Background
Charles Follen was the son of Christoph Follenius, a prominent judge at Giessen, HesseDarmstadt.
abolitionist Unitarian preacher first professor of German literature at Harvard German liberal refugee
Charles Follen was the son of Christoph Follenius, a prominent judge at Giessen, HesseDarmstadt.
He entered the university of his native town in the spring of 1813, not yet seventeen years old, devoting himself to the study of law and ethics, but soon, at the rising of the German people against Napoleon, joined a company of volunteers.
After the conclusion of peace in 1814, resuming his studies at Giessen, he eagerly plunged into the progressive student movement —the so-called Burschenschaftsbewegung.
Even after his appointment, in 1818, to a lectureship at the University of Jena, undismayed by official warnings and censures, he carried on what was in effect revolutionary propaganda, and it is not surprising that, when on March 23, 1819, the reactionary writer Kotzebue was assassinated by Karl Sand, a close student friend of Follen’s, the latter should have been arrested and tried as an accomplice.
No evidence could be found against him, however, and he was acquitted, but since he was dismissed from the university and placed under strict police surveillance, so that all avenues for a useful public career in Germany seemed closed to him, he decided to leave the country and serve the cause of freedom elsewhere.
After a brief stay in Paris early in 1820, where he made the acquaintance of Lafayette, he went to Switzerland, and taught Latin and history for a year in the cantonal school of Chur, until in the autumn of 1821 he was called as lecturer on jurisprudence and metaphysics to the newly reorganized University of Basel. Here he spent three active and highly successful years.
In 1824, however, the Prussian government, fearful lest his democratic and cosmopolitan teachings should spread in Germany, not only forbade its subjects to attend the University of Basel, but, supported by the other members of the Holy Alliance, demanded Follen’s extradition, on the charge of his subverting the foundation of society. Now America seemed the only asylum left.
On November 1, 1824, Follen and his friend Karl Beck sailed from Havre for New York. Follen’s American career also was a tragic mixture of high aspirations and deep disappointments.
At first his ideals appeared to be realized in the new country. Through George Ticknor, to whom he was introduced by Lafayette, he received an offer from Harvard College of an in- structorship in German, which he accepted with the understanding that he should also have an opportunity to give lectures on law. He entered upon this position in December 1825, and in the next few years displayed a most remarkable versatility.
In addition to teaching the German language to college classes and lecturing on jurisprudence before select audiences of Boston lawyers, he gave practical lessons in the new art of gymnastics made popular by “Father” Jahn, wrote linguistic text-books, literary readers, theological and philosophical essays, preached occasionally in Unitarian churches and around Boston, and in 1829 even accepted an additional regular instructorship in ethics and history at the Harvard Divinity School.
It is no wonder that a man of such parts should have been gladly received by the intellectual and social élite of New England.
In March 1830, he acquired American citizenship; in April of the same year, a son was born to him; in August, he was appointed, for a term of five years, professor of German literature at Harvard College.
Even before the appearance, in January 1831, of Garrison’s Liberator, Follen had boldly spoken out against slavery in his Boston “Lectures on Moral Philosophy” of 1830, but it was Garrison’s and Whittier’s example which urged him into action against slavery.
There seems no doubt that this address was the immediate cause of the severance of Follen’s connection with Harvard College. When the tenure of his professorship expired in August 1835, it was not renewed, although his striking success as a teacher had widely and emphatically been recognized.
From now on all the more eagerly he devoted himself to upholding his ideals of reform and progress in every sphere of life.
In the various positions which he filled during the following three years, as private teacher, lecturer, and Unitarian minister, he never ceased to make the training of original and independent individuals his primary object.
His last ministry was at East Lexington, Massachusetts.
On the return trip from a course of lectures on German literature before the Merchants’ Library Association in New York, he perished with nearly all the passengers and crew of the steamer Lexington, which caught fire in Long Island Sound, during the night of January 13-14, 1840.
At a hearing before a committee of the Massachusetts legislature in January 1836, he protested with vigor and dignity against a proposed attempt to inhibit the publication of Abolitionist writings. In an article in the Quarter ly Anti-Slavery Magazine, October 1836, he laid bare all the various forms of oppression which seemed to him to endanger true democracy in this country, among them the political and legal inferiority of women, the general subserviency to wealth, the sectarianism of the churches, the formalism and conventionality of academic instruction.
In 1834, he joined the New England Anti-Slavery Society, and at its first convention held in Boston, well knowing that he thereby risked his own future, he drafted the “Address to the People of the United States. ”
In September 1828, he married a woman of aristocratic breeding, Eliza Lee Cabot.
