Ebony and Ivy

by Craig Steven Wilder

  THE PEOPLE IN THE PRESIDENT’S HOUSE

  In his biographical portraits of the graduates of Harvard, the librarian John Langdon Sibley took mastery as a measure of wealth, and explained the frequency of slaveholding officers and alumni by reminding readers that owning black people was a habit of “most prosperous men.” President Increase Mather, class of 1656, used “his negro”—a gift from his son Cotton Mather, class of 1678—to run errands for the college. “This Day, a surprising Thing befell me,” Cotton Mather noted around Christmas 1706, “it seems to be a mighty Smile of Heaven upon my Family.” The congregation at the Old North Church presented Rev. Mather with a young black man. “I putt upon him the Name of Onesimus,” Mather continued, estimating his value at nearly £50.15

  Incoming presidents often brought enslaved people to campus or secured servants after their arrival. Harvard president Benjamin Wadsworth owned an enslaved black man named Titus, who lived with the president’s family. “I bought a Negro Wench,” Wadsworth wrote in October 1726, just two days before he moved into the president’s quarters. “She came to our house at Cambridge this day, I paid no money down for her,” he added, but owed £85 on credit. Wadsworth later hired two free women servants, including Desire Simon, a Native American.16

  As Harvard’s chronicler had done, a Yale historian asserted that “it was a common custom of the times to own Negro or Indian slaves” to explain the conspicuous presence of bound people at the founding of the college. In October 1701 the Reverend James Pierpont of New Haven and a group of Connecticut ministers secured a colonial charter for the new “Collegiate School.” On November 11, seven of the ten trustees traveled by horseback to a meeting at the home of Thomas Buckingham in Saybrook. Timothy Woodbridge arrived from Hartford. Noadiah Russell came alone from Middletown. Israel Chauncy of Stratford and Joseph Webb of Fairfield met Samuel Andrew in Milford. James Pierpont joined them at New Haven, and they rode to meet Abraham Pierson in Kenilworth. This procession was “followed on horseback by their men-servants or slaves.”17

  Abraham Pierson served as the college’s first rector. His father had trained at Cambridge University and then migrated to the colonies to serve with John Eliot as an Indian missionary; he authored an early Algonquian guide to Christian scripture. Dissenters from New Haven organized a number of settlements. Pierson followed Robert Treat, who raised a Puritan outpost in Newark, New Jersey. The colony attracted freemen by offering grants of 150 acres and equal plots for each able male servant or half parcels for lesser servants. Rev. Pierson brought most of his congregation to the new town, which was named for his ancestral home in England, and he left his children large farms that they used to become a substantial slaveholding family. After graduating from Harvard in 1668, Abraham Pierson joined his father at First Church in Newark. The younger Pierson presided at the Newark church until about 1692, when he resettled in Connecticut.18

  Two slaves—Tom and Pung—passed between the three Pierpont brothers, Benjamin, John, and James. They were by no means the only links to the slave economy in the Pierpont inventory. Benjamin Pierpont, a 1689 graduate of Harvard, took the pulpit of a congregation in Charleston, South Carolina, where he acquired slaves, a plantation, and several parcels of land. In 1685 James, Harvard class of 1681, was called to pastor First Congregational Church in New Haven, Connecticut. He eventually inherited Benjamin’s “plantation in South Carolina … [along] the Ashley river” and two lots in Charleston. To provide for the spiritual health of the Palmetto City, Benjamin Pierpont gave two additional lots to support a Presbyterian minister. If unclaimed after five years, these lots would go to James.19

  Slaveholding was common among Yale’s early faculty and governors. Elisha Williams, Harvard class of 1711, acquired a significant estate, including land and slaves, from his marriage to Eunice Chester. Williams ran a preparatory school in Wethersfield, Connecticut. In September 1725 the Yale board appointed Williams rector of the college. With only a rector and a single tutor, Yale was a modest institution, and Williams spent the next fifteen years teaching, managing students, and stabilizing the college’s finances. The Reverend Eliphalet Adams, who prepared boys for Yale and Harvard in his New London home, owned several slaves, including one person donated by his parish. He once baptized five of his servants in a single year. Fluent in Mohegan, Rev. Adams also served under the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel as an Indian missionary. The Reverend Thomas Clap, a 1722 graduate of Harvard, was a lifelong slaveholder. Clap became rector in 1740, and five years later the board named him president, the first in Yale’s history. Rev. Clap and his wife made a personal pact to free their slaves; however, Clap’s administration wedded Yale’s fortunes to those of New England’s Atlantic merchants.20

  In 1756 the Reverend Ezra Stiles, a former tutor and a future president of Yale, placed a hogshead of rum aboard a ship leaving Rhode Island and instructed Captain William Pinnegar to trade it for a black child on the Guinea coast. The minister later named the boy Newport after his point of entry. As legend has it, Stiles confronted the moral problem of his actions after the transaction was completed. Finding the ten-year-old child in his kitchen crying, “the whole truth flashed upon the master’s mind, and he saw the evil he had done,” a fellow college president confessed. Stiles had separated Newport forever from his family and home, condemning him to a life of service in a foreign land. The minister promised to educate and train the boy in an attempt to partially repair that damage. On March 12, 1775, Rev. Stiles “baptized my Negro Man Newport … and admitted him into full Communion with the Church.” Three years later, Ezra Stiles assumed the presidency of Yale. “At noon arrived here two Carriages from New Haven a Caravan & Wagon sent by the Corporation of Yale College to remove my Family,” the new president noted. That week Rev. Stiles “freed or liberated my Negro Man Newport.”21

  Such moments of moral reckoning were rare. When he organized the College of Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was a slave owner. He had purchased his first “negro boy” while he was in his twenties, and he later used several slaves in his shop and his home. He brought two enslaved people, including his personal servant, Peter, on his travels to England. “We conclude to sell them both the first good opportunity, for we do not like negro servants,” Franklin once protested to his mother. In fact, he did not manumit any of his servants. Although he later led the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Franklin’s career as a master ended as his slaves died or fled. The Quaker communion expelled Stephen Hopkins, the founding chancellor of the College of Rhode Island, for continuing to hold slaves after the Friends had condemned the institution. Hopkins’s slaves included St. Jago, who was named for the Caribbean port. The Reverend James Manning, a graduate of New Jersey, brought his slave with him when he assumed the presidency of the new college in Rhode Island. Hopkins and Manning eventually came to oppose slavery.22

  A succession of eight slave owners presided over the College of New Jersey during its first seventy-five years. In 1733 Jonathan Dickinson, the charter president, purchased a black girl from a neighbor in Elizabethtown. The Newark minister Aaron Burr, who replaced Dickinson, bought a black man from the New York merchant John Livingston. Jonathan Edwards, who took control in 1758, grew up in a slaveholding house in East Windsor, Connecticut, and he later used enslaved labor in his mission to the Stockbridge Indians. In June 1731 he had traveled to Newport, Rhode Island, to buy Venus, a fourteen-year-old black girl, for £80. During his years in Delaware and Virginia, the Reverend Samuel Davies taught enslaved people to read, welcomed them into his church and home, and baptized hundreds of black people. “A number of them,” Davies wrote while reflecting upon his own slaves and the larger black community, “are the genuine Children of Abraham.” When the Reverend Samuel Finley died, his estate, including six black people, was auctioned from the president’s house in Princeton. John Witherspoon began buying slaves within a few years of his arrival from Scotland. By 1784 two enslaved black people were listed among the taxable property of
President Witherspoon. Samuel Stanhope Smith, Witherspoon’s son-in-law and successor, made observations about a house slave to inform his famous thesis on human complexion. Ashbel Green acquired an enslaved girl from his marriage to Elizabeth Stockton. The Greens later brought the child from Philadelphia to Princeton, where she worked in the president’s house.23

  Despite the dire financial situation of his school, President Jacob Hardenbergh of Queen’s College in New Brunswick acquired a slave in 1793, just two years before the trustees were forced to close the college for more than a decade. In 1795 the board suspended classes, released the faculty, sent the students home, and vacated the campus; still, Father Hardenbergh managed to acquire a second slave that year. More than a decade passed before the governors could reopen the college.24

  Although the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock had taken in his first Indian students in the 1740s to supplement his income, he did not formalize the Indian school until 1754, about the same time that he began buying and selling human beings. Early in 1757 the minister paid William Clark of Plymouth £50 for a “Negro man named Ishmael, being a servant for life.” In the spring of 1760 he bought Sippy (perhaps Scipio) from Timothy Kimball in Coventry. A few days later, the reverend paid Peter Spencer of East Haddam £65 for his “Negro man servant named Brister aged about twenty one years.”25

  Jonathan Dickinson by

  Edward Ludlow Mooney

  Aaron Burr Sr. by

  Edward Ludlow Mooney

  Jonathan Edwards by

  Henry Augustus Loop

  Samuel Davies by

  James Massalon

  The first eight presidents of the College of New Jersey

  SOURCE: Princeton University

  Samuel Finley by

  Charles Walker Lind

  John Witherspoon after

  Charles Willson Peale

  Samuel Stanhope Smith by

  Charles B. Lawrence

  Ashbel Green by

  an unknown artist

  Slavery subsidized Wheelock’s mission. In 1762 he gave Ann Morrison £75 for “a negro man named Exeter of the age of forty ought years[,] a negro woman named Chloe of the age of thirty five years[,] and a negro male child named Hercules of the age of about three years[,] all slaves for life.” Worried that Chloe might be afflicted with rheumatism, the minister secured a guarantee from Morrison, who promised in writing to give him a £5 rebate in case “that difficulty should return upon her by means whereof she be disabled from business.” Wheelock also made deals to protect the spiritual and physical health of enslaved people. “Nando [perhaps Fernando] will not hear anything of coming to Dartmouth,” Gideon Buckingham responded in February 1772. A year earlier, Wheelock had requested that the Buckinghams transfer ownership of Nando and his wife, Hagar, to erase a £100 debt and to end what Wheelock saw as Nando’s abusive behavior toward Hagar. “I believe the situation here would be very agreeable to Nando as it is to my negroes who have agreeable company enough and live well,” Wheelock surmised. “I have a great variety of business I can employ Nando in.” Apparently Nando had already been promised his freedom. Wheelock offered to liberate him and provide a twenty-acre farm if he accepted Christ and changed his behavior.26

  Of course, the minister’s primary concern was accessing labor. In the spring of 1773 Rev. Wheelock found himself in competition for Caesar, an enslaved man whom he was renting. Wheelock wrote to Caesar’s owner, Captain Moses Little, confused over two different messages that arrived about the fate of the enslaved man. One instructed him to return Caesar by canoe, while a neighbor claimed to have permission to employ Caesar at his house. Dartmouth’s president had his own designs. “I have concluded to buy the Negro if he proves to be the slave which you take him to be,” Wheelock began, provided the price remained £20. The minister promised payment as soon as a title was secured. As the American Revolution approached, Rev. Wheelock found himself short of cash but in need of supplies and labor. “I understand the money must be paid down for the cheese, I have expectation of getting the hard money & I am not quite certain of paper,” he begged Asa Foot. “As to the Negro, I don’t know when I shall be able to pay for him.” Nonetheless, Wheelock alerted Foot that he would likely want another man and a woman the following summer.27

  Dartmouth College in an 1834 engraving

  SOURCE: Library of Congress

  Such transactions fill the historical records of American colleges. In 1770 Domine Johannes Ritzema accepted “a young Negro, valued at £45,” from John Van Zandt to satisfy rents owed to the Dutch Reformed Church of New York City. That exchange cleared Van Zandt’s obligations, and the church agreed to a new fifteen-year lease on the property. Father Ritzema was both a founder of Queen’s College and, as the senior Dutch Reformed minister in Manhattan, a charter trustee of King’s College. Ritzema had also been a delegate and signatory to a 1765 New Jersey convention that endorsed Eleazar Wheelock’s British fund-raising campaign. As William R. Davie was organizing the groundbreaking for the University of North Carolina, he stopped his work to sell a “negroe girl slave [named] Dinah,” whose age he estimated to be thirteen, to Elijah Crockett to compensate him for his “negroe man called Joe,” who had died while under Davie’s supervision.28

  College governors were quite comfortable negotiating the slave economy. Wheelock’s last will and testament reveals no great anxiety about mastery. Brister was to remain enslaved, although he had served the Indian mission for two decades and had been a trusted personal attendant to the president. Wheelock’s will freed only a single person. “To my servant Boy Archelaus[,] I give his freedom from slavery when he shall arrive at the age of twenty five years,” the president promised, while giving the boy a fifty-acre plot in Landaff, New Hampshire, Emancipation was conditioned upon Archelaus proving to the satisfaction of the county presbytery that he could support himself and be “trusted with his freedom.”29 Wheelock’s son and successor, John, increased the family’s slaveholdings.

  VIOLENCE AS AN ACADEMIC MATTER

  Shortly after his graduation from Harvard, Benjamin Wadsworth served as chaplain for a Massachusetts delegation to negotiations in Albany, New York, between the English and the Iroquois. The Bay Colony committee, led by Samuel Sewall and Penn Townsend, was made up of Harvard graduates. New York governor Benjamin Fletcher and the wealthy landholders Stephen Van Cortlandt and Peter Schuyler hosted the August 1694 meeting. John Allen and Caleb Stanley came from Connecticut. Governor Andrew Hamilton of New Jersey arrived with his aid John Pinchon. Twenty-five Iroquois sachems from the Five Nations attended the negotiations. On the third night of their journey from Boston, the Massachusetts delegates saw “a negro coming from Albany,” which led them to become “very suspicious.” Concluding he was a runaway slave, they seized him. Wadsworth and his companions tied the man up and then camped for the evening, intending to bring their prisoner to the Albany authorities. The captive managed to get free while they slept, take a gun and possibly a sword, and escape. “We thought of him,” Wadsworth noted in disappointment.30 When Rev. Wadsworth acquired his first slave is not certain, but the future president of Harvard seemed quite displeased with the results of his early foray into slave catching.

  Masters regulated their slaves with violence. In 1698 the Reverend Samuel Gray, a founding trustee of the College of William and Mary, murdered an enslaved child for running away. Rev. Gray struck the boy on the head, drawing blood, and then put a hot iron to the child’s flesh. The minister had the boy tied to a tree, and then ordered another slave to whip him. The boy later died. Gray argued that “such accidents” were inevitable, a position that seems to have succeeded, as a court declined to convict him. The congregation at Christ Church in Middlesex County gave him a considerable quantity of tobacco to resign. The following year, Gray settled at a parish in Westmoreland. He later became the pastor of St. Peter’s Church in New Kent.31

  When Benjamin Wadsworth ministered the First Church in Boston, he gave his parishioners a series of sermons
on household order, including a lecture on slavery. Wadsworth warned his congregation not to “pinch” their servants by denying them the food, drink, clothing, medical attention, and periods of rest necessary to their health. They should give their slaves time for prayer and private contemplation, give them to God and pray for them, and let them read the Bible and other books that would enhance their faith. Householders should protect their slaves, he continued, and keep them busy enough to avoid sin, but not so exhausted as to impair their well-being. Leaning on biblical references, the future Harvard president also instructed his congregants to beat their slaves. Corporal punishments were needed to chastise and deter wrong, for “a servant will not be corrected by words.” Preferring the biblical term “correction,” the pastor warned his audience to avoid “rage and passion” and “cruel and unmerciful” acts, instead always choosing the mildest penalty that would effectively cure the fault, remembering that a good master needed neither tyranny nor terror. Rev. Wadsworth instructed the slaves sitting in his church to willfully submit to every godly action and demand made by their masters, including physical punishments. A servant’s life should be consumed in work and prayer, interrupted by brief moments of rest for sustenance.32

  Perhaps Wadsworth’s call for Christian mastery and thoughtful violence responded to the long history of brutality in the colony. Neither church nor academy moderated the horrors of slavery. A “negro woman was burned to death,” the Reverend Increase Mather had written in his diary in September 1681, adding that this was the first “such death in New England.”33