Chapter 5, “Whitening the Promised Land,” analyzes the colleges’ role in crafting and propagating a determinist and widely held vision that white people would become the sole possessors of the North American mainland. Colleges stopped being instruments for Christianizing Native people and became a means of effacing the religious and national divisions between European colonists. The popular belief in the divine promise of a white continent combined with an insatiable hunger for land to help American colonists invent themselves as a single people and cast Native Americans as barriers to progress.
The pernicious social ideas of the colonial era informed equally destructive intellectual obsessions in the new nation. Chapter 6, “‘All Students & All Americans,’” explains the origins of racial science in the Atlantic world. Race research brought the political and social ascent of the college. On both sides of the Atlantic, university faculties collected and processed information about human difference from which they forged theories of biological supremacy and inferiority. Scholars from the American colonies were central actors in the emergence of this racial science. Chapter 7, “‘On the Bodily and Mental Inferiority of the Negro,’” examines an early nineteenth-century trial that included testimony from many of the leading race researchers in the nation. Race science raised the prestige of the academy and allowed scholars to challenge the authority of the church by asserting a new, secular expertise over human affairs. However, the growing authority and influence of science also reflected scholars’ willingness and ability to defend the social order of slavery. The final chapter, “‘Could They Be Sent Back to Africa,’” studies the resulting rise of the academy and academics as a distinct political constituency within the antebellum United States. Significantly, their claims to authority over race became scholars’ route to the public sphere. Their first appearance as a force in the national political culture came as they articulated the social danger of free black people, whom they advocated relocating to Africa. This chapter offers an explanation for why college officers and professors were so dramatically overrepresented in movements to identify “racial” threats to the society and devise methods to homogenize the population.
In short, American colleges were not innocent or passive beneficiaries of conquest and colonial slavery. The European invasion of the Americas and the modern slave trade pulled peoples throughout the Atlantic world into each others’ lives, and colleges were among the colonial institutions that braided their histories and rendered their fates dependent and antagonistic. The academy never stood apart from American slavery—in fact, it stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage.
Part I
Slavery and the Rise of the American College
Coupling these men in Synods God hath blest,
By his word truth is found, error confest.
As helpfull unto godly learning they,
With Schooles and Colledge, finde out learnings way.
—EDWARD WINSLOW, 1647
To give a young Gentleman right Education;
The Army’s the very best School in the Nation.
My School-master call’d me a Dunce and a Fool;
But at Cuffs, I was always the Cock of the School.
… Now, Madam, you’ll think it a strange thing to say,
But the Sight of a Book, makes me sick to this Day.
—JONATHAN SWIFT, A SOLDIER AND
A SCHOLAR (1732)
Chapter 1
The Edges of the Empire
Colleges in the Arsenal of European Imperialism
In 1704 Jonathan Belcher, Harvard College class of 1699, traveled to Europe, where he was received at the court of Sophia, Dowager Electress of Hanover, through whom England, Ireland, and Scotland were to be united under one crown. She presented Belcher with her portrait for the colonies. Humbled in the presence of this intellectually talented and generous lady, the young man promised to send back from America “some small matters,” including candles original to New England. Belcher later decided to bring his gifts personally, returning to Europe in 1708 to fulfill his oath. The future colonial governor begged forgiveness for taking so long to keep his commitment and delivered salutations from Joseph Dudley, the royal governor of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. He delivered the candles. Belcher also presented Sophia with “an Indian Slave, A native of my Countrey, of which I humbly ask your Royal Highness’s Acceptance.” Io, the child whom Jonathan Belcher gave away, remained at court in Hanover, and Belcher drew rewards from this exchange for much of his life by exploiting the fantasies about America’s aboriginal peoples that had been circulating in Europe for more than two centuries.1
Sophia, Dowager Electress of Hanover, painted in Indian costume by
her sister, Luise Hollandine, in 1644
Jonathan Belcher was a child of colonialism. He came of age in a colony in which Christian hegemony went unchallenged. Disease had devastated the Native populations of New England and the militarization of the Christian settlements held the remaining Indian nations in submission. The African slave trade and its dependent commerce contributed to a robust New England economy that further marginalized Native communities. In 1680 Andrew Belcher and four other Boston businessmen sent the Elizabeth, under Captain William Warren, on a slaving mission that killed at least twenty-two people and brought more than a hundred enslaved Africans to market in Rhode Island. Andrew Belcher was “a very great Merchant” who amassed “a considerable Estate,” reads his obituary. That fortune afforded his son an education at Boston’s Latin School, then a preparatory ritual for entrance into Harvard College, where he took two degrees. Jonathan Belcher worked as the European liaison for his father’s merchant house, and solidified his social status by marrying Mary Partridge, the daughter of New Hampshire lieutenant governor William Partridge. Jonathan Belcher sat on the Massachusetts Council for more than a decade. In 1729 King George II, Sophia’s grandson, appointed Belcher governor of Massachusetts, which made him an ex officio trustee of Harvard and brought the Indian missions of New England under his authority.2
Colleges supplied the administrations of the colonies, supported domestic institutions, and advanced Christian rule over Native peoples. After he was replaced as governor of Massachusetts in 1741, Belcher traveled to England in search of another appointment. He was granted the governorship of New Jersey, a significant demotion. Unable to secure a more attractive post, he reluctantly settled among a people in “a Wretched State of Ignorance[,] Unpolisht and of bad Manners.” He chose Burlington, which was a short horse ride to more cosmopolitan Philadelphia. Governor Belcher reissued the charter of the College of New Jersey (Princeton), authorized lotteries to raise an endowment, promoted a European fund-raising campaign, donated a library of nearly five hundred volumes and a small art collection, and encouraged the admission of students from John and David Brainerd’s mission among the Lenape (Delaware) Indians. In response to this generosity, the trustees decided to dedicate the first campus building to him, calling it Belcher Hall. The governor declined, suggesting instead that it be named Nassau Hall, in tribute to King William III of the royal House of Nassau, “the great Deliverer of the British Nation, from those two Monstrous Furies,—Popery & Slavery.”3
Like his present to Sophia, Jonathan Belcher’s generosity toward Harvard and the College of New Jersey was rooted in the oppression of other people. The first five colleges in the British American colonies—Harvard (established 1636), William and Mary (1693), Yale (1701), Codrington (1745) in Barbados, and New Jersey (1746)4—were instruments of Christian expansionism, weapons for the conquest of indigenous peoples, and major beneficiaries of the African slave trade and slavery.
ESCOLARES Y CONQUISTADORES
Diverse personnel patrolled Europe’s American possessions, and a range of structures marked and secured the edges of its empires. Missionaries, explorers, merchants, traders, and soldiers extended the borders of the colonial world, and churches, forts, storehouses, docks, and ship
s announced the permanence of the European invasion. Scholars and schools were a less obvious but no less significant presence. Spain’s conquests in the Americas were followed by intensive periods of institution building. Universities catalyzed cultural shifts in the capitals and hinterlands of the defeated Taino, Carib, Aztec, Mayan, and Incan empires.
Dominican priests organized the Universidad de Santo Tomás de Aquino (Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo), the first college in the Americas. They began a seminary shortly after the Spanish invasion, and a 1538 papal decree raised that academy to a university. As early as the 1530s, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinians had seminaries in Mexico, where the Dominicans laid the foundations of the Pontificia Universidad (1551). Jesuits in Lima, Peru, founded the Universidad de San Marcos (1551) to instruct indios and record and codify the Quechua language. Franciscans built the Universidad de Antioquia (1554) in Colombia “para ilustrar a los aborígenes.” Ordered priests established universities in Mexico City, Santo Domingo, Lima, and Medellín modeled on those of Salamanca and Alcala in Spain. By the mid-sixteenth century these institutions had assembled faculties, formed academic divisions with full courses of study, and begun conferring degrees.5
The African slave trade underwrote this invasion of ideas. Ferdinand and Isabella authorized the transport of enslaved Africans into the Americas, a commerce that grew rapidly after the first slaves were delivered in 1502. Catholic clergy traded, bought, and sold Africans in Atlantic markets, and forced them to labor on plantations, in mines, and in towns. In 1530 a Dominican bishop begged King Charles V to deregulate the Africa trade, which required a royal license, to allow colonists in Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Puerto Rico greater access to labor. Santo Domingo and Cuba had active ports, and both islands operated as distribution centers into the greater Caribbean and into mainland settlements such as Yucatán and Vera Cruz in Mexico. Traders also landed at Cartagena, Colombia, where they shipped Africans to Portobello, Panama, marched them to the Pacific, and transported them south to Peru.6
At the College of San Pablo in Lima, Jesuits built their residence with enslaved African workers, and the order trafficked in adults and children for investment and labor. Africans toiled at the college and on its haciendas, elite Spanish colonists donated land and slaves to the school, and priests administered an extensive commercial enterprise. In Peru alone, Jesuits owned thousands of enslaved African people, whom they used to sustain a network of colleges and missions. “By the time of the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from Spanish America,” writes historian Nicholas P. Cushner, “the colleges were ranked among the largest slaveholders in America.”7
Forged during wars and conflicts that began with the Crusades and continued through the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic orders had the capacity to project and protect the faith at the boundaries of the empire. In 1608 Samuel de Champlain led the invasion of eastern Canada that established New France. Récollet and Jesuit priests soon initiated missions to the Wendat (Huron). The Compagnie de la Nouvelle France directed the governor “to bind the Huron nation to him … by subjecting it to the yoke of the gospel.” Before his death in 1635, Champlain had dispatched priests to learn Native languages, settled missionaries among the Indians, pushed French villages closer to Native nations, encouraged intermarriage between Indians and French settlers, and invited Native people into the French colonies. The Jesuits began schools to catechize Indian children, and they opened an Indian academy in Quebec with a donation from the Marquis de Gamache. Clergy founded the Collège des Jésuites (1635) in Quebec to train Native men to evangelize the aboriginal nations. In 1663 Bishop François de Laval founded the Séminaire de Québec as the clerical headquarters of New France, and Louis XIV later ordered the addition of a dormitory for Indian boys.8
French colonists relied upon Portuguese and Dutch slave traders to provision the plantations in the Caribbean and at the mouth of the Mississippi. African slavery was also established in Canada. Jesuit superior general Paul Le Jeune had an enslaved boy who was probably the first African in the colony. Olivier Le Jeune, as he was renamed, arrived during the Englishman David Kirke’s 1629 conquest of French Canada. Father Le Jeune obtained him when the French retook that region under the Treaty of St. Germain. Following the restoration, King Louis acceded to the colonists’ pleas for enslaved Africans in order to address labor shortages and maintain their competitiveness with New England and New Netherland.9
François de Laval
SOURCE: Séminaire de Québec
The colonists already had a thriving trade in Indians. “I am to baptize a little Hiroquois [Iroquois] child who is to be taken to France,” Father Le Jeune wrote from North America in the early seventeenth century. The boy was “never to return to this country,” he continued, as “he was given to a Frenchman.” The four-year-old “cried all the time before his baptism, and ran away from us,” the priest laughed; “I could not hold him.” Le Jeune baptized the child, renamed him Louis in honor of the king, and shipped him off. French colonists created an extensive market in enslaved Indians whom they used in the Canadian settlements and the French West Indies. Bound Indians greatly outnumbered unfree Africans in Canada, and Catholic settlers in Montreal and Quebec formed a ready market for Native peoples taken in wars or raids throughout the Americas.10
Britain’s rulers had also learned the strategic value of academies during their wars for territory, thrones, trade routes, and people. The medieval and early modern universities—Oxford (1096) and Cambridge (1209) in England; St. Andrews (1413), Glasgow (1451), Aberdeen (1495), and Edinburgh (1582) in Scotland; and Trinity College (1592) in Ireland—had been swept into the religious and political conflicts that gave birth to Great Britain. Hundreds of Oxford students dropped their books and began drilling with arms on campus during the English Civil Wars, 1642 to 1651. The crown and Parliament engaged in repeated purges of hostile students and faculty to bring the colleges into the service of their competing political causes. A clandestine Puritanism thrived at Cambridge despite monarchist efforts to make the faculty and scholars conform to the Church of England. Dissenting theology spread from Emmanuel and Sidney Sussex to other colleges in the university, including Trinity and Corpus Christi.11
Universities facilitated England’s colonial campaigns in Scotland and Ireland, and they played a similar role in the Americas. The English sought to open a college during the formative years of Virginia. In February 1615 King James I directed his bishops to hold collections for “the founding & endowing of an ample Colledge” among “those Barbarians” of Virginia. Raising a college was part of a layered English strategy to maintain religious orthodoxy among the colonists and to check the power of the confederacy under Chief Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas. Thomas Dale, who brought Pocahontas’s delegation to England the following year, and the Reverend Alexander Whitaker, minister to the colony, pleaded for the charter by reminding the crown of its obligation to evangelize and educate Indians. Dale had unsuccessfully tried to get the colonial government moved to Henrico, a James River outpost named for Henry, Prince of Wales. He courted the college to secure his investment, accelerate the conversion of the local Indians, and help turn Native people into tenants who could bolster commerce and security.12
After King James commanded “the College to be erected in Virginia for the conversion of Infidels,” the Virginia Company apportioned ten thousand acres in Henrico to endow the Indian academy and a larger university. By 1619, when the first enslaved Africans were traded into the colony, supporters had raised more than £2,000 in Britain for the colonial school, collected donations for a library and other necessities, and drawn up basic regulations. The company dispatched carpenters, bricklayers, craftsmen, and farmers to begin building the campus and cultivating the grants. More than three hundred people under the direction of George Thorpe settled the lands—some fifty of them missionaries tasked with “the reclaiming of the Barbarous Natives.” The Reverend Patrick Copland, a Scot and an experienced East Indi
es missionary who had met Thomas Dale in Asia, agreed to be rector of the college, receiving shares entitling him to three hundred acres of Virginia land.13
Conflicts over territory and trade had already fractured relations between Christians and Indians. On April 18, 1622, Copland delivered a thanksgiving prayer in London for Virginia, where he was soon to resettle. A ship that returned to London that July carried reports that Chief Opechancanough, who came to power after the death of his brother Chief Powhatan, had attacked the colony on March 22, massacred dozens of inhabitants, and destroyed the settlement. In 1624 Edward Palmer of London left lands in New England and Virginia to support a college on a Susquehanna River island, but his executors mismanaged the fund and nothing came of his design. King James revoked the Virginia Company charter that year and imposed royal government, an upheaval that ended the first attempt to organize a Protestant college in America.14
Nonetheless, the seeds of the English universities were already being planted. In its first quarter century New England received more than a hundred Cambridge alumni and more than thirty graduates of Oxford. Even young Trinity, in Dublin, was training personnel for the colonies. John Winthrop Jr. graduated from Trinity before his father—the first governor of Massachusetts Bay—departed for North America. John Sherrard left Providence Island in the West Indies to study in Dublin. The brothers Samuel and Increase Mather both earned advanced degrees from Trinity.15
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