Ebony and Ivy
Page 9
Nassau Hall at the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University
SOURCE: Library of Congress
In 1768 Benjamin Rush visited the home of Elizabeth Montgomery Witherspoon to convince her to let her husband take charge of the struggling College of New Jersey (Princeton). The young Pennsylvanian was in Scotland finishing his medical degree at the University of Edinburgh when the passing of President Samuel Finley left his alma mater in turmoil. Rush was a frequent dinner guest at the Witherspoons’. He believed the minister predisposed to moving to the Americas, but Elizabeth Witherspoon was not excited about the colonies. Rev. Witherspoon declined the offer more than once and even nominated other clergy for the presidency. “I think the College of New-Jersey would flourish, as much under him as ever it has done under any of his Predecessors,” Rush assured a fellow graduate, praising the Scottish minister’s fine manners, nimble mind, and broad intellectual interests. He compared Witherspoon to the two prior presidents: “He appears to be Mr. [Samuel] Davies and Dr. [Samuel] Finley united in one man.” Rush was delighted that Rev. Witherspoon commanded the pulpit and preached without resorting to a written text for his sermons. The student’s enthusiasm helped sway the Witherspoons. John Witherspoon resigned his church in Paisley, began raising money for their journey and for the college, sold his home, and prepared to depart. Several local families accompanied him. “I believe you must look out for an Island to settle a Colony[,] 4 or 5 families seem determined to go,” the incoming president jested.4
That was no fantasy. An extended family that reached across Britain’s colonial empire prepared the way for Witherspoon’s journey to North America and inspired new strategies for rescuing the College of New Jersey.
AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH OF COLLEGES
Catholics dominated higher education in the first two centuries of the European invasion of the America, but Harvard enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the wealthy inhabitants of the Protestant colonies. Even the founding of academies in Virginia and Connecticut did little to break the Cambridge college’s grip on the American elite. William and Mary operated as a regional college, and Yale lacked the facilities, staff, and connections to seriously rival Harvard.
The first potential challenge came from the West Indies. In 1710 General Christopher Codrington’s bequest for a West Indian college was transferred to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG)—a London-based missionary corporation chartered by William III in 1701—to supply the British colonies with orthodox ministers. Queen Anne’s governor general in the Leeward Islands, Codrington had arranged for the SPG to receive perpetual funding from the labor of hundreds of enslaved black people.
I give and bequeath my two Plantations in the Island of Barbados to the Society for the propagation of the Christian Religion in Foreign parts erected and established by my late Good master King William the third, and my Desire is to have the Plantations Continued Entire and three hundred negroes at Least always Kept thereon, and a Convenient Number of Professors and Scholars maintain’d.
The SPG held title to the plantations, people, and money. Christopher Codrington had designated funds to establish a college in Barbados. That endowment included more than three hundred enslaved black people on two estates totaling eight hundred acres. The general also left large gifts to Oxford University, his alma mater, to support its faculty, students, and religious missions.5
The Codrington experiment drew attention in New England and Britain. George Berkeley, the Anglican dean of Derry, Ireland, doubted that such a plan could work. An advisor to and supporter of several American schools, including Harvard, Yale, and, later, King’s (Columbia), Berkeley had visions of establishing his own colonial academy. Burdened by “so much wealth and luxury,” Barbados, he predicted, would ruin a college. Just provisioning faculty and scholars would be prohibitively expensive on an island where virtually every inch of soil had been turned to commercial agriculture under slave labor and where food and other necessities were generally imported. Money and privilege had corroded the morals of the island Christians, who would be unsuitable neighbors for students. Rev. Berkeley warned that such proximity to crass commercialism “might tempt the readers or fellows of the college to become merchants, to the neglect of their proper business.”6
Hugh Hall Jr., a Barbadian who attended Harvard, confirmed many of Berkeley’s suspicions. He returned to the island to discover that there was little for a Renaissance man to do. The son of a judge and councilor, Hall was sent at age seven to live with his grandmother in Boston. In 1713 he graduated from Harvard and took a master’s degree three years later. His father then called on him to apprentice in the family’s merchant house. In 1718 the younger Hall wrote his British factors confirming his successful entrance into the slave trade: “We have sold ye Number of Seventy one Negroes, of which Forty three are Men, seven Woemen, Fifteen Boys, & Six Girls; whose whole Amount is Nineteen Hundred & thirty five Pounds.” Smallpox and dysentery reduced the number of survivors and lessened their value, he confessed, although the investment still proved profitable. Hall soon returned to Boston, where he built a thriving merchant house, continued slave trading, and administered his Barbadian plantations. “Several very likely Young Negro’s of each Sex just Arrived to be Sold by Mr. Hugh Hall[,] Merchant, on Credit, with Good Security,” reads a May 1728 advertisement in the New-England Weekly Journal. Customers who came to his warehouse could also buy West Indian rum, sugar, and goods from Europe.7
Several Harvard alumni and officers purchased slaves from other graduates of the college in a fairly cozy commercial network. Hall moved slaves into New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the South. For more than twenty years Thomas Hubbard of Boston served as treasurer of Harvard. A 1721 graduate, Hubbard invested routinely in slaving voyages and sold “fine young Negro Boys and Girls; also Cotton Wool and Old West India Rum” from his Summer Street home. “Sale of Three Negroes, Eight barrels of Sugar & one h[ogs] h[ea]d of Rum,” Hall recorded in one journal entry during a year in which he sold scores of black people from Barbados alone. The Reverand Benjamin Colman bought Frank, an enslaved man from Barbados, through Hugh Hall. Rev. Colman served nearly fifty years as an overseer of Harvard. He was also minister of the Brattle Street Church and a governor of the New England Company. The fellows chose Colman to succeed John Leverett as president of Harvard, but the legislature declined to ratify his appointment over concerns about his religious orthodoxy.8
Hugh Hall, Barbadian native, Harvard alumnus, and
prosperous slave trader
SOURCE: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Although half of the graduates of the earliest colleges became ministers, that fact had little impact upon the pattern of alumni slaveholding. Northeastern parishes routinely gave black people to ministers, and divines bought and sold human beings, distributed slaves in their wills, advertised for runaways, and sold people at auction. A 1698 graduate, the Reverend Thomas Symmes, recorded the births of four enslaved people in his house. In the decade beginning in 1701, Harvard graduated at least twenty young men who became ministers and masters, virtually all of whom took pulpits in New England. Slaveholding clergy occupied some of the most influential churches in the colonies, including several in Boston, Charlestown, and Cambridge.9
Harvard-trained divines often dabbled in mastery. “His kindliness took such forms as the spending of hours in teaching his negro slaves, some of them raw from the Guinea Coast,” a biographer noted of Benjamin Colman; however, that benevolence “did not prevent his advertizing them for sale ‘on reasonable terms.’” In 1709, two years after his graduation, Thomas Prince boarded the Thomas and Elizabeth for a journey to Barbados. Prince was horrified by his first glimpse of Caribbean slavery. The Africans were “all absolute slaves, till kind Death … [wrenched the]m out of ye hands of Tyrannick masters” who had brazenly deprived black people of any chance at salvation or thoughts of a future independent of their owners’. Minister of South C
hurch in Boston and a historian of New England, Prince possessed a thorough understanding of the intimate economic connections between New England and the British West Indies. Still, on August 9, 1729, Rev. Prince bought Ocraqua, an enslaved African carried to Boston on one of Hall’s ships. The York minister Samuel Moody, a 1697 graduate, received a black woman as a gift from his congregation. The parishioners rethought the propriety of that gesture a year later and sold her for a male slave who could serve in the minister’s house without raising suspicions. Rev. Moody also owned Dinah, an enslaved Indian woman.10
Harvard’s West Indian ties paralleled New England’s commercial and social connections to the British Caribbean. Dorothy Saltonstall and her husband, John Frizell, gave Harvard hundreds of pounds from a fortune built in the Barbados trade. Born in Windsor, Connecticut, Dudley Woodbridge finished his life as a Barbados planter. In 1717 Woodbridge, class of 1696, traveled to London, where he presented a grand scheme to the directors of the Royal African Company for restructuring the slave trade in the Caribbean. By regulating the quality of the slaves and licensing traders, the company could make commerce safer and more efficient, extend plantation slavery into the less developed islands, and increase profits. West Indian traders, including Hugh Hall, regularly complained that business in the islands was chaotic and poorly governed. The African Company accepted Woodbridge’s plan and appointed him director general and attorney in Barbados with authority in the Windward Islands and Cuba.11
Cultivating this West Indian elite became an important task for any successful college administrator. Harvard’s officers had earlier missed an opportunity with Woodbridge. “I formerly had intentions of sending my Eldest Son, Dudley, for New England,” he wrote to Rev. Colman, “but now resolve him for London in a few days.” Losing the tuition of an island official and slave trader was a major blow, worse still because Woodbridge was a native son and an alumnus. Woodbridge tried to mellow the impact by promising his two-year-old to Harvard. However, his uncle, the Reverend Timothy Woodbridge, had recently founded Yale College, where Timothy and Abigail Woodbridge sent their sons, and where the family redirected its giving.12
Administrators cherished the West Indians. Hall informed Colman that Barbados’s ministers and planters had “miserably Neglected & Disregarded” General Christopher Codrington’s bequest and instructions. Colman saw the philanthropic and missionary aims of the gift as a model for work in New England. Hall warned that there was little chance of raising a college in Barbados, and, he added, “I am Afraid the Pious Legacy of General Codrington’s for the Propagation of the Gospel among our Poor Negroes here will be Imprudently Thrown away if not wickedly Murthered.” Unfortunately, General Codrington had never visited “our Cambridge,” Hall continued, since Harvard would have put the gift to better use. It was not until 1745 that the SPG and the governors founded Codrington College, thirty-five years after the bequest, as a small seminary.13
The general dedicated a fraction of his estate to educate a fraction of the enslaved population, but even that gesture was received poorly among the planters. Many leading white Barbadians had lived through the 1675 conspiracy, which involved slaves on the majority of the plantations. One of the chief conspirators came from the Halls’ estate. In 1693, the year Hugh Hall Jr. was born, the enslaved population rose up again. The colonial government responded with a campaign of terror that included castrating dozens of black men. It is little wonder that his Barbados neighbors were gutting the Codrington grant. White Barbadians believed that Africans “had no more Souls than Brutes, & were really a Species below Us,” Hall responded in disgust. Such scorn, coming from a slave trader and slaveholder, was a telling measure of how rapidly racial ideas were coalescing in the minds of Christian colonists throughout the Americas. In the aftermath of the 1712 revolt in Manhattan, white New Yorkers also stridently rejected the religious training of Africans, cursed the men who instructed them, and, as the Reverend John Sharpe of the New York garrison lamented, developed “a vile conceit that the Negroes have no immortal Souls but are a sort of speaking brute destined by God to a State of Servitude.”14
Codrington College in Barbados
SOURCE: New York Public Library
The southern plantations captured the imagination of Harvard’s students. An alumnus and the college librarian, John Gore abandoned the academic life to become a ship’s captain. In the summer of 1711, Gore was almost killed when a French privateer attacked his ship off Antigua. Hugh Hall confided to President Leverett that he was somewhat torn at having “strangely Metamorphosed from a Student to a Merchant.” Many alumni were making that choice. “If you have a good Trade for Negroes [you] may purchase forty or Fifty Negroes,” William Ellery, a 1722 graduate, instructed Captain Pollipus Hammond, “get most of them mere Boys and Girl[s], some Men, let them be Young, [but] No very small Children.” Ellery built his merchant house in Newport, Rhode Island, where he launched multiple slaving ventures. During his final year at Harvard, Cotton Tufts “meditated on what I’ve learnt that’s worth the knowing,” and concluded that he had gained little. When Tufts graduated from Harvard in 1749, his ambition was to use “this small [college] Degree” to open “a Rich lasting & large store.”15
Tufts had innumerable role models. In 1729 the Jamaican planter Leonard Vassall donated land in Boston for Trinity Church at about the same time that his son William enrolled at Harvard. In 1743 William inherited his family’s plantations, which he governed from New England. Vassall sought a more genteel and learned life than he could lead in Jamaica, and the revenue from his Jamaican plantations and manufactories afforded him that leisure. In a single month he sent letters instructing his overseer to purchase thirty “choice new Negroes” and asking his retailers to find the best available translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, a rare volume on rhetoric, and a complete leather-bound edition of Cicero’s works in Latin: “If you cannot get the best Latin Paris edition do not send any.” Vassall was unusual in his concern about the conditions on his Jamaican estates, routinely reminding his overseer and manager to avoid the excesses of violence that were so common on the islands and which he had seen during his childhood.
I am glad ye have got the promise of the first Choice of 10 Ten Gold coast Negroes at £60 p[er] head, & hope by the time of this reaches you you’ll have purchase the whole of the 80 new Negroes I desired ye would buy for my Estate. I greatly approve of your Method of managing my Estate particularly my Negroes, and am greatly Obliged to ye for your attention and earnestly beg the continuance of it. I am more & more persuaded of the propriety of having sufficient strength on my estate to do all the Work on it without hiring and without pushing or overworking the Negroes so as to hurt & discourage them.16
Many Harvard men built their careers on the Caribbean and Africa trades. By the end of the eighteenth century, Peter Chardon Brooks was on his way to becoming the wealthiest man in New England, having amassed a fortune by insuring ships in the West Indies, Africa, Europe, and Asia trades. Brooks was named by his father, the Reverend Edward Brooks, after Peter Chardon, a friend and Harvard classmate who was the son of a successful Boston merchant and who died in the West Indies in October 1766, a few months before young Brooks’s birth. Hugh Hall of Barbados and Boston and Peter Chardon Brooks of Medford and Boston typified a generation of planters, merchants, investors, and underwriters who rationalized and integrated the financial and commercial economies of the Atlantic world.17
PLANTING PREACHERS
Founded in 1670, South Carolina was, in Peter Wood’s description, “the colony of a colony”—a beneficiary of the success, agricultural overdevelopment, and rigid hierarchy of Barbados, which caused many experienced islanders to move to the mainland. Not just the lower orders but wealthy planters relocated in hopes of expanding their holdings for future generations. About half of the early colonists came from the British West Indies, and Barbadians dominated that migration, bringing administrative skills, slaves, and money. More than half of the slav
es came from Barbados and, as on the island, enslaved people soon were the majority of the population. The northward migration of the Barbadians helped to make Harvard the most influential college in the colonial South. The islanders and New England’s Puritans had long been kindred colonial adventurers. William Sayle, the first governor of South Carolina, had earlier recruited Puritans to come to the Caribbean and now brought experienced island settlers to the new colony. In 1696 the South Carolina legislature codified the links between the colonies when it copied the Barbados slave code.18
From 1670 through 1715, English and Scottish immigrants sold as many as fifty thousand enslaved Indians to the British West Indies. In fact, they exported more enslaved people than they imported. The immigrants lacked capital. By trading with neighboring nations for furs and enemies captured during wars and raids, the Carolinians created the wealth to purchase enslaved Africans. “The four Indian Women with their two Children, put to sale on Satturday the 9th Instant, were sold together for seventy-five Pounds,” notes a February 1717 entry in the journal of the Indian trade commissioners. The commissioners licensed agents with the authority “to trade, deal and barter within the English Settlements of this Government, with any Indians in Amity with the same, for Skins, Furs and Indian Slaves” and authorized outposts where friendly Indians could bring in goods, rest, and wait for other traders. One of the most important factories was in Cherokee country, where Indian captives were held before being marched into Charleston. The Indians-for-Africans trade reduced the risk of enslaved Indians fleeing to their own lands or inciting conflicts and brought a population of African slaves who lacked knowledge of the local geography and languages but possessed important agricultural skills, particularly in rice production.19