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| Boynton Mansion at N Street and Vermont Avenue, NW |
The first President of Howard
University, Charles B. Boynton, took office on March 19, 1867, marking the
official beginning of the esteemed institution that had been conceived in his
house near the intersection of N Street and Vermont Avenue earlier that year. His contemporaries called him “President of
the Board of Trustees,” and his tenure would be short; he resigned on August
27, 1867 over a dispute with namesake Otis O. Howard stemming from their
differing racial policies.
Charles Brandon Boynton (left, via NARA) had been born
in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on June
12, 1806. He entered Williams College in
the class of 1827, but, owing to illness, was obliged to leave during his
senior year. He took up the study of
law, and, after filling one or two local offices, was elected to the
Massachusetts legislature. While
studying law he became interested in religion, qualified himself for the
ministry, and was ordained pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Housatonic,
Connecticut, in 1840.
After a stay of three years, he moved to churches in Lansingburg and
Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and in 1846 to Cincinnati, Ohio where he remained
until 1877; with the exception of his terms of service as chaplain of the House
of Representatives in the 39th and 40th congresses (1867-1869), while he
resided at N Street and Vermont Avenue. Boynton had earlier ventured to
Washington to serve as the first pastor of the First Congregational Church upon
its founding in 1865.
On November 20, 1866, ten members,
including Howard, of various socially concerned groups of the time met in
Washington, D.C., to discuss plans for a theological seminary to train colored
ministers. Interest was sufficient, however, in creating an educational
institute for areas other than the ministry. The result was the Howard Normal
Institute for the Education of Preachers and Teachers. On January 8, 1867, the
Board of Trustees met at Boynton’s house and voted to change the name of the
institution to Howard University.
Boynton bore an important part in the anti-slavery controversy, which was
fiercely waged in Cincinnati during the early years of his pastorate. His published books include Journey through Kansas, with Sketch of
Nebraska (Cincinnati, 1855); The
Russian Empire (1856), The Four Great
Powers--England, France, Russia, and America; their Policy, Resources, and
Probable Future (1866); and History
of the Navy during the Rebellion (New York, 1868).
A strict abolitionist, Boynton and Major General Otis O. Howard (1830-1909)
had differing views of the very early forms of segregation immediately
following the Civil War, despite their common goal of providing affordable education
for black citizens at the collegiate level.
On November 17, 1867, Boynton preached a sermon on race relations in
which he advocated that blacks be allowed to enter churches of white
congregations and become members, but where existing black churches were
located he encouraged them to remain and strengthen their own religious
institutions, advocating voluntary segregation.
Howard, on the other hand, mandated integration at every society level.
Boynton also advocated the self reliant “city within a city” theory of
advancement, opportunity, and business patronage that black leaders lectured in
the 1920s along U Street. In 1867,
Boynton preached that “every one taken thus from the number of the black,
diminishes to that extent, their strength and their power of progress and
elevation. We can afford to receive the
Colored people, but their own race can not afford to lose them.” (From Walter
Dyson’s Howard University: A History,
1941)
Howard and his followers continued to publicly push for racial
integration in all aspects of private and public life, and Boynton left the
position as both pastor of the First Congregational Church September 6, 1867, and
as the first President of Howard University, a month earlier on August 27, 1867. He was replaced by Byron Sunderland until Otis
O. Howard became President a year later, in 1868.
Boynton’s son, Henry Van Ness Boynton, below, was a well known newspaper
correspondent that built the house at 1321 R Street between 1875 and 1879,
where he and his father lived in 1880, according to the federal census (left, in 2007). Henry Boynton charged Otis Howard with
misappropriating funds from the Freedman’s Bureau which he controlled, and a
federal investigation ensued in 1870 to determine if Howard directed funds
donated to public institutions such as Howard University to promote his own
namesake. As commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau, Howard was known for
promoting the welfare and education of former slaves, freedmen, and war
refugees.
By 1870, an astonishing $529,000 from
the Bureau’s coffers had been donated to Howard University, where twenty other
black schools such as Lincoln University had only received $15,000. The issue softened, and Howard himself served
as the University’s President from 1868 to 1874.
Charles Boynton died
in Cincinnati, Ohio, on April, 27, 1883; his son, Henry Van Ness Boynton
died at 1321 R Street in 1905. Mordecai Wyatt Johnson (1890-1976)
later served as Howard University’s first black president, and its thirteenth,
from 1926 until 1960.
Copyright Paul K. Williams