Joseph Henry

In December 1861, the Smithsonian became embroiled in the escalating wartime battle over abolition. The eminent physicist Joseph Henry, first secretary of the Smithsonian, carefully guarded the institution’s nonpartisan reputation for scientific research and publication. Unaware that he was dealing with an antislavery pressure group, Henry allowed the recently formed Washington Lecture Association to present a series of talks in the Smithsonian’s public lecture hall.

Henry was horrified by the openly political speeches, which attacked the Lincoln administration for its inaction on emancipation. But it was not only the politicization of the Smithsonian that troubled him. Although his scientific research had benefited years earlier from the “indispensable” assistance of Sam Parker, a free man of mixed race, Henry barred Frederick Douglass from taking the stage with the other abolitionist speakers. He later explained, “I would not let the lecture of the coloured man be given in the rooms of the Smithsonian.”