Stephen Minot Weld Jr.

Stephen Minot Weld Jr. (January 4, 1842 – March 16, 1920), a member of Boston's illustrious Weld Family, was a horticulturalist and much-decorated United States Army officer of the American Civil War.

Weld prepared for higher education at the Jamaica Plain boarding school mastered by his father, Stephen Minot Weld. Weld was an abstemious young man who claimed:

"I did not touch a drop of wine or liquor all through my college career until about a month before I graduated, nor did I smoke until then.."

Once he arrived at Harvard College, however, Weld had little love of that institution's authority figures and wrote:

"The whole spirit between the Faculty and the students was one of war...we looked on the Faculty as our oppressors, and we were--a great many of us--up to every devilment that we could think of, to trouble and bother them....The College then was more in the nature of a boarding-school."

Stephen Minot Weld's older cousin George Walker Weld (for whom Weld Boathouse is named) was at Harvard the same time as Stephen and the pair sometimes cooperated in their mischief.

Weld was a first-year student at Harvard Law School when the war broke out and he was eager to join the action. Although Weld soon distinguished himself in this war which put an end to slavery in the United States, he was no abolitionist and had:

"little liking for those he considered antislavery zealots...when abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner made an appearance at the Harvard class day exercises in 1860, Weld was a member of the graduating class that booed and hissed him. Like most conservative upper-class New Englanders, Weld disliked slavery, but he had no special sympathy for the sufferings of blacks; he felt that, if left alone, the South's 'peculiar institution' would die out of its own accord."

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