Reproducing New Jersey’s educational and theological style by recruiting its graduates as trustees, faculty, and tutors, the new Presbyterian colleges maintained close executive and organizational subservience to Princeton. Samuel Stanhope Smith, born and raised in Chester County, Pennsylvania, gained his administrative and teaching experience at Hampden-Sydney. President Witherspoon sent his son David to assist. In 1775 Rev. Smith married Ann Witherspoon, daughter of the president, and later earned a professorship at the College of New Jersey. In 1795 Smith succeeded his father-in-law as president. Similarly, in 1812 the trustees of Princeton Theological Seminary elected the Reverend Archibald Alexander, a past president of Hampden-Sydney, as their first president. Rev. Alexander was educated at Liberty Hall Academy (Washington and Lee), and he began his career as a plantation tutor.57
A moral comfort with bondage and a willingness to use the slave economy to spread the denomination facilitated the southern and westward march of New Jersey’s alumni. In 1782 Witherspoon’s students founded Liberty Hall in Lexington, Virginia, as the first southern franchise of the Princeton college. The board comprised New Jersey alumni, including Caleb Baker Wallace, the primary fund-raiser. The trustees bought and sold black people as part of their endowment, and leased their surplus black workers to raise additional cash. A surviving advertisement records this relationship. Liberty Hall’s trustees posted bills announcing that they were hiring out “twenty likely Negroes belonging to Washington College: consisting of Men, Women, Boys and Girls, many of them very valuable,” for the following year from the front of the courthouse in Lexington.58
President Witherspoon made the College of New Jersey the intellectual headquarters of the Scottish and Scots-Irish communities in America, turning a young northern school into a southern and West Indian intellectual and cultural force. The contest was not won, but the competition was changed forever. Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Philadelphia, King’s, Queen’s, Rhode Island, and Dartmouth launched new campaigns for the loyalty of wealthy planters and traders.
Given their access to these colleges, white colonists in the West Indies and the South had little need for local schools. The wealthy planters of South Carolina sent their sons north, which allowed them to delay establishing advanced academies until the nineteenth century. In 1774 Edward Long accused Jamaica’s planters and officials of failing to fund academies, thereby causing the racial declension of white people. Elite white women were sent abroad for education and, therefore, had some culture, Long continued, but the majority of the white women spoke “drawling, dissonant gibberish” and acquired the “aukward carriage and vulgar manners” of enslaved black women. Despite its wealth, by the late eighteenth century Barbados had but a few dozen teachers on the whole island. The historian Eric Williams found that the entire educational infrastructure of the British Caribbean colonies comprised little more than Codrington College and a single secondary school in Jamaica.59
Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam by John Greenwood. Chancellor Stephen Hopkins, College of Rhode Island (Brown), is sleeping at the table next to his brother, the slave ship’s captain Esek Hopkins.
SOURCE: Saint Louis Art Museum
It was the stark and rigid stratification of colonial society that John Witherspoon exploited to stabilize the College of New Jersey. It was the security that human slavery provided free men, the wealth that slave traders and slaveholders could generate, and the social networks of plantation economies that brought Witherspoon to the American academy and that carried the American academy into modernity.
In a quarter century at the helm of the College of New Jersey, Rev. Witherspoon instructed hundreds of young men who became leaders of Revolutionary America. His protégés included President James Madison, twenty United States senators, three justices of the Supreme Court, thirteen governors, twenty-three congressmen, and scores of ministers, college presidents and professors, and military officers. One scholar summed up his influence: “Dr. Witherspoon not only led his students, but all the Scotch and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of the country, bodily into the Revolutionary movement.”60
In 1776 the Reverend John Witherspoon signed the Declaration of Independence, marshaling the dissenting tradition of his own Presbyterian faith in support of the cause of rebellion and calling upon his antityrannical and anti-English roots in defense of American freedom. He and his contemporaries had established their own intellectual freedom upon human bondage. They had also bound the nation’s intellectual culture to the future of American slavery and the slave trade.
To answer for their Master’s Blood,
which they’ve unjustly spilt;
And if not Pardon’d, sure they must,
Remain with all their Guilt.
—“A FEW LINES ON OCCASION OF THE UNTIMELY
END OF MARK AND PHILLIS” (1755)
For Sale. A fine MULATTO WENCH, about eighteen
years of age, plain cook, and extraordinary good
washer, warranted sober, honest and no runaway; she is
of a mild temper, easily managed, and would be an
acquisition to any person, being remarkably honest and
trusty. To prevent trouble her price Four Hundred and
Fifty Dollars, notes with good indorsers; or she will be
changed for an elderly Wench with one or two
children, or field slave; the difference of value on either
side paid in cash.
—S. BEVENS, MASTER, COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON,
CITY GAZETTE, MARCH 22, 1805
Attending servants come,
The carriage wheels like thunders roar,
To bear the pensive seniors home,
Here to be seen no more.
—GEORGE M. HORTON, “THE GRADUATE LEAVES
COLLEGE” (1845)
Chapter 4
Ebony and Ivy
Enslaved People on Campus
Approached more easily by canoe than by land, Dartmouth College depended upon enslaved labor. New Hampshire governor John Wentworth had lured the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock from Connecticut with a generous charter and control of a section of the Connecticut River. In 1770 the freeholders of Hanover ceded three square miles of land and jurisdiction to the college. Rev. Wheelock set out for Hanover with a small group of students, his family, and eight enslaved black people: Brister, Exeter, Chloe, Caesar, Lavinia, Archelaus, Peggy, and a child. While preparing to leave his wife and children to campaign in Britain for Wheelock’s academy, the Reverend Samson Occom had pleaded with his mentor for the use of a slave and a team of oxen to get his home and farm in order. Recognizing Wheelock’s reliance upon enslaved labor, Occom conceded, “Let me have a yoke of Oxen if you can’t spare a Negroe.” In 1770 Wheelock sat down in “My Hutt in Hanover Woods” to update the aging British evangelist George Whitefield on the college’s progress. He owed much of his success to the slaves whom he continued acquiring. Governor Wentworth donated at least two people, including London Dow. There were more slaves than faculty, administrators, or active trustees; in fact, there were arguably as many enslaved black people at Dartmouth as there were students in the college course, and Wheelock’s slaves outnumbered his Native American students.1
The decline of Rev. Wheelock’s Indian mission is significant. Wheelock was using the relationships that the Mohegan minister had made in England, including a friendship with William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, to advance this new project. Most of his Native students were now children, studying in his grammar school. At least two of Wheelock’s slaves, Chloe and Exeter, studied at the Indian school. Moreover, the president was occasionally curing the “bad habits” of these Indians by putting them to work with his black slaves. In November 1777 Rev. Wheelock complained to the Abenaki sachem Joseph Gill that his children, Anthony, Joseph, and Montuit, were only interested in play. The boys delighted in being delighted. They lacked discipline, he continued, and when given chores and tasks, they protested that they were only there for school. Whee
lock’s solution was to “send them into the field with my laborers to learn every branch of labor, if it be for only a few days.” In its first two centuries, Dartmouth graduated fewer than twenty Native Americans; it had produced that many white alumni within five years of its founding—or its first three graduating classes.2
African slavery was thriving in the new college towns. A trustee of Queen’s College (Rutgers) reminded himself of a scheduled report from President Jacob Hardenberg by scribbling a note on a strip of newspaper carrying an advertisement for the capture of the college trustee John Lawrence’s black teenager and her baby.3 The ubiquity and persistence of servitude on both sides of the college wall was not a mere consequence of the colonial academy’s location in the greater Atlantic economy. Human slavery was the precondition for the rise of higher education in the Americas.
Enslaved Africans came to campus through a violent remapping of the continent. By the mid-eighteenth century, nearly three hundred thousand black people constituted a fifth of the population in the British mainland colonies and dwarfed the Native populations east of the Appalachians. In little more than a half century, there were more people of African descent in the new nation than indigenous peoples in all the areas of North America that now form the continental United States.4
Washington College (now Washington and Lee)
advertised slaves for hire in 1826.
SOURCE: Library of Congress
The slave trade and enslaved labor sustained thriving economies that closed the gaps between the European outposts, constricted the boundaries of Indian country, and ultimately toppled sovereign Native nations. Africans had been in New Spain and New France almost from their founding. The Pilgrims and Puritans had made peace with human slavery soon after their migrations began. The smallpox epidemic that ravaged the Northeast in 1702 took the lives of dozens of enslaved Africans. In 1715 the Connecticut government had attempted to ban the importation of enslaved Indians to reduce hostilities; nonetheless, the African slave trade caused the unfree population to boom. By 1730 there were about seven hundred slaves in Connecticut. By midcentury, black people outnumbered unconverted and “praying” Indians in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Several hundred black people were laboring in Boston, and enslaved Africans were ordinary in the seaboard towns of New England and on the western frontier.5
At the borders of Iroquoia, the Dutch and the English used enslaved black people to raise forts, clear and cultivate farms, and maintain towns. European expansion throughout the Hudson Valley required unfree labor. By the 1740s, the African population in the New York colony surpassed the population of the Iroquois Confederacy, which comprised six nations located between the Hudson River and the Great Lakes: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. One of every six people in Manhattan was an African, and the black population of Kings County (today’s Brooklyn) was nearing a third of the total. There were large concentrations of enslaved Africans in the outlying farming districts of Long Island and New Jersey. Black people accounted for 20 percent of the population of Bergen County and about 10 percent of the population in the rest of eastern New Jersey. More than ten thousand Africans were toiling in Pennsylvania at midcentury, as depopulation reduced the Lenape and Susquehannock to dependency. There were a thousand enslaved people in Philadelphia, and their numbers were swelling in all the backcountry counties.6
The growth of the black population had even greater effect on Native nations in the South. Africans were about a third of the population in Maryland, and 40 percent, more than a hundred thousand people, in Virginia. By the 1750s, twenty thousand black people were enslaved in North Carolina, and their numbers doubled in the next decade. There were more African people, nearly fifty thousand, than Indians or white settlers in South Carolina. The black population of the Carolinas was greater than the combined Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek populations. The entire Cherokee nation comprised ten thousand people, there were fifteen thousand Choctaws and Chickasaws, and fewer than fifteen thousand Creeks. By 1750 Georgia’s founding prohibition against slavery fell to expediency and profiteering; white settlers had smuggled thousands of slaves into the region, and, within a few decades, black people were nearly half the total population. At midcentury, Virginia governor William Gooch could boast that “we have no Indian nations of any strength” within striking distance of the colony, and only the Cherokee and the Six Nations exercised any real power.7
Wars and depopulation in Native nations, the rapid growth of the enslaved black population, and European immigration opened new lands to settlement. For two centuries, college officers had insinuated themselves into these territories by using land grants and leases to tap into the wealth being generated in the unfree agricultural economies. In 1662, a year before he chartered the Séminaire de Québec, Bishop François de Laval purchased the seigneurie de Beaupré, one of the royal fiefdoms of New France. Christian colonists in Canada already had an active market in Native people, and they were petitioning Paris for greater access to enslaved Africans. The bishop later bought the Île d’Orléans in the St. Lawrence River and a number of manors. In 1680 Laval transferred his colonial seigneuries, the Méobec abbey and several priories in France, gifts from King Louis XIV, and most of his personal possessions to the seminary.8
At the other end of Harvard’s bonds and mortgages—the interest-bearing instruments that trustees used to secure their cash assets—were men such as Edmund Quincy of Braintree, Massachusetts, who owned Africans and Native Americans, and Nathaniel Byfield, a founder of Bristol, Rhode Island. Byfield had formed the partnership that established the new town on lands confiscated at the end of King Philip’s War. He also owned Bristol’s first merchant ship, which carried supplies to the West Indian and South American plantations. Elias Parkman opened his home to sell “a parcel of likely Negro boys and one girl” from the Guinea coast. Parkman rented one of Harvard’s Boston properties. In the fall of 1706 John Campbell, another tenant of the college, gave away “a Negro Infant Girl about Six Weeks Old” without reference to her parents. A slave owner, Campbell used his position as Boston postmaster and his paper, the Boston News-Letter, to facilitate the purchase and sale of enslaved people, the capture of unfree people who absconded, and the shipment of bound Africans and Indians throughout the colonies.9
Yale and William and Mary also acquired tens of thousands of acres in the British colonies. In a single 1732 act, the General Assembly of Connecticut gave Yale parcels in Canaan, Goshen, Norfolk, Cornwall, and Kent totaling fifteen hundred acres. Yale’s board negotiated leases, hired managers and agents, collected rents, inspected the properties, and bid on neighboring parcels to expand their holdings. The governors of William and Mary held vast estates throughout the colony and regularly leased the college slaves to earn income and reduce costs. In 1742 they sent a committee of two to investigate a report that slaves had escaped from their Nottaway plantations and “to endeavor to put things to right.”10
In 1732, when George Berkeley donated Whitehall, his Rhode Island plantation, to Yale, he increased the college’s real estate holdings and its ties to slavery. Yale’s board rented Whitehall to a sequence of slaveholding tenants. Captain Silas Cooke, a long-term Whitehall lessee, had lost nine enslaved Africans and three enslaved Indians when he was captured privateering in the West Indies during the French and Indian War. In August 1776 Cooke wrote to the merchant Aaron Lopez, a personal friend, for help finding Sharpe Cooke, an enslaved man who worked as the distiller at Whitehall. He suspected that his servant was hiding among Lopez’s slaves in Newport. Angered at the loss of this skilled slave, Captain Cooke begged Lopez to have him arrested. “If any Body in Providence wants such a fellow, [I] will sell him cheap,” he added in frustration.11
Lands, leases, and laborers were the bases of an American feudalism. “The Universities in Britain and Ireland were liberally endowed with lands, by your Maj[es]ty’s Illustrious Predecessors,” James Jay respectfully reminded King George
III before requesting a twenty-thousand-acre bounty for King’s College (Columbia) in New York. The trustees craved real estate. In just a couple of decades, royal governors helped them amass more than fifty thousand acres.12
College overseers regularly appealed to local officials, colonial governors, and the crown for land. The trustees of the College of New Jersey (Princeton) delayed building a campus while they essentially auctioned their school to competing towns. They eventually decided upon Princeton after its boosters offered about two hundred acres and Governor Jonathan Belcher promised “to adopt it as a child.” The board sought and acquired little land thereafter—the campus hardly grew during the first century—but it successfully attached the school to the powerful Morris, Penn, Livingston, and Alexander families, who were replicating Scotland’s lord-tenant relations in the colony. “I suppose you have heard that Dr. Wheelock has obtained a Charter for a College … and has about 20 Thousand Acres of Land as an Endowment, from the Governor & other gentlemen who are largely concerned in lands,” President James Manning of the College of Rhode Island (Brown) jealously informed a London patron.13
Governor Thomas Penn gave the College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania) his twenty-five-hundred-acre Perkasie estate in Bucks County. Enslaved Africans had worked these holdings for decades. William and Hannah Penn had kept slaves as personal servants and laborers, and they had even punished one of their enslaved women by selling her to Barbados. Thomas Penn’s gift sat in a region where German and Scottish immigrants and their slaves were pushing into Indian country, and where the trustees were extending bonds and mortgages to settlers. Governor Penn donated an additional £500 and promised annual contributions of £50. He prohibited the sale of the estate, and instructed the board to invest his money in real estate to ensure a steady annual income for the college.14
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