Josiah Henson,” Longfellow House Washington’s Headquarters, National Park Service, accessed February 4, 2022, https://www.nps.gov/people/josiah-henson.htm.
For more on Darby Vassall, see sidebar in section III of this report.

Chapter

Table of contents

Charles Follen, Henry Ware, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Abolitionist Faculty Members

John Gorham Palfrey: Abolitionist Dean

Table of contents

Charles Follen, Henry Ware, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Abolitionist Faculty Members

Footnotes

John Gorham Palfrey: Abolitionist Dean