“All influence opposit to divine perverts human nature into brutality from infancy into distant years,” Horton writes, “while spiritual influence elevates man into an angelic sphere.” (The library has since digitized the document and posted it online.)

Why the essay was written, and how Harrisse acquired it, is unclear. But the other documents in the scrapbook suggest it may have had some relationship — whether symbolic, or actual — to complex politics on campus.

First, there are letters and other material relating to problems that Harrisse, a French-Jewish immigrant who arrived in Chapel Hill in 1853, was having with his students, mostly the sons of wealthy planters, who he said threw acorns at the blackboard when he turned his back, and further harassed him by tying up a goat in his classroom and even his bedroom.

“He wanted the administration to discipline them, but they wouldn’t,” Mr. Senchyne said.

Harrisse also collected newspaper articles relating to the far more prominent troubles of another professor, Benjamin Hedrick, who caused a furor in 1856 when he publicly announced his support for John C. Frémont, the antislavery Republican candidate for president. The ensuing “black Republican” controversy, as it was known, became national news, and many in North Carolina called for Hedrick’s firing, on the grounds that he was poisoning student minds by overtly opposing slavery.

Harrisse, who, like Hedrick, was forced out of the university, “is clearly up to something with the placement of these texts,” Mr. Senchyne said.

“Harrisse has too little influence, and can’t control his classroom,” he said. “Hedrick is thought to have too much, and is feared by people in power. And then, in the middle of all that, you have Horton’s essay on individual influence.”