by Duffy Oakley
As my final year living in Breckinridge Hall starts to come to a close, I might be forgiven for questioning why the housing gods always decide to curse me (having condemned me to Nasty Nev my first year). But instead, I am questioning why anyone at all lives in Breck. You might be expecting me to go into a litany of oft-repeated complaints about RLO, mold, the HVAC system, freezing cold showers, the two washing machines for three floors of people, the seemingly constant fire alarms or even Breck’s supposed hauntedness. But my qualms are less with the building itself and more with the person it’s named for.
The Breckinridge family was one of the most prominent plantation-owning families in Kentucky during the nineteenth century, with numerous state and federal officeholders, including one Vice President of the United States. But the namesake of Breck is much lesser known: Robert Jefferson Breckinridge.
Although this Breckinridge was also a politician, serving in the state legislature from 1825 to 1830, he devoted most of his life to religion and education. Due to his support for the conservative theological faction in the Old School-New School controversy, he was elected as a leader of the national Presbyterian Church in 1841, but he remained controversial both within his own denomination and outside of it. He was a prolific writer of anti-Catholic articles, to the point of being charged for libel due to his published attacks on a Catholic individual, which ultimately resulted in a hung trial. Like John Marshall Harlan, he was also a member of the nativist, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party during its brief existence.
Beginning in 1847, Breckinridge served six years as Superintendent of Public Instruction in Kentucky and is credited by some as the “father of public schools” in the state due to his strengthening of the fledgling school system at the time. However, other reforms he advocated proved to be less popular, such as parental selection of textbooks, using the Bible as the primary reading material, and increasing his own salary. He resigned this position to found the Danville Theological Seminary in 1853, which started out in Old Centre before moving to a building in what is now Constitution Square.
The seminary was rocked by troubles stemming from the Civil War, during which the Presbyterian Church split into North and South branches. Breckinridge supported the Union and was an advocate for gradual emancipation despite the fact that by 1860 he himself owned 37 slaves at his family’s large plantation. This stance alienated not only many prospective students at the seminary but also his own family, which like many Kentucky families was split between Union loyalists and Confederate rebels. (His nephew, the former Vice President John C. Breckinridge, became a Confederate general and was appointed by Jefferson Davis as the Confederacy’s Secretary of War in 1865.)
Breckinridge also began to experience ailing health during this turbulent time for the seminary and the country, ultimately retiring from teaching in 1869 and passing away in 1871. Twenty years later, Breckinridge Hall was constructed on Centre College’s campus as a dormitory for the seminary. By the 1890s, however, the seminary was dwindling, and much of the building’s space went unused. In 1901, the dormitory officially became part of Centre College when the Danville Theological Seminary merged into its Louisville counterpart. To this day, the dorm still bears the name of the seminary’s former professor, and a small, unremarkable plaque next to the first floor lounge recounts this history, although few people have likely ever bothered to stop and read it.
My question, then, is why do we need to continue honoring a slaveowning planter who never even attended or worked at Centre itself? Much like John Marshall Harlan, he was a xenophobic, nativist Know-Nothing, and in Breckinridge’s case, he publicly aired his naked intolerance for religious difference. Some may justify Breckinridge Hall’s name by pointing to his support for the Union and gradual emancipation, rationalizing away his shortcomings, like personally owning dozens of slaves and harboring bigoted views about Catholic immigrants, to the historical context of his era. But the argument that “it was a different time” does not hold much water when we have examples of Breckinridge’s contemporaries, including Danville’s own James G. Birney, rejecting the institution of slavery altogether by freeing their own slaves and advocating for the total and immediate emancipation of all enslaved people.
It is clearly not enough to think the right things in the abstract while actively doing harm to others and supporting entrenched institutions of inequality with your own actions. But Centre’s choice to continue honoring Breckinridge implicitly offers him up as a model to Centre students. Our college should actually live up to its mission of “prepar[ing] students for lives of learning, leadership, and service” and put into practice its stated belief that “our values are not static; they reflect our ongoing commitment to continuously evolve to meet the challenges of our changing campus and a changing world.” In the year 2026, we should not be preparing students to be leaders following the example of slaveowning xenophobes. We must instead find ways to truly live out our values and inculcate in our students an understanding of the urgent necessity to resist inequality and promote social justice in all that we do.