Birmingham state herald., 1896-05-02
PROFESSOR BARNARD.

Frederick A. P. Barnard was for many Alabama and is well remembered by the older graduates of that institution His life was very variable and interesting although his rapid change from south ern sympathizer to union shrieker ex- hlbits moral weakness which was un- expected. A sketch of his life has just been published from the pen of John Full ton. The New York Evening Post re- views it at length and we republish the review as a reminder of a part of our history at the outbreak of the civil war. Professor Barnard's conversion to the union cause was so rapid and complete as to appear ludicrous. Strange to say, a man who had justified slavery was at once welcomed by the north and made president of great northern college:
 Born in Sheffield, Mass, in the year of many great ones, 1909, at the tender age of he was being schooled by Oryille Dewey, the distinguished Unitarian preacher. But, though his education be- gan so early, it was throughout extreme ly imperfect, and he did not consider that he was ever really educated at all. It is an interesting circumstance that, in the Stockbridge academy, Mark Hop- IN II Hams college, was continually ptted against Barnard in all sorts of generous intellectual rivalries. Barnards admis- sion to Yale and his experience there re- peat in a general way many other ac- counts that we have had of the feeble ness and slackness of the college at and about the time of his attendance QS24-2S). Not having studied arithmetic at all since his childhood, he devoted a few weeks to examining it, and so discovered the beginning of an aptitude which after ward grew steadily with his growth and strengthened with his strength At his graduation he was next upon the honor list to Horace Binney, Jr, who excelled him in his classics. Barnard was the youngest student in his class.
 His predilection was for the law; but inherited, incurable and increasing deaf ness compelled a different course. The chapter on his life in Hartford whither he went directly from college, with glimpses of Catherine and Harriet Beecher, George D. Prentice, Whittier, Park Benjamin and Fanny Fern, is the most entertaining in the book. He was a man of orations, and his first one was prepared for @ Fourth of July celebration at Sheffield in 1929. It was plea for the Colonization society's plan of negro de- portation. But even this was too radical. the village elders thought for popular approval, and he substituted for 1t one of the regulation sort. His deafness ~ar- ried him back to Hartford, after years tutorship at Yale, 10 teach in Gallaudet's Deaf and Dumb asylum from which Gal laudet had just retired. Similar work followed in New York, whence in 1888 he went to Alabama and remained there un- til 1854, as professor of mathematics in the infant state university, which on his arrival had just been completely broken up by the insubordination of the students and the resignation of the faculty. Poli- tics as well as education interested him, and an oraton which he gave at Tuska- loosa, July f, 1851, is here reproduced en- tire. It did not go very near the heart of the matter. The connection of involun- tary labor and respectable idleness as cause and effect was the most vigorous thrust With a mental reservation in favor of slavery, he was eloquent for the union as "a peaceful asylum of the op- pressed-'the fettered thousands of other lands As time went on, pr. Barnard's complicity with the industrial system of the south became much more pro- nounced. Going to Oxford, Miss, as chan cellor of the state university. he ulti- mately became subdued to what he work ed into a remarkable degree for a New Englander of education and character As his biographer says:
 "'He accepted slavery as an unwelcome fact; he acquiesced in it as an established fact; he defended it as a fact that could not, in his opinion. be annulled or elimi- mated from the social state of the south i; and finally he participated in 1t by becom- ing, of his own will a slaveholder.'
 Subjected to suspicion, he replied: T was born at the north; that I cannot help. I am a slaveholder, and, if I know myself, I am sound on the slavery question:
 "As the catastrophe grew near he was equally indignant. at the northern agi- tators who were ready to imperil the un- ion for the sake of hastening emancipa- tion, and at the southern agitators, whom he believed to be plotting the dis ruption of the union There is not" says his biographer. the slightest doubt