Ebony and Ivy

by Craig Steven Wilder

  First Church in Cambridge—an extension of Harvard—reflected the racial order of elite colonial society. In 1757 the college paid a seventh of the cost to replace the old church. The trustees decided the location and orientation of the new meetinghouse. They selected a pew for the president, reserved the entire front section for the students, and dictated the size and configuration of the scholars’ seats. In a later exchange, the Harvard Corporation agreed to a modest reduction in the size of the students’ gallery, “provided, that the part we thus cede to the Parish shall not be occupied by the negroes.” First Church baptized, buried, or administered other rites to scores of black people owned by prominent Harvard families, including Philip (Danforth), Zillah (Brattle), Cuffy (Phipps), Jack (Tufts), and Cuba (Vassall). “Titus, Presid[en]t Wadsworth’s Man Servant … was also admitted to full Communion,” reads an entry on October 13, 1729. In 1741 Edward Wigglesworth, the first Hollis Professor of Divinity, watched his slave Hannibal receive communion, and twelve years later Gerald, Hannibal’s son, was baptized. Edward Wiggles-worth and his son of the same name held the Hollis Professorship as a family entitlement for most of the eighteenth century. Even after slavery was outlawed in Massachusetts, college officials continued to rely upon black labor. In October 1789, a decade after the state courts had erased the legal foundations for servitude, Harvard president Joseph Willard had his “negro man Servant” Cesar baptized.54

  Students often used enslaved people for amusements ranging from boxing to singing, dancing, and fiddling—diversions that were common at colonial colleges. Samuel Curwen, a student during Wadsworth’s administration, carried a small notebook in which he had transcribed the college laws in Latin, but such reminders did little to calm the campus. In the spring of 1737, the Harvard faculty barred Titus, “a Molatto slave of the late Rev[eren]d Pres[iden]t Wadsworth,” from entering the students’ rooms or even coming to campus after he was found drinking with the undergraduates. Three years later, the professors had to repeat their prohibition on students associating with the Wadsworths’ slave. In September 1751 they punished several undergraduates for “making drunk a Negro-man-servant belonging [to] Mr. Sprague, & that to Such Degree as greatly indanger’d his Life.” Included among the culprits were four members of Harvard’s class of 1754: Samuel Foxcroft, the future minister of the First Congregational Church in New Gloucester, Maine, and the son of the pastor of Boston’s First Church; Samuel Quincy, later a loyalist solicitor who prosecuted British soldiers after the Boston Massacre; John Hancock, the shipping heir, future governor, and signer of the Declaration of Independence; and Samuel Marshall, who went on to study medicine in London and then established a practice in Boston.55

  Harvard’s supposedly pious young students proved especially unruly. The faculty had to suppress everything from “foolish talking” to fornicating. Garishly dressed boys bedeviled the seventeenth-century governors, who responded with strict prohibitions on “strange ruffinalike or New-fangled fashions,” including gold and silver adornments and long, curled, parted, or powdered hair. President John Leverett dealt with John Nutting, who forged money to pay his tuition, and Benjamin Shattuck, who engaged in sexual misconduct. On election day in 1711 a student named Hussey walked through town in women’s clothing, accompanying “scandalous p[eo]ple.” President Wadsworth would have his own stories to tell. In the middle of the night, Nathaniel Hubbard Jr. and John Winthrop Jr. stole ropes that they used to hang the dog of a local resident. In June 1726 Eliza Bacheldor’s father was searching the yard for Jonathan Hayward, who had had sex with his daughter. In 1733 the Jamaican planter Leonard Vassall sued a tutor who slapped William Vassall in the face for failing to remove his hat. Students disturbed the peace with fireworks and bonfires, and their undergraduate years could be measured in busted fences and broken windows. “The Glass [was] broken in the Chamber next over the Kitchen & the Hebrew School,” the governors complained during their March 1753 meeting. Several months later they were investigating the students’ “abusive & insolent” behavior toward the Hebrew instructor. The faculty imposed fines and punishments for this “great Disorder.” The overseers warned Edward Brooks’s freshman class of heavy penalties for using the valedictory address or their status as head of class to make threats.56

  Yale’s officers also policed vandalism, violence, and other disorders. Citizens began complaining about intoxicated undergraduates as soon as the college moved to New Haven. Things got worse with time. Jesse Denison, of the class of 1756, was keeping a pistol in his room. In February 1753 he carried the loaded gun into town and used it to threaten a local resident during a disagreement. Denison then fired his pistol in public, “tho, as he says, not with any Design to do them any Mischief.” Several years later the freshmen celebrated commencement by patrolling the yard with clubs, making menacing gestures and frightening sounds. One student even “brandished a naked sword.” The trustees had to lock the college to keep the boys from dancing and carousing at night. They punished “extravagant” dress and barred local taverns from selling students “any rum, brandy or distilled spirits, or any liquor mixed of either of them on any occasion whatsoever.” Nonetheless, by 1765 the officers were asking the New Haven authorities to police the commencement.57

  Perhaps taking a lesson from the older schools, the trustees of New Jersey and King’s prepared lengthy lists of infractions and punishments for their first classes. The New Jersey officers threatened to expel any student found guilty of “Drunkenness, Fornication, Lying, Theft or any other Scandalous Crime.” They prohibited the scholars from bringing wine or liquor into their rooms, playing dice or cards, frequenting taverns, or associating with disreputable people. King’s governors also forbade cockfighting, dice, and other gaming, and warned the students to pass by houses of vice and prostitution and avoid “any persons of known scandalous behaviour.” The governors set fines for slandering and maiming other people. Several years later they banned all women from residing at the college—except for the cook—and then had the campus fenced and hired a porter to watch the gate. Despite these precautions the Manhattan campus remained volatile. John Jauncey, a senior, challenged President Myles Cooper “to fight with pistols, before ye whole Class, whilst they were engaged in their Recitation.” He was expelled.58

  College boys felt particularly entitled to terrorize slaves and servants. In April 1772, while President Cooper and the faculty examined the senior class in the chapel, Beverly Robinson, an upperclassman, attacked one of the servants. “Robinson spit in the Cook’s Face, kicked, & otherwise abused him,” reads the record. Despite his violent temper and consistently poor academic performance, Robinson received a mild punishment: confinement to campus for two weeks and additional academic assignments from Cooper. The son of a trustee and the heir to an elite slave trading line, Robinson graduated in 1773. He later became a trustee.59

  At Williams College, the students paid a black man, whom they nicknamed “Abe Bunter,” to see him smash his head with wooden boards and barrels. “Probably no more formidable battering-ram of this species could be found anywhere,” joked a historian of the college. The author was decidedly unconcerned with the real name of “Abe Bunter”—a moniker that mocked this unfortunate career—or the grotesqueness of the transactions. Instead, he insisted that “Bunter” had a “phenomenally thick skull” and described him as a “barbaric figure” who “haunted the campus” with “his one tremendous ‘talent.’ “60

  The students at the University of North Carolina enjoyed “pranking” slaves in Chapel Hill. George M. Horton, an enslaved man who sold fruit in town, learned to read and write by manipulating these exchanges, and he became known in town for his poetry. Such encounters could easily turn violent. In September 1811 dozens of students began rioting, destroying property, ransacking the rooms and halls, and attacking the college servants. The undergraduates accused the faculty of imposing harsh and unfair punishments and disregarding student opinions. The teachers and officers remained in the buil
dings into the evening to restore order. Culprits were brought in for questioning, but explosions of gunpowder interrupted the meetings. When the faculty went to locate the new disturbances, they reported, “a little Negro was found in a corner of the room of one of these young men” hiding because one of the students had just fired a gun at him. Just a few years later, three students got drunk and broke into a local house, where they threatened the residents and assaulted a slave.61

  FROM COLLEGE GREEN TO “NIGGER HILL”

  Little places named for forgotten black people dot the northern states. Many of these secluded communities have ties to American colleges. Jonathan Jackson, class of 1761—a third-generation Harvard student, preceded by his father and his maternal grandfather—used his education and an inheritance to establish himself as a merchant, selling rum and other goods to Africa traders and dealing to the West Indies. The Harvard network brought repeated public appointments that rescued him from serial business failures and allowed him to maintain his household: “one discrete Woman and a Negro Fellow.” On the eve of the Revolution, Jackson emancipated Pomp Jackson, who then fought with the colonists. Pomp Jackson removed to Pomps Pond, near Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, at about the same time that future Harvard presidents John Thornton Kirkland, the son of the Indian missionary Samuel Kirkland, and Josiah Quincy, the nephew of the headmaster, were there preparing for college. The pond was named not for the black veteran but rather for Pomp Lovejoy, a black man who retreated to this remote spot after gaining his freedom from Captain William Lovejoy.62

  Once enslaved on the Princeton campus, Betsey Stockton finished her life a free woman, a teacher, and a missionary to Hawaii. Her death in 1865 brought numerous tributes. Leading citizens of Cooperstown, New York, raised a fund for a bronze tablet recognizing her mission but could not find a site that would accept it. “She is one of the most remarkable women I ever conversed with,” remembered President James Marshall of Cedar Rapids College (Coe College). Late in 1822 Stockton had left New Haven on the Thames to teach and evangelize in Hawaii, where her facility with languages proved invaluable to the Lahaina and Maui missions. After her return in 1825 she taught at colored schools in Cooperstown and Princeton. An intellectual elite attended her Princeton funeral. President John Maclean officiated, assisted by the mathematician John Thomas Duffield and the theologian Charles Hodge. Stockton was buried in Cooperstown, in the family plot of the Reverend Charles Samuel Stewart, with whom she had worked in Hawaii.63

  Pomps Pond, Andover, Massachusetts

  SOURCE: Andover Historical Society

  Phebe Ann Jacobs was born in Beverwijck, New Jersey, in the British and Dutch farming belt that stretched from Elizabeth to Trenton. Maria Malleville Wheelock—the daughter of Dartmouth president John Wheelock and Maria Suhm, who hailed from a slaveholding family with ties to New Jersey and St. Croix—had received Phebe as a gift from her mother. Malleville, as she was known, married Dartmouth professor William Allen. In 1820 they all went to Brunswick, Maine, after Allen accepted the presidency of Bowdoin. As slavery ended in Maine, black families began relocating to several of the ungoverned coastal islands—commonly called the “Negro Islands”—including Malaga, not far from the college. There was also a “Negro Island,” originally named Gilman, just south of Dartmouth, near the falls in the Connecticut River from which the campus drew power. Enslaved people had been building Brunswick long before there was a college. Andrew Dunning, a signer of the petition for incorporation, brought slaves to settle the area. More than a dozen black people were living there a half century later, and the greater region had an active slaving history. When Maria Malleville Wheelock died, Phebe Jacobs moved off campus, supporting herself by washing and ironing for the students. Jacobs died alone in her “little habitation.”64

  Betsey Stockton, from a photograph c. 1863

  SOURCE: New York State Historical Association Library.

  Campus folklore and place names record the story of slavery in college towns. These local legends and landscapes are a diary of the long, intimate association between the academy and slavery. Dartmouth president John Wheelock had inherited “Brister, Archelaus, Lavinia or Anna and the infant child,” his father’s oxen, tools, “horses and as many swine as he shall have occasion for.” Under the second Wheelock administration, the number of enslaved people in Hanover doubled. Unfree people continued to toil at the college and in the Wheelock household until legislative decisions and a changing international market eroded mastery in New Hampshire. Many of these free African Americans worked for the college and the students. Professor John King Lord recalled Jenny Wentworth as a “good nigger,” his term for a pious, hardworking black person. The black community clustered just south of the campus and apart from white residents, who now cast them as a nuisance and a problem. Evidence of the tension was written into the very geography of the place, which included the college, the town, and a modest elevation that was popularly derided as “Nigger Hill.”65

  Part II

  Race and the Rise of the American College

  The number of purely white people in the world is

  proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny;

  Asia chiefly is tawny; America (exclusive of the new

  comers) wholly so. … And while we are, as I may call

  it, scouring our planet, by clearing America of woods,

  and so making this side of our globe reflect a brighter

  light to the eyes of inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why

  should we, in the sight of superior beings, darken its

  people? Why increase the sons of Africa, by planting

  them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity,

  by excluding all blacks and tawnys, of increasing

  the lovely white and red?

  —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, “OBSERVATIONS

  CONCERNING THE INCREASE OF MANKIND

  AND THE PEOPLING OF COUNTRIES” (1751)

  Look round you! behold a country, vast in extent,

  merciful in its climate, exuberant in its soil, the seat

  of Plenty, the garden of the Lord! behold it given to

  us and to our posterity, to propagate Virtue, to cultivate

  the useful Arts, and to spread abroad the pure evangelical

  Religion of Jesus! behold Colonies founded in

  it! Protestant Colonies! free Colonies! British Colonies!

  behold them exulting in their Liberty; flourishing in

  Commerce; the Arts and Sciences planted in them.

  —PROVOST WILLIAM SMITH, THE CHRISTIAN

  SOLDIER’S DUTY (1757)

  I am very sorry to hear by the publick Papers that the

  Indian War is not at an End. I can not conceive what

  it is these People are aiming at, but I am afraid, we

  ourselves are not intirely blameless.

  —SAMUEL BARD, EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY,

  TO DR. JOHN BARD, NEW YORK, 1764

  Chapter 5

  Whitening the Promised Land

  Colleges and the Racial Destiny of North America

  On December 14, 1763, Edward Shippen rushed a letter to Pennsylvania lieutenant governor John Penn alerting him that “a Company of People from the Frontiers had killed and scalped most of the Indians at the Conestogoe Town early this morning.” Getting their name from the Paxtung Presbyterian Church in the backcountry, fifty well-armed “Paxton Boys”—a gang of Scots-Irish immigrants—rode into Conestoga and murdered several Susquehannocks: an elderly woman, three elderly men, a young woman, and a small boy. They butchered the corpses and torched the cabins. Before the attack, several residents had left for a local foundry to sell homemade baskets, bowls, and brooms, and thereby escaped the slaughter. Governor Penn delivered a message to the legislature condemning the cold-blooded murders and requesting funds to secure the remaining Indians, and Shippen, who was the Penns’ agent in the backcountry, announced warrants for the perpetrators.1

&nb
sp; “I am to acquaint your Honour that between two and three of the clock this afternoon, upwards of a hundred armed men … rode very fast into town … stove open the door and killed all the Indians,” Shippen wrote apologetically on December 27, less than two weeks after the first massacre. That afternoon men armed with rifles, tomahawks, and other weapons stormed into town, invaded the workhouse where the Indians had been moved for safety, and murdered the three surviving families: three men, three women, three girls, and five boys. For decades before the massacres, European immigrants had pressed into Indian country, raising the values of lands held by the eastern elite and generating new social tensions and political disputes. In December 1763, however, the Paxtons shattered the founding covenant of Pennsylvania—peaceful coexistence with Native peoples—by destroying the Susquehannock in a surge of racial violence. On January 2, 1764, Governor Penn authorized a £200 reward for the leaders, having already ordered his justices and sheriffs to hunt them. A month later the Paxton Boys, rumored to be two hundred strong, headed toward Philadelphia to wipe out the Lenape people and display their power at the door of the proprietary regime. They made it to about Germantown before a gathering military response forced them to turn back.2