Ebony and Ivy

by Craig Steven Wilder

  THE TRUE GOD AND CHURCH

  In 1636 the Massachusetts General Court chartered a “colledge” in Newtown (Cambridge) and three years later named it in honor of John Harvard, a young minister at the First Church in Charlestown. In 1638 Rev. Harvard died of tuberculosis, leaving half his estate, about £780, and a library of more than two hundred books to further the training of the ministry. He was the son of two modest Puritans: Robert Harvard and Katherine Rogers of Southwark, London. Katherine Rogers was the daughter of a Stratford-on-Avon cattle merchant and alderman, and Robert Harvard was a butcher and tavern owner. In 1627 John Harvard had entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees before leaving with Ann Sadler, his wife, for Massachusetts. Several Emmanuel graduates, including Thomas Shepard and Richard Saltonstall, were founders of the colonial school.16

  Shortly after the establishment of Harvard, Puritan ministers began sending missives to England that chronicled the spread of the Gospel in America. New England’s First Fruits, the initial pamphlet, identified the nascent college as a symbol of Christianity’s success. Readers learned that Puritan ministers were preaching to the Indians, Native people were embracing the true God, and the English were winning the Indians’ affection and esteem by treating them “fairly and courteously, with loving termes, good looks and kind salutes.” Known as “Eliot Tracts”—for the missionary John Eliot—these communications were written as the colonists achieved military dominance during the four decades between the Pequot Massacre in 1637 and King Philip’s War in 1675. They included passionate vignettes of Indians accepting Christianity, coming to fear eternal damnation, seeking protection from disease and death by adopting the colonists’ religion, and advertising their conversion by mimicking English customs and attire.17

  British colonists did not blush over the strategic benefits of spreading their faith. Depopulation and political crises within the Indian nations emboldened the English. Mortality rates among the seaboard communities reached as high as 90 percent. “God and Jesus Christ, God and Jesus Christ help me,” Nishohkou’s two-year-old child screamed before dying from the bloody flux (severe dysentery) that also had stricken his mother and siblings. “Father, I am going to God,” Nishohkou’s three-year-old said before expiring. Rev. Eliot reported that Nishohkou made a confession of faith. “That Winter the Pox came, and almost all our kindred died,” Ponampam recalled of the events that caused his mother to take him at eight years of age and move closer to the colonists. The government of God “is now beginning to be set up where it never was before,” the Reverend Richard Mather promised his British readers. “The greatest parte of them are swept awaye by the small poxe, which still continues among them,” a grateful Governor John Winthrop wrote of the epidemics. “God hathe hereby cleared our title to this place.” He estimated that fewer than fifty Indians remained in the immediate vicinity of the colony, and added that these remaining people had been penned and subjugated.18

  Puritan expansion also benefited from a new institution: a missionary company vested with extraordinary privileges and authority. In 1649 Parliament created the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England. The mission of the “New England Company” was to accelerate the Christianization of the North American Indians, and it served as a model for the later Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1701) and the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (1709).19

  It was a momentous year for Protestants. In 1649 the defeated and dethroned King Charles I was tried and executed, and Parliament dispatched the warrior Puritan Oliver Cromwell to slaughter the Irish into submission. New England was a bastion of support for Cromwell, his army, and the short-lived English republic, and, as Lord Protector of the British Commonwealth, Cromwell hatched failed plans to seed Ireland and Jamaica with sympathetic and sturdy spiritual radicals from Massachusetts. The New England Company could hold and solicit funds, establish schools, and supply teachers and ministers. British subjects eagerly endowed the corporation through their wills, with rents from lands, and with yearly subscriptions. British colonists added to the company’s treasury, which paid for everything from the tuition and board of Indian students to the printing presses that ran off thousands of copies of the Reverend John Eliot’s Algonquian Bible, or “ye Indian Bible,” the Algonquian catechism, and other primers and literature. Puritan divines sent testimonials on the advance of faith in America, and anyone in London could examine accounts of the corporation’s revenues and expenditures.20

  John Eliot’s Algonquian translation of the Bible, published in 1663

  SOURCE: Massachusetts Historical Society

  A wave of Christian ministers, first from British universities and then from Harvard, evangelized Native communities. Harvard president Henry Dunster, an experienced missionary, encouraged Indian education, augmented the charter to include the evangelization of Native people, and broke ground for a new school. The mission included “the education of the English & Indian Youth of this Country in knowledge: and godliness.” In 1655 his successor, Charles Chauncy, opened the Indian College, the first brick structure on Harvard Yard, at a cost of nearly £400. The two-story building sat next to Old College and across from Goffe College—each new building was designated “college”—which neighbored the president’s house. It had study chambers, halls, and rooms for twenty students. Harvard offered free education to Indians and encouraged English students to learn Algonquian.21

  In defense of the Indian College, Rev. Chauncy recalled the scholarly tradition of the church. He berated colonists who opposed schools and cultivated an ignorance that encouraged sin. Among the greatest failures of the New Englanders was the corruption of Native peoples, to whom Christians had traded guns and liquor with deadly consequences, he charged. A few years later the president reported the progress of two young Indian boys, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck and Joel Iacoomis, who were attending the grammar school in Cambridge and whom Chauncy personally examined in Latin. In 1665 Cheeshahteaumuck graduated from Harvard, its first and only Indian graduate during the colonial period.22

  In New England and Virginia, the English brought Indian children into schools to learn the ways of the Christian God and to swear loyalty to the English and their government. When the idea of removing children met cool receptions, they brought whole Native families into English villages. The Massachusetts General Court offered Indian parents a new coat every year that their child apprenticed in a Christian house. Rev. Eliot promoted these relocations to attack beliefs and break up traditions that acted as barriers to Christianization or offended English sensibilities. “Divers of the Indians Children, Boyes and Girles we have received into our houses,” the 1643 report declared, “who are long since civilized, and in subjection to us.” From 1651 to 1674, Eliot organized fourteen “praying towns”—communities of converted Indians, governed internally but under English supervision—where thousands of Native people lived apart from their unredeemed clans.23

  The vanished Indian College at Harvard, as drawn in 1936 for Samuel Eliot

  Morison’s Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century

  SOURCE: Harvard University Press

  The year that the Indian College opened, Harvard’s governors revised the by-laws and regulations. Students had to wear their gowns or cloaks whenever they left their rooms, and their grooming and comportment had to be consistent with English custom for learned men. At Harvard and William and Mary, Native students also dressed in English clothes, marking their cultural submission. The English sought to correct Indians’ appearance, speech, and beliefs. Master of the Latin school in Roxbury, Eliot prepared the most promising Indian youth in English, Latin, and Greek. Admission to Harvard required the ability to “make & speake or write true Latin in prose” and proof that one was “Competently grounded in the Greeke Language.” The faculty forbade all Harvard boys from speaking English even in casual exchanges, a regulation that was freely and routinely violated. Wha
t was burdensome to English students proved transformative to Native boys.24

  Indians at the grammar level studied in English at both Harvard and the College of William and Mary. Those who entered the advanced course were required to think and speak in the language of imperial Europe. As the language of diplomacy, theology, philosophy, and law, Latin had served as a medium of power and authority in Europe. The hegemonic language of the Europeans displaced Native languages and their attendant values and ideas. Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck and Joel Iacoomis both forwarded Latin addresses to the honoratissimi benefactores of the New England Company with independent confirmations of their proficiency in classical languages. An Indian named Eleazar in the class of 1679 left a Latin poem eulogizing the Reverend Thomas Thacher, pastor of Old South Church in Boston. Eleazar died before graduation. A member of the class of 1716, Benjamin Larnel earned praise for his Latin and Greek poetry. He too died before graduating. The English immersed Native students in Christian history, its literatures, leaders, and governing values.25 Trained in colonial schools and colleges, Native youth returned to Indian villages as exemplars of the benefits of English culture, or they separated themselves from Indian communities to live among the colonists.

  “The Lord delegated you to be our patrons … so that you may perform the work of bringing blessings to us pagans,” reads Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck’s Latin oration. “We were naked in our souls as well as in our bodies, we were aliens from all humanity.” Harvard’s Indian students were, in Cheeshahteaumuck’s words, “instruments to spread and propagate the gospel among our kin and neighbours, so that they also may know the Lord and Christ.” The Puritans were, by this logic, mere media of providence—the unfolding will of God. At the outbreak of King Philip’s War, Harvard president Increase Mather took a moment to catalogue the religious missions to indigenous peoples in the Americas to prove the Puritans’ faithful execution of God’s directives.26

  SERVUS COLLEGII

  African slavery and the slave trade subsidized the college and the colony. In 1636, the year Harvard was founded, a group of merchants at nearby Marblehead (Naumkeag)—where residents had unsuccessfully maneuvered to house the college—built and outfitted a small ship and named it Desire. The following summer, Desire became the first slaver to depart from the British North American mainland. Under John Winthrop’s instructions, Captain William Pierce sold seventeen Pequot War captives into bondage at Providence Island in the Caribbean in exchange for cotton, tobacco, salt, and enslaved Africans. The sale of prisoners from hostile nations became policy in Boston and Plymouth, a practice that also brought hundreds of enslaved black people into the colonies.27

  The birth of slavery in New England was also the dawn of slavery at Harvard. Desire “returned from the West Indies after seven months,” Winthrop noted in February 1638, and “brought some cotton, and tobacco, and negroes.” It is not clear if the “Moor” who served Harvard’s earliest students came to Massachusetts in the belly of Desire, but he remains the first enslaved black person documented in the colony, and his life more tightly braids the genesis of slavery in New England into the founding of the college. Nathaniel Eaton, the first instructor and schoolmaster, owned this man. Master Eaton had studied at Trinity, Cambridge University, and the Harvard trustees empowered him to design the curriculum and supervise the social lives of the students. Using £400 from the legislature and Rev. Harvard’s bequest, Eaton erected a hall, began cultivating the grounds, and gathered the first class, which, Winthrop boasted, included “the sons of gentlemen and others of best note in the country.” The boys took their meals from Mistress Eaton and paid the Eatons for room and board. A six-foot fence surrounded the college yard to help the Eatons control the movements of the students.28

  The governors’ faith in Master Easton was poorly repaid. Nathaniel Eaton was a volatile man who tussled with his own boarders and instructed the students by mixing whippings into lessons. Students complained that they were regularly and severely beaten, their meals were either inedible or insufficient, the rooms were not cleaned, and the servants were recalcitrant and undisciplined. One student, Samuel Hough, returned to his room to find the Moor sleeping in his bed, and his classmates compared their plights to that of the slave. Some of the boys accused the Eatons of extorting money for services such as laundering. Rotting fish had been served, meat was scarce and foul when available, beer had been denied for extended periods, and on one occasion their “hasty pudding,” or porridge, had been tainted with animal excrement. In 1639 the General Court tried Master Eaton and levied fines against him. The overseers fired him and closed the college for reorganization.29

  When Harvard reopened, the colony had more numerous links to Atlantic slavery. After the destruction of the Henrico college Patrick Copland had settled in Bermuda, where he began trading with New England. In the aftermath of the Pequot War, Governor Winthrop documented the sale of hundreds of women and children, a dozen of whom were traded to Copland. The minister recruited British students from the West Indian plantations for Winthrop, making Harvard the first in a long line of North American schools to target wealthy planters as a source of enrollments and income.30

  “Our pinnaces had very good receipts in the West Indies,” the governor informed his son John. Merchants linked New England to the Caribbean and West Africa, where human beings were prime goods. After graduating in Harvard’s first class, George Downing, Governor Winthrop’s nephew, spent months preaching to the English in Barbados, Antigua, Santa Cruz, Nevis, and St. Christopher, where he measured demand for New England commodities and gathered advice on establishing slavery in the Puritan colonies. He explained that newcomers used English indentured servants until they could afford “to procure Negroes (the life of this place).” The plantations were so profitable that an enslaved African paid for himself or herself after only eighteen months. The Puritans quickly adopted slaveholding. In February 1641 “a negro maid” owned by Israel Stoughton—a founder and early benefactor of Harvard—received baptism and admission to the Dorchester church. “You may also own Negroes and Negresses,” observed a Huguenot visitor in 1687; “there is not a House in Boston, however small may be its Means, that has not one or two. There are those that have five or six, and all make a good Living.”31

  New England and its college were producing scores of young men who coveted futures in the British Caribbean as planters and traders. “If you go to Barbados, you will see a flourishing Island, many able men,” Downing enviously reported. “I believe they have bought this year no lesse than a thousand negroes.” By the end of the century enslaved black people outnumbered white colonists almost three to one in Barbados and the island had become England’s most valuable possession in the Americas. Winthrop’s son Henry went to Barbados. His son Samuel relocated to Antigua. Stoughton’s son died during a failed voyage to Barbados. Downing returned to England, where he counseled James, Duke of York, on the conquest of New Netherland, and was knighted for his service to the crown.32

  George Downing informed his cousin John Winthrop Jr. that fish and meat were the “certainest commodityes” to sell in the Caribbean. Exactly a century later, Jeremiah Dummer, a Harvard graduate and patron of Yale College, credited New England for the profitability of West Indian sugar in Europe and for helping the British Caribbean hold off French and Dutch competitors. Wheat, corn, horses, timber, and staves flowed south from New England, which also supplied “Barrel Pork, Mack[e]rel, and refuse Cod-Fish for their Negroes.” West Indian planters could reserve their laborers and lands for sugar production. Hundreds of ships left New England for the southern and Caribbean colonies, particularly Barbados, with virtually everything those colonies needed, an economic historian concludes, including low-quality fish for “the poor Guinea negroes whom the Royal African Company was pouring into the Spanish sugar Islands.”33

  As the population of enslaved black people grew, New Englanders crafted laws to regulate the unfree. Massachusetts required the whipping of slaves found on the stre
ets at night or away from their owners’ homes without consent, and moved to keep cash and arms out of the hands of black servants. No enslaved person could carry a stick or other potential weapon. The Boston selectmen maintained a census of free black men, who were required to maintain the roads and do other unpaid labor for the town. Curfews for enslaved people were imposed in Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island; the last of these extended its law to include free black people. The punishment for violators was public flogging. Governments penalized manumissions to limit the growth of the free black population. The colonists burned enslaved people at the stake, hanged them, and sold them out of the region for actions deemed threatening. In a single term in 1681, a Massachusetts court sentenced Maria and Jack, two enslaved black people, to death for two separate cases of arson. Maria was burned—the first person punished in this manner—and Jack was hanged. The judges ordered that Jack’s corpse be tossed into the fire with Maria. In 1704 John Campbell, a Scottish immigrant, began publishing the Boston News-Letter, which provides a record of the rise of slavery in the colony. Not only merchants but carpenters, midwives, booksellers, and butchers were buying and selling Africans.34

  New Englanders were partners in the rise of Atlantic slavery. Puritan merchants carried food, timber, animals, and other supplies to the expanding markets of the English, French, Spanish, and Dutch colonies. Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison argued that the West Indies rescued New England. Puritans also supplied the Carolinas and Virginia and brought the products of slave labor and other materials back to New England, where they built new ships and launched new ventures. New Englanders entered the Atlantic slave economy as shippers, insurers, manufacturers, and investors. For two centuries the Caribbean and southern markets buoyed the New England economy, and ships from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire filled West Indian ports.35