Silliman
Benjamin Silliman (1779-1864) was born into a family holding slaves, but grew to hate slavery and publicly oppose it. His diary and letters are full of denunciations of slavery, and an autobiographical sketch he wrote during the Civil War includes an honest confession of the wrong as it existed in his family:
“I regret to record that there were slaves . . . under our roof. . . . [T]here were house-slaves in the most respectable families, even in those of clergymen in the now free States; and those who fought for their country [in the Revolutionary War], of whom our father was one, did not appear to have felt their own inconsistency . . . .
“A sense of integrity alone induces me to record these painful facts regarding the participation of our family in the sin and shame of slavery . . . our nation is now settling an awful account with heaven for the accumulated guilt of more than two centuries, for which we are paying the heavy penalty of our blood.”1
Though Silliman, like Abraham Lincoln, initially supported the colonization of former slaves in Africa, like Lincoln, he later realized that this was not the answer to slavery. At the death of John C. Calhoun (for whom Calhoun College is named), Silliman recorded his grief at his former student’s defense of slavery: “He in a great measure changed the state of opinion and the manner of speaking and writing upon this subject in the South, until we have come to present to the world the mortifying and disgraceful spectacle of a great republic—and the only real republic in the world—standing forth in vindication of slavery. . . .” In this same meditation he wrote about slavery, “It is in better hands than man’s; and I trust that ultimately the colored men of all races on this continent will be received into the great human family as rational beings, and as heirs of immortality. While I mourn for Mr. Calhoun as a friend, I regard the political course of his later years as disastrous to his country and not honorable to his memory . . . .”2
1. George Park Fisher, Life of Benjamin Silliman, (New York, Charles Scribner and Company, 1866), I, pp. 21-22.
2. Fisher, Life of Benjamin Silliman, II, pp. 98-99.