| Court majority by arguing that Congress had the
power to ban slavery in the territories, he was not an anti-slavery advocate, and he
later criticized Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation as
unconstitutional. Annie Curtis
belonged to the generation of Boston women whose formal education extended only through
high school. Learning continued, however, in frequent attendance in the lyceum
lectures of the day and public lectures given at Harvard. Her father was a founder
of the Boston Atheneum. She was related to Charles Eliot, president of
Harvard; George Ticknor, Harvard's first professor of modern languages; and to Anna
Eliot Ticknor, founder of Society to Encourage Studies at Home, the forerunner of the
Harvard Annex and Radcliffe College.
On December 9, 1880 she married Seth Low, the half brother of
her sister's husband, at Trinity Church Boston; they had no children. A wealthy Brooklyn merchant and reform politician,
Seth Low was, like his wife, descended from New England Unitarians. His grandfather,
the elder Seth Low, migrated to Brooklyn in the early nineteenth century; he and his son
Abiel Abbot became prominent shippers and public servants. Seth Low grew up in
comfort and attended Columbia, where he led his class and graduated in 1870.
President F. A. P. Barnard called him "the first scholar in college and the most
manly young man we have had here for many years." After college, he joined the
Episcopal Church, went into the family shipping business, became active in alumni
fund-raising. Preferring public service to business, he joined the Columbia Board of
Trustees in 1881, served as mayor of Brooklyn from 1883-1888, president of Columbia
University from 1890 to 1901, and mayor of New York City from 1901-1903. As mayor of
Brooklyn he integrated the public schools and made textbooks free to all, applied civil
service principles in the hiring of teachers, established a normal school, invested
heavily in new schools, and expanded and modernized the police, fire, and sanitation
departments.
Annie Low shared her
husband's commitment to political reform and education. According to her nephew,
Benjamin R. Low, she was a "woman of rare mind, poise and sagacity," who gave
her husband, "without stint and with complete self-effacement, her constant and
devoted sympathy, companionship and advice." A member of the Barnard
College Board of Trustees during her husband’s tenure as president of Columbia, she
sat on both the Finance Committee and the Academic Committee of the Board. She was also a member of the New York chapter of
the Daughters of the American Revolution (then an organization committed to social reform)
and probably played a role in the organization’s making available to Barnard the
services of Professor J. F. Jameson as a lecturer in American history before
Columbia was able to supply an instructor. Barnard
students so appreciated her efforts on their behalf that in 1894 they dedicated their
first publication, The Barnard Annual (forerunner to the Mortarboard) to
her.
Annie Low’s greatest contribution to
Barnard was in helping expand its educational offerings.
Founded in 1889 on the model of the Radcliffe “Annex” to Harvard
University, Barnard was required by its constitution to provide the same curriculum
offered at Columbia and to hire only Columbia professors and instructors. But within a
year, Barnard’s needs had outstripped Columbia’s faculty resources. Seth Low sought to alleviate the strain by opening
Columbia courses to Barnard students, but he encountered stiff opposition, especially from
the Dean of the Faculty of Political Science, John W. Burgess. In frustration the Lows concocted an elaborate
scheme.
In 1895 Annie Low made an anonymous gift to
the Barnard Trustees of $12,000 a year for three years, and the Barnard Trustees, in turn,
offered the money to Columbia to pay the salaries of three new professors. Seth Low, for his part, persuaded the Columbia
faculty to guarantee to Barnard the teaching services of these professors or an equivalent
number of hours from other Columbia faculty. The
Low’s secret gift allowed Columbia to gain the services of three of the
country’s leading scholars, James Harvey Robinson in history, John Bates Clark in
economics, and Frank Nelson Cole in mathematics, but Barnard continued to encounter severe
difficulties in staffing its courses. Therefore,
in 1900 the Barnard and Columbia Boards of Trustees entered into an Intercorporate
Agreement, under which Barnard gained the right to hire its own faculty and to design its
own curriculum. Following the agreement,
Professors Robinson, Clark, and Cole, along with eight other Columbia professors, became
the nucleus of Barnard’s new faculty.
[Annie Curtis Low left a few records, mostly financial papers for the
years after 1915, in the Seth Low Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division of the
Columbia Library. The story of her anonymous
gift to Barnard is pieced together from the Papers of Seth Low, Emily Smith Putnam, and
John W. Burgess in Columbiana and the Rare Books and Manuscript Library, as well as her
obituary in The New York Times on April 2, 1929.]
ROSALIND
ROSENBERG |
