James Burrill Angell

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.[9] 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.[10]

In 1845, Angell began studying at Brown, which had a total of seven instructors on the faculty at the time.[11] 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.[12]

Portrait of James Burrill Angell as a young man.

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.[13] 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".[14]

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.[15]

Angell's first decade in Ann Arbor was marked by several controversies. One involved his expressions of Christian piety in the course of official business, which drew criticism as aligning the state-funded university too closely with his personal faith.[lower-alpha 1] Detroit resident Stephen B. McCracken lodged a complaint in 1873 that said such Christian—and specifically Protestant—favoritism violated the state constitution, to the detriment of Catholics, Jews, spiritualists, and free thinkers. A state senate committee investigated and ultimately cleared Angell and the university, concluding that "the teachings of the university are those of a liberal and enlightened Christianity, in the general, highest and best use of the term." Angell recognized the need to make the Christian spirit he wished to cultivate more voluntary and less explicitly Protestant, first by dropping compulsory chapel attendance, then by hiring the university's first Roman Catholic faculty member, Eugene W. Hilgard.[33]

The question of whether homeopathic medicine should be taught at the university had been debated for decades before Angell's arrival, and in 1873 the legislature passed a law appointing two professors of homeopathy in the medical school, despite the testimony of Angell and others that doing so would be a great mistake that might ultimately kill the entire department due to the hostility of the medical faculty towards homeopathy. The regents refused to appoint the professors,[lower-alpha 2] saying it was impossible to teach both types of medicine in a single department but they would establish a separate school to teach homeopathy if the legislature funded it. Funding for a separate school was provided in 1875, and the School of Homeopathy was created. In spite of his earlier opposition, Angell worked to find qualified professors and to ensure the school provided the best possible instruction, and it coexisted with the medical school until it was closed in 1922.[35]

In October 1875, an audit of student laboratory fees in the chemistry department found a shortfall of $831.10, attributable to one of two professors, Silas H. Douglas or Preston B. Rose. Rose at first mortgaged his house to make up the difference, but later Douglas was also found to be responsible; charges and counter-charges were made among the two men, various regents, and President Angell. Douglas was Episcopalian and Rose was Methodist, and their fellow churchmen joined in a bitter public debate over who was to blame. A two-month investigation by the state legislature produced a 740-page report, and the case ultimately went to the Michigan Supreme Court, where Douglas won a judgment against the university in 1881. One historian wrote that "no one who examines the voluminous records of the struggle ... can doubt that the University would have been a far stronger institution ... had there been no Douglas-Rose controversy".[36] The six-year fight affected Angell as well, with one professor saying he "was never quite the same" afterwards.[37]

Angell Hall, dedicated in 1924, on the University of Michigan campus.

During his tenure at Michigan, the faculty size grew from 35 to about 400; the student body from 1,100 to over 5,000; the annual budget from $104,000 to over $1,000,000.[38] The following schools or colleges were founded during his tenure: Dentistry, Pharmacy, Music, Nursing, and Architecture & Urban Planning.[39]

Concerned about the growing role of professionalism in collegiate sports and a loss of control by faculties over athletics on campus, Angell called for a meeting in 1906 of the presidents of the members of the Western Conference (now the Big Ten). At the Angell Conference, the presidents agreed to restrictions on the number of games, years of student eligibility, and ticket prices. An additional rule targeted Michigan football coach Fielding H. Yost's considerable outside income by requiring coaches be full-time employees of the university. In spite of Angell's efforts to institute more control, Yost convinced a majority of the regents to support him, and Michigan left the athletic conference for nearly a decade rather than abide by the new rules.[40]

In February 1880, Secretary of State William M. Evarts asked Angell to go to China to negotiate changes to the Burlingame Treaty that would reduce the flow of Chinese immigrants into the Pacific United States. Angell was nominated by President Hayes, confirmed by the Senate as minister to China and chairman of the treaty commission on April 9, 1880. Angell left for Peking that June with fellow commissioners John F. Swift and William Henry Trescot, and presented his credentials on August 16, succeeding George Seward.[41] Henry S. Frieze was appointed acting president of the University of Michigan in his absence.

The commission negotiated two treaties. The first, formally called the Treaty Regulating Immigration from China and dubbed by historians as the Angell Treaty of 1880, allowed the U.S. to regulate and limit the immigration of Chinese laborers, but not to prohibit it outright.[42] The second was a trade treaty that outlawed the trade of opium and set tonnage dues and tariffs to be the same for both nations.[43] The treaties, collectively, were signed on November 17, 1880, and the other commissioners returned home, leaving Angell in China to fulfill his duties as minister.[44] After a year, he decided to return to academia and left China on October 4, 1881, taking a trip through Europe and returning to Ann Arbor on February 24, 1882.[45] Angell was succeeded in his post by John Russell Young.[41] Most of the provisions that the Angell Treaty had secured were negated by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Scott Act of 1888, which placed much stricter bans on Chinese immigration.[46]

In the fall of 1887, President Cleveland appointed Angell to a three-man commission, along with William L. Putnam and Secretary of State Thomas F. Bayard, to negotiate with the British government regarding fishing rights off the coast of Canada, which had been a source of misunderstanding between Canada and the U.S. since they were first agreed to in the Treaty of 1818.[47][48] The results of these negotiations, the Bayard-Chamberlain Treaty, was signed on February 15, 1888, but subsequently failed ratification in the U.S. Senate, whose Republican majority had objected to the formation of the commission in the first place.[49][50]

On November 4, 1895, President Cleveland appointed Angell to the Deep Waterways Commission, along with John E. Russell and Lyman E. Cooley. The commission, created by Congress, was to negotiate an agreement between the U.S. and Canada regarding the creation of a waterway to allow ocean-going traffic between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean.[51] They undertook a feasibility study[52] and forwarded proposals for further appropriations to Congress, but little was done,[53] and it was not until 1959 that the St. Lawrence Seaway finally opened.

President McKinley asked Angell to serve as minister to Turkey in April 1897 and he agreed on the condition he could return home after a year if he wished. Angell's nomination encountered brief opposition from Constantinople, first because of reports that he had accused Russia of fomenting unrest in the region, and then because Sultan Abdul Hamid II had confused Angell's Congregationalist faith with the Congregation of Jesuits, of whom he had a poor opinion.[54] These objections were resolved by Angell's denial of the former report and clarification to the Sultan on the latter misunderstanding; the Senate confirmed him and he sailed to Europe on the SS Normandie in July, then on to Constantinople, where he presented his credentials to the Sultan on September 3,[55] succeeding Alexander W. Terrell.[56] The University of Michigan regents appointed Harry Burns Hutchins acting president in his absence, through October 1898.[57]

The pressing issue facing Angell in Turkey was the protection of American missionaries during the unrest following the massacre of Armenians that had been carried out over the previous two years, as well as compensation for damage to their properties they claimed were caused by both the deliberate actions and the inaction of Turkish forces. He was mostly unsuccessful on this front, except for negotiating a $50,000 surcharge on a warship the Ottoman Empire was purchasing from an American firm, with the understanding that this would be used to resolve the claims of damages (and which was eventually paid in 1901). Angell blamed this failure in part on the outbreak of the Spanish–American War causing American naval ships to leave the area and remove pressure on the Sultan.[58]

Angell and his wife toured the Middle East from January to March 1898, visiting Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, Beirut, and Ephesus.[59] President McKinley was disturbed by a request from Angell to send American warships to "rattle the Sultan's windows"; he feared it would lead to an event like the sinking of the Maine, and approached Oscar S. Straus about taking over the post. Angell himself was becoming discouraged by his inability to win concessions from the Turkish government and submitted his resignation in May.[60] He had his final audience with the Sultan on August 5 and left his post on August 13, traveling home by way of Greece, Italy, Switzerland, and France.[61]

A number of James Angell's descendants and near relatives rose to prominence in their respective fields, largely also in academia:

• Son James Rowland Angell was president of Yale University.[67]
• Son Alexis Caswell Angell was a Michigan Law School professor and U.S. District Judge.[68]
  • Grandson Robert Cooley Angell was chair of the sociology department at the University of Michigan and president of the American Sociological Association.[69]
• Nephew Frank Angell was a psychologist at Cornell and Stanford universities.[70]
• Son-in-law Andrew McLaughlin, married to Angell's daughter Lois (b. 1863[71]), was a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian.[72]
  • Granddaughter Constance Green was also a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian.[73]
  • Grandson James Angell MacLachlan was a Harvard Law School professor.[74]

• Elected an associate fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1868.[75]
• Elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1890.[76]
• Served as president of the American Historical Association from 1892 to 1893.[77]
• Honorary Doctor of Law degrees from Brown University (1868), Columbia University (1887), Rutgers College (1896), Princeton University (1896), Yale University (1901), Johns Hopkins University (1902), University of Wisconsin (1904), University of Vermont (1904), Harvard University (1906), University of Michigan (1908), and Dartmouth College (1909).[78]
• Regent of the Smithsonian Institution from January 19, 1887, to January 15, 1912.[79]
• Awarded the First Class of the Order of the Sacred Treasure by Emperor Meiji in October 1909 for service to Japanese students.[8]
• Inducted into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 2008.[80]

Angell by Bitter

• Angell Hall, one of the most prominent buildings on the University of Michigan campus, is named after him. Designed by Albert Kahn,[81] it was completed in 1924 at a cost of $1 million, providing 152,000 square feet (14,100 m²) of classroom and office space.[82]
• In 1910 sculptor Karl Bitter produced a 7-foot-tall (2.1 m) bas relief depicting a seated Angell. It now resides in the lobby of Angell Hall.[83]
• A caricature of Angell by Ulysses Ricci's firm Ricci and Zari can be found carved on a corbel at the University of Michigan's Law Quadrangle.[84]
• Angell School, a kindergarten through fifth grade elementary school in the Ann Arbor Public Schools, is named after him.[85]
• The former University of Michigan honor society Michigamua renamed itself the Order of Angell in 2007, over the objections of some of Angell's descendants.[86]
• Sarah Caswell Angell Hall was a theater in Barbour Gymnasium (a women's gymnasium on the Michigan campus), named in honor of Angell's wife in 1905. The gymnasium was torn down in 1946.[87]