President Ezra Stiles maintained a religious fellowship with the black community of New Haven during his tenure at Yale. He had earlier held services for African Americans in the study of his Newport home, welcoming as many as ninety people at a time. He referred to black people as his brothers and sisters in Christ and fell to his knees with them in prayer. “This day died Phyllis a Negro Sister of our Church,” the minister noted with affection in March 1773, adding that Brother Zingo, her husband, had joined the church first and then urged his wife and children to attend. “She was brought hither out of Guinea [in] 1759 aet. 13 or 14 [years old], and has lived in Gov. [Josiah] Lyndon[’]s Family ever since.” In August 1790 President Stiles and fourteen other men—most of them faculty and officers of Yale—drafted a constitution for the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom. They began meeting the following month with Rev. Stiles as their president.6
A lively antislavery discourse flowered on the young nation’s campuses. Ashbel Green penned a position paper against slavery for the General Assembly of the New Jersey Presbytery, and he ministered to black people in the Princeton area. Peter Wilson, professor of Greek and Latin at Columbia, authored an antislavery tract, which he followed with other abolitionist essays. His colleague John Daniel Gros, a German immigrant and professor of the German language, moral philosophy, and geography, also began publicly condemning bondage. In 1789 Columbia awarded Rev. Gros an honorary doctorate of divinity. His fellow honorees included the Reverend Abraham Beach of Somerset, New Jersey, a Yale graduate and slave owner, who served more than a quarter century as a trustee of Columbia and nearly a half century on the board of Rutgers. In an address before President Stiles’s antislavery society, the Reverend Jonathan Edwards Jr., later the president of Union College, charged that the slave trade had brought only brutality, inhumanity, bloodshed, warfare, upheaval, and immorality to Africa, Europe, and the Americas.7
Manumission societies were encouraging this antislavery dialogue. In 1785 Thomas Clarkson won a medal at Cambridge University for the best Latin dissertation on the morality of slavery. The New York Manumission Society ordered copies of that thesis. The following year the board supplied a similar essay award at Columbia, where the trustees voted that “a gold medal be given to the person who shall deliver the best oration at the next annual commencement of the College in New York, exposing in the best manner the injustice and cruelty of the slave trade, and the oppression and impolicy of holding negroes in slavery.” The effect was immediate. “Who gave you a better right, O ye Americans, to go to the coast of Africa, and betray and kidnap its quiet and peaceful inhabitants,” a graduate challenged his audience during a 1786 commencement, while reminding them of the evil of holding “your fellow men … in hopeless and perpetual slavery.” Moses Brown offered an antislavery prize to Rhode Island but learned that it would not be “agreeable” to the slave traders on the board. He then queried President Samuel Hopkins on the possibility of creating competitions at Harvard, Yale, or New Jersey.8
The era saw a measurable decline in slaveholding among northern faculty and administrators. In 1788 Timothy Dwight, later the president of Yale, made a contract with an enslaved woman named Naomi for her freedom. In 1807 Ashbel Green manumitted nine-year-old Betsey Stockton after the death of his wife, Elizabeth Stockton. The child continued to live with President Green, who also tutored her. That year Edward Dorr Griffin purchased a black boy named Samuel Skudder and made an emancipation agreement with the child’s parents. During the next five years Professor Peter Wilson of Columbia freed two black women, Susan and Isabel. In 1817 the college patron and trustee Henry Rutgers liberated Thomas Boston. In September 1821 the trustee Abraham Beach brought Caesar Jackson before the justices of Franklin Township, New Jersey, to begin the manumission process.9
However, these steps toward the regional eradication of slavery aggravated fears of a multiracial future. By the early nineteenth century American Christians were missionizing the Hawaiian Islands, India, Palestine, and China. This enthusiasm for overseas outreach reflected, in part, a fracturing of the consensus for domestic evangelization. Foreign missions allowed white Christians to convert indigenous and colored peoples without strengthening the political and legal claims of nonwhite and non-Christian peoples upon the United States. Students from Yale tutored Henry Obookiah, one of five Hawaiian teenagers brought to Connecticut, and Obookiah later lived and studied with President Timothy Dwight. In 1817 the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) had established a school in Cornwall, Connecticut, to prepare colored youth for Christian missions. Yale president Jeremiah Day mentored Yung Wing, a Chinese student and the first Asian to graduate from a United States college. The place of people of color in North America was less clear. When Gallegina, or “The Buck,” a Scottish and Cherokee student from Georgia, arrived at Cornwall, he was surrounded by youth from Hawaii, India, China, Malaysia, and other nations. Gallegina became a ward of Elias Boudinot, the former president of the Continental Congress, the founding president of the American Bible Society, and a graduate and trustee of the College of New Jersey. At twenty-four years old, Betsey Stockton left Princeton for an ABCFM program—in Hawaii.10
Henry Rutgers’s Manumission of Thomas Boston, 1817
SOURCE: New-York Historical Society
BANISHED NEGROES AND VANISHED INDIANS
“Could they be sent back to Africa, a three-fold benefit would arise,” the Reverend Robert Finley promised a friend in 1816: “we should be cleared of them:—we should send to Africa a population partially civilized and christianized for its benefit:—our blacks themselves would be put in a better situation.” His father, James Finley, a Glasgow merchant and a parishioner of John Witherspoon, followed Witherspoon to Princeton. In 1787 Robert graduated from the College of New Jersey, and at fifteen he became a tutor in the South. Finley returned to Princeton to study for the ministry, and he later served as a professor and a trustee. As he began planning African colonization, Robert Finley was called to the presidency of the University of Georgia. He shared the colonization plan with his family and close friends. Finley saw the immediate task as convincing “the rich and benevolent [to] devise means to form a colony on some part of Africa” for the relocation of free black people. In 1817 United States Supreme Court justice Bushrod Washington, the nephew of George Washington, became the charter president of the American Colonization Society (ACS). Elias B. Caldwell recruited Washington power brokers to the cause. Caldwell was clerk of the Supreme Court, Finley’s brother-in-law, and a charge of Elias Boudinot. Samuel John Mills, of the haystack communion, helped draw religious radicals to the cause. Charles Fenton Mercer, a 1797 graduate of New Jersey and possibly the originator of the colonization idea, established the Liberia colony in 1822.11
The ACS was born on campus. It was conceived from the collision between enthusiastic Christianity and the rigid racial definitions that governed social and political thought in the United States. Colonization was, at its genesis, a compromise between the evangelical urge to solve the moral problem of slavery and the political and social rejection of a multiracial society. It sought to balance the moral economy by answering the religious challenges of the Great Awakening while respecting the solidifying political configuration of the United States. Academics exercised disproportionate influence over this discourse. They advanced colonization as the best, perhaps only, chance to manage the political tensions resulting from the nation’s diverging regional economies and demographic transformations.
White Americans had already made ethnic cleansing a preferred solution to their self-constructed racial dilemmas. President Thomas Jefferson ignited speculation about the fate of Native Americans when the Louisiana Purchase opened the possibility of the United States exchanging lands with the eastern Indian nations. The federal government subsequently used coercion, violence, cycles of debt, and deceit to reduce Native territories in the Southeast and displace Indians who stood in the path of white migrations and
the expansion of plantation slavery. President James Madison faced increased pressure to dispossess Indians as the price of cotton climbed in international markets and overproduction exhausted the seaboard plantations. In his second inaugural address, President James Monroe belittled the idea of Indian nations as a dangerous and misleading flattery that inhibited the federal government’s administration of Native peoples, whom he cast as perpetual dependents. Monroe urged Congress to vacate Native Americans’ land rights and settle Indians in such ways as to encourage the westward expansion of white people.12
Certificate of membership in the American Colonization Society
SOURCE: Library of Congress
The image of Indians as a barrier to progress supplanted earlier beliefs that Native peoples could be assimilated through the civilizing institutions of Christian society. Christians had once accused Native people of “savagery” and prescribed conversion as the antidote, but the social meaning of savagery was shifting from a cultural flaw to a fixed biological trait measured in the vulnerabilities of Indians and announced by their complexions. The racial constructs that coalesced in defense of slavery also allowed white people to redefine Native Americans as incapable of civilization. An Indian presence thus became incompatible with progress. Andrew Jackson’s military campaigns popularized the image of Indians as defeated peoples. The immediate and complete removal of Indians to areas beyond white settlement, President Jackson later explained, promised to further economic development in the South and end the political conflicts between the national and state governments over the status of Native people and their lands. In 1814 Jackson had led the forces that defeated the Creek and forced them to surrender twenty-three million acres, including most of Alabama and southern Georgia, to the United States.13
White southerners were now poised to claim tens of millions of acres from multiple Native nations. The 1830 Indian Removal Act authorized the federal government to treat with Native nations to swap lands in the East for territories across the Mississippi. The following year, Chief Justice John Marshall declared Indians “domestic dependent nations” in Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia. The decision invoked the scientific notion of a hierarchy of the human races to depict the political subordination of all indigenous peoples as inevitable.14
Those same political pressures had reshaped evangelical outreach to Native Americans and African Americans. A Bible Society founder and future president of Rutgers College, Philip Milledoler designed missions to Indian nations west of the Mississippi River. Planters and settlers eyeing agricultural lands in the southeastern states helped push national policy toward removal, and missionary activity deferred to their politics. Simultaneously, Rev. Milledoler also joined Williams president Edward Dorr Griffin in promoting African colonization. Father Milledoler and Henry Rutgers served as the founding vice president and president, respectively, of the New York Colonization Society.15
Although many northerners opposed Indian removal, it was precisely the success of the racial clearances in the South that offered the most compelling evidence that a campaign to relocate free black people and conduct religious crusades on the African continent and throughout the colored world were viable. The prolonged attack upon Native presences gave millions of Americans reason to believe that all subject peoples could be disappeared. It was through Indian removal that the desire to eliminate nonwhite, non-Christian presences came to dominate the popular culture.
REGIONAL WHITE NATIONALISMS
“Where the Indian always has been, he enjoys an absolute right still to be,” Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen declared in opposition to Georgia’s steps to remove the Cherokee nation. The future chancellor of the University of the City of New York (New York University) and future president of Rutgers University was one of the most prominent defenders of the Indians in the southeastern states. It belongs among the great speeches of United States history, if only for its elegant defense of the separation of powers and its articulation of the principle of state subordination to federal authority. Frelinghuysen warned that the violation of treaties with Indian nations would undermine the integrity of the United States government. Even mere contracts constrain all parties, but the Cherokee possessed more than pieces of paper recording ancient promises. They were a sovereign nation, the senator thundered. European powers had recognized their sovereignty throughout the colonial era, and the United States had repeatedly affirmed their national status. “I ask in what code of the law of nation, or by what process of abstract deduction, their rights have been extinguished?” These treaties constituted exchanges of obligations, and now Georgia sought to keep the gains but toss off the responsibilities. “Truth and honor have no citadel on earth—their sanctions are despised and forgotten, and the law of the strongest prevails,” Frelinghuysen charged. Raw greed threatened the constitution. Native people had ceded hundreds of millions of acres of land to the United States by purchase and by treaty, “yet we crave more.” That hunger was so great, so insatiable, that it could be neither satisfied nor restrained by contract, honor, or principle.16
When President Jackson visited Harvard in 1834, the residents of Cambridge sharply divided over whether and how to protest his Indian removal policy. By the time that Jackson left the White House, federal relocation programs had affected virtually every nation east of the Mississippi and north to Lake Michigan. Native peoples from New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest—including the Oneida, Winnebago, and Black Hawk—were uprooted, and the policy remapped the South. The “Five Civilized Tribes”—Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole—were cleared. The government cultivated political and economic conditions that made removal the only option for many communities, and federal troops warred against Native nations that did not comply. Martin Van Buren of New York was secretary of state in Andrew Jackson’s cabinet and part of the northern bloc that sided with Georgia. In 1838 President Van Buren concluded this tragic era with the deadly forced march of the Cherokee along the “Trail of Tears.”17
Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen, president of Rutgers and
New York University
SOURCE: Library of Congress
Many northerners condemned Georgians for supporting any permutation of state and federal power—whatever its constitutionality—that promised to clear Indians off rich agricultural lands. Southerners responded by lampooning these fiery defenses of Cherokee territorial rights from northerners whose recent family histories were intertwined with the violent subordination of Indian peoples and whose regional histories included the erasure of scores of Native sovereignties. What if his ancestors were “a blood-thirsty race?” Congressman Edward Everett of Massachusetts cautiously allowed. What if they “treated the Indians barbarously?” A former Harvard professor and a future president and trustee of the college, Everett argued that a prior breach was a poor defense for a new injustice.18
President Edward Everett of Harvard
SOURCE: Library of Congress
While northerners could find fault with the necessity and legality of Indian removal, they could hardly disown the underlying body of ideas. Countless white people in New England and the Mid-Atlantic were convinced of not only the possibility of racially homogenizing their regions but also the value of that project. They were building a social geography consistent with their political and economic desires. The presuppositions of removal campaigns—particularly the biological basis of civilization and citizenship—were informed by racial ideas that had ascended in every region of the antebellum nation.
Congressman Everett shared the New Jersey senator’s sense of the potentially tragic consequences of Indian removal. Everett signed a copy of Frelinghuysen’s speech and sent it to the librarian of Harvard, John Langdon Sibley. “I cannot disguise my impression, that it is the greatest question which ever came before Congress, short of the question of peace and war,” Everett estimated. He argued that the reputation of the United States in all its foreign affairs was at issue. Georgia sought t
o strip a sovereign and friendly nation of its land and open that territory to white settlement. It declared the Cherokee its subjects in order to acquire the power to turn them into exiles and refugees. Its primary justification was to protect the Cherokee from an aggressively expanding white population. “Who urges this plea?” asked Frelinghuysen. “They who covet the Indian lands.” Proponents offered a circular explanation that Indians had to be driven away to secure them from the people driving them away.19
Frelinghuysen and Everett made impassioned defenses of the humanity and equality of the Cherokee. “The Indians are men, endowed with kindred faculties and powers with ourselves,” the senator appealed, “they have a place in human sympathy, and are justly entitled to share in the common bounties of benignant Providence.” They were no less the children of God and no less a part of the divine plan. The northerners cited Thomas Jefferson’s affirmation of Cherokee civilization. Everett recalled that the Virginian had helped to organize the Cherokee government. These Indians had embraced Christianity, commercial trade, farming and advanced agricultural techniques, and democracy. They had skilled political leaders, successful businessmen and merchants, artisans, and professionals. “Men as competent as ourselves” were being robbed of privilege and property, Everett countered.20
These crusades peaked in the 1830s. As Congressman Everett was sending Harvard a copy of Frelinghuysen’s speech, Elliot Cresson was forwarding a signed copy of the annual report of the Pennsylvania Colonization Society to Harvard president Josiah Quincy. A wealthy merchant and college benefactor, Cresson was one of four Philadelphians to hold a $1,000 life membership in the American Colonization Society. He worked as an ACS agent, and he had raised funds for the cause in England. “The removal of our coloured population is, I think, a common object,” wrote Chief Justice Marshall in 1831, the year of Cherokee v. Georgia. “The whole union would be strengthened by it, and relieved from a danger whose extent can scarcely be estimated.” Justice Marshall joined former president James Madison in arguing the practicality and constitutionality of selling federal lands to fund African colonization.21
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