Nonetheless, Rush enjoyed broad intellectual influence over medical science in the slave states. In June 1813 the members of the Medical Society of South Carolina gathered in the Circular Church in Charleston to memorialize Benjamin Rush. The Philadelphia physician had taught or mentored half the members of the society, a telling measure of his influence, the reach of the Pennsylvania medical program, and the legacies of Scottish universities in American medicine and science. When Rush began teaching, he had fewer than two dozen students; the year before his death he taught more than four hundred. Dr. David Ramsay, a New Jersey graduate and the son-in-law of John Witherspoon, delivered the eulogy. He recounted Rush’s heroic sacrifices during the yellow fever outbreaks in Philadelphia, his contributions to science and public health, his service in the Continental Congress, and his educational and humanitarian endeavors.44
In fact, southern scholars had routinely and vigorously debated slavery. Student literary societies at the University of Georgia took up the question, and such exchanges were fairly common on southern campuses before the escalation of sectional tensions in the antebellum era. In 1828 Georgia’s Phi Kappas decided that slavery was unjust, and a decade later they debated themselves to an abolitionist conclusion. Another campus society, the Demosthenians, came within a single vote of endorsing abolition. Students at Georgia became more reflexively proslavery as the sectional crisis intensified. In 1832 William Gaston, a graduate of New Jersey, included an antislavery critique in an address at the University of North Carolina. The university published the speech and kept it in circulation for decades. Gaston served as a trustee at North Carolina for forty years.45
Scholars became more reluctant to criticize slavery in the face of the social anxieties that followed Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia; the political pressure of an aggressive, organized Atlantic movement to abolish slavery; and the economic promises of financial speculation in Mississippi cotton lands and slaves. Professor Thomas R. Dew, a slave owner from a wealthy plantation family, earned the presidency of the College of William and Mary in part with his forthright defenses of slavery in the wake of the Turner uprising. President Thomas Cooper of South Carolina College (University of South Carolina) ended academic debate of slavery at that institution and insisted upon a full, positive defense of human bondage. Professor James H. Thornwell, who later served as president of South Carolina, lobbied to stop Presbyterians from publicly criticizing and opposing slavery, and he became an architect of a proslavery Christian theology that asserted the eternal morality of servitude in Judeo-Christian tradition.46
Academics had long exploited political opportunities to demonstrate the validity of science—as in the Whistelo trial—and southern scholars were equally adept at using the sectional crisis to establish their value to the region and the nation. “Are we to have peace or fratricidal war?” worried Professor William Barton Rogers of William and Mary. In 1819 Hannah Blythe Rogers and Patrick Kerr Rogers, professor of chemistry, had moved to Williamsburg with their four sons: James Blythe, William Barton, Henry Darwin, and Robert Empie. William and James entered the undergraduate class with young men like Thomas R. Dew. The Rogerses lived in Brafferton Hall—the old Indian College—which had its own crew of slaves. William Barton disliked the South. He panned his classmates for their incessant “feasting, dancing, and music,” and he predicted that their graduations would hasten the decline of a civilization that was already “fast falling to decay.” In 1824 he warned Thomas Jefferson that his alma mater was lost. There was simply something about the place, he explained, that “must forever prevent it from being prosperous or successful.” In 1828 William Rogers replaced his father on the faculty. His concerns soon shifted to the political climate of the region. “In this part of the State the politics are ultra-Southern,” he lamented to his uncle. Nonetheless, he and his brothers Henry and Robert had substantial careers in tobacco and cotton country.47
The region’s dependence upon northern and European scholars added to these tensions. The cotton wealth that funded southern education had enticed many ambitious northern- and European-born intellectuals to adapt to the slave regime. The pedigrees of intellectual outsiders came under greater scrutiny as slavery came under greater criticism in Atlantic discourses. The rapid expansion of the southern academy in the decades after the Revolution had brought a migration of scholars from the North and Europe to the plantation states. Academics looking for opportunities found new southern colleges and universities flush with money and students. They also found a growing defensiveness about slavery and a rising insecurity about the migration of people and ideas into the South.48
“I am a slaveholder, and, if I know myself, I am ‘sound on the slavery question,’” President Frederick A. P. Barnard responded to critics at the University of Mississippi. Toward the end of 1859 several students entered Barnard’s house while the president was away, with “shameful designs” upon an enslaved young woman named Jane. They assaulted Jane, beating her so severely that she carried scars and wounds for months, and one of them, Samuel Humphreys, raped her. When the faculty declined to dismiss Humphreys on the testimony of a black woman, the president ordered his expulsion. A divided faculty vote—the northerners voting with the northern-born president—and Barnard’s decision to dismiss the student brought accusations of race treason. Detractors accused the president of using “Negro evidence” against a white man.49
The faculty response to Barnard constituted a public unpacking and examination of the lineage and quality of the ideas that informed his moral and social judgments; it was an attempt to display the regional specificity of knowledge. “There were scores of thousands of [northern-born] men at the South in much the same position as he,” a biographer estimated, and many of them were scholars. Jefferson Davis, soon to be the president of the new Confederate government, sided with Barnard, making a public show of shaking the president’s hand during the controversy. Jacob Thompson, a university trustee, sent Barnard a note of support for exercising an honorable “paternalism” over his slaves. If Barnard’s actions signaled hostility toward slavery, Thompson added, “then I am a downright abolitionist.” Barnard left Mississippi at the outbreak of the Civil War, eventually taking the presidency of Columbia University, where he served for a quarter century. The trustees commemorated his death in 1889 with the dedication of Barnard College.50
Despite its troubled reputation, the University of Virginia saw its largest undergraduate classes in the years before the Civil War. Most of these students were southerners bound by the knowledge that they would soon take guardianship over an increasingly isolated region. They solidified their bonds with violent rituals, drunken games, and other passages into manhood. They had a well-known appetite for whiskey. Spirited contests and public disorder on campus—such as the chemistry faculty’s annual “Laughing-Gas Day”—were common and taxed the patience of administrations, but the campus soon became infamous for outright insurrections. On Thursday, November 12, 1840, a masked student began shouting and firing a pistol outside the house of John Davis, chairman of the faculty. Earlier that day, the student had borrowed a gun from a classmate, and declared his intention to defend his right to riot. When Davis went to the door to investigate the disturbance, the young man turned and shot him in the stomach. “He died a Christian hero, blessing his family and his weeping colleagues and friends,” William Barton Rogers, now a professor in Charlottesville, wrote to his brothers. It was part of a long and dangerous period, during which the administration and prominent alumni struggled to reestablish order. Still, in 1852 John S. Mosby, a sophomore, shot a classmate during an altercation. The following year, Rogers resigned his chair as the undergraduate population at Virginia reached its antebellum peak.51
Politicians, editors, and academics in the South urged the necessity of expanding the educational infrastructure of the region to defend slavery. Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright, a Virginian who studied at Philadelphia under Benjamin Rush and th
en practiced and taught in Mississippi and Louisiana, used Thomas Jefferson’s call for the anatomical dissection of colored people to argue for a distinct southern science. The climate, conditions, and history of Europe reduced the value of modern science for southerners, Cartwright argued. The slave states shared more with the ancient civilization of Greece, where Hippocrates had anticipated the peculiar influence of climate and region on medical knowledge. Proslavery thought found academic expression in the desire to free the South from external intellectual influences. Editors cried for southern medical schools to address unique regional realities, and hundreds of southern students withdrew from northern medical colleges in the years before the Civil War.52
Southern intellectuals did not conjure the idea that there was knowledge particular to the slave societies of the Americas. For more than a century American and European scholars had presumed that the plantations were distinct environments for understanding natural science, and they assigned unique authority to researchers from those areas. They acknowledged the expertise of doctors from the slave colonies on questions of race. Physicians who practiced in the South and the Caribbean had held sway during the Whistelo proceedings. As bondage became peculiar to their region, southerners made a discrete claim to this knowledge and seized upon its political potential.
The sectional crisis hastened the rise of a regional intellectual elite. In the summer of 1857 the Episcopal bishops of ten southern states gathered on Lookout Mountain in Tennessee to approve a plan for the University of the South, which they envisioned as a rival to the elite universities of the world and the headquarters of southern intellectualism. They chose a site on the Cumberland Plateau and began designing the campus. Vermont bishop John Henry Hopkins, a northern apologist for slavery, resided six months in the Tennessee woods while he assisted the engineers and officers in laying out the grounds and buildings. A grand ceremony to place the cornerstone attracted some five thousand guests—including an envoy from Trinity Church in New York City—catered to by a parade of slaves brought from Nashville.53
As proslavery ultraism radicalized higher education in the South, northern scholars sought political common ground at the logical extremes of race. They did not retreat; they lagged behind. Faced with an increasingly divided nation and their own ambivalence about the place of black people in American society, a new generation of northern researchers expounded upon the mental and physical gaps between the races—an academic project with immediate relevance to the political conflicts over slavery. New York City became a clearinghouse for translating and circulating new developments in race science, particularly polygenist theories. The physician John Van Evrie ran a small industry translating, reworking, and publishing new scholarship from Europe asserting the distinct origins and development of the races.54 American scholars constructed two ideological paths to a national reconciliation: positive defenses of slavery grounded in history, theology, and economics; and scientific attacks upon the humanity of the colored races that denied black people the moral status of persons and forced them into the moral sphere of brutes.
The ship Indian Chief, Captain Cochran, chartered by
the American Colonization Society, sailed from this
port on Wednesday last, the 15th inst. for the Society’s
settlement at Cape Montserado, on the Coast of
Africa. She takes out one hundred fifty-four free
people of colour, with supplies for the Colony.
—AFRICAN REPOSITORY AND
COLONIAL JOURNAL, 1826
It is the most ludicrous Society that ever yet was dreamed
of. … There is no reason for removing the negro from
America but his color.
—DANIEL O’CONNELL, M.P., 1833
Heigho! it is a fine thing to be an Indian. One might
almost as well be a slave. … I greatly doubt that any
missionary has ever thought of making the Indian or
African his equal. As soon as we begin to talk about
equal rights, the cry of amalgamation is set up, as if
men of color could not enjoy their natural rights
without any necessity of intermarriage between the
sons and daughters of the two races. Strange, strange
indeed!
—REV. WILLIAM APESS, 1833
When an enlightened and Christianized community
shall have, on the shores of Africa, laws, language and
literature, drawn from among us, may then the scenes
of the house of bondage be to them like the remembrance
of Egypt to the Israelite,—a motive of thankfulness
to Him who hath redeemed them!
—HARRIET BEECHER STOWE,
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN (1852)
Chapter 8
“Could They Be Sent Back to Africa”
Colleges and the Quest for a White Nation
In the summer of 1806, several students at Williams College were overtaken by a sense of the presence and grace of God. As a teenager in Torrington, Connecticut, Samuel John Mills Jr. had witnessed the spiritual fervor of the Second Great Awakening. He began praying for a similar rebirth on campus. James Richards, Francis L. Robbins, Harvey Loomis, and Byram Green joined him. During one prayer meeting, they ran into a haystack to seek shelter from a storm. That haystack assembly committed to spreading the Gospel around the world. New colleges—Williams (1793), Bowdoin (1794), Union (1795), and Middlebury (1800)—amplified the social effects of the Awakening. Faculty and students on the older campuses also experienced revivals of faith. “The divine influence seemed to descend like a silent dew of heaven,” President Ashbel Green reported from Princeton, “and in about four weeks there were very few individuals in the college edifice who were not deeply impressed with a sense of the importance of spiritual and eternal things.” Green noted that every space on the campus was turned over to prayer.1
Williams president Edward Dorr Griffin later identified the haystack meeting as the beginning of a religious revolution that led to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1812), the New York–New Jersey Synod’s African School (1816), the American Bible Society (1816), the United Foreign Missionary Society (1817), and the American Colonization Society (1817). The Awakening had earlier roused Griffin’s church in Newark, New Jersey. “I never before witnessed the communication of a spirit of prayer so earnest and so general,” he recalled with awe, “nor observed such evident and remarkable answers to prayer.” It began when the deaths of the Reverend Alexander Mc-Whorter—a trustee of the College of New Jersey (Princeton) and a founder of Newark Academy—and other prominent Christians shook the community. A hundred people joined the congregation in a single day, and the converts came from all strata of the society, “including poor negroes,” Griffin celebrated. Union College awarded Rev. Griffin an honorary degree for his contributions to this national revival.2
This religious renewal sent American Christians crusading across the globe to fulfill the agenda of the compassionate and protective God who had guided them through the Revolution and into political liberty. It also further exposed the moral conflict between their declarations of individual and group freedom and their continued reliance upon the enslavement and dispossession of other peoples. As it swept the campuses, the revival forced intellectual engagement with these social injustices.
The Awakening occurred as the people of the United States were defining themselves as a nation, and it ultimately revealed the social limits of religious humanitarianism in American society. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, white people selected deeply racialized criteria for membership in the United States to defend their material aspirations from the challenges of their political and religious declarations.
The language of race was the vernacular of the campus. The political struggles to decide the composition of the United States marked the first time that college professors and officers occupied the public sphere as an interested
class. They exercised expertise over the pressing social question of who belonged in the new nation. “I am not accustomed to speak in public, except on subjects connected with my own profession,” Calvin Stowe, a professor of biblical studies and the husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe, confessed at the beginning of a lecture on what to do with the nation’s black population.3
The greatest domestic questions of the nineteenth century were debated in racial terms, and thus they enhanced the authority of the academy in political affairs. Scholars acquired broad influence as they responded to anxieties about the makeup of the nation and crafted arguments for restricting membership in American society. Academics delineated the social boundaries of the United States and synthesized discordant regional definitions of citizenship into a common dream of a white Christian society.
“O YE AMERICANS”
The American Revolution and the Second Great Awakening had incited a sincere and prolonged critique of slavery on campuses that remained financially dependent upon slave owners and slave traders; however, efforts to challenge and dismantle slavery in the Mid-Atlantic and New England aggravated concerns about the composition of American society. In 1784 the New York State legislature reopened King’s College as Columbia, changed its governance to recognize the disconnection from Britain, and named the continuing and new trustees. John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, John Lawrence, and Matthew Clarkson, all slaveholders, were on the new board. All four men were also founding members of the New York Manumission Society, established in January 1785 as the Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, and Protecting Such of Them as Have Been or May Be Liberated.4
The founders acknowledged a divine will that black people “share equally with us in that civil and religious liberty with which an indulgent Providence has blessed these states.” Such godsends led merchants such as Matthew Clarkson to doubt the morality of human slavery. In 1789 Moses Brown, of the Providence family partnership that had funded the deadly voyage of the Sally in 1764 and helped found the College of Rhode Island (Brown), organized the Providence Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.5
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