James Burrill Angell (January 7, 1829 – April 1, 1916) was an American educator and diplomat. He is best known for being the longest-serving president of the University of Michigan, from 1871 to 1909. He represented the transition from small college life to nationally oriented universities. Under his energetic leadership, Michigan gained prominence as an elite public university. Angell is often cited by school administrators for providing the vision that the university should provide "an uncommon education for the common man." Angell was also president of the University of Vermont from 1866 to 1871 and helped that small school recover from its financial difficulties brought on by the Civil War. Throughout the war, he was the editor of The Providence Journal and was a consistent vocal supporter of Abraham Lincoln.
Angell served in diplomatic posts as America's minister to China from 1880 to 1881 and then to the Ottoman Empire from 1897 to 1898. On his mission to China, he was the primary American negotiator of the Angell Treaty of 1880 that curtailed the emigration of laborers to the United States, as well as a second treaty restricting the trade in opium. In the Ottoman Empire, he was responsible for the protection of American missionaries during the unrest following the massacre of Armenians. Angell was a member of a prominent Yankee family in Rhode Island, and many of his descendants became senior academics.
Early life James Burrill Angell was born January 7, 1829, in Scituate, Rhode Island, the eldest of eight children of Andrew Aldrich Angell and Amy Aldrich, who themselves were distantly related; he was named after a former senator, James Burrill. The Angells had been a prominent family in and around Providence, Rhode Island, since its founding in 1636 by Roger Williams and his companion Thomas Angell. Though scant, there is evidence suggesting Thomas Angell's ancestors were relations of Henry I of England.
Thomas Angell's grandson had settled the farm where James was born in 1710, the same year he founded the Angell Tavern, where Scituate's leaders held town meetings after its incorporation in 1730, and where men such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and the Marquis de Lafayette stayed during the Revolutionary War. Angell's grandfather built an inn on the site in 1810, and Angell credited his boyhood interaction with the travelers who passed through for some of his later success, saying, "... the knowledge of men I gained by the observations and experiences of my boyhood in the country tavern has been of the greatest service. ... The eminent political speakers were always entertained at our table, and some of them were very helpful friends in my later life." The building burned down in 1862, and the land was later submerged during the creation of the Scituate Reservoir.
Education Angell attended the local school until the age of eight, when his parents placed him with a Quaker tutor who taught him arithmetic and surveying. At twelve, he left home to attend a seminary in Seekonk, Massachusetts, in order to study Latin, but after one term went to study at the Smithville Seminary, where he stayed until the age of fourteen. Unsure what career path to take, he had worked on the family farm for two summers, and also unsuccessfully attempted to find clerk jobs with Providence businesses. When his father informed him that he had the financial means to pay for college, Angell decided to attend Brown University. A year too young to enroll, he went first to University Grammar School in Providence, where one of his instructors was Henry S. Frieze, who would later serve as acting president of the University of Michigan while Angell was abroad on diplomatic assignments.
In 1845, Angell began studying at Brown, which had a total of seven instructors on the faculty at the time. He graduated in 1849 and obtained part-time jobs working as an assistant librarian at the university and tutoring a boy whose eyesight prevented him from reading. In 1850, Angell came down with a cold and sore throat, but he refused to give his throat any rest from the daily exertion of reading aloud to his pupil. The resultant damage to his throat made extended speaking difficult for the rest of his life.
Travels While Angell was recuperating, the father of his friend Rowland Hazard II, whose own grandson Rowland Hazard III would later be instrumental in the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous, suggested that Angell accompany Hazard on an upcoming winter tour of the South he was undertaking to help alleviate a lung ailment. The trip, which began on October 5, 1850, lasted seven and a half months and took Angell and Hazard throughout much of the South. The young men were introduced to the realities of slavery, including a whipping and a slave auction that Angell called "the most repulsive and disgusting spectacle we had ever seen".
Upon his return, Angell had planned to attend Andover Theological Seminary and take up a career as a minister. A throat specialist, however, advised him to avoid any work that would require extended public speaking, and he instead found work in the office of Ellis S. Chesbrough, the city engineer of Boston. His brief tenure there ended when his friend Rowland Hazard, still suffering from lung ailments, invited him on another trip, this time to Europe. The pair traveled first to France, arriving just three weeks after Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte had staged a coup d'état, then later to Italy and Austria. While in Vienna, he received a letter from Francis Wayland, the president of Brown University, offering him a choice of jobs as chairman of either the Civil Engineering or Modern Language Department, with a year and a half of continued study in Europe. He chose the latter, and went to Paris for several months to study French, then to Braunschweig, Germany to study German, finally returning home in the summer of 1853.
Professor and editor When Angell began his tenure as chair of the modern languages department at Brown University, President Wayland was in the midst of reorganizing the university away from its traditional roots. Additional study was offered in areas such as modern languages and engineering, Angell's own areas of interest, and students were given greater freedom to choose elective courses. Extension classes were initiated to bring instruction to the wider community, and Angell gave lectures on his experiences in Europe and on the topic of education. Among his own students, Angell singled out as especially memorable two future U.S. Secretaries of State, Richard Olney and John Hay.
On November 26, 1855, Angell married Sarah Swoope Caswell, the daughter of Alexis Caswell, who was then a professor at Brown and became its president in 1868. Sarah's family was also long-established in New England, and she was a direct descendant of Peregrine White, the first baby born in Plymouth Colony. The couple had a son, Alexis C. Angell, on April 26, 1857.
Wayland grew frustrated with a lack of funding for his reforms and resigned as president in 1855, and his successor, Barnas Sears, reversed many of the reforms. The study of modern languages was de-emphasized, leaving Angell unsatisfied with teaching duties that were now limited to only one-year courses. He began writing articles for The Providence Journal starting in 1854 and took over full responsibility for the editorial pages in 1859. After the editor and part-owner, Henry B. Anthony, was elected to the United States Senate in 1858, he proposed that Angell replace him as editor. Angell resigned his professorship in 1860 to become the full-time editor of the paper.
Angell allied himself with the radical wing of the new Republican Party, and lent the paper's backing to the 1860 gubernatorial candidacy of abolitionist Republican nominee Seth Padelford, which failed when a coalition concerned about the economic effects of angering the South instead led to the election of fellow Republican William Sprague. In the presidential contest, Angell felt that Rhode Island's interests would be best served by the nomination of staunch abolitionist William H. Seward as the Republican candidate. But when the somewhat more moderate Abraham Lincoln was nominated, he put the power of the Journal behind Lincoln's candidacy, publishing favorable letters from his former pupil John Hay, who was by then working in Lincoln's law offices. In the end, Lincoln carried Rhode Island, 61.4% to 38.6%.
Angell ran the Journal for the entire Civil War, and briefly considered buying it to run as a non-partisan newspaper (an idea which Senator Anthony rejected), but the workload took its toll on his health. In August 1866, when the University of Vermont requested that he come serve as its new president, he accepted the offer and moved to Burlington.
University of Vermont The Civil War had depleted the University of Vermont of students and the funds that came with them. When he assumed the presidency in 1866, Angell's primary responsibility was to improve both the size of the student body and the university's finances. He oversaw the integration of a state agricultural college formed following passage of the Morrill Act in 1862, which had introduced land-grant colleges in the United States. This effort faced resistance both from classicists worried about the influence of the new college on the quality of education and from farmers who doubted the university curriculum had much to offer them, but Angell was able to build enough trust between the groups that the integration went forward, and both the finances and enrollment began to recover; the latter grew from 31 in 1866 to 67 in 1870.
Angell traveled to state and county fairs around Vermont to attract publicity for the university and his fundraising efforts, and also secured donations from prominent alumni such as Henry J. Raymond, founder of The New York Times, and Congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Due to a lack of funds to hire professors, he personally taught the university's courses in history, rhetoric, German, and international law.
On May 8, 1869, the Angells had another son, James Rowland Angell, who later served as president of Yale University. On September 3 of that year, the University of Michigan offered Angell its presidency, following the resignation of Erastus Haven that June. He visited Ann Arbor with his wife, but he felt that he had a duty to complete his work at the University of Vermont and declined the offer. Michigan repeated the offer in 1871, his former teacher Henry S. Frieze having served as acting president while the regents searched for a permanent president. This time, Angell felt that the University of Vermont had made enough progress that he could leave it in good conscience, and he accepted the offer. He made a trip to Ann Arbor to deliver his inaugural address at Commencement on June 28, 1871, then returned to Vermont to complete the academic term before moving his family to Ann Arbor in September of that year.
University of Michigan
When Angell took over as the third president of the University of Michigan in 1871, it was the largest university in the country, with 1,207 students, 35 faculty members, and an annual budget of $104,000. But it was still more a collection of colleges than an expression of the "German model" of university that had been envisioned by its first two presidents, Henry Philip Tappan and the recently departed Haven. Over the next 38 years, Angell oversaw growth and innovation that led to him being called "the chief architect of the modern state university".