Slavery and the University

Histories and Legacies

Leslie Harris, James Campbell, Alfred Brophy

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780820354446
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Geschichte der Pädagogik

Slavery and the University is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.

The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery's influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.

PART ONE

Proslavery and Antislavery Thought and Action

CHAPTER ONE

“Sons from the Southward & Some from the West Indies”

The Academy and Slavery in Revolutionary America

Craig Steven Wilder

I learn from Messrs [James] Madison & [Caleb] Wallace how much I am indebted to you for your favourable Opinions & Friendship[,] the Continuance of which I will do [my] best to deserve.

PRESIDENT JOHN WITHERSPOON, PRINCETON,
TO COLONEL HENRY LEE, VIRGINIA, 1770

“Give us a merchant acquainted with trade!” workingmen in Bristol, England, shouted in support of Henry Cruger Jr. during a special election to fill a vacant seat in Parliament. Five years into a costly war between Britain and its North American colonies, many Bristol citizens were tying their political and economic futures to a colonial slave trader. Slavers and planters had become symbols of prosperity in Britain and America. Henry Cruger Jr. lost that 1781 election but won the Bristol mayoralty later that year. He reclaimed a seat in the House of Commons shortly after the war when the kingdom’s economy was even more flaccid. The Cruger commercial network extended throughout the Atlantic world: from New York to Britain, Jamaica, Saint Croix, Curaçao, and the West African coast. Cruger ships brought enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and the North American mainland, supplied the West Indian and southern plantations, carried the products of enslaved labor to Europe, and transported European goods to the colonies. Cruger had studied in New York City at King’s College, where his father and uncle were founding trustees. In 1739 his grandfather became mayor of New York, and his uncle claimed the mayoralty in 1757. Slave traders, planters, and land barons underwrote the institutional development of the colonies. The elite established schools, libraries, churches, and hospitals and combined to govern these new institutions. Colonial academies were born in the slave economy, and that same economy funded the expansion of the educational infrastructure in the early years of the United States.¹

Although established, sponsored, and, to differing degrees, governed by Christian denominations—Congregational, Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, Methodist, Catholic, and Lutheran—early colleges and academies were poorly supported. The governors of Harvard (founded 1636) exploited the dense commercial networks that linked New England, the South, and the British Caribbean. Boston was second only to London as a destination for Barbadians. New England ships circled in and out of the West Indies, where successive Harvard administrations campaigned for donations and solicited students. While in port at Bridgetown, Barbados, in 1709, the Harvard graduate Thomas Prince logged the continual arrival of ships from the northern colonies, particularly Newport, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.²

Colonial North America was a hostile environment for schools. In 1718 the trustees of the Collegiate School (founded 1701) in New Haven, Connecticut, received a donation from the Welsh merchant Elihu Yale: four hundred books, some cash, and a painting of George I. The board recognized the gift by renaming the college for Yale. In 1722 the governors built a house for the rector—the more ministerial term used before the trustees established a presidency—by taking subscriptions, selling lands, and getting the General Assembly of Connecticut to tax rum imported from the West Indies. A year later, the Yale board bestowed a medical degree upon Daniel Turner, a respectable guild-licensed surgeon in London who lacked the academic credentials to join the Royal College of Physicians. It was the first medical degree ever granted in North America. Turner sent twenty-five books and a brief letter outlining his qualifications to New Haven, and at the September commencement the trustees awarded him in absentia an honorary doctorate in medicine. Yale had no medical school and no science faculty. The Royal College declined to recognize Turner’s colonial credentials.³

The actions of Yale’s trustees were not unusual. From the establishment of Jamestown through the Civil War, Americans began several hundred academies, but 80 percent of them failed. “Small and unknown as we are in respects of the great and famous universities w[hi]ch adorn the Kingdomes of Great Britain,” the trustees of Harvard wrote to the embattled King George I before describing their institution as “yo[u]r Maj[es]ty[’]s Loyal and Humble College in America.” Governors had little choice but to forge or affirm such ties. For most of its first hundred years, Harvard did not have a single professor but instead relied upon tutors for instruction. The presidents of colonial colleges lived like itinerants, spending much of the year journeying from town to town and province to province, by horseback and in rough coaches, hats in hands. They delivered sermons and academic addresses in churches and local associations, frequently publishing these lectures to raise a bit more money for their schools.⁴

Historian Frederick Rudolph neatly captured the hand-to-mouth realities of the early academy: “Often when a college had a building, it had no students. If it had students, frequently it had no building. If it had either, then perhaps it had no money, perhaps no professors; if professors, then no president[;] if a president, then no professors.” In 1724 the Reverend Hugh Jones complained that William and Mary (founded 1691) had a seminary without a chapel, a college without scholarships, a library without books, all under a “President without a fix’d Salary till of late.” Seeking to solve his financial woes, President James Blair unsuccessfully promoted Virginia as a site for servicing and building ships for slave traders in Bristol, England.⁵

Higher education in the colonies ascended as the Atlantic slave trade peaked. In the decades before the Revolution, slaving families like the Crugers transformed British North America. In the quarter century between 1745 and 1769, ministers, merchants, and land speculators organized seven new colleges in the British colonies: Codrington College in Barbados in 1745; the College of New Jersey, now known as Princeton, in 1746; King’s College (Columbia) in 1754; the College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania) in 1755; the College of Rhode Island (Brown) in 1764; Queen’s College (Rutgers) in 1766; and Dartmouth College in 1769. More schools also meant greater competition for money, including money linked, directly and indirectly, to the slave economy.

A coincidence of religious and economic developments excited this academic revolution. The First Great Awakening, the spiritual revival in the first half of the eighteenth century, brought attempts to institutionalize new theologies and religious practices. The wave of college building responded to these denominational rivalries: Presbyterians in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; Anglicans in Barbados, New York, and Pennsylvania; Baptists in Rhode Island; Reformed Dutch in New Jersey and New York; and Congregationalists in New Hampshire.⁶ Families like the Crugers of New York, the Livingstons in New Jersey and New York, the Allens of Philadelphia, the Browns in Rhode Island, and the Lees of Virginia became the new patrons of colonial education. This generosity facilitated their political rise and allowed them simultaneously to meet the expectations of their faiths and their economic positions.

Colonists also established preparatory schools, formal and informal, to feed the new colleges. College-bound boys frequently studied privately with ministers and tutors. Elisha Williams, a 1711 Harvard graduate who “attained the dignity of land and slaves” through his marriage to Eunice Chester, writes his biographer, kept a school at Wethersfield, Connecticut. In September 1725 Williams became the rector of Yale, where he and a single tutor constituted the faculty. In 1743 the Reverend Francis Alison began New-Ark Academy (now the University of Delaware) in his home to counter New Light theology in the Mid-Atlantic. The evangelicals countered with “log colleges,” ephemeral frontier schools, to train young men for the college in Princeton. The Jesuits (the Society of Jesus) had a preparatory school at their secluded slave plantation at Bohemia Manor, Maryland, where they educated Catholic boys away from the hostile gaze of the Protestant majority. Wealthier Catholic families then sent their sons to finish their educations in Europe. The cousins Charles Carroll of Carrollton, an affluent slaveholder and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and John Carroll, a slave owner and the first Catholic bishop in the United States, had both studied at Bohemia. In 1774, on the eve of the American Revolution, the Reverend Alexander MacWhorter—who trained at New-Ark Academy in Delaware, graduated from the College of New Jersey, and received a doctorate from Yale—helped found Newark Academy.⁷

In the upper Mid-Atlantic and New England, families whose incomes came from the slave trade and from provisioning the southern and Caribbean plantations financed the new schools, while in the lower Mid-Atlantic, the South, and the British West Indies, plantation families largely sponsored education. However, the integration of these slave economies increased intercolonial social contacts and philanthropy.

The officers and trustees of northern schools knew that wealthy clients sat at the other end of the trade routes that brought fish, meat, produce, horses, wood, candles, rope, cloth, and human beings to the southern and Caribbean plantations. “Whereas the Drafts of several Letters have been prepared to be Transmitted to the several West India Islands by a committee,” began the minutes of the October 1759 meeting of the trustees of King’s College, where the board, which largely comprised merchants, launched its first Caribbean fund-raising campaign before the college had a building. Hezekiah Smith, a College of Rhode Island trustee, headed south to solicit money from the Baptist communions in the plantations, particularly South Carolina. Shortly after the Scottish minister John Witherspoon took the helm of the floundering College of New Jersey, he went to New York and New England to meet the most prominent families and then left for a tour of the South. Upon his return, Reverend Witherspoon used his new connections to bring Colonel Henry Lee’s son, Harry Jr., from Virginia to Princeton. In 1770 the Reverend James Caldwell raised £700 in South Carolina for the Princeton college. Two years later, President Witherspoon authored a communiqué to the British West Indies, welcoming donations and cataloging the benefits of educating sons in New Jersey. That same year, Dr. Hugh Williamson traveled to the West Indies on behalf of New-Ark Academy.⁸

The wealth of traders, planters, and landowners raised the prospects of American academies and colleges. New York’s merchants designed a grand campus for King’s College to display their status and their city’s growing prestige. Their vision for the college differed significantly from that of the founding president, Samuel Johnson, who called his board a gang of dullards who elevated the aesthetic over the academic. “Our Building (now finished) has cost so much, that I see not how we shall have stock enough to provide sufficient salaries,” Reverend Johnson complained to the archbishop of Canterbury only four years after the college received its charter. Faced with escalating costs, President Johnson protested that he had done “all that I can do to save it” and begged Providence to protect his college from its trustees.⁹

The wealth generated in Atlantic slavery swelled the confidence of many boards and officers. When it opened, Nassau Hall, the nucleus of the College of New Jersey in Princeton, was the largest building in British America, a monument to its merchant benefactors. It stood three stories, could house nearly 150 students, and included a library, chapel, dining halls, and meeting rooms. The Reverend Eleazar Wheelock planned Dartmouth Hall as the focal point of his campus, located on a small hill and topped by cupola and weathervane to balance the surrounding terrain. Sometimes college governors referenced British tradition for campus designs, but they as frequently seized the opportunity to make statements about the economic and social importance of the colonies. The trustees of the College of Philadelphia drew upon an emerging vernacular architecture. They even cu...