On Saturday, March 23, 2109, from 9am to 5pm, the House Divided Project is sponsoring an open house at 61 N. West Street to highlight its new Dickinson & Slavery exhibit. For that day only, visitors will also be able to view rarely seen relics associated with slavery and emancipation from the renowned J. Howard Wert Collection.
The Dickinson & Slavery exhibit opened on February 1, 2019 and features little-known stories about the college’s deep and complicated ties to slavery and anti-slavery. Exhibit panels describe the paradox of college founders, like John Dickinson and Benjamin Rush, who initially owned slaves but eventually became converted to abolitionism. Visitors will also learn about the stories of Dickinsonians during the sectional crisis, including Stephen Duncan (Class of 1805), a Mississippi planter who was one of the country’s largest slaveholders, and Richard McAllister (Class of 1840), who was the nation’s most aggressive fugitive slave commissioner. But perhaps most revealing, exhibit panels describe the lives of formerly enslaved families that came to call Dickinson and Carlisle their home, during and after the Civil War. One of these figures, Robert C. Young, a long-serving janitor and policeman on campus, also helped to integrate the school in 1886.
The exhibit is usually open to the public only on Wednesdays from 9am to noon.
On Saturday, March 23, 2019, visitors will also be able to see relics from the J. Howard Wert Collection, which is considered one of the finest privately held collections of Civil War era artifacts. Wert came from a prominent antislavery family in Adams County, Pennsylvania. They knew Benjamin Rush. Wert himself was a graduate of Gettysburg College who served as a scout for Union forces during the 1863 battle and was present for the Gettysburg Address later that year. Wert eventually enlisted in the Union army and became a teacher, author and noted school superintendent in Harrisburg. He died in 1920. During his lifetime, however, he continued the family tradition of collecting important historical artifacts. On display at the open house, visitors will see:
- Relics from Sam and Bayard Wilkeson, a father and son who were at Gettysburg. Sam Wilkeson was the lead correspondent for the New York Times covering the battle. Bayard, his oldest son, was a young lieutenant, killed on the battle’s first day.
- Relics of slavery and the Underground Railroad, including an s-brand like the one used in the episode that inspired John Greenleaf Whittier’s famous anti-slavery poem, “The Branded Hand”
- Relics from George Washington, passed along to the Wert family by their friend Benjamin Rush
George Washington’s document box (Courtesy of J. Howard Wert Collection)
The HISTORY channel has just launched a 
(REVISED AND UPDATED) The House Divided Project at Dickinson College celebrated its tenth anniversary in March 2016 by hosting a special conference on the Reconstruction Era, with a series of campus events headlined by Pulitzer-Prize winner Eric Foner, and featuring noted historians Gregory Downs, Matthew Pinsker, Jeffrey Rosen, and Anne Sarah Rubin. All events were streamed over YouTube and are available now via embedded viewers on this page.
Jeffrey Rosen is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Constitution Center, the first and only nonprofit, nonpartisan institution devoted to the most powerful vision of freedom ever expressed: the U.S. Constitution. He is a professor at The George Washington University Law School, where he has taught since 1997. He is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he explores issues involving the future of technology and the Constitution. Rose is the author of several books including The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America (2007). He has also just helped launch the 
Matthew Pinsker is the Pohanka Chair for Civil War History at Dickinson College and the Director of the House Divided Project. Matt is also a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington DC. He has previously held visiting fellowships at Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College and the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Matt graduated from Harvard College and received a D.Phil. degree in Modern History from the University of Oxford. He is the author of two books: Abraham Lincoln –a volume in the American Presidents Reference Series from Congressional Quarterly Press (2002) and Lincoln’s Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers’ Home (Oxford University Press, 2003). Matt’s next book is forthcoming from W.W. Norton & Co., tentatively entitled, Boss Lincoln: Understanding Abraham Lincoln’s Partisan Leadership. On Saturday, Matt will be unveiling plans for the new Reconstruction Digital Classroom which will go online shortly after the anniversary conference.
Gregory Downs studies the political and cultural history of the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries at the University of California / Davis. He is the author or editor of several books. Downs’s latest monograph, 
Anne Sarah Rubin is a Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she teaches courses on the Civil War, American South, and the Nineteenth Century United States. She is also the Director of the 
On Tuesday evening, April 25, 2017, the House Divided Project is hosting two major public events at Dickinson College: an open house at its studio on 61 N. West Street from 4-6 p.m. and then a special premiere of the powerful new documentary film on the legacy of lynching in the American South, “An Outrage,” at the Weiss Center for Performing Arts from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
