Thursday, March 6, 2025

Charles Van Loon, teenage abolitionist

Facts and findings about the Philo Logos Society, 1836-1838

Albany. From Greenbush. 1834 print by J. W. Hill
via The New York Public Library Digital Collections

In this piece I want to consolidate various interesting and potentially significant findings about the Philo Logos Society, some disclosed in earlier posts on Melvilliana:
The Philo Logos Society was the debate club for young men in Albany, New York that Herman Melville joined as a teenager in 1837--and wrecked, allegedly, before leaving town for Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Over the summer Herman lived and worked on the Melvill farm-place near Pittsfield, still managed by his uncle Thomas Melvill, Jr. In the fall, Herman taught school for one term in the rural "Sykes" or Sikes District below Washington Mountain. Back in Albany by February of 1838, Herman somehow got himself elected president of the Philo Logos Society. The newspaper notice of Melville's victory in a controversial and possibly rigged election was first transcribed by Jay Leyda in the good old Melville Log Volume 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951) at page 74.

Albany Evening Journal - February 13, 1838
via genealogybank.com

At a meeting of the Philo Logos Society of the city of Albany, held at their room in Stanwix Hall, on the evening of the 9th instant, the following gentlemen were unanimously elected to serve for the ensuing year:

President — Herman Melville.
Vice President — Lotus Niles.
Secretary — Daniel E. Bassett.
Treasurer — Alfred Greene.

-- Albany Evening Journal, February 13, 1838.

The reported election at Stanwix Hall was fake news, "essentially a "hoax" according to the writer of a pseudonymous communication to the Albany Microscope (February 17, 1838) signed "Sandle Wood." 

Even before Herman vamoosed the previous year, his affected classicism, unkempt appearance (even his buddies called him "the Ciceronian baboon") and questionable ethics bothered one person enough to report his bad influence on the Philo Logos Society to the Albany Microscope in a letter signed "R.," published there on April 15, 1837. If Herman ever read the 1837 letter from "R." he ignored it. But this new charge of election fraud got a fast answer in the letter signed "Philologian" and published in the next issue of the Albany Microscope (February 24, 1838). This was Herman Melville's first known appearance in print. Figuring (understandably but wrongly, it turned out) that "Sandle Wood" had to be the debate club's former president, Charles Van Loon, Herman worked in a punning ad hominem attack on his presumed antagonist as a "silly and brainless loon." 

There followed an exchange of hostile but in their way hilarious letters between Van Loon and Melville, and one would-be peacekeeper who signed himself "Americus." Most of these 1837-8 letters concerning the Philo Logos affair are reprinted in the 1993 Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville's Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth (see pages 10-20 and 553-564). Before that, William H. Gilman gave the 1838 exchange in Melville's Early Life and Redburn (New York University Press, 1951); see Appendix A, pages 251-263. For factual detail and unfailing reasonableness, Gilman's rehearsal of the whole Philo Logos "fracas" is hard to beat. See Melville's Early Life, pages 74-75 for Gilman's persuasive take on the "venomous letter" from R in April 1837; and pages and 90-95 on the controversy as revived and extended in the 1838 correspondence published in the Albany Microscope. Not in Gilman or the Northwestern-Newberry edition, a negative comment from "TOM TOBY" about "the erudite Debaters," cited but not transcribed by Leyda in the Melville Log Volume 1, page 78.

In addition to Gilman's judicious treatment, more historical context and commentary on the Philo Logos saga can be found in Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography Volume 1, 1819-1851 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) at pages 112-113 and 121-124; and John Bryant, Herman Melville: A Half Known Life (Wiley-Blackwell, 2021). In Bryant's Volume 1, see chapter 31 "Debater and Cosmopolite" at pages 359-376; in Volume 2, pages 1003-1004. Bryant ascribes the 1837 letter from "R." to Charles Van Loon--a tempting attribution based on internal evidence, but resisted by previous editors and biographers. Van Loon's authorship would nicely account for echoes in his first 1838 letter of 1837 matter, specifically Melville's nickname "Ciceronian baboon" alongside latinized mockeries of his real name, and the focus on "principles." However, it does not account for the initial "R." in 1837, the nasty tone noted by Gilman (and, I would add, R's more violent imagery and metaphors) or the interest in political angles instead of religious convictions. R sounds to me like a future lawyer, banker, or politician; whereas Van Loon, signing himself "Ex-President" in 1838, sounds like the preacher and reformer he indeed became. What to do? Here's a tell: Bryant claims that verbal parallels in the later letters "allow us to tease out the fact that R was in fact 19-year-old Charles Van Loon" (Half Known Life Volume 1, page 364). Whenever your college English professor or any academic writer says "the fact that...in fact," asserting that something is fact twice in the same sentence, you can be pretty sure it's not. Call it rather an interesting proposition you're free to accept, reject, or ignore in the absence of external evidence identifying R as Charles Van Loon.

By all accounts Van Loon and Melville dominated the debate club, as recollected twenty years later by newspaper editor William J. Moses, a former member. As Hershel Parker discovered, Moses gave an anecdote from the old Philo Logos days in a column of the Auburn American (January 4, 1858) promoting Melville's lecture on "Statues in Rome." 

Transcribed by Hershel Parker from the Auburn NY American (January 4, 1858)
via Fragments from a Writing Desk

"The attendance was generally small, and the interest of all was almost centred in the debates between Van Loon and Melville, they being a tight match for each other, and delighting in nothing more than in being pitted against each other in an intellectual combat."

The complete text of this 1858 item has been reprinted by Steven Olsen-Smith in Melville in His Own Time (University of Iowa Press, 2015) at pages 26-27.

In the next sections of the present essay I will give evidence, mostly gathered from old New York newspapers, for three main findings about the Young Men's Philo Logos Society (PLS) and Herman Melville's involvement therewith:

  1. The PLS was not formally affiliated with the Albany Young Men's Association (YMA)

  2. Only two public debates on known topics were hosted by the PLS in 1836-7: first, on the immediate abolition of slavery (October 20, 1836) ; and second, on prospects for successfully continuing the republican form of government in the United States of America (January 5, 1837). 

  3. Ex-President Charles Van Loon (1819-1847), then barely 19 years of age, was already a dedicated abolitionist by the time of his contentious 1838 correspondence with Herman Melville, showcased in the Albany Microscope.

Philo Logos not the Debating Society of the Albany YMA

In print, authoritative sources including the Northwestern-Newberry volume of Melville's Correspondence have inaccurately described the Philo Logos Society as being affiliated with or belonging to the Young Men's Association for Mutual Improvement in the City of Albany. In fact these were two different organizations with different histories, interests, meeting places, and (for the most part, apparently) memberships.

That Philo Logos and the Debating Society of the Albany Young Men's Association were different groups can be seen by comparing the published announcement of Melville's "unanimous" election to the presidency of Philo Logos with other announcements from the same time period concerning the annual meeting of the YMA, expressly held "for the purpose of electing officers of the Association and of the Debating Society therewith connected, for the coming year."

Albany Evening Journal - February 2, 1838

As announced in the Albany Argus on December 22, 1837, the Executive Committee of the Young Men's Association had formally decided to change the time for electing officers of the Debating Society "from the third Monday of October to the first Monday of February." Prior to election night in the New Year 1838, two slates of candidates were listed in the Albany Evening Journal (February 3, 1838). Samuel Van Vechten, named on both tickets as preferred nominee, won the election for President of the Debating Society connected with the Albany Young Men's Association. As shown below, Van Vechten's victory was reported in the Albany Argus on February 16, 1838. As also indicated in the same report, John Silsby was elected 1st Vice-President; Fenner Ferguson 2nd Vice-President; and Albert W. Van Derwerken, Secretary.

Albany Argus - February 16, 1838

Sam Van Vechten was elected president of the YMA Debating Society on Monday the 5th of February; four days later on the 9th of February, Melville was elected president of Philo Logos. Two different groups, with different officers elected at different meeting places in Albany: the Lecture Room of the Exchange building ("a large and commodious building constructed of granite" and located at the foot of State street, as described at page 55 in the 1842 Gazetteer of the State of New York) for the Debating Society of the Young Men's Association; and Stanwix Hall for the Philo Logos Society. Availability of Stanwix Hall would presumably have been facilitated with help from co-owner of the building Peter Gansevoort, shortly after his nephew Herman's return to to Albany in February 1838. 

Two debates hosted by the "Young Men's Philo Logos Society" in 1836-7 


Before April 1837 only two public debates had been staged by the Philologos Society, "with unprecedented success" according to "R." in his letter to the Albany Microscope (April 15, 1837):

"The society was formed for the purpose of improvement in composition, elocution and debate. It has met with unprecedented success; having "astonished the natives" of this fair city with two very spirited public debates. And it continued to flourish and spread its branches like a green bay tree, until the bohun upus melvum [= bohun upas, the fabled poison tree of Java] was transplanted into its fertile soil, from the Ciceronian Debating Society, of which he was the principle destroyer."  -- Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Northwestern University Press, 1993) page 552.

According to R, the two debates both took place before Herman Melville joined Philo Logos. Melville might have attended either or both, but evidently he did not participate as a member. The first debate hosted by the Philo Logos Society took place on Thursday, October 20, 1836. The topic was slavery, a bold choice for that or any organization's maiden event:

DEBATE.— The question, “ought Slavery to be immediately abolished in the United States,” will this evening be discussed by the members of the Young Men’s Philo Logos Society, in the Lecture Room of the Green street Baptist church. commencing at 7 precisely. All who feel an interest are invited to attend.

N. B. The members of the society are requested to meet at their hall at half past six.
By order. CHAS. VAN LOON, Pres’t.
V. B. Lockrow, Sec’ry.

The advertised meeting place, Green street Baptist church, was the First Baptist Church in Albany. This church formerly had been led by Bartholomew T. Welch, an eloquent and well-respected preacher. Welch left in 1834 to assume charge of the 2nd Baptist Church on Pearl Street. George B. Ide took over from Dr. Welch. Early in 1836, Alanson L. Covell succeeded Ide as pastor of the First Baptist Church on Green street. Covell unfortunately suffered much from chronic illness and died on September 20, 1837, in Albany. For more about Albany churches and ministers see George Rogers Howell, the Bi-centennial History of Albany Volume 2 page 749.

Coincidentally or otherwise, the first Philo Logos debate was conducted in the absence of Pastor Covell, who happened to be away that week, visiting cherished friends in Whitesboro, New York. 

When the Philo Logos Society made its brave public debut to discuss the immediate abolition of slavery, the elder Debating Society of the Young Men's Association was just gearing up for the winter season. In the Albany Argus for October 14, 1836, YMA Secretary Daniel Fry announced a forthcoming "Election for a President, two Vice Presidents, and a Secretary of the Debating Society of this Association," to be "held at the Lecture Room, Knickerbacker Hall" on "Monday next (October 17th)" between noon and 2:00 p.m. Probably a subsequent newspaper report of who won appeared in the Argus or Evening Journal, but I have yet to find it. Early in 1836, Herman's older brother Gansevoort Melville had been elected President of the YMA Debating Society, according to Jay Leyda in the Melville Log Volume 1, page 66. Perhaps Gansevoort continued on as 1st or 2nd Vice President for some months after the October election. Whatever the results in October, Gansevoort had to resign from the Executive Committee of the Young Men's Association in April of the next year, after losing his hat and fur business in bankruptcy. Over at the Philo Logos Society, however, Charles Van Loon remained firmly in charge. 

Van Loon would be re-elected President of the "Young Men's Philologos Society" on April 8, 1837, as reported in the Albany Evening Journal for April 29, 1837:

At the annual election of the Young Men’s Philologos Society, holden April 8th, 1837, the following gentlemen were duly elected officers for the ensuing year:
Charles Van Loon, President.
Abraham Burke, 1st Vice President.
S[almon] A. Phelps, 2d Vice President.
Wm. Lincoln, Recording Secretary.
Jacob A. Lansing, Corresponding Secretary.
Roswell Steele, Treasurer.

As indicated in the earliest newspaper announcements of public debates and elections, Charles Van Loon's group formally and consistently styled itself the "Young Men's Philologos Society." Although plainly imitative, the qualifying expression Young Men's in, for example, the announcement of Van Loon's re-election as President, does not assert any formal affiliation with the Young Men's Association of the City of Debating Albany. As shown herein, the Albany YMA had its own debating society, always called "the Debating Society." Like the Albany YMA, Philologos or Philo Logos was organized by and for the young men of Albany. The constitution and by-laws adopted by Philo Logos may well have imitated (that is, plagiarized) those of the older organization, but the Debating Society of the YMA and Philo Logos were always two different groups. 

Second debate of the "Young Men's Philologos Society"

The second of two known public debates hosted by the Philo Logos Society took place early in the next year, on January 5, 1837.  The location for this second debate shifted from the 1st Baptist Church on Green street to the Albany Female Seminary. And the chosen topic, future prospects for the republican form of government in the United States of America, seems far less inflammatory than the immediate abolition of slavery.

PUBLIC DEBATE.

The quarterly public debate of the Young Men’s Philologos Society will take place Jan 5th 1837, in the Chapel of the Albany Female Seminary, in Division st. commencing at half past 7 P. M.

Question— “Will the present republican form of government probably exist in the United States for a half century to come?”

The citizens generally are invited to attend.

By order. CHAS VAN LOON, Pres’t.

Wm. Lincoln, Sec’ty.

 After the event, this notice of thanks appeared in the Albany Evening Journal for Saturday, January 7, 1837:

A CARD.—The young men of Philologos Society, tender their thanks to the Rev. J. M. Garfield, Principal of the Seminary, for the gratuitous use of the chapel of that institution on the occasion of their public debate.

John Metcalf Garfield served as Principal of the Albany Female Seminary from 1831 to 1849.

Later in January 1837, the Debating Society of the Albany Young Men's Association debated the effect of universal education on the crime rate:

"YOUNG MEN'S ASSOCIATION--DEBATING SOCIETY.--The question for debate this evening is, "Has the general diffusion of knowledge a tendency to diminish crime?" Meeting at 7 o'clock in the Lecture Room. 
T. W. LOCKWOOD, Sec'y. -- Albany Argus for Tuesday, January 31, 1837

As indicated in the published newspaper announcement, quoted above from the Albany Argus for Tuesday, January 31, 1837,  T. W. Lockwood was named as Secretary of the YMA Debating Society during the same month and year that William Lincoln was identified as Secretary of the Young Men's Philologos Society. Lincoln evidently replaced the former Philologos Secretary, V. B. Lockrow (= Van Buren Lockrow). 

Charles Van Loon, teenage abolitionist


Charles Van Loon listed as a registered delegate to the Anti-Slavery Convention in Albany, New York
Utica, NY Friend of Man - March 14, 1838
The third of my three discoveries about the Philo Logos Society firmly establishes the credentials of Herman Melville's debate club frenemy Charles Van Loon (1819-1847) as a bona fide abolitionist in late February and early March 1838, mere days after Melville lampooned him in print as "that silly and brainless loon." Charles was the youngest son of Sarah Wendell and Peter Van Loon (1774-1852), a successful and highly respected merchant in Albany. The Van Loons lived on Lydius street, and Charles's father Peter was remembered for his "character of unquestionable integrity." Considering the courage previously demonstrated by Charles Van Loon back in October 1836, in his bringing so provocative a topic as "the immediate abolition of slavery" to the First Baptist Church, news of his continued political activism on behalf of the anti-slavery cause may not have pleased his friends or family circle, but it would not have surprised them. Turns out, in-between the appearance of Herman Melville's first letter in the Albany Microscope (February 24, 1838) signed "Philologian" and Melville's second, two-part communication (March 17 and 24, 1838) signed "Philologean," the main target of his artful arguing was locally engaged as a registered delegate to the Anti-Slavery Convention, a three-day affair taking place at the Reverend Edward Norris Kirk's 4th Presbyterian Church in Albany. 

Boston Liberator - March 16, 1838
Notable speakers included Gerrit Smith of Peterboro, Beriah Green of Whitesboro, Erastus D. Culver, William Goodell, and Nathaniel Paul of Albany. Van Loon's registration and presumably his physical presence at some point as one of about 200 delegates to the Albany Anti-Slavery Convention is documented in The Friend of Man for March 14, 1838. Edited by William Goodell, the Friend of Man was a weekly abolitionist newspaper published in Utica for the New York State Anti-Slavery Society. The names of Charles Van Loon and at least one other known member of the Philo Logos Society, D. E. Bassett, appear in the list of registered delegates printed on the front page of this issue. Earlier in February 1838, only a few weeks before the Anti-Slavery Convention, Daniel E. Bassett had been elected Secretary of the Philo Logos Society during the controversial proceedings at Stanwix Hall that resulted in Herman Melville's election as President. And no (in case you're wondering), although depicted as enviably "leisureful" by the deposed president of PLS, and thus without any schedule conflicts or pressing obligations that we know of, Herman Melville's name does not appear in the published roll of delegates to the 1838 Anti-Slavery Convention in Albany.

The Anti-Slavery Convention took place during the three days (and nights) from Wednesday, February 28 through Friday, March 2, 1838, at Rev. Edward Norris Kirk's Fourth Presbyterian Church on North Market street. All told, delegates to the Anti-Slavery Conference discussed and adopted 31 formal resolutions.

In light of Charles Van Loon's likely participation, some elements of his impassioned discourse in the Philo Logos controversy may have been influenced by rhetorical flights and flourishes heard in conversations and speeches by fellow abolitionists, any day or night of the gathering. For example, Mr. Pritchett of Utica urged a muscular Christian opposition to slavery and its apologists:
"There is a radical defect in modern views of Christianity. It may be observed in Paley's ethical writings; and it has been often repeated. It is the idea that Christianity is a soft and timid spirit, selecting ever more gentle terms, careful not to irritate the partisans of evil. This is all wrong. Suppose some sturdy ruffian were torturing my infant brother, if I had the spirit of love towards my brother, should I not cry out in strong, harsh, passionate terms? Even so Christianity is not afraid to denounce wrong. It is not afraid to stand up before a titled hypocrite, and call him "thou whited wall," as the apostle Paul did. It is not afraid to tell oppressive professors of religion that their "hands are full of blood." Nor will it fear, with Ezekiel, to denounce clerical oppressors as a "conspiracy of the prophets like a roaring lion, ravening the prey; they have devoured souls--they have made many widows in the midst thereof." The true spirit of love will denounce oppressive legislators, as "princes like wolves ravening the prey," who "destroy souls to get dishonest gain." The spirit of love will warn guilty nations when their oppressions call down God's vengeance. As we turn over the scroll of prophecy, we find the doom of destruction pronounced on one people after another. And what is the main ground of God's controversy with them? Oppression. Nor will that spirit waste itself in tedious calculations as to the effect of this or that expression. It will trust to the voice of God speaking in those impulses of the heart, which, at the sight of wrong, prompt the indignant rebuke, the earnest appeal, the utterance of contempt. Why has our Maker given us these emotions?-- To speed us with swift feet to the rescue of the suffering, when otherwise we might lose ourselves in some interminable process of hair-splitting ratiocination about the amount of guilt, of suffering, and the exact quantity of feeling which it would be proper for us to expend or express on the case. God's prophets yielded themselves to the full swing of these impulses. Out of the abundance of their hearts did they pour out those torrents of denunciations, glowing with indignant scorn while mingled with the tears of pity. We need not fear hating hypocrisy too much, or the mean spirit of popularity-seeking, self-exalting, compromising, worldly policy. Nor need we fear expressing our hatred too forcibly. Yet we should take heed that we do not use hard names and harsh language in the spirit of insult, for the sake of hurting another's feelings--this indeed would be malignant--but the spirit of calling hard names is not necessarily malignant.... 
... Does not God abhor the slaveholder, the manstealer? Yes, and we ought to abhor the slavehodler--not the man, the immortal soul, the image of God. No. The more we love that, the more we shall hate the horrible perversion which makes it the enemy of its kind, a slaveholder, a manstealer."  

One of the later resolutions adopted at the Anti-Slavery Convention specifically addressed prejudice against color:

Resolved, That we regard the prevailing prejudices against the people of color as unnatural, unkind, anti-scriptural, and calculated in an eminent degree to wound their feelings, repress their ambition and to destroy their confidence in the sublime principles of the Gospel. 

Discussed on Thursday evening, March 1st according to the write-up in the Friend of Man. If young Charles Van Loon (whose birthday was in March, making him barely 19 years of age, almost) stayed around that night for discussion of the 16th Resolution, he would have heard these remarks by the Reverend Nathaniel Paul. then pastor of the Baptist Church on Hamilton street:

Remarks by Rev. Nathaniel Paul at Albany Anti-Slavery Convention
Utica, NY Friend of Man - March 14, 1838
 REV. NATHANIEL PAUL, of Albany.-- This is an important resolution in whatever light it is viewed.  No obstacle in the way of abolition is more powerful than prejudice against color. Were I a slaveholder, and you should come to me and ask for the abolition of slavery, I would say to you, go home and do away with your wicked prejudice, which prevents colored students from entering your colleges and seminaries, colored children from enjoying the instructions of your infant schools, and pious colored people from sitting at your communion tables, before you preach to me. After you have done that, I will listen; until you do it, I can not hear you....

During my travels in England, I met with what I call true friends of abolition. There are, I am sorry to say, two kinds of abolitionists--whether in Albany or not, I can not say. 1. That kind who hate slavery, especially that which is 1000 or 1500 miles off. But as bad as they hate slavery, they hate a man who wears a colored skin, worse. I only carry out the Savior's rule of judging trees by their fruits. I do not like wolves in sheep's clothing. Another kind is that to which it is a great honor for a man to be allied--those whose principles are based on the word of God and the Declaration of Independence. It is self-evident that God has created all men equal. Thank God there are some who acknowledge this truth, and act under its influence; who will make any sacrifice required to plead the cause of the oppressed and injured. When I see a man of this character, I know how I feel, but I can not tell. I can not help loving them. They carry out the spirit of the Savior's golden rule. Though many of them are rich and honored, yet they are not above pleading the cause of the poor and dumb. 

[Here Mr. P. stopped, having consumed the time allotted to each speaker; but cries of Go on, go on, were heard.]

As reported in another column of the Utica Friend of Man for March 14, 1838, Utica lawyer and anti-slavery activist Alvan Stewart had recently visited Albany and delivered three speeches there on abolition, one at Rev. Kirk's Church. In Albany Stewart was pleased to find the stirrings of abolitionism, especially in promising young men:

"The mind of Albany is inquiring on this most interesting subject. There are a number of most excellent young men who are determined to rescue Albany from the strange paralysis under which in times gone by she has so lamentably languished."
Charles Van Loon's early leadership, demonstrated in October 1836 by his staging a public debate on the immediate abolition of slavery, and his later participation in the Anti-Slavery Convention, would surely put him in the company of those "most excellent young men" whom Alvan Stewart met in Albany. Doubtless Van Loon would have wished to hear one or more of Stewart's impactful speeches in Albany. Even if he didn't, Charles Van Loon the "Ex-President" was already a legit abolitionist when he tangled with Herman Melville the "Philologian" in the pages of the Albany Microscope. 

September would find Charles Van Loon serving as Secretary of the "Young Men's Anti-Slavery Society" (Albany Evening Journal, September 17, 1838). Before the year was out, Van Loon would be a featured speaker at local anti-slavery gatherings. As announced in the Albany Evening Journal on December 11, 1838:
ANTI-SLAVERY MEETING.-- The Anti-Slavery Meeting advertised for this (Tuesday) evening, is postponed until Sabbath evening next. It will be held at Mr. Paul's church, Hamilton st. A lecture will be delivered by Mr WIGGINS, agent of the N. Y. Anti-Slavery Society. Mr. VAN LOON, and others, will address the meeting. Citizens generally are invited to attend. 

"Mr. Paul" was of course the distinguished clergyman Nathaniel Paul, then pastor of the Hamilton Street Baptist Church in Albany. As pointed out already, Charles Van Loon would have met and heard the great man speak in Rev. Kirk's 4th Presbyterian Church while attending the Anti-Slavery Convention. 

Even as a teenager, then, Charles Van Loon does not appear to have exhibited anything like the "Negrophobia," youthful bigotry, "vain racism," or "adolescent racism" repeatedly attributed to him by John Bryant in both volumes of his Melville biography, Herman Melville: A Half Known Life (Wiley Blackwell, 2021).

Part of the Index in my copy of John Bryant's
Herman Melville: A Half Known Life (Wiley Blackwell, 2021) Volume 2, page 1348. 

Knowing something of Van Loon's later credentials as an ardent social reformer and abolitionist,  Bryant calls it "surprising" to find him exposed as a teenage racist in his epistolary duel with Herman Melville. As best I can tell, the biographer's chief reason for branding this future warrior for equal rights as a bigot is Van Loon's too-colorful denunciation of Melville as a "moral Ethiopian" in the following passage from Van Loon's first rebuttal, published in the Albany Microscope on March 10, 1838:

"As the name of this individual does not admit of an ingenious analytical introduction into the columns of the Microscope, I will inform the members of the Philologos Society, that it is none other than he, whose "fantastic tricks" have earned for him the richly merited title Ciceronian baboon;" but I shall lead him up before the public under the more romantic appellation of Hermanus Melvillian. Hermanus Melvillian, a moral Ethiopian, whose conscience qualms not in view of the  most atrocious guilt; whose brazen cheek never tingles with the blush of shame, whose moral principles, and sensibilities, have been destroyed by the corruption of his own black and bloodless heart. With regard to his billingsgate effusion in the Microscope, I as heartily repel its infamous allegations, as I despise the character, and detest the principles of its infamous author."

Presenting his own take as transparently true, needing little in the way of explanation or reasoning to defend, Bryant appears to read the phrase moral Ethiopian backwards (and out of context) to slander Ethiopians and Africans generally as villainous Black persons with "black" = evil hearts. As used by Van Loon (according Bryant) the pejorative moral Ethiopian not only demeans Melville, it racially stereotypes Black folk along with him as monsters, demons, sub-human creatures wickedly immoral by nature and without shame, lacking any "moral principles" to guide their behavior or feelings of guilt to redeem it. 

It's true that in Melville's day the word Ethiopian was frequently used to mean black in color. Cutting Charles Van Loon the slack he probably always deserved--and definitely deserves now, newly revealed as a model teenage abolitionist--we might stop there and read Ethiopian adjectivally as a synonym for black. As Melville will do in Moby-Dick chapter 61 where his narrator Ishmael describes "a gigantic Sperm Whale" in pathetic death-throes, "rolling in the water like the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun's rays like a mirror." Read in context, Melville's adjective "Ethiopian" specifies the "hue" of noun "back," describing its color. 

In context, the "hue" designated by Melville's descriptor Ethiopian appears glossy" and "glistening," beautifully enhanced by water and sunshine. Checking just now on the Melville Electronic Library I see this helpful hypertext note, provided in their online version of Chapter 61:

Ethiopian: A native of Ethiopia and a term used in the early to mid-19th century to designate dark-skinned Africans generally; performers of black minstrelsy (usually white men in blackface) were also referred to as “Ethiopians.” Melville uses the word here to mean “black,” and earlier in “The Ship,” Ch. 16, he describes the Pequod’s exotic decoration as being like that of "any barbaric Ethiopian emperor."
https://melville.electroniclibrary.org/editions/versions-of-moby-dick/61-stubb-kills-a-whale

From the Longman Critical Edition of Moby-Dick, edited by John Bryant and Haskell Springer (Pearson Education, Inc., 2007) at pages 254, this terser version: 

"Ethiopian: African, dark." 

Even more economically, editors Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker in the 2nd and 3rd Norton Critical Editions of Moby-Dick say, "Dark." In another chapter of Moby-Dick Melville introduced the figure of a wildly dressed Ethiopian ruler to depict the gaudily appointed Pequod. In Chapter 61, however, no person of color, literal or metaphorical, is necessarily evoked by Melville's use of the word Ethiopian which simply means, "black" or "dark."

In grammar and syntax, Van Loon's usage in 1838 looks a bit more complicated than Melville's straightforward adjective-noun phrasing in 1851, but the sense is basically the same. Yes, to be sure, calling Melville a "moral Ethiopian" is Van Loon's bombastic way of denigrating, indeed "blackening" the name of his adversary. But the "black" part of Van Loon's verbal attack has to do with color, and that specifically applied to the presumed sinfulness of his target, Herman Melville--not to any "Ethiopian" living or dead, real or imagined. Although in the position of a noun, Ethiopian functions adjectivally to modify moral which in context means something like "morally" or "with respect to one's morals or morality." Translate: Melville is morally black as the proverbial Ethiopian's skin. Beyond skin-color, just nothing is expressed or implied concerning Ethiopians, Africans, Blacks, or any person of color anywhere, ever, whether regarded collectively, say as a nation or race, or individually. Unless you want it to be--but any imputation of race-based inferiority is on you, dear reader, and possibly your errant English professor. 

Context matters, as ever. In this case we don't have far to read, fortunately, since Van Loon takes pains to explain himself. As plainly and immediately stated, the appellation "moral Ethiopian" befits Herman Melville in particular as someone known to the writer

whose conscience qualms not in view of the most atrocious guilt; whose brazen cheek never tingles with the blush of shame, whose moral principles, and sensibilities, have been destroyed by the corruption of his own black and bloodless heart.”

Van Loon excoriates the "Ethiopian" blackness of Melville's "moral principles," figuratively represented as a "black and bloodless heart." Most definitely and deliberately, Van Loon here draws on conventionally negative connotations of the English word black when it functions as an adjective. As set forth in Noah Webster's 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language Volume 1, the digital version:

BLACK, adjective

1. Of the color of night; destitute of light; dark.

2. Darkened by clouds; as the heavens black with clouds.

3. Sullen; having a cloudy look or countenance.

4. Atrociously wicked; horrible; as a black deed or crime.

5. Dismal; mournful; calamitous.

Accessible via https://webstersdictionary1828.com/Home?word=black

Number 4 seems closest to the meaning of black as employed by the "Ex-President" of the Young Men's Philo Logos Society. Writing in 1838, young Charles Van Loon would have readers of the Albany Microscope believe the heart of his debate club adversary Herman Melville to be "black and bloodless" =  "atrociously wicked." 

Similarly inflated language may be found in a variety of antebellum sources and contexts, most of them more serious than the forensic high jinks indulged in by Melville and Van Loon as exceptionally talented teenagers, verbally strutting their stuff. In the Massachusetts House of Representatives, one year after the Philo Logos fracas, the representative from Nantucket, George Bradburn introduced a radical petition from the women of Dorchester for repeal of unconstitutional State laws that discriminate on the basis of skin color. Rep. Bradburn, a Unitarian minister and celebrated antislavery politician, argued for equal treatment of racially mixed partners in marriage, and their children. Anticipating vigorous objections to this needful constitutional reform, Bradburn hypothesized that by their extreme and unreasonable fear of promoting racial "amalgamation" opponents of the measure would reveal their 

"hearts blacker than the blackest of Ethiopian skins." 

Reported in "The Marriage Law," Boston Liberator, February 15, 1839; reprinted in the New York Emancipator on February 28, 1839. 

Also exemplified in abolitionist circles is the term "moral blackamoor," a Shakespearean variant of Van Loon's "moral Ethiopian." From a column in the Boston Liberator (August 20, 1847) signed "Q." the instance of moral blackamoor quoted below is by editor Edmund Quincy, "a tireless and devoted advocate for abolitionism."

"Great is Humbug, especially in America; but even here it cannot destroy the essential difference between an honest man and a knave! Mr. Burritt may know a great deal, but he does not know enough to impart to the ocean of milk-and-water which he seems to think it to be his mission to pour around the world, the power to wash a single moral blackamoor white! --Q. "Mr. Burritt and the Vice-Presidency," Boston Liberator, August 20, 1847. 

This later twist on the same conceit, used to denounce racial violence, appeared in the Cincinnati Post (December 10, 1887) decades after the Civil War ended: 

Cincinnati Post - December 10, 1887
"Some miscreant whose heart is blacker than an Ethiopian's epidermis is trying to burn out the colored citizens of Glendale. He succeeded in destroying their Baptist church last night."

Lurking in Van Loon's castigation of Herman Melville as a "moral Ethiopian" is a scriptural allusion, unrecognized in Melville scholarship before now, to this once-familiar Bible verse: 

"Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil." -- Jeremiah 13:23 

Although relatively late, two works published in and around 1879 combine the expression "moral Ethiopian" with an explicit reference to the widely cited rhetorical question proposed in the Old Testament by the prophet Jeremiah. 

As a young Baptist believer, Van Loon may have encountered a similar conflation of Jeremiah 13:23 and the metaphorical phrase moral Ethiopian, in church or at a revival meeting. 

The warmth and severity with which Van Loon denounced his fallen schoolfellow put him in good company with other "perfervid religionists," as Bryant very aptly tags them. If Charles Van Loon was born to preach the Gospel to sinners, Herman Melville was born to troll insufferable moralizers for the fun of it, making their 1838 fireworks practically inevitable. Writing in May 1851, Melville famously told Nathaniel Hawthorne he refused to believe in a Temperance Heaven. Sure of the Temperance Heaven in store, Van Loon battled like a crusader to establish a Temperance Heaven-on-Earth, too.

Knowing Charles Van Loon better now as a model teenage abolitionist, even John Bryant I think will wish to acquit him on all charges of "adolescent racism" leveled in the first two volumes of Herman Melville: A Half Known Life. Whenever Bryant gets around to making amends, ideally in the proposed third volume of his Melville biography, he might reconsider his claim for the ludicrous depiction of a black tambourine man named "Billy Loon" in Omoo chapter 65 as Melville's private and (if Bryant is right) woefully petty joke on the supposed bigotry of his former rival. 

In 1838, besides attending the Anti-Slavery Convention in Albany with Gerrit Smith and Nathaniel Paul, rebuking the devil in Melville, and speaking at Nathaniel Paul's Baptist Church on Hamilton street, Charles Van Loon also entered the Hamilton Literary and Theological Seminary, a Baptist seminary in Madison County, New York. On February 27, 1839, "Mr. Charles Van Loon was ordained to the pastoral charge of the Central Baptist Church" in Westfield, Massachusetts. In 1840 Van Loon married the former Miss Cynthia Jane Frisbie. One of the couple's three daughters survived their father.

Rev. Van Loon's discourse on the Importance of the Bible in forming the character of the Student was reviewed and found to be unintentionally "amusing" in the Boston Post (December 18, 1841):

"It is a production of considerable spirit and eloquence, containing nothing new in idea, and is deformed by the exhibition of much narrowness and puerility of mind."

Already a committed temperance activist, Van Loon felt compelled in this production to warn his audience against the many inducements to drinking in poetry and fiction: 

"Profane literature has always been a faithful and efficient handmaid of intemperance. Novelists have given the most attractive coloring to scenes of debauchery and riot--poets have sung their sweetest strains to 'sparkling wine of roseate hue,' to 'flowing bowls' and 'jolly bumpers,' and the 'nectar of the gods'--when, had their fancies been chastened by Bible truth, they would have bodied forth the forms of 'biting serpents and stinging adders,' they would have sung us the terrors of 'liquid death and distilled damnation." 

His worldlier Boston critic answered, "To all this, we are much inclined to remark with Jeremy Twitcher, "Vell, vot of it," for certainly, such boyish stuff deserves no graver reply." 

In 1843 the Van Loons relocated to Poughkeepsie where Charles served as pastor of the First Baptist Church until his death on November 22, 1847. In Poughkeepsie, the minister's zeal for social reform as a champion of abolition and temperance, and the sincerity of his own personal temperance vows, came under intense scrutiny after local brewer and church member Matthew Vassar accused him of drinking ale at Vassar's home and brewery. There followed an exchange of heated accusations and counter-accusations, levied in published letters from all involved parties. Bill Jeffway, Executive Director of the Dutchess County Historical Society, gives a lively account of the whole affair in The Temperance Minister in the Brewer's Pulpit. Recalling to some extent the Philo Logos controversy in Albany, Van Loon's melodramatic 1845 newspaper war with Matthew Vassar had much higher stakes for his professional livelihood and reputation, and more importantly for his own physical and mental health. 

Charles Van Loon died in Poughkeepsie on November 22, 1847. The moving eulogy delivered at his funeral by Henry G. Ludlow was reprinted from the New York Reformer in the Columbus, Ohio Western Christian Journal of December 31, 1847. Hopefully I can transcribe and post it later on. For now, here is the text of a brief newspaper announcement, reprinted in Albany:

DEATH OF REV. CHARLES VAN LOON.-- This eloquent young divine, whose memory is fresh and familiar to many of our citizens, died at Poughkeepsie, N. Y. on Monday the 22d inst.-- He was an ardent, and eloquent friend of Temperance, and a bold and vigorous writer. Possessed of a noble and generous heart, he devoted his brief life to the good of his fellow man. -- from the Cincinnati OH Signal; reprinted in Albany NY Evening Atlas on December 6, 1847.

Twenty years ago, Robert K. Wallace published his well-received book length study, Douglass & Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style (Spinner Publications, 2005), an exercise in comparative biography and literary history, confessedly bent on discovering some trace of a personal connection between Herman Melville and Douglass and conscientiously elaborating the merest hint of mutual influence. Too briefly, Charles Van Loon enjoyed the friendship with Douglass that Melville experts have wished Melville had. On the road for seven days in the summer of 1847, Van Loon traveled with Douglass, Joseph Comstock Hathaway, and Charles Lenox Remond to Port Byron, Seneca Falls, Waterloo, and Canandaigua. Writing from Syracuse, Van Loon reported on this trip in a letter to the New York National Anti-Slavery Standard (August 19, 1847). On their tour of western New York State, Van Loon and Douglass made speeches together from the same platform, engaged in spirited political debates with friends and foes, and actively participated in meetings of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Western New-York division. 

Speaking in Canandaigua, New York on the 10th anniversary of West India Emancipation, Frederick Douglass recalled sharing the platform with Charles Van Loon ten years before. Douglass then offered this reminiscence of "our well beloved friend":

Mr. President, I am deeply affected by the thought that many who were with us ten years ago, and who bore an honorable part in the joyous exercises of that occasion, are now numbered with the silent dead. Sir, I miss one such from this platform. Soon after that memorable meeting, our well beloved friend, Chas. Van Loon, was cut down, in the midst of his years and his usefulness, and transferred to that undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveler returns. Many who now hear me, will remember how nobly he bore himself on the occasion of our celebration. You remember how he despised, disregarded and trampled upon the mean spirit of color caste, which was then so rampant and bitter in the country, and his cordial and practical recognition of the great truths of human brotherhood. Some of you will never forget, as I shall never forget, his glorious, towering, spontaneous, copious, truthful, and fountain-like out-gushing eloquence. I never think of that meeting without thinking of Chas. van Loon. He was a true man, a genuine friend of liberty, and of liberty for all men, without the least regard for any of the wicked distinctions, arbitrarily set up by the pride and depravity of the wealthy and strong, against the rights of the humble and weak. My friends, we should cherish the memory of Chas. Van Loon as a precious treasure, for it is not often that a people like ours, has such a memory to cherish. The poor have but few friends, and we, the colored people, are emphatically and peculiarly, the poor of this land.

-- "West India Emancipation" in Two Speeches by Frederick Douglass (Rochester, NY: C. P. Dewey, 1857) page 4. 


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