Ebony and Ivy

by Craig Steven Wilder

  The board included a number of men who traded in indentured British and German servants and enslaved Africans. The bifurcation of the Pennsylvania economy between agriculture and a rising system of manufactories brought calls for laborers with different skills and backgrounds. Meeting these demands had lasting political and social consequences. It sparked cyclical struggles between the Quaker minority and a growing population of European immigrants, who demanded political representation and sought the freedom to war against Indians for control over lands at the western border of the colony. Those who arrived as indentured servants often carried an even greater sense of entitlement upon their emancipation.51

  Commerce strained the Quaker ethic. In 1684 a British firm had brought 150 enslaved Africans to Philadelphia. “It were better they were blacks,” William Penn, the founding proprietor, decided the following year while addressing the colony’s labor needs, “for then a man has them while they live.” In the eighteenth century the number of Pennsylvania merchants in the Africa trade jumped significantly. William Allen and Joseph Turner, both founding trustees of the College of Philadelphia, formed a partnership that brought slaves from the British Caribbean and servants from Europe. David Barclay represented Allen and Turner in London. The two investors advertised for runaways, including people fleeing their New Jersey iron foundry; used their firm to facilitate slave catching; and sold people from their offices. Aging Philadelphia merchants often drifted into manufacturing to limit their exposure in the riskier Atlantic trade. Prominent families such as the Allens, Turners, and Whartons shaped the iron industry, which used enslaved black and indentured white labor. Allen and Turner invested more than £20,000 in a single foundry. One of Pennsylvania’s wealthiest men, William Allen, sent three sons to the college, two of whom also became trustees.52

  Samuel Johnson teaching his first class at King’s College,

  in a nineteenth-century illustration

  SOURCE: New York Public Library

  Philadelphia mayor Charles Willing, a charter trustee of the academy, owned three ships and organized at least six slaving expeditions. A 1747 advertisement he took out announced that “several likely Negro Men and Boys” were to be sold from “the Brigantine George from Guinea.” He was also offering rum and sugar from Barbados and a variety of goods from England. Thomas Willing, the mayor’s son, partnered with Robert Morris in one of the colony’s largest slaving outfits, Willing and Morris, which sold hundreds of Africans into the Pennsylvania and Delaware markets. Later the president of the Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, Thomas Willing also spent more than thirty years on the board of the college.53

  The Philadelphia college was a beneficiary of these trades in unfree people. A Scot who first settled the Caribbean, John Inglis relocated to Philadelphia, where he sent four slavers to the Carolinas and West Indies in less than a decade. His father-in-law, George McCall, and brother-in-law, Samuel McCall, also a founding trustee, invested in more than fifteen slaving voyages. William Plumsted, another charter trustee and also a son-in-law of George McCall, sent two slaving vessels to sea while serving on the board; one, in partnership with David Franks, brought a hundred enslaved people from Guinea to Philadelphia. John Searle, the son of a slaver and an experienced Madeira trader, was part of a second generation of merchants who became trustees as slave importations into Pennsylvania and Delaware peaked.54

  The merchants pulled the school into the unfree economy. “A Likely young Negro Woman, who can Wash, Iron, and cook well; also a young Negro Girl, about 14 Years of Age,” began John Inglis’s 1739 announcement for two slaves whom he advertised as smallpox survivors. Inglis also sold British indentured servants—primarily tradesman and farmers—and Caribbean and English wares from his Front Street store. After advertising the wide variety of dry goods at his merchant house, he noted that he “had to sell two likely young Negro Men fit for Town or Country Service.” Thomas Lawrence moved black people in the local markets, including a Barbadian woman named Hannah who ran away in 1739, and Elizabeth Gregory, born on Long Island, who escaped in 1749.55

  In 1759 the firm of Tench Francis, a founder of the Philadelphia college, sent Obadiah Brown and Company of Providence an update of the insurance rates for Wheel of Fortune, a schooner being configured for a voyage to the African coast. William Coxe, Francis’s son-in-law and a graduate of Philadelphia, partnered in a 1762 slaving voyage that brought seventy-five people from Gambia to Pennsylvania on the schooner Sally. The Browns became benefactors and governors of the College of Rhode Island, which the trustees renamed in 1804 to recognize a gift from Nicholas Brown.56

  Merchants in Providence and Newport dominated the American arm of the African slave trade. In 1764, the charter year of the College of Rhode Island, the brigantine Sally—belonging to Nicholas, John, Joseph, and Moses Brown of Providence, known collectively as Nicholas Brown and Company—left on an African voyage that proved disastrous. The Brown brothers provided Captain Esek Hopkins—younger brother of College of Rhode Island chancellor Stephen Hopkins, later a signer of the Declaration of Independence—with careful instructions: where and how to trade on the African coast, money and materials for purchasing people, directions for unloading the captives into the Caribbean markets, and a specific request to return to Providence with four teenage boys for the family’s use. The competition for slaves and the scarce supply of captives on the African coast prolonged Hopkins’s work. From November 1764 through August 1765 Captain Hopkins trolled for human beings, paying off kidnappers and trading rum, guns, knives, powder, cloth and clothing, beads, tobacco, onions, and other goods for children, women, and men. When the ship finally set sail for the West Indies, nineteen people, many of them children, had already died, including a woman who hung herself between the decks. The captives rose up during the journey across the Atlantic, and the crew killed eight people and seriously wounded several others. Death and suicide marked the remainder of the voyage—only 88 of 196 Africans survived.57

  A product of a middling family in New Jersey, Jasper Farmar’s work as a slave ship’s captain gave him entry to the merchant class. He withdrew from the dangerous Africa trade and increased his wealth by captaining ships between New York and London. Farmar used his earnings to invest in his own ships, open a merchant house with his brother Samuel, and partner in the Africa trade. By midcentury he was involved in slaving ventures with the merchant and King’s College trustee John Watts. Some measure of his success came when his heir, Jasper, enrolled at Queen’s College in New Brunswick. The charter trustees of Queen’s came from the most prominent slaveholding and slave trading families in the region, and they included Philip Livingston, Robert Livingston, Theodorus Van Wyck, Peter Schenck, and Abraham Hasbrouck. The college sat in the Dutch slaveholding belt that stretched from Elizabethtown to Trenton, and its founding president, Jacob Hardenbergh, and first tutor, Frederick Frelinghuysen, were slave owners. Its earliest graduates were from slaveholding Dutch families, among them the Schencks, Van Cortlandts, and Van Hornes.58

  THE ERA OF MERCHANT BENEVOLENCE

  As slave traders and planters came to power in colonial society, they took guardianship over education. The Boston merchant Nicholas Boylston willed £1,500 for the Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory, one of Harvard’s first endowed chairs. He made large sums bringing luxury goods into the colony during the French and Indian War, after Thomas Boylston—his brother, business partner, and executor—had enhanced their rather comfortable inheritance through the slave trade. In their 1765 will, the Maryland slaveholders Peter and Susannah Bayard created a scholarship at the College of New Jersey for worthy but impoverished students. The gift was made in memory of their son John—”a youth of an Extraordinary Genius Carefully Improv’d by a Liberall Education”—who had died a decade earlier. In his 1775 will, Cornelius Van Schaack instructed his executors to set aside a fund for the education of his grandchildren. His son Peter, a lawyer, attended King’s College, from which his grandson Henry Cru
ger Van Schaack also graduated.59 Such generosity had costs.

  “You do me great Honour, Sir, in presuming such favourable Things of my Administration,” President Samuel Davies of New Jersey told the head of the Livingston clan in 1760. Such families built and maintained colonial academies. “If my future Management Should be so happy as to deserve the Continuance of your Charity, I shall esteem it the greatest Blessing I can enjoy in Life,” Rev. Davies continued. A founder of the college, Peter Van Brugh Livingston served on the board for more than a decade, cementing a family connection to Princeton that lasted for generations.60

  The Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian Livingston family generally sent their children to the colleges of the dissenting churches in New England and New Jersey. Before the American Revolution, two Livingston men governed New Jersey and a half dozen Livingston boys enrolled in the school. Six members of the family finished King’s in the same period. After increasing his fortune in the Africa trade, Philip—whose ascendance at Livingston Manor was marked by the horrendous voyage of the Wolf—became an elder and deacon in the Dutch Reformed Church of New York City. He donated liberally to King’s College, and in 1766 he became a founding trustee of the Dutch Reformed Queen’s College. The high point of his public life came when he represented New York in the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence.61

  A slave trading and slaveholding family with branches across the Northeast, the Ogdens fit the profile of the dynasties that came to rule colonial education. They descended from a patentee of Elizabeth, the first permanent European settlement in New Jersey. Originally Elizabethtown, this was the area where a small number of black people who fled Manhattan during the hysteria of 1741 were quickly rounded up and burned. It was also the birthplace of the College of New Jersey. Slave ownership in East Jersey was “common,” and the area housed a number of active traders. In 1730 Captains John and David Ogden commissioned the schooner Union in New Jersey and launched their new ship on its first African voyage during Christmas week. Slave owners and dealers, the Ogdens were also generous patrons of the northeastern colleges. By the time Robert Ogden stepped down as a trustee of New Jersey, seven of his children and relatives had graduated. Despite the closing of King’s College during the Revolution, the Ogdens established a family tradition there too, with at least three Ogden men taking degrees before the outbreak of the war. Two Ogden boys enrolled at Philadelphia within a few years of its founding.62

  The American college was an extension of merchant wealth. In 1746 Philip Livingston, from the second generation of the family, donated the money for the Livingston Professorship in Divinity at Yale, the first such chair in the history of the struggling New Haven college, in gratitude for his sons’ educations. Peter Van Brugh Livingston, his son, and Peter Schuyler also gave to Yale, where President Thomas Clap, who created the chair, kept close account of such patronage. It did not take long for the merchant families to become academic officers. For example, College of New Jersey treasurer David Ogden graduated from Yale in 1728, shortly before his uncles sent the Union on its first Africa voyage.63

  Donations from Britain were also frequently linked to the slave economy. Samuel Holden, the director of the Bank of England, gave Yale a small library. His bank catered to the wealthy planters of the British West Indies. The officers of Harvard appointed John Lloyd Jr., the London financier and insurer, as their agent to collect on their behalf, a decision that likely responded to the benefactions pouring into British universities from West Indian planters and merchants. The College of William and Mary chose the London firm Perry, Lane, and Company, which had an extensive business with the slave colonies, as its representatives in Britain.64

  In the decades before the American Revolution, merchants and planters became not just the benefactors of colonial society but its new masters. Slaveholders became college presidents. The wealth of the traders determined the locations and decided the fates of colonial schools. Profits from the sale and purchase of human beings paid for campuses and swelled college trusts. And the politics of the campus conformed to the presence and demands of slave-holding students as colleges aggressively cultivated a social environment attractive to the sons of wealthy families.

  If you made me your wife, Sir, in time you may fill a

  Whole town with our children, and likewise your villa.

  I, famous for breeding, you, famous for knowledge,

  I’ll found a whole nation, you’ll found a whole college.

  —A POEM TO GEORGE BERKELEY, CA. 1725

  Yesterday morning between three and four o’clock, I

  was awakened by the cry of fire. … The [Prince ton]

  College fire engine and buckets being brought, all

  possible means were used to extinguish the flames, but

  to no purpose; the fire burnt till seven o’clock, when

  the whole house laid in ashes. … The students upon

  this occasion behaved with a becoming boldness which

  does them honour. … The fire is supposed to have

  been occasioned by the carelessness of a negro wench,

  who left a candle burning when she went to bed.

  —PENNSYLVANIA PACKET, (FEBRUARY 1, 1773)

  I suppose you have heard before this that Princetown

  College is burnt to the ground, tis supposed by some

  of the students.

  —ADRIANA BOUDINOT

  Chapter 3

  “The Very Name of a West-Indian”

  Atlantic Slavery and the Rise of the American College

  A seventeenth-century ship’s surgeon who rises to captain his own commercial adventures to unknown and exotic lands could easily be spotted for a slave trader. Lemuel Gulliver studies at Cambridge University before apprenticing as a surgeon and completing his education at Leiden, Holland. He sails to the West Indies and the African coast. He is captured and has chances to kidnap, passes judgment upon alien cultures, and interferes in the domestic and foreign affairs of other nations in a world in which the qualities of ruthlessness and immorality, justice and generosity are distributed in counterintuitive ways. Britain is on trial in Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Through Gulliver, Jonathan Swift exposes the appalling realities of the empire’s unseemly commercial relationships. Gulliver discovers the humane and admirable traits of different beings. The inhabitants of these strange lands with their varied virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses, triumphs and failures, expose the ugliness of the real world. When Gulliver returns to England, he declares his loyalty to the crown but pleads against sending the king’s forces to these far-off places. England’s colonial endeavors mocked its religion and its claims to civilization. “As those countries which I have described do not appear to have any desire of being conquered and enslaved, murdered or driven out by colonies; nor abound either in gold, silver, sugar, or tobacco,” Gulliver counsels, “I did humbly conceive, they were by no means proper objects of our zeal, our valour, or our interest.” Eighteenth-century English literature, including Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and New Voyage Round the World (1725), mimicked popular travel and exploration accounts and exposed how fully the British mind had turned toward the Atlantic.1

  In 1765 the Reverend John Witherspoon published his own fantasy novel about a community of servants who form themselves into a corporation, or union, for their protection and to benefit their masters. Another of Swift’s productions, a humorous advisory for servants, may have influenced Witherspoon, although there were other contenders. Located in the interior of Brazil, Witherspoon’s servants are not and never were slaves. They use their union to acquire and seize greater control over the society. This combination had but two major goals, Witherspoon narrates: “the increase of their wages, and the diminution of their labour.” In the end, these leveling impulses plunge them into despotism and generate the novel’s few ironies. The laborers bestow fancy titles upon themselves for trifling accomplishments, invent wonderfully silly excuses for growing
their salaries and dishonoring work, and bully or abuse each other into a social stagnation that opens them to an inevitable conquest from some foreign power. Witherspoon’s novel lacks the humor of Jonathan Swift and the drama of Daniel Defoe, but the difference is not simply a matter of talent. The satire of Witherspoon’s History of a Corporation of Servants is undermined by the author’s ambivalence about colonialism and servitude.2

  John Witherspoon spent virtually all of his first forty-five years in a narrow corridor, roughly seventy miles of the Scottish Lowlands, stretching from Fife on the east coast to Paisley on the west, where he acquired his education and ministerial experience. He watched as the Atlantic merchants gilded cities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh, transforming their universities, their populations, and their prospects. He took account of Scottish and Scots-Irish emigrants, including his own relatives, pouring from Britain into the Americas. The political philosopher Adam Smith was born the same year as Witherspoon, also in the Lowlands. Smith attended the University of Glasgow while Witherspoon enrolled at St. Andrews. Witherspoon then headed to Edinburgh and Smith to distant Oxford. Smith became professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow. Witherspoon took the pulpit of the church in neighboring Paisley. Atlantic slavery and the British imperial system framed their intellectual and professional lives. “Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to,” Smith protested against the enslavement of Africans by the “sordid master(s)” of Europe. He treated the subject again when he argued the economic irrationality of slavery in his Wealth of Nations. By that time, Witherspoon had chosen a radically different course: he had emigrated to the Americas to become a college president, a minor colonial proprietor, a slave owner, and a supplicant of the planter class.3