{"id":601,"date":"2018-10-22T13:06:50","date_gmt":"2018-10-22T13:06:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/slavery\/?page_id=601"},"modified":"2018-12-15T15:24:22","modified_gmt":"2018-12-15T15:24:22","slug":"charles-nisbet","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/slavery\/people\/charles-nisbet\/","title":{"rendered":"Charles Nisbet"},"content":{"rendered":"
PUBLIC MEMORY AT DICKINSON<\/strong><\/h6>\n

\"Nisbet\"Charles Nisbet receives strong praise on the college website “as one of the most successful college presidents of his day.”\u00a0 There is also a portrait of him in Old West.\u00a0 However, no official material at the college describes Nisbet’s strong antislavery views.<\/p>\n

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BRIEF PROFILE<\/strong><\/h6>\n

A native of Scotland, Dr.\u00a0Charles Nisbet\u00a0was hired to become the first president of Dickinson College. Nisbet was a well-regarded scholar, but he developed an uneasy relationship with many of Carlisle’s elite citizenry and Dickinson’s Board of Trustees. Much of the tension stemmed from Nisbet’s\u00a0\u201cdecidedly anti-Republican\u201d views and lack of faith in the new American system of government. According Roger Taney, one of his students,\u00a0Nisbet \u201chad no faith in our institutions, and did not believe in their stability, or in their capacity to protect the rights of person or property against the impulses of popular passion, which combinations of designing men might continue to excite.\u201d\u00a0 While Taney’s recollection\u00a0may exaggerate Nisbet’s views, the trustees, who had created Dickinson as a center of learning in the new republic, were alarmed. Writing in 1787, one correspondent warned Benjamin Rush that Nisbet\u2019s ideas would “injure Dickinson college greatly.\u201d On another public\u00a0occasion, Nisbet reportedly \u201creflected upon some persons in Carlisle most grossly maliciously and falsely,\u201d in the presence of\u00a0trustees\u00a0John Montgomery, John King and John Black.\u00a0\u201cThe whole board of Trustees condemn\u201d him, one informant wrote, and trustees John Armstrong and Stephen Duncan in particular were “very angry” with Nisbet. In 1790, Rush admitted that the \u201cprinciple difficulty in the way of our\u00a0success\u201d was Nisbet\u2019s reputation for being too elitist. \u201cHis Conversation & letters are so very illiberal & so public against the college \u2014 the town of Carlisle \u2014 and every thing that is\u00a0American, that the name of the College is unpopular with many people upon his Account.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0Yet clearly part of Nisbet’s intellectual elitism, and what set him apart from many “Americans,” was his strong and public opposition to slavery.<\/p>\n

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FURTHER READING<\/strong><\/h6>\n