Harlow Shapley was very famous as a scientist. He located the center of the Milky Way galaxy, finding that our solar system is far from the Galactic Center. As Director from 1921 to 1953, Shapley built the Harvard College Observatory into the foremost US graduate school in astronomy and “a mecca” for astronomers from around the world. From 1953 Shapley published that life in the universe would arise on planets in “the liquid water belt” distance from their stars. This standard is applied in the search for extraterrestrial life today.
Some other Shapley contributions to science
Debated Heber Curtis in April 1920 on “Scale of the Universe.” This Great Debate been taught for decades as an example of the scientific method
Shapley-Ames Catalog of Bright Galaxies with Adelaide Ames (1932) formed the basis for understanding thousands of galaxies as they were discovered
Gave thousands of lectures and wrote as many articles to excite the public and students about astronomy and science
Promoted the Einstein-Hubble cosmology - universe has many galaxies racing away
“We are star stuff” having evolved from the elements in stars (1926 and 1950s-1960s)
Argued life must exist on other worlds, so “we are not alone:”
8 is how many medals and prizes Shapley was awarded. 12 is how many foreign academies elected him as a member.
He grew up on his father’s wheat farm in southwest Missouri — the Ozarks. The family was not especially political nor religious. He excelled at science and ascended to what can only be called “stardom” in 1918 when he published his discovery of the Galactic Center. He could have continued for decades as a great authority on science and relatively apolitical, as did others such as Robert A. Millikin and Edwin P. Hubble.
Why was Shapley a liberal?
Harlow Shapley Wiki [SIA2008-5931]
So why from 1933 did Shapley set about relocating Jewish and other scholars fleeing Nazi Europe? Why, as Director of Harvard College Observatory, did he put the prestige of Harvard on this issue when some Corporation members - his bosses - were indifferent or opposed? Why did he join Paul Robeson’s anti-lynching campaign in 1946? Why support liberal House candidate Martha Sharp? Why tell reporters that the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was a “star chamber” and fight for its abolition? Why blast back, when Senator Joseph McCarthy attacked him in 1950, “The Senator succeeded in telling six lies in four sentences,…probably the indoor record for mendacity!”
Is Grandfather Stowell the answer?
Horace Stowell (1811-1907) was the most prominent member of the Stowell family in the nineteenth century. His father Enoch Stowell (1768-1859) migrated from New Hampshire to central New York in 1792. Enoch acquired good “forest wilderness” along the Chenango River where the townships of Hamilton and Lebanon would be established. 1/
For cultural and religious reasons, many of the white settlers in the region helped slaves fleeing north from Kentucky. The Underground Railroad also ran up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany. The Erie Canal, built 1817-1825, created a direct water route from Albany to Buffalo and Lake Erie, opening travel to Ohio, Michigan, western frontier and also Canada.
“Routes of the Underground Railroad,” Wikipedia, compiled by Wilbur H. Siebert, The Macmillan Company, 1898. The Underground Railroad was not a real railroad but the network of secret routes slaves traveled to seek their freedom.
Black abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass convened meetings in the area. A wealthy landowner Gerrit Smith was a key organizer. Horace Stowell was not as wealthy as his friend Gerrit Smith (but few were). Stowell was just as passionate.
As his grandson Harlow Shapley said later: “Grandfather Stowell was an abolitionist with a capital A.”
“The God-given heritage of every human soul”
Of Horace Stowell a contemporaneous tribute says:
“In early manhood, having been impressed with a deep sense of the sin of human slavery, he became an ardent abolitionist. His home was one of the stations on the ‘underground railroad’; and many a fugitive slave passed through on his way from chains and cruel taskmasters to a new life of liberty to freedom, the God-given heritage of every human soul.” 2/
Stowell took his family to land he bought in Michigan in 1836. Then he relocated to Bloomington, Illinois, where he “associated with” Owen Lovejoy, the outspoken abolitionist and friend of Abraham Lincoln. In 1844 Stowell brought his family back to their property in Hamilton, New York. He joined the Republican Party when it was formed in 1854.
“Horace Stowell “has never ceased to exhibit whenever a voice has been needed to proclaim the right or a willing arm to advance its triumph.””
New York State abolished slavery in 1827. So Stowell, Smith et. al. could help fugitives“to a new life of liberty and freedom” along the Underground Railroad with little fear of punishment. They not only aided passage. Gerrit Smith also provided land to some Black families for permanent settlement in the New York countryside. 2/
The Cazenovia Convention August 21-22, 1850 drew 2,000-3,000 people including fugitive slaves to protest Congress’ proposed federal right to capture and return fugitives in any state. Frederick Douglass is by table at viewer’s left end. Gerrit Smith stands at center. Daguerrotype: Madison County Historical Society
The Chenango River flowed through Horace Stowell’s property. Rivers enabled fugitives to travel and shelter on their banks out of sight.
But the situation became radically more dangerous for fugitives and their friends on September 18, 1850 when Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. Historian Eric Foner in Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad writes that the act was meant to solve conflicting state laws about fugitives’ rights; instead it was the match that lit the fire.
Instantly in New York, federal “agents” seized Black fugitives (with only brief descriptions from their distant owners), shackled them and sent them back. Agents got bounty fees. The federal powers asserted by the Act enabled citizen’s arrests of fugitives and those who aided the quest for “freedom for every human soul.” 3/
Fugitive being captured and chained by white men. WikiMedia/ Anti-Slavery Almanac 1839.
An important visit at age ten
When Horace Stowell’s grandson Harlow Shapley and his twin Horace Shapley were ten, their mother Sarah Stowell Shapley brought them from southwest Missouri to the Stowell homestead in Hamilton New York. (Why? “Maybe just to get away from Missouri,” Harlow recalled later.) See below: Stowells & Shapleys - More than you need to know
The boys lived in the Stowell household for a year. Harlow recalled their schoolteacher wasn’t very good. The twins showed off to local people by “riding standing up.” But they missed the “wild life” they enjoyed in Missouri “to hunt rabbits and squirrels” and “playing Wild West hunters.”
Nonetheless Grandfather Stowell was impressive. The Tribute to him as a “leading citizen of Madison County,” written about this time says:
“Though now well along in years, he is still young at heart and spirit and one in whose society the young can take pleasure.
“Possessing a large fund of information, the result of his extended reading, he takes interest in current events, having been particularly interested in the recent [1893] World’s Fair at Chicago.”
Family secrets
Horace Stowell’s “negro-smuggling business” was surely known to his wife Anna, his son Andrew, and daughters Kate and Sarah. In his 1969 memoir Through Rugged Ways to the Stars, grandson Harlow recalled:
“[I]n our youth we knew that there was something wrong about the Stowell family. They were hush-hush especially about an ugly old building over the back hill - not in sight of the stone house. Many years later, our sister told us that it had been one of the stations on the underground railway….
“That old house was one of the stopovers. The Negroes would travel at night. Of course that human smuggling was over long before we were born. It was kept secret because it was illegal to ship Negroes, and Grandfather Stowell was breaking the law -- not that anybody bothered him very much.
“It just was not very respectable to do a thing like that; but Grandfather was a man of firm convictions and an Abolitionist with a capital A. Now we are proud to say that the house has been marked by the New York Historical Society as a place where Horace Stowell ran a Negro-smuggling business.” 5/
“Perhaps I inherited something”
By the 1960s Stowell’s grandson was often called “the great astronomer.” He was equally known for raising his voice for humanitarian causes and internationalism in pre-war Europe, World War Two and the Cold War. In his memoir, Shapley makes a bow to Horace Stowell:
“Perhaps I inherited something that showed up when I brought Jews, et. al., to America in the Hitler days, and fought Senator Joseph McCarthy and his crew in the 1950s. I have always been a bit obstreperous!” 6/
Grave of Horace Stowell (1811-1907) of Hamilton / Lebanon, New York. He is said to be buried near the Colgate University campus. Photo: Richard Rhode
“I am exceedingly unhappy when I see injustice. I am neither Negro, nor Jew, nor Communist. But I am a fellow-traveler with all the minorities in turn when their constitutional rights are invaded by a thoughtless majority or by malicious aggressors.”
Stowells & Shapleys - More than you need to know
Horace’s daughter, Sarah Stowell (1848-1932) married Willis Harlow Shapley in Lamar, southwest Missouri, in 1877. Willis had grown up on a farm there owned by his father, Col. Calvin Harlow Shapley (1843-1895). He is sometimes referred to as C.H. or The Colonel.
The Shapley family had a connection to central New York. C.H. Shapley had been born in Eaton, near Lebanon. The Lebanon town cemetery has the grave of C.H.’s grandfather William Shapley (1755-1815). Col C.H. Shapley served in the Union Army in the Civil War, for which he got land in Missouri -- eventually 3,000 acres. In 1866, the Colonel, his wife Melissa and their young son Willis journeyed by train and wagon to claim this land. But the Indians had stolen two wagons meant to take the household 100 miles to their new place. They got there finally, only to find their house was not built; the lumber had not arrived!
Members of the Shapley and Stowell families traveled between the flatland of Missouri and central New York’s lush hills. Col. Shapley was back in Lebanon in 1873 to marry Horace Stowell’s elder daughter Kate Allen. Kate was in Lebanon in 1875 when she gave birth to their son Lloyd Stowell Shapley. (He became a Navy commander and governor of Guam. ) They and son Willis managed the land in Missouri. The families intermarried again: in 1877 the Colonel’s son Willis married Kate’s sister Sarah Stowell in Missouri.
Sarah Stowell and Willis Harlow Shapley had four children who lived to adulthood: Lillian, Horace and Harlow, and John. Horace stayed on the Missouri land; Lillian Golliday. was a teacher. Harlow became an astronomer. John Shapley got a Master’s and a PhD leading to professorships in art history at Brown and the University of Chicago. John's wife Fern Rusk Shapley created the entire catalog of the Kress Collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Thanks to Dale Dermott of Lamar, Mo. for local research and fitting this story together.
Notes
1/ William Henry Harrison Stowell, The Stowell Genealogy, Tuttle Antiquarian Books, 1921. Entries for Enoch Stowell (p. 250) and Horace Stowell (pp. 461-462).
2/ The Underground Railroad (Amazon Original, Barry Jenkins, 2021) See map and text of Madison County, NY Freedom Trail Map (pdf.) Also Madison County Heritage Trails and
Gerrit Smith Estate and Landmark in Peterboro, NY.
3/ Tribute to Horace Stowell in “The Leading Citizens of Madison County,” Madison County NY and Ingalls Family 1999-2004. Horace Stowell lived there until his death in 1907 at 96.
4/ Foner, Eric, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, W.W. Norton, 2016.
5/ Shapley, Harlow, Through Rugged Ways to the Stars, Scribners’ 1969. pp. 6-8.
6/ Shapley, Harlow, op. cit. p. 7.