Pen Hallowell

Sally Jenkins makes one thing clear: We have no business celebrating the deeds of men who were traitors to the United States. No statues, no school names, no plaques, no military base names. Nor should we indulge in wistful discussions about the nobility of the “Lost Cause” or Gone with the Wind. We certainly should not celebrate sports teams/events that equate valor solely with athleticism and militarism, ignoring the quiet heroism that recognizes that ‘the courage necessary to face death in battle is not of the highest order.”

“From the Civil War to the football field, we have been celebrating the wrong values,” is a must read story of the damaging Southern martial values” of manhood many people, North and South, celebrate. Sally Jenkins, a columnist for The Washington Post, provides a compelling, insightful analysis of what values we should be celebrating.

Instead of the Confederate battle flag, Ms. Jenkins offers Norwood Penrose Hallowell, known to his friends as Pen, who was a Quaker, abolitionist, and, unexpectedly, a Union officer wounded three times in combat. He and three of his brothers fought with distinction during the Civil War, and collectively with others they were known as the Fighting Quakers.

The Hallowell brothers were from an abolitionist family, resolute in their beliefs long before abolitionism was acceptable, even in their home city of Philadelphia. Their father, Morris Hallowell, a well-to-merchant, posted this notice on his office door:

“We … declare publicly that we have no apologies to make for our opinions and that we will continue, as ever, to hold and express just such sentiments as our consciences and convictions dictate, without reference to the supposed view of our customers, and in especial contempt of that class of dealers in our city who ‘sell their principles with their goods.’ … where anyone presumes to demand as a preliminary to purchasing from us, that he shall know our opinions upon Slavery or any other mooted question in Religion or Politics, he shall be informed as we now tell you, that he cannot purchase from us for cash or upon any terms until he shall have amply apologized for the insult.” [1]

His principled stand had its costs: Many of his Southern customers declared their debts to him null and void; many of his Northern customers ceased to trade with him. By the end of the war, his business was in ruins.

Morris and his wife Hannah used their home as a safe house on the Underground Railway. More than once the teenage Hallowell boys spirited away escaped slaves as their masters walked the streets searching for them.

Their commitment to abolitionism fit comfortably with their Quaker beliefs, but when the Hallowell brothers joined the Union army, their Meeting House assembled to debate whether to expel them, because nonviolence was another important Quaker belief. In the end, the brothers’ commitment to ending slavery convinced their brethren to allow them to remain members.

As a student at Harvard College, Pen Hallowell became friends with the bluest of the blue of Boston society: the Shaw, Putnam, and Lowell families. His classmates included what would later become the creme of the abolitionist cause: William Lloyd Garrison, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (who was later wounded in the same Civil War battle as Pen Hollowell).

Three of the brothers (Pen, Edward, and William) enlisted as soon as the war began; the fourth (Richard) was deemed too sickly to enlist, but he fulfilled his obligation (for that’s what the family believed it to be) to end slavery in other ways. During the war, Pen was promoted to colonel, William to lieutenant colonel, and Edward to brigadier general. Each of them was wounded in combat, Pen multiple times, but all survived the war. All of them excelled at leadership under fire.

After two years of fighting, two of the brothers were home on convalescent leave. Pen had suffered a debilitating wound to his arm, from which he never fully recovered. When Morris Hollowell received word that Pen was wounded, he went to the battlefield to find his son. Once found, Pen’s father took him home to recuperate. Pen was lucky. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s father spent three weeks searching for his son. Delirious, the young Holmes had wandered away from the military hospital; a local family found him sitting on a street corner, bleeding from a neck wound. They took him into their home and nursed him.

Pen and Edward later returned to Boston to train new army recruits. While they were in the city, Massachusetts announced it was forming a “Negro Regiment” that would need experienced officers. Pen and Edward volunteered.

The first Black regiment in the North was the 54th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteers; the second was the 55th Regiment. One of the distinctions of the Hallowell brothers is that two of them, Pen (55th) and Edward (54th) commanded Black regiments at the same time; William was Pen’s adjutant. Their brother Richard, unable to enlist himself, served as treasurer and chief recruiting official for the regiments, finding Black volunteers from as far away as St. Louis.

Both Black units served with distinction during the war; both suffered near debilitating losses of officers and enlisted men.

After he was wounded a third time, Pen was discharged from the army. But rather than going home, he went to Washington DC to fight for equal pay for the Black soldiers in the Union army. White soldiers were paid $13.00 per month, but Black soldiers only $7.00. After dogged lobbying by Pen, and stubborn months-long resistance by Black soldiers, Congress agreed to their demand.

After the war, the brothers had successful business careers, but the lives of Edward and William were shorter than they might have been due to their war injuries and illnesses (malaria, contracted while fighting in the South). Richard, who had been too sickly to enlist, also lived a comparatively short life. Only Pen lived to just shy of his 75th birthday.

Just as they were abolitionists before the war, the brothers were against Jim Crow after the end of Reconstruction. Richard, who managed several Black schools, traveled to South Carolina for his health. While there, he visited several Black communities and schools.

His interest in Black lives was noticed and resented by some members of the White community, who sent him a threatening letter, telling him that if he did not “leave Camden within four days, he would be given fifty lashes on his naked back.” Richard’s sister-in-law saw the letter first and panicked, knowing that he was unlikely to accede to the demand; she made up an excuse for the family to immediately return home. Richard was not pleased by the subterfuge when he discovered it.

A few weeks after the return home, Richard received a conciliatory letter from several “substantial citizens” of the town, assuring him that he was welcome. His reply was worthy of Morris, his abolitionist father:

“Until they are ready to extend cordial welcome, not only to all who may visit the town for recreation or health or to establish business relations, but also to those interested in social, educational, political or religious questions, who refuse to be tongue-tied or to wear muzzles of any man’s making, you must not be surprised if freedom-loving Northern men, with capital to invest and ability to develop industries, give preference to broader minded and freer communities to be found elsewhere.”

Pen Hallowell, too, kept up the family tradition. He opposed memorial plaques at Harvard that honored students who fought for the Confederacy. He wrote to a friend:

“As an old man, however, I cannot readily dissociate the doer from the deed … If treason and rebellion were odious and wicked in 1862, I do not know what has happened to make them less so in 1910.”

And that brings us back to Sally Jenkins’ The Washington Post article. Why, she asks, are there “a half-dozen statues of Stonewall Jackson peering from pedestals, so tall he can see over three states,” but none to men like Pen Hallowell? Mr. Hallowell exhibits every bit of the physical courage and leadership represented by the general, and Mr. Hollowell wasn’t a traitor. He was a patriot dedicated to the freedom of enslaved men and women, a White man fighting against the racism of Jim Crow. Why isn’t he the role model for athletes? For the men and women at military service academies? Why on earth are we celebrating Southern traitors?

Ned Hallowell, Pen’s brother, also understood what leadership meant:

“Assigned the rear guard during a perilous retreat in a battle called Olustee, he and his men spent 20,000 cartridges checking the Confederates and then countermarched to save a train of intermingled black and white wounded soldiers that had broken down. When they couldn’t fix the motor, they attached ropes to the engine cars and manually hauled that bloody train to safety, with Confederate gunfire guttering at their backs.”

Why bring this up, especially with reference to sports? Ms. Jenkins answers:

“… Because every well-meaning but unread white athlete, coach, owner, athletic director and sportswriter needs to understand that Pen Hallowell, to whom black lives really did matter, lost his war. And football had no small part in that.”

She continues, passionately, to what I believe is her penultimate idea:

“The vague phrase ‘systemic racism’ is not just perpetuated by men with badges. It’s also propagated by our false victory narratives. There have been few more powerful cultural narrators than the NFL and the NCAA, with their close association with military triumphalism. They have been terrible teachers of historical truth, lousy with misplaced definitions of valor. Pen Hallowell was alive to hear Harvard football coach W. Cameron Forbes declare in 1900 that American football was ‘the expression of strength of the Anglo-Saxon. It is the dominant spirit of the dominant race, and to this it owes its popularity and its hope of permanence.’”

And then there was a mild-mannered Princeton academic and assistant football coach named Woodrow Wilson, “who rewrote the Civil War in volumes of purported American history so racist that they enraged Hallowell because they so ‘abounded with apologies for slavery.’”

Pen Hallowell fought back.

“On Memorial Day in 1896, he gave a remembrance address at Harvard. Sickened by romantic war myths in which the treachery and slave-driving of the Confederacy was painted over as cavalier spirit, Hallowell said, ‘To ignore the irreconcilable distinction between the cause of the North and that of the South is to degrade the war.’”

“Yet isn’t that what we have done?” Ms. Jenkins asks. “We have degraded that war — to the point that we hardly know what real honor is anymore, much less how to coach it on our playing fields. Degraded it until Colin Kaepernick was reviled for a simple show of conscience on racism … Degraded it to the point that Pen Hallowell has faded to a relative obscurity, except among war buffs and historians, while the University of Mississippi kept Colonel Reb as a mascot until 2003. Even now frat boys will dress in the costumes of traitors to the flag at cotillions, without the first blush of hot shame.”

Ms. Jenkins believes Pen Hallowell has another valuable insight.

“But most important is what Hallowell has to teach about courage and protest. ‘The courage necessary to face death in battle is not of the highest order,’ Hallowell wrote. He saw a ‘higher and rarer courage’ in the ‘long suffering and patient endurance’ of the soldiers so invested in their equal pay protest that they fought for 18 months without accepting a cent until they won fair treatment.”

Black Lives Matter. Civil Rights Matter. Inequality Matters. The Environment Matters. All of them matter more and are far stronger than the reactionary forces arrayed against us. Pen Hallowell’s ghost, the ghosts of the Black men of the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiments, are urging, “Don’t give up the fight.”

When Pen died in 1914, his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said Mr. Hallowell was a “savage abolitionist, a fighting Quaker who blushed at his own militancy, intolerant of criticism or opposition, but the most generously gallant spirit … the greatest I could ever know.”

Ms. Jenkins concludes, “If there was a peerless man who deserves to be on a height, it’s Pen Hallowell. Yet look what we have done to him. Look what we have done to all of us.”

***

[1] Susan M. Brooks, “Edward Needles Hallowell, 1837–1871, Col. 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers.” The Medford Historical Society on Presentation to the Society of a Plaque Honoring Edward Needles Hallowell, n.d. Quoted in John T. Galvin, “The Hallowells: Fighting Quakers.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series, Vol. 104 (1992), p. 43. This article is the source of the historical information in this post. Available online (free registration required) JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25081047?read-now=1&seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents