F.A.P. Barnard, Slavery, and the University of Mississippi
How did slavery shape the experiences and career of the University of Mississippi's third president, F.A.P. Barnard?
Introduction
Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard served as a professor at the University of Mississippi and then as its president, or chancellor, from 1856 to 1860. Being northern-born and educated, Barnard grew up and went to school in places where slavery had been ended legally long before the Civil War, though racial tensions and violence against Black people still existed in these areas. He arrived in the South in the 1840s, having only ever lived in "free" states, and entered the slavery-centric plantocracy. Due to the fact he had a foot in both camps, with his northern "free" state background contrasting with his southern slave-owning career, Barnard had a complicated relationship with the "slavery question."
Barnard's own views on slavery were put on trial when he decided to punish a white student for raping and brutally beating one of the enslaved women he owned, Jane, in 1859. During this time, however, it was not legal to rely on the testimony of an enslaved person since they did not count as citizens, but as property. H.R. Branham, a physician and Board of Trustees Member at the University of Mississippi, took this opportunity to accuse Barnard of being "unsound on the slavery question," in order to threaten his credibility and possibly push him out of the university completely. As a result of this accusation, Barnard faced heavy criticism from his peers and his career in Oxford was jeopardized. Barnard won out in the end, earning the favor of the majority of the Board of Trustees after declaring his allegiance to the South and slavery in no uncertain terms. But his stay in Oxford came to an end with the outbreak of the Civil War, when he left both his position and the state for good. Thereafter, Barnard went on to become the longest-serving president of Columbia College, now University, and Barnard College was subsequently founded and named in his honor after his death. Barnard has an enormous reputation in nineteenth-century academia and also occupies an important place in the history of the University of Mississippi.
By studying Barnard in this chronological and geographic-based format, we can better understand what the "slavery" question meant in and outside of the slave-holding South. Since Barnard is a figure who spent a great deal of time as a northerner in the South, he is a good example of how complicated white racial attitudes in nineteenth-century America really were. The North was not an abolitionist Utopia, exemplified by Barnard's easy transition into slave-holding. Barnard was also embroiled in one of the most scandalous conflicts at the University of Mississippi since its inception, so it's important to know his background and life details to better understand the infamous Branham Affair and all its nuances.
Why Should We Study Barnard?
When Frederick Barnard became president of the University of Mississippi, the nation was preparing for the bloodiest military conflict it would ever see within its own borders. He, a northern-born academic with little to no history with slavery, ascended to power in one of the most notorious slave states in the South at the most complicated time possible.
He came from New England and grew up in a home almost completely removed from slavery, and yet spent many of his adult years as a slave owner himself. After his stint in the South, Barnard returned to the Northeast and had a rather remarkable academic career. Studying Barnard's life alongside the cultural and political atmospheres in which he lived, studied, and taught helps us understand the effects of slavery in both the South and the North.
Barnard was also the key player in one of the University of Mississippi's most infamous scandals: the Branham Affair. By taking the word of his slave, Jane, over the word of the white student who viciously attacked her, Barnard threatened his position in Oxford and the South as a whole.
Despite the unquestionably bold act of speaking on behalf of Jane, whose testimony was not legally admissible since she was counted not as a citizen but as property, Barnard asserted that he was not "unsound" on the slavery question and that his loyalty lay with the South and the institution of slavery.
It could be argued that Barnard was truly an abolitionist at heart, a product of his upbringing, and merely owned slaves in the South to aid his career and reputation, which would make him shrewd and calculating. It could also be argued that he was no different from every other slave-owner in antebellum Mississippi and Alabama and later tried to wash his hands of the whole ordeal by fleeing back North when the Civil War broke out.
Regardless, Barnard played a very complex and important part in the history of the University of Mississippi, especially the history of slavery at the school. Studying his role in this history alongside his life and career outside of the South helps us understand that nineteenth century slavery in the United States was not just a southern problem, but a national one.
Barnard Timeline Map
Barnard's Birthplace
Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard was born in Sheffield, Massachusetts in 1809 to Robert Barnard, a well-known Massachusetts lawyer and state senator, and Augusta Porter, a well-bred socialite born in Connecticut. Robert Barnard was also known for being extremely conservative and even harbored sympathies for the British during the War of 1812. Growing up in a conservative family in New England, Frederick was instilled with Christian values and a strong sense of morality.
Massachusetts had long been slavery-free, since the case of Commonwealth v. Jennison ruled that slavery was illegal under the Massachusetts Constitution in 1783. By the nineteenth century, Massachusetts was home to many free Black communities, churches, schools, and mutual aid societies alongside their famous abolitionist communities.
Frederick was the first of two brothers, the youngest being John Gross, and they were very close to one another in both personality and intellect. Both boys were known to be highly energetic and dedicated to learning. The Barnard brothers were born into wealth and status, but they were also born with otosclerosis, a genetic disorder that caused moderate to extreme hearing loss in its victims.
Saratoga Academy
Frederick’s great uncle on his mother’s side was famous for being a Continental Army doctor as well as being the first president of Saratoga Springs Village, the place where his brother–Frederick Augustus Barnard’s maternal grandfather–would settle down. Frederick attended Saratoga Academy while living with his grandfather.
Yale College
Barnard attended Yale University, then called Yale College, and graduated in 1828 at the top of his class.
While Barnard attended Yale, the city of New Haven’s growing free Black community was flourishing. The community was founded on the success of a few notable Black businessmen and by 1825, the African United Ecclesiastical Society – New Haven’s first black Congregational church, was established. The year Barnard graduated, 1828, saw the birth of New Haven’s first Black-led Episcopal Church.
Since Barnard considered himself Episcopalian at this point, there is no doubt that his path crossed with the members of this new church while he was in New Haven. It is difficult to make such assumptions, but it is reasonable to assume that since these free Black people were practicing the same religion in the same town, Barnard at least knew these people and their new Black-led church existed.
American Asylum for the Education and Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb
After graduating from Yale and subsequently losing much of his hearing due to the otosclerosis he inherited from his mother, Barnard worked in Hartford, Connecticut as a teacher at the American Asylum for the Education and Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, now known as the American School for the Deaf.
The school provided instruction in math, reading, writing, geography, history, the Bible, all in sign language. Hartford, similar to New Haven, also had a bustling free Black community and by 1825, Black city residents in the town formed the African Religious Society which became a Congregational Church by the early 1830s.
New York Institute for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb
From 1832 to 1838, Barnard worked as a teacher at the New York Institute for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb. The school was located on a corner of 50th Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan when Barnard worked there but is now located in Greenburgh, New York.
During this time, the abolitionist coalition in New York City was growing and was becoming more and more inclusive of Black activists. Anti-slavery rhetoric and activism was alive and well in 1830s New York and middle class Black people made up an indispensable population to the New York abolitionists.
1834 Anti-Abolition Riot
Abolition in New York City was fraught with faults in the 1830s while Barnard was living in the city. The New York Manumission Society had become increasingly aligned with the campaign to establish a colony for African Americans in Africa, which pushed most of their Black supporters away. In July of 1834, the rising tensions between abolitionists and anti-abolitionists in the city came to a head and a terrible race riot broke out in the city.
Many businesses, churches, and public meeting areas that were known for being frequented by Black Americans were attacked or ransacked by anti-aboltion groups. The homes of abolitionists were also targeted by violence during the riot, which lasted nearly a week and ended on July 9, 1834.
The riots offered a glimpse at the racism that boiled beneath the outer façade of New York City’s abolitionist reputation.
The University of Alabama
Barnard moved to Tuscaloosa and served as a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy and then as a professor of natural history and chemistry at the University of Alabama from 1838 to 1854.
During Barnard's time at the University of Alabama, Dr. Basil Manly served as the president. Manly was known as a theologian and was an important figure in the Southern Baptist church.
By the time Barnard came to the university, the culture of on-campus slavery was thriving and Manly himself owned over thirty-five slaves. Barnard made it his business to assimilate into this culture and owned many slaves while he lived in Tuscaloosa.
Christ Episcopal Church
There is no information about where Frederick Barnard married Margaret McMurray, but Barnard had converted to Episcopalianism at Yale and had been dedicated practicing the religion since then, so the two may have married at the oldest Episcopal church in Tuscaloosa.
Margaret McMurray was born in England to parents Robert and Sophia McMurray, a Scottish businessman and a well-educated British socialite respectively. Margaret was raised in Dayton, Ohio and met Frederick Barnard while visiting her cousin in Tuscaloosa in 1847. There is no evidence showing Margaret had any former relationship with slavery, but that changed when she married Barnard and became a slave mistress.
Described as a "love match" by friends, the couple married about two months after they first met. Margaret supported Barnard in all of his subsequent positions and stayed by his side until his death in 1889.
Oliver-Barnard Hall
Originally named "Barnard Hall," this building was erected in 1889 and then reconstructed in 2000. The structure still bears the former professor's name, though his reputation on campus is now understood to have been fraught with scandal. Slavery was deeply embedded into the culture at the University of Alabama when Barnard arrived and violence against slaves characterized the atmosphere on campus.
Though he came from a pious family in a slavery-free northern state, Barnard owned slaves while he worked at the University of Alabama. While there is no clear census data to back up the claims that Barnard owned slaves while in Tuscaloosa, certain accounts from President of the school Basil Manly's diary refer to some enslaved women as "Barnard's women."
Luna, one of these women, was a victim of violent abuse at the hands of some of the university's white male students. She was not the only victim; all of "Barnard's women" were known to have been sexually brutalized by students and faculty and "pimped out" by an enslaved man owned by Barnard on a regular basis, according to Manly's records. It is worth mentioning, though, that Manly and Barnard's relationship was strained to say the least, so these accusations should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt. Barnard's own account of these women's experiences is nowhere to be found, but their legacy on campus has not been forgotten.
The University of Mississippi
After leaving his position at the University of Alabama in 1854, Barnard became a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at the University of Mississippi until 1858, when he became chancellor of the institution.
St. Peter's Episcopal Church
In 1854, Barnard was ordained and served as a priest in St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Oxford, Mississippi. During the 1840s and 1850s, Christian churches in the South were under an enormous amount of pressure to choose a "side" on the "slavery debate," so Barnard was entering a very tricky position as a preacher from a northern background in a slave state.
Baptism and Methodism had quickly taken over the South in the nineteenth century, and these two denominations were the main players in the "schism" that the slavery question caused amongst Christian churches. The Episcopal Church was somewhat less involved in the conflict.
The Lyceum
The University of Mississippi Board of Trustees met in March of 1860 and addressed directly the case of one of Barnard's slaves, Jane, who had been brutally raped and beaten to the point of months-long incapacitation while the Barnards were away in Vicksburg. The Lyceum is not referred to in the Board of Trustees minutes as the designated meeting place for the Board, but as one of the only common buildings on campus, it can be assumed that the Lyceum hosted at least some of the Board of Trustees meetings.
The two students accused were seen by a credible witness, Professor Edward Boynton, fleeing Barnard's residence after hearing a commotion from that area. Jane revealed to Margaret Barnard the details of her attack and Margaret told Barnard, who immediately brought the issue before the Board and aimed to have the students responsible expelled from the University.
At the time, the word of an enslaved person did not count as viable testimony so Jane could not legally give her statement. This also meant that her disclosure of the event could not count as a sound reason to charge the students for any crime. Nevertheless, Barnard decided to have one of the students removed, and wrote to his parents to have them withdraw him from the University.
H.R. Branham, a physician and Board of Trustees Member at the University of Mississippi, took this opportunity to accuse Barnard of being "unsound on the slavery question," in order to threaten his credibility and possibly push him out of the university completely. As a result of this accusation, the Board of Trustees convened a trial to determine whether Barnard was sufficiently proslavery to continue leading the school. Barnard won out in the end, earning the favor of the majority of the Board of Trustees after declaring his allegiance to the South and slavery in no uncertain terms.
This ordeal, called the "Branham Affair" after Barnard's main antagonist, was a stain on Barnard's time as chancellor as well as the University itself. The less than satisfactory outcome also reveals how deeply slavery was imbedded into the laws, policies, ideals, culture, and identity of the University of Mississippi.
Barnard Observatory
Barnard commissioned the construction of an Observatory in 1856 and the building was completed in 1859. It began serving as the chancellor's residence in 1860 and housed Barnard's family, but when the Civil War broke out, the observatory lost its purpose.
The state-of-the-art telescope that had been made for the observatory could no longer be delivered to Oxford, Barnard resigned from his position, and the observatory was forced to act as a hospital for wounded soldiers. After a long and complicated history on campus, the Barnard Observatory now houses the University's Center for the Study of Southern Culture and is one of the oldest standing buildings on campus.
Dearborn Observatory
After Barnard ordered a custom 19-inch lens for his observatory at the University of Mississippi, the Civil War broke out and halted the delivery of this telescope.
Instead of finding its way to the University of Mississippi, the lens was delivered instead to the Dearborn Observatory in Chicago, Illinois after being purchased by the University of Chicago.
The telescope, which had the largest lens in the world at the time of its creation, is still in use on the campus of Northwestern University, where the Dearborn Observatory has resided since 1887.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Barnard was voted an Associate Fellow for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1860 after leaving the University of Mississippi.
Columbia College
F.A.P. Barnard served as the tenth president of Columbia College, known now as Columbia University, in New York City from 1864 until 1888. Barnard did a great deal both to expand the university's enrollment and make education more accessible. His time as president of Columbia is famed--even today--for the reforms and expansion that it brought about.
"Colored Orphan Asylum"
In 1863, just a year before Barnard would move back to New York City to become president of Columbia College, a large-scale draft riot broke out in the city, claiming hundreds of lives and destroying countless homes and businesses, including the "Colored Orphan Asylum" on the corner of 43rd and 5th.
The riot started out as a protest against a new conscription rule that exempted men who could pay $300 or a substitute from the draft into the Union military but it quickly turned into an anti-Black conflict. The mob ransacked Black-owned homes and businesses and attacked Black people in the streets.
This eruption of anti-Black violence in the city opened the wounds that had been made by the city's history with slavery and proved that New York was not really a safe place for free Black people despite its status as a free state.
Barnard College
While president of Columbia University, Barnard repeatedly advocated for the admission of women. Although he did not succeed, Barnard College for Women was later named after F.A.P. Barnard and honored his outspokenness about the need for women's access to education. The school remains as an incredibly prestigious institution in New York City and strives to instill Barnard's principles of fearlessness and innovation in its students.
F.A.P. Barnard Burial Site
Barnard remained president of Columbia University until his death in 1889. He was subsequently buried alongside his parents and siblings in Sheffield, Massachusetts.
Though Barnard made undoubtedly important contributions to the academic world in nineteenth century America and was by many accounts rather liberal in many of his ideas and policies, his successes do not erase the fact that he owned human beings while he lived and worked in the South.
When it was suggested by a fellow University of Mississippi professor that Barnard was "unsound on the slavery question," Barnard fired back immediately, and asserted in no uncertain terms that his loyalty lay with the South and her "institutions," including slavery.
Though Barnard seems to be a complicated figure in the history of the University of Mississippi as well as American academia as a whole, we can read his own words and see that he did not consider himself a morally gray or divided figure in any sense.
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About
This StoryMap was completed by Reagan Whittington, a history major at the University of Mississippi, during the spring of 2021 as part of an internship with the University of Mississippi Slavery Research Group that was directed by Professor Anne Twitty .
