A Town Meeting in Canaan

As black students started trickling into Canaan to attend Noyes Academy, the school's enemies became more and more agitated. Over the July 4^th holiday of 1835, they formed a mob with the intention of attacking the school building, but they were turned back by Joseph Richardson, a well-respected deacon of the church. The leaders of the mob regrouped, and decided that they would call a legally warned town meeting, Any decisions made at that meeting would have been made legally. Anyone carrying out those decisions would be exempt from prosecution.

The meeting was duly warned. The town convened on July 31. William Wallace tells us that “the house was crowded with men filled with rage, rum, and riotous intentions”. Interestingly enough, the moderator is the same Joseph Richardson who had turned back the mob a couple of weeks earlier. The citizens present voted to call the school a Public Nuisance, because white females and black males at the school are “closely intimate”, and before long, there will be an “amalgamation of blood”. In other words, it's only a matter of time before Canaan has some mixed race babies in their midst as a result of this academy.

After the school was labeled a Public Nuisance, it then became the duty of the good citizens of Canaan to tear it down. The meeting voted to remove the school from where it stood. They decided that the selectmen would pick its final resting place and the town would pay any expenses incurred during the removal of the school. A committee was chosen to oversee the removal of the school.

When William Wallace wrote the account of the town meeting, he had the report from the meeting right in front of him, although he says that “the author of which sleeps in obscurity.” The report lists the names of the men who were on the committee to oversee the school's removal. Someone who also slept in obscurity, had, long after the fact, taken a pencil and written a 19^th century “where are they now” next to the name of each committee member. Wallace is nice enough to include those comments in his story on Noyes Academy. Thus, here is the list of committee members with the anonymous comments in red.

Jacob Trussel (still at 90 broken and defiant)

Chamberlain Packard, Jr (killed by God)

Win Campbell ( a foolish old infidel)

Herod Richardson

Elijah R Colby ( dead and rotten and now forgotten)

Americus Gates

Daniel Patee, Jr (a blasphemous cripple)

Nathaniel Shepard (a common drunkard)

Luther Kinne (ossified legs)

Peter Stevens

Robert Clark (dead in his bed)

Salmon P Cobb (an old witch too mean to live or die)

Daniel Campbell

James Patee ( a drunkard)

John Fales, Jr (an idiot)

Wesley P Burpee (an awful death from cancer)

Benjamin W Porter (drowned)

Bartlett Hoit (killed by God after having stolen money sent to him to keep his wife's father from starving or being thrown on the town)

March Barber (old, foolish, jealous and insane)

This list provides some interesting topics for further research, for sure. For now, this list raises some questions for me. Who was this person who wrote these footnotes? It is clear that there were plenty of people in Canaan who supported the Academy. Where were they? Why did they give this mob of lowlives (if you believe the anonymous author of the comments) free reign? It's one thing to add snarky footnotes to a town report decades after the fact, but where were they when the whole thing was happening? From what we have read, I believe Nathaniel Currier was a really good man who was not a speech maker or necessarily a leader. Wallace quotes him as saying that himself, so I think it's fair to assume that he wasn't going to lead a defense of the school. We know that George Kimball had big ideas, but we also know that the New Hampshire Bar Association of the day called him lazy in a published directory of lawyers. That pretty much takes him off the list. Samuel Noyes himself was way too old. It appears that the lower elements seized the day in August of 1835 in Canaan.