Ebony and Ivy

by Craig Steven Wilder

  As the Wolf approached the Gold Coast, Dr. Chancellor’s fears overwhelmed him. “I am now got into a most shocking part of the world,” he entered in his diary upon seeing Africa. “Merciless wretches” were hiding on shore, and the sailors were certain that if they left the ship they would “be immediately cut up, broil’d on the coals, and devour’d.” The Africans, the surgeon added, “often eat their own children,” and all disputes on shore ended in one person digesting another. Members of the crew took turns hiding with arms belowdecks to protect against an attack.32

  Merchants packed their human cargoes tightly into the

  holds of slave ships. Diagram from 1808

  SOURCE: The Granger Collection

  Merchants increased cargoes by laying enslaved people on their sides, chest to back, with little more than a couple of feet of vertical space. Makeshift platforms were built between the floor and deck to expand capacity. Stripped nude to make them easier to wash down and secure, shackled in pairs, and often branded for identification, these prisoners spent long periods in rat- and insect-infested bowels of ships, interrupted only by a regimen of feedings, airings, and exercise under threat of whips, blades, and guns. A ship’s surgeon protested that the intolerable stench and heat during one voyage limited his visits belowdecks, where the floor was so covered in blood and excrement that “it resembled a slaughterhouse.” While in Britain training to fill a chemistry professorship at Yale, Benjamin Silliman observed conditions that “equally disgust decency and shock humanity” when a friend took him on a tour of a Guinea ship docked in Liverpool. “It was just finished, and had not then been employed,” he recalled, “the narrow cells and the chains, which were as yet unstained with blood … were all ready for the victims.” Even that brief glimpse into a new ship horrified this son of a slave-owning family. “There will be a day when these things shall be told in heaven!” he predicted.33

  Dr. Chancellor complained bitterly about the Wolf. Water flowed freely into the ship during storms, forcing the crew to stand ankle deep belowdecks or risk being swept into the ocean. “These sorts of vessels are terrible things to have slaves in, especially so great a number sick & none but myself to look after them,” Chancellor complained. By May 1750 the three dozen people chained belowdecks, many of them small children, were ill. The holds for the Africans were so cramped and their detention so prolonged that several could not walk without assistance. Chancellor recorded their suffering and his anxieties as the enterprise crumbled. “I am in the very height of my miserys,” he admitted during the summer, “not only from the deaths of the slaves, but the reflection, that by the Capt[ain] is cast on me on that acc[oun]t.”34

  Lingering doubts about their ability to control enslaved people had led white northerners to demand children, whom they believed to be less rebellious and more susceptible to Christian instruction. “For this market they must be young[,] the younger the better if not quite Children, those advanced in years will never do,” the merchant and King’s College trustee John Watts advised Gedney Clarke in 1762. “I should imagine a Cargo of them not exceeding thirty [in total] might turn out at fifty pounds a head gross Sales.” A year earlier John and Susanna Wheatley had gone aboard Phillis at the Long Wharf in Boston and purchased a sickly girl who was covering herself with a piece of old carpet. Owning several older black people, the Wheatleys were shopping for a child to serve them as they aged. They named her Phillis (Wheatley) in honor of the ship.35

  Before they became the presidents of the College of New Jersey and Yale, respectively, the Connecticut evangelist Jonathan Edwards and the Rhode Island minister Ezra Stiles both purchased African children through the captains of slave ships in Newport. In 1738 the Boston merchant Peter Faneuil empowered Captain Peter Buckley to sell several hogsheads and barrels of fish in Antigua, and use the proceeds to buy a “strait limbed Negro lad … from 12 to fiveteen years” with a docile temperament. “I have lost one of my Negroe boys, who died of a Consumption [tuberculosis],” William Vassall, a Harvard graduate and Boston resident, informed his plantation manager, James Wedderburn, in Jamaica, “& want another in his room very much.” Vassall instructed his overseer to find, purchase, and ship a “sprightly lively healthy young Negroe lad about 14 years old,” who could act as a personal servant and butler, spoke English, and had no bad habits. Governor James Bowdoin, who established the Bowdoin Prize at Harvard and whose namesake endowed Bowdoin College in Maine, authorized a family member to buy a “light-timber’d Negro boy” for his home.36

  On Tuesday evening, May 29, a five-year-old girl succumbed to the conditions on the Wolf. Wednesday morning the surgeon went below and “found a boy dead[,] at noon another, and in the afternoon another.” The doctor believed that his medicines were too potent; he had not expected Captain Wall to take on small children. “This morning early found another of the boys dead,” he recorded the following day, “the sight was shocking and to see likely boys floating over board is a misery to all on board.” On Tuesday, June 5, Dr. Chancellor brought up the corpse of a three-year-old girl. He conducted an autopsy, and “found in her Intestines 7 worms some of them 12 & 13 Inches, roll’d up together in a bundle.” On Saturday a third little girl expired. The new week began with the doctor carrying up a dead girl. Two days later, on June 13, he autopsied a baby and witnessed her “stomach chock’d full” of worms. Two enslaved people were dying each week, most of them children. The fourteenth brought the passing of two small boys, including another child “whom I might call my own,” lamented Chancellor. This boy had ulcerated lungs. On Thursday, June 21, a boy and a girl died. Deaths continued to mount.37

  Little children were primary casualties of Livingston’s investment. “At noon threw over a boy slave who died,” the surgeon casually noted on July 13. This was the second child discarded that month. “I forgot to mention that yesterday to add to many misfortunes we threw over board a child of 3 years,” Chancellor jotted a week later. This little girl had suffered with green flux, white flux, and bloody flux—manifestations of severe dysentery—and measles during her long imprisonment. Dr. Chancellor became more comfortable handling dead children, but the escalating casualties had his emotions swinging between compassion and rage. He twice accused the Africans of murdering each other, and even blamed them for dying—the journey being at “the mercy of vile slaves”—since every lost life prolonged the voyage. August began with Chancellor removing “12 large worms” from the corpse of a baby girl. Three little girls and two other captives died that month. The crew tossed scores of human bodies into the water as the Wolf cruised along the African coast for more than a year.38

  Despite a revolt before they departed for America and the deaths of two imprisoned Africans at sea, Captain Wall piloted the Wolf into New York harbor in May 1751, completing a horrific, but ordinary, slaving voyage. The Livingston network, tying interests in New York, Great Britain, the West Indies, and the African coast, again paid off. According to Dr. Chancellor’s diary, Captain Wall purchased 147 people on the African coast, but Philip Livingston reported only 66 at New York City. Wall claimed seven people as part of his contract. Livingston had killed almost as many people as he traded. He and Wall then quickly put the survivors up for sale.39

  FROM TRADERS TO TRUSTEES

  By 1753 William Livingston, the youngest brother of Philip, was unquestionably the most vocal opponent of the Anglican college that was being planned in New York City. His father, the elder Philip, had sent him to Yale and then to study law. William Livingston had little interest in the bar or the merchant house. He was more of a literary man. He became a prominent advocate of the arts and sciences in New York City and a strident opponent of corruption in the colonial government. He was a founder of the New York Society Library and the Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge. Beginning in 1746 he threw his energies into a plan for a college in New York City. However, the Anglican minority soon began maneuvering for an Episcopal seminary under the leadership of Samuel Johnson, an Anglica
n priest from Connecticut, who would also be installed at Trinity Church. The successful founding of the Presbyterian College of New Jersey had touched a nerve among New York’s Anglicans. Eighteenth-century New Yorkers were as likely to see conspiracies from above as they were to see plots from below. The Anglican grab on the college aggravated deeply rooted fears of the Church of England and the crown’s desire to crush dissent in the colonies. William Livingston led the backlash. He accused the Anglicans of religious tyranny, and they charged that Livingston was manipulating public opinion to protect the Presbyterian college.40

  In 1753 William Smith, a Scottish Anglican educated at King’s College in Aberdeen, saw his proposal for a New York academy wither during this conflict. Benjamin Franklin recruited Smith to help raise the status of his Philadelphia academy. “I am sorry it meets so great opposition,” Elizabeth DeLancey, daughter of Cadwallader Colden, later wrote of the factionalism that continued to jeopardize her husband Peter DeLancey’s hopes for a college.41

  William Livingston’s three-year war against the college diminished the Anglican victory, took a heavy toll on advocates such as Governor James DeLancey, and tarnished the public image of the school before it ever received a student. However, he had been less successful at drawing his merchant brothers to the cause. Philip, John, and Peter Livingston became trustees, sponsors, or benefactors.42

  The division within Livingston Manor is suggestive of a greater social and economic transformation in New York. There was a tension between the sectarian origins of the colonies and the development of an Atlantic commerce, particularly the slave trade, dependent upon intercolonial economic and social relationships. Merchants were, in fact, a visible presence and important faction in the governance of the new school.

  In the charter of King’s College, George II appointed his clerics and public administrators as ex officio trustees: the archbishop of Canterbury, the governor, secretary, and treasurer of New York, the justices of the supreme court, the mayor, and the senior Episcopal, Dutch Reformed, Lutheran, French Protestant, and Presbyterian ministers. The public trustees included slaveholders and slave traders such as Mayor David Holland and Abraham De-Peyster. Perhaps to calm the public, Governor DeLancey, recruited the rest of the board from the city’s commercial leaders: Frederick Philipse, John and Henry Cruger, Paul Richard, Joseph Robinson, John Lawrence, John Watts, Leonard Lispenard, Joseph Reade, Nathaniel Marston, Oliver DeLancey, Henry Beekman, Joseph Haynes, John Livingston, Philip Verplanck, Philip Livingston, and David Clarkson. In the following decades the trustees continued to come from this stratum, including Ludlows, Duanes, Provoosts, and Morrises. William Alexander, a Livingston in-law, and Beverly Robinson, the husband of the merchant princess Susannah Philipse, joined the board along with Charles Ward Apthorpe, whose Elmwood estate in upper Manhattan drew comparisons to the grandeur of ancient Rome.43

  Philip Livingston, a founding benefactor of King’s College

  (Columbia) and Queen’s (Rutgers)

  SOURCE: Brooklyn Historical Society

  King’s was a merchants’ college. In its first two decades it enrolled nearly ninety sons of the commercial class, more children of Atlantic traders than any other college in British North America. Although a fire destroyed many of the treasurer’s reports for colonial New York, the slaving activities of the trustees show through even this damaged and incomplete record. In the month before the execution of the charter, several governors or patrons traded slaves. In September 1754 the sloop Polly docked in Manhattan holding seven enslaved Africans with its other cargo. Two people died during the Polly’s return. This was just a few weeks before Nathaniel Marston, a partial owner of the venture, became a trustee. That same month Philip Livingston’s sloop returned from the African coast, and the following month John Livingston’s ship completed a voyage to Jamaica. In the years before he became a trustee, David Clarkson had partnered in several slaving voyages. Matthew Clarkson, a future trustee, was active in the trade long after the opening of King’s. The number of trustees trading in slaves increased through the 1750s.44

  In May 1755 Governor DeLancey brought the charter—which Attorney General William Kempe, a trustee, had prepared—to Edward Willett’s house to swear in the new board. Trinity donated two square blocks north and south of Robinson Street between Church and Chapel. In exchange the Reformed Dutch and Presbyterians accepted Anglican affiliation, which meant an Anglican president and the use of that church’s prayers. Samuel Johnson accepted the presidency and Anglicans dominated the original trustee board. Justice Daniel Horsmanden, a trustee who donated at least £500 to the college, administered the board members’ oaths.45

  The influence of the merchants rested in large part on their willingness to leverage the slave economy. “I Do give and bequeath unto my said Nine grandchildren after the Decease of my said Wife Sarah Each and every one of them a Negro slave such as my said son in Law & Daughter or the survivor of them shall think proper,” wrote Peter Van Brugh. He left his grandson Peter Van Brugh Livingston a portion of a family house, lot, and furnishings, and he gave his granddaughter Sarah Livingston ownership of his “Negro Bett,” or a surviving black woman, upon his wife’s death. His wife, Sarah, took possession of a collection of properties in Albany and New York City along with “all my Negro slaves, Horses, Cattle, households of furniture, utensills, and all my moveable and personall estate.” His daughter Catrina Van Brugh and son-in-law Philip Livingston took a half share in a house, lot, and furnishings, and a piece of the larger estate upon Sarah Van Brugh’s death. Philip Livingston received slaves and commercial slaving interests from his parents and his in-laws, and he left both to his own children, including Peter Van Brugh and Philip, as did their in-laws. For example, James Alexander added to this fortune after his son William married Philip and Catrina’s daughter Sarah.46

  Advertisement from Charles Willing, trustee of the College of

  Philadelphia, today’s University of Pennsylvania

  SOURCE: Pennsylvania Gazette

  A landless Scottish noble who had trained as an attorney in Glasgow and London, James Alexander became a wealthy lawyer and land speculator in East Jersey. He married Mary Sprat, a Provoost widow and daughter of the DePeyster family, whose considerable business experience as a merchant trader aided his rise. By the time of his death, Alexander held large estates in New York and owned as much as sixty thousand acres of land in New Jersey.47

  Preserved in the records of Peter Van Brugh Livingston, James Alexander’s 1745 will included a grant to support the new enthusiasm of the merchants: “I do give to the use of a colledge for the education of youth to be erected in the Province of New York the Sum of one hundred Pounds New york money.” Alexander increased his gift to the planned “colledge” with payments that the colony owed him for his service in the assembly. Public money for the new school came directly and indirectly from slavery and the slave trade. “The Dutys on Rum Wine & Negroes have heretofore supported our Civil List” is how the trustee John Watts described that dependence. For two decades the colonial treasurer Abraham DePeyster collected taxes on the human merchandise moved through the port. Ship’s captains entering New York vouched to DePeyster for the accuracy of their manifests for “Slaves, Wine, Rum, or other distilled Liquors, Shrub, Cocoa, or dutiable Dry-Goods.” James Alexander also donated £50 “to the use of a colledge for the Education of youth to be erected in the Province of New Jersey.”48

  The traders could afford to be magnanimous. Churches, hospitals, libraries, and colleges were the rewards of a broad social investment in Atlantic slavery. The New-York Post-Boy and Weekly Gazette broadside that announced the trustees’ swearing-in ceremony carried a single advertisement: “TWO likely Negro Boys, and a Girl, to be Sold. Inquire of William Griffith, opposite Beekman’s Slip.” The symbolism of that sheet being paid for by a notice for the sale of black children is appropriate, for the participation of the founders in slave trading was one of their more distinguishing characteristics.49 />
  Throughout the Mid-Atlantic and New England, higher education had its greatest period of expansion as the African slave trade peaked. In September 1742 the merchants of Philadelphia set exchange rates in response to a shortage of hard currency. Those endorsing that published agreement included most of the men who later served as the governors of the College of Philadelphia. Quaker Philadelphia was a hub in the transatlantic commercial network. The founders of the new school included the Quakers James Logan and Lloyd Zachary. By the mid-eighteenth century there were more than eighty Quaker slave traders in London. David and John Barclay, who freed their Jamaican slaves shortly after inheriting a plantation, donated to the Philadelphia college and served as its London agents. Philadelphia traders carried provisions and enslaved people to Barbados and the rest of the British Caribbean. Several of the trustees were West Indies merchants, and the board actively sought donors and students from those islands. Provost William Smith had come to mainland North America with Josiah Martin, a royal councilor and planter from Antigua, whose slaves had participated in the rebellion of 1736. Martin was a founding trustee of King’s, and he enrolled two of his sons at Philadelphia.50