Antebellum Literary Societies: Princeton Version

Well, I'm starting to get serious about my paper (due March 16) on antebellum literary addresses at the University of North Carolina.  I've had a fabulous RA going through the archives all fall, reading addresses by undergraduates -- what a rich source of data, btw.  And that data wasn't available for the University of Alabama. Everything I know about undergraduate addresses at Alabama comes from the titles of them on a few extant programs and a few newspaper stories.  But UNC has some really well preserved records.  And -- for those of you grading exams, get this -- there are a number of essays preserved in the archives on the same topic.  Now, while I now you find it difficult, perhaps even impossible, to believe that you'd want to read exam papers if not compelled to, for me they're proving a nice source of data for making assessments about the range of ideas in students' minds.

Anyway, I'm making my way through the published addresses given at UNC -- and am beginning to formulate some cool hypotheses.  First off, they're not as good a gauge of the public mind as those at Alabama, at least not yet.  As I discussed in an article in Law and Literature back in 2008, Alabama's addresses moved from enlightenment documents in the early 1830s to romantic ones in the 1840s and 1850s, and the later ones were obsessed with the role that educated people might play in supporting the institution of slavery.  At UNC, at least as far as I've gotten, there seems to be a more general concern over popular education than in the UA addresses.  Also, while the late 1850s addresses are moderately proslavery, they're concerned with promoting Union.  One initial hypothesis is that North Carolina was more moderate on slavery than Alabama.  Perhaps that's not surprising, but there's some suggestive data in those addresses.  This, of course, invites comparison with literary addresses given at UGA and South Carolina, too.  And then with other places like Transylvania in Kentucky and UVA and William and Mary.

All of this leads me to want to talk about North Carolina Supreme Court Justice William Gaston's 1832 address at UNC.  Gaston's address is one of the most famous of the antebellum literary addresses.  Ralph Waldo Emerson's American Scholar is the most famous -- and has received an enormous amount of commentary.  There are others, much less famous, like Emerson's address "Literary Ethics," given at Dartmouth.  And then there are some, very small number of others, that are occasionally cited.  Edward Everett gave one at Harvard in 1824--General LaFayette was in the audience.  You know who Everett was--every schoolchild has heard a story about him.  But you just don't realize it.  You remember that story about Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg?  He was preceded by some clown who spoke for 2.5 hours?  Well ... Edward Everett is that clown.  (Everett had a decent speech, actually.  Need to blog about that at some point--what one might call "the other Gettysburg address.")  Governor DeWitt Clinton gave one that's been read a few times, too; ditto for Joseph Buckminster and Justice Story.  But by and large, these are obscure addresses.  Gaston is among those handful of addresses that people sometimes read.

 After I first read Gaston's speech back maybe a decade ago (upon seeing it referenced in a debate in Congress, I think on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850), I went looking for other Gaston speeches.  He gave one to a joint meeting of the Whig and Cliosophic Socieites at Princeton in 1835.  And since I'm now talking about the Whig and Cliosophic Societies, I thought I'd post a couple of pictures I took last spring.  The one on the far upper right is of the Cliosophic Society; the middle one on the right is of the Whig Society.  At least that's how I remember it.  I took those photos on the same trip I took a picture of Princeton Law School.  And I got a very nice picture of Nassau Hall, which is on the immediate right.

So there you have it, some pictures of Princeton's literary society buildings, to put alongside the pictures of the University of Georgia literary societies I posted earlier in the fall.

As we get closer to March 16, I'll be talking more about the contents of the addresses and trying to draw some inferences from them about the intellectual culture of antebellum UNC.

Comments

[Sarah Ludington]

This is fascinating stuff Al. Were the student addresses oral examinations -- ie, read out loud to examiners to earn a degree? Or were they written and submitted to teachers? (And I wonder whether oral vs. written presentation would have made a difference in the opinion expressed).

[Alfred]

Thanks for asking, Sarah -- the student orations were delivered off a prepared text (and at least for UNC, we have some of those addresses). Of particular interest to you and Mitu Gulati will be one from the late 1850s on Mississippi's repudiation of its debt.

You're exactly right to ask about the differences between oral delivery and reading after the fact; I'm trying to get a better hold on audience reaction to the oral addresses. Judge Gaston's 1832 UNC address is reprinted at least 5, maybe 6 times before the Civil War. (That's really rare, but for at least several of these, the audience for the printed word seems to be larger than for the spoken word.)

[Darren Rosenblum]

This is so interesting, I wonder if the Philomathean Society at Penn had anything on this debate. I know that in the meetings there are records of debates over slavery, but I'm not sure if they're specific to the arguments you're making.

[Alfred]

There are some published speeches given to the Penn Philo society before the Civil War, though I've never looked into what, if any unpublished records exist for Philo. I'd be very interested in the debates over slavery -- though my primary focus these days is schools south of the Mason-Dixon line.

The literary society sponsored speeches from outsiders -- often though not always alumni. These were usually given at graduation or at the beginning of the school year. And then they also had an active internal debating schedule. It's the external and graduation speeches that are published; the internal speeches are preserved in the minutes of literary societies. Tragically, but un-surprisingly, few of the internal speeches survive. But sometimes we have those, as well as other cool stuff, like library borrowing records. So we can figure what students read. I'll be talking about a bunch of this stuff in the spring.