THE REV. JOSEPH HOPKINS TWICHELL: A CELEBRATION                              STORY 6

THE DAY JOE TWICHELL TOOK ON ROBERT E. LEE

By Steve Courtney

At noon on June 22, 1896, the president and corporators of Yale University climbed to a simple wooden platform erected between two rows of elm trees on what was already known as the Old Campus, in front of the Old Library, not yet known as Dwight Hall. Before them, ready for unveiling, was a great block of red Maine granite supporting a statue of the late President of Yale, Theodore Dwight Woolsey, mutton-chop whiskers, academic robe and all, his bronze eyes staring in the direction of Phelps Gate.

As a group of undergraduates began to sing “Integer Vitae,” one of the members of the corporation might be seen to be frowning under his mortarboard, for he had just heard bad news. His downturned white moustache gave him a glowering look to begin with, and his eyes could be quite severe under his shock of white hair, though in fact at most times he was the most gently humorous of men, and one of the most popular as an after-dinner speaker at Yale alumni events. He had been port waist on the crew at Yale, Class of 1859, and a chaplain during the Civil War. For 32 years he had been the pastor of a wealthy Hartford congregation. Some people said he had the appearance and at least some of the wit of his close friend and traveling companion, Mark Twain.

Now the Rev. Joseph Hopkins Twichell’s good humor was being sorely tried. He had been chosen to give the main address at the dedication of President Woolsey’s statue in part because he was popular, and in part because, unlike an increasing number of Yale officials, he had known Woolsey well. Woolsey had been a conservative president of Yale when Twichell was an undergraduate in the 1850s; one student described his classroom as a “chilly atmosphere of repression.” Twichell had felt the sting of Woolsey’s discipline when he and two classmates were suspended after a student riot. But Woolsey was a passionate abolitionist. In 1854 he was one of the organizers of a meeting against the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In 1856 Yale undergraduates had helped finance Sharps rifles for antislavery emigrés during the “bleeding Kansas” wars.

What irked Twichell as he sat on the platform, listening to the closing strains of the students’ song was what the Rev. Newman Smyth had whispered to him as he was climbing the steps to the platform. The Class of ’96, whose commencement was two days away, were to plant their class ivy on the north side of nearby Chittenden Hall that afternoon, and they had chosen to plant ivy from the grave of Robert E. Lee.

********************

Yale classes had been planting ivy against college walls since 1852, and carving the class year above their planting. The idea of planting General Lee’s ivy had come from the reconciliationist mood among young Americans of the 1890s, a reconciliation that now seems perverse, as it was mirrored by increasing Jim Crow measures and lynchings in the South. David Blight points out in his book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory that “by 1897, the sectional reunion was all but complete politically and culturally, and a racial apartheid was steadily becoming the law of the land.” The Class of ’96 were graduating in the year of Plessy vs. Ferguson.

This spirit of reconciliation had moved a New Haven patent attorney, George D. Seymour, two years before. On a visit to the South, he cut a sprig of ivy from the “Lee Vine” growing on the wall of a church in Lexingon, Va., where the Confederate general is buried. A New Haven nursery had rooted it, and Seymour offered it to the Ivy Committee of the Class of ’96. There seems to have been a plan to go to New York and obtain some ivy from Grant’s Tomb, and let the two grow together up the Chittenden wall, but by planting day only Rebel ivy was available. The class had gone so far as to seek and obtain the permission of Lee’s widow for the act.

Joe Twichell had spent three years of his life witnessing the carnage that Lee and his cohorts had, in his view, inflicted on the country. His regiment was with McClellan in the Virginia Peninsula when Lee drove the Yankees back; with Meade at Gettysburg when Lee stumbled; and with Grant in the Wilderness when Lee, though by then on the defensive, inflicted huge casualties on the Union troops. Twichell regarded Lee as a principled man. Many in the North saw him as a traitor who should have been hanged. But the juxtaposition of dedicating the abolitionist Woolsey’s statue and honoring a representative of the slave power was too grotesque. “I disliked the thing so much that I could not forbear an open protest against it,” Twichell wrote in his journal.

As the music of “Integer Vitae” faded, Twichell rose and faced the hundred or so spectators standing in a semi-circle and began a flowery and rousing eulogy. He described a meeting with Woolsey in New Haven during the war. “I met him walking up and down on College Street waiting for the second bell; and with what warmth he greeted me at at once began to ply me with questions about the Battle of Gettysburg, which had just been fought, and the Yale men who had borne part in it, and other things at the front, till there was not a second more to spare. It stood revealed in his whole tone and manner that he loved his country with all his hopes and fears.”

Here, instead of going on to speak of Woolsey’s preaching ability, Twichell spoke of the forbidding bronze face: “And if I may be pardoned, I must say that if it were possible that face would be averted from the scene, when it shall happen this afternoon -- if so be that it shall happen -- that an ivy from the grave of Robert Lee, a good man, but the representative of an infamous cause, shall be planted on this campus to climb the walls of ever loyal Yale.”

********************

“The utterance of Dr. Twichell came like a clap of thunder from a clear sky,” said a New Haven newspaper. “It was the surprise of the commencement exercises thus far. There was, however, no demonstration until he was finished. Then the expression became at once the talk of the throng that surrounded the statue.”

Some of this talk is reflected in a clipping preserved in Twichell’s scrapbook in the Beinecke library, as the seniors on the ivy committee huddled wondering what to do. “You can’t change the ivy now,” said one. “One third of the class are from the south and it will be a personal insult to them if you do.”

“But you are insulting the two-thirds of the class from the north,” said another senior. Another proposed a statement that the ivy had been chosen because it was “a good piece of ivy, nothing more.” Others rejected this idea “because they thought they would show this respect for a good man and their willingness to put aside the bitterness of sectional feeling.”

“I wish the committee had selected the ivy from any old place, so that we wouldn’t have had this talk,” said a committee member. “Where’s your sand?” challenged another. The committee did a very nice thing in a very nice way. It doesn’t harm anyone. It does a great deal of good. I am sticking for the ivy.” The planting ceremony went forward.

It was an odd reversal, with the elderly graduates at the exercises playing the radical role and the youngsters playing the conciliators. “The older members of the audience applauded [Twichell] vigorously and the Seniors kept still and looked a little glum,” the Yale Alumni Weekly reported. Some greyhaired veterans threatened to tear up the ivy that night, and the seniors vowed to defend it.

These oldsters did not include President Timothy Dwight, Class of 1849, who was asked after Twichell’s speech if he would forbid the ivy planting. As he was later paraphrased, “although he should have advised against choosing this ivy if he had been asked in advance, he thought it better not to make any opposition after it had been procured and the choice made public.” Dwight previously had faced a student demonstration over the placement of the Woolsey statue -- originally it was to be sited on a favorite student ballfield -- and he wasn’t looking for more trouble. Prof. Arthur T. Hadley, who would succeed Dwight as Yale’s president three years later, was evenhandedly critical: “If the students had asked my opinion I would have told them not to do it...if Dr. Twichell had asked my advice as to the wisdom of such sentiment against the ivy as he expressed, I would have advised against it, because it was intended to stir up sectional feeling and the least there is of that the better.”

The story went out over the Associated Press wire - with Twichell’s statement slightly improved for effect -- and soon newspapers all over the country were having their say. “Rev. Dr. Joseph Twichell has given the drybones at Yale a healthy stirring up by a strong blast of loyalty,” said one unidentified clipping in Twichell’s scrapbook about the event. “I rub my eyes in astonishment,” wrote Henry B. Goddard to the Hartford Times. “It did not to me seem possible that the manly, noble, muscular Christian that I had known in Hartford could be so ungenerous upon such an occasion.” The sentiments got hotter as the story headed South. “A serpent’s hiss at a great man’s grave,” said a Georgia paper.

Letters Twichell preserved in his scrapbook were passionate, whether from north or South. “Why is it that sectional bitterness is kept red-hot north – by preachers? Can’t you “draw” by preaching the gospel?” wrote an anonymous correspondent. “This little slip [an anti-Twichell newspaper clipping] expresses the sentiment of thousands of good men who wore the blue (which I doubt very much if you did if you could get a substitute) better than any thing I have seen lately of such fools as you are,” wrote a Philadelphian. “May God forgive you and enlarge you,” wrote an Ohioan.

A businessman from Franklin, Louisiana, whom Twichell had married to a Hartford bride eight years before, wrote more in sorrow than in anger. “You may know my concern for your words of denunciation of the exponent of a lost cause whose very name is a household synonym of virtue and chivalry in every American home South of Mason and Dixon’s line,” wrote Benjamin T. Comfort. He went on to blame the war on “fanatical New England abolitionists” and -- in a telling reflection of the economic depression of the 1890s and the growth of populism -- predicted that the financial centers of the country would shift from the East to Chicago, New Orleans and Galveston.

Others supported Twichell, notably his friends Frank W. Cheney, a wealthy silk manufacturer of South Manchester, Connecticut; Leonard W. Bacon, the son of his undergraduate ministerial mentor of the same name; and Gen. Joseph R. Hawley, the former Senator, governor of Connecticut and publisher of The Hartford Courant. In a reflection of the recent controversy over the honoring of slaveowners by naming colleges after them at Yale, Hawley defended Twichell in the press: “When has Yale particularly honored the memory of a Union soldier?” he asked an interviewer. “If it has I do not recall it. There are many graves of generals in the northern army to pick slips of ivy from.”

********************

The following August, when Twichell was vacationing in the Adirondacks and Dwight was traveling in the Tyrol, some Southern gentlemen visited New Haven and asked to see the Lee ivy on the north side of Chittenden Hall. To their surprise, it had been torn up.

A faculty member told a reporter that the act of vandalism had no doubt been committed by people outside the university. Again, the story made the wires, and the Atlanta Constitution opined that the ivy’s removal “was the act of some midnight marauder with a soul as small and mean as that of the Rev. Joseph Twichell.” Twichell, however, took the high road in a letter to the Hartford Times, saying it was a free country and the class had a right to plant and preserve its ivy. “Much as I was personally offended by it, and earnestly as – speaking for those whose feelings I shared – I protested against it, I would willingly have done anything in my power to keep it from being molested.”

The following June, a member of the Class of 1896 announced that “another ivy would shortly be secured from the same place as the original and would be planted where the latter stood.” Whether this is done is not known. Though many carved dates remain in the Old Campus, later expansions of Chittenden Hall, now Linsly-Chittenden, seem to have obliterated the site of the Class of ’96’s ivy planting.

RETURN TO TWICHELL & TWAIN STORIES                     TOP OF PAGE