John Gorham Palfrey: Abolitionist Dean
The experience of Professor and Divinity School Dean John Gorham Palfrey (faculty, 1830–1839; overseer, 1828–1831, 1852–1855) illustrates both the presence of active abolitionists in the Harvard community and some of the challenges they faced.
Palfrey grew up in Boston, attended Phillips Exeter Academy alongside future Harvard President Jared Sparks (1849–1853), and graduated with a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School in 1818. After more than a decade as the minister of a multiracial congregation at Boston’s Brattle Street Church, he returned to Harvard in 1830 as professor of biblical literature and dean of the Divinity School. While one biographer describes the “timidity” of Palfrey’s abolitionism during these years—Palfrey joined the nascent Cambridge Anti-Slavery Society in the 1830s but quickly backed away in the face of “public opinion”—Palfrey became more vocal after 1838.Go to footnote 355 detail
In that year, Palfrey received word from his brothers in Louisiana that his father’s health was declining, raising the prospect that Palfrey soon might inherit enslaved people from his father’s plantation. He immediately began to investigate how he might legally free any enslaved people who passed to him.Go to footnote 356 detail At the same time, Palfrey faced pressure from Harvard President Josiah Quincy to postpone an abolitionist public debate, organized by Divinity School students, as Quincy feared a disturbance to campus life. In correspondence, Quincy urged Palfrey to reconsider the event, which Quincy deemed unsuitable for “a seminary of learning, composed of young men, from every quarter of the country; among whom are many whose prejudices, passions, and interests are deeply implicated and affected by these depulsions and who feel very naturally and strongly on the subject.”Go to footnote 357 detail When Palfrey opted not to postpone the debate, Quincy wrote again, objecting to the fact that students from across Harvard had been invited to the event and stating his intention to seek the “advice and action” of the Corporation.Go to footnote 358 detail Less than two months later—although not in time to prevent the debate—the Corporation adopted a resolution that forbade anyone other than University faculty or staff members “to teach, lecture or preach, or deliver any oration or discourse in any of the schools belonging to the University, or in any Society connected with either of them” without permission.Go to footnote 359 detail Palfrey resigned from Harvard shortly thereafter, in 1839, and entered politics.
In the ensuing years, Palfrey was elected as the Whig candidate and an abolitionist to the Massachusetts state legislature (1842–1843); appointed secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1844–1847); and elected to the United States House of Representatives (1847–1849).Go to footnote 360 detail
Palfrey’s father died in 1843 and, true to his earlier intentions and despite the opposition of his brothers, he hired an agent in New Orleans to seek the bulk of his inheritance in human property. Palfrey then freed the older people among the enslaved he inherited and paid to transport the others—16 men, women, and children under the age of 30 who could not legally be manumitted under Louisiana’s laws—to the NortheastGo to footnote 361 detail, where he found paid work for them in homes across Massachusetts and New York.Go to footnote 362 detail
In 1848 Palfrey, newly affiliated with the abolitionist Free Soil Party, ran for reelection to the US House of Representatives. He lost but remained active in Massachusetts politics, where debate over slavery heated up following the enactment of the Compromise of 1850 and a ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that the Fugitive Slave Act, a key element of the compromise, must be enforced in the state.Go to footnote 363 detail These developments helped turn public opinion in the Commonwealth against slavery, and this period marks perhaps the moment of starkest disconnect between Harvard, with its national ambitions, and New England over the question of abolition.Go to footnote 364 detail
Around this same time, Palfrey’s activism again drew the notice of the Harvard community.Go to footnote 365 detail In March 1850, his longtime friend, Harvard President Jared Sparks (faculty, 1838–1849; president, 1849–1853), made a personal call: Sparks, a moderate who opposed slavery but favored the removal of former slaves from the United States, told Palfrey that his activities on behalf of the Free Soil Party were harming Harvard’s reputation—this despite the fact that Palfrey had not worked at the University for more than a decade. Palfrey was outraged by Sparks’s request that he moderate his political activities.Go to footnote 366 detail
Sparks’s request appears to have been driven by concerns about how the abolitionist activities of Harvard affiliates like Palfrey were influencing national public opinion of the University. Later in 1850, Sparks received a letter from Caleb Cushing, a Harvard graduate and former US representative from Massachusetts, complaining that “abolitionism and political Free Soilers” were “sheltered and nurtured under the broad wings of the university.”Go to footnote 367 detail This pushback occurred around the same time that Harvard Medical School admitted the Black students Daniel Laing Jr., Isaac H. Snowden, and Martin Robison Delany, only to rescind their admission in the face of protests from white students and families—many of them Southern.Go to footnote 368 detail (This incident is discussed in greater detail below.) Moreover, in 1851, in response to questions from the Massachusetts legislature—which still provided funding to Harvard in this period—Sparks explained low enrollment by noting that Southerners had been hard to recruit in recent years. Concerns about the recruitment and retention of Southern students were certainly on his and other administrators’ minds.Go to footnote 369 detail
Following Palfrey’s failed 1851 run for Governor of MassachusettsGo to footnote 370 detail and Sparks’s 1852 decision to step down as Harvard president and leave the University, Ephraim Peabody, a Harvard Divinity School graduate and pastor of Boston’s King’s Chapel, wrote to Palfrey to inquire whether he would be interested in being nominated for Sparks’s soon-to-be vacant professorship. Peabody, while not an officer of the University, was well connected with prominent Harvard affiliates, several of whom were active members of his parish.Go to footnote 371 detail The offer came with a caveat: Peabody warned Palfrey that “an active part in the politics of the day beyond what is incumbent on every private citizen, would be thought by the Corporation & by the Public incompatible with an Office in the College.”Go to footnote 372 detail
Palfrey wrote back expressing his interest in the position, not least because he needed a means of supporting his family. He also acknowledged that the University leadership would expect him to show restraint in politics, but he did not commit to remaining on the sidelines.Go to footnote 373 detail There is no record of any further correspondence on this subject, but Palfrey did not succeed Sparks as the McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History.
The next year, Sparks himself sought another prominent University position for Palfrey, suggesting to members of the Corporation that Palfrey be considered for the role of treasurer upon the incumbent’s retirement. Palfrey did not receive that position either, and in this case, the reasons are on record. Fellow Charles G. Loring (AB 1812; fellow, 1838–1857) advised against nominating Palfrey because of his politics, despite Loring’s conviction that Palfrey would be an excellent treasurer:
The only doubt arises from his peculiar position as a very prominent leader of a political party, against which such inveterate lividity exists among a large portion of the influential members of society at the North, in the Middle States–, & which is unanimously felt at the South.– This would weigh nothing with me, if the appointment were to a private office, in which the public has no interest, nor any right to interfere. But the College is eminently public, & ought to be managed as a national institution–, & it becomes therefore a grave question, how far any office should be filled by a person, who is obnoxious to the [illegible], or ill will of a section of the nation, or any large portion of the people.Go to footnote 374 detail
Loring went on to imply that he was supported in this view by “the Ch. J.”—Lemuel Shaw, then chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and another Harvard fellow.Go to footnote 375 detail While Loring and Shaw were personally opposed to slavery, they took a moderate line in hopes of protecting Harvard as a “national” university.
The events of the 1850s eventually drove Harvard, like every other national institution, to take a stand. In the end, abolitionists were partly vindicated, while political moderates fell out of favor: In 1855, just two years after rejecting Palfrey as treasurer, the Corporation declined to grant an honorary degree to the former treasurer Samuel Atkins Eliot (AB 1817; treasurer, 1842–1853), who had voted for the Fugitive Slave Act while in Congress.Go to footnote 376 detail In 1859, Harvard granted honorary degrees to the abolitionists Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Charles Sumner.Go to footnote 377 detail From 1861 to 1865, Harvard’s national stature and the internal divisions that came with it were reflected in the service of Harvard men in the Civil War: 1,358 Harvard men enlisted for the Union, and 136 of them died; another 304 enlisted for the Confederacy, of whom 70 lost their lives.Go to footnote 378 detail Palfrey ended his career not at Harvard but in politics, appointed the postmaster of Boston in 1861 by President Abraham Lincoln.Go to footnote 379 detail
