Ebony and Ivy

by Craig Steven Wilder

  By midcentury Harvard’s monopoly over West Indian students and donors crumbled as Atlantic commerce multiplied the economic and social links between the mainland and the Caribbean. Judah Monis, the first instructor of Hebrew at Harvard, had been a merchant and rabbi in Jamaica, where a number of the undergraduates originated. Yale’s trustees began raking the Caribbean for donors. There were other attractions. George Whitefield Kirkland, twin brother of Harvard president John Thornton Kirkland, became a Caribbean merchant and worked as a mercenary in South America to dig himself and his father—Samuel Kirkland, the founder of Hamilton College—out of debt. Both twins had attended Dartmouth.39

  West Indian and southern plantation families were among the founders of the midcentury colleges and well represented in their governments, faculties, and student bodies. The officers of New Jersey tried to escape the competition for pupils in New England and the Mid-Atlantic by wooing the children of the southern and Caribbean gentry. Before he turned to the planters, the Reverend John Witherspoon had unsuccessfully tried to use friendships forged during his visit to Holland, prior to emigrating to the Americas, to convince the leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church to abandon the new Queen’s College (Rutgers) in New Brunswick and partner in the College of New Jersey.40

  “The very name of a West-Indian has come to imply in it great opulence,” wrote Rev. Witherspoon in a rhetorical bow before the white inhabitants of the British Caribbean. In 1772 the trustees approved a Caribbean campaign and appointed Witherspoon’s son, James, who had graduated two years earlier, and the Reverend Charles Beatty as their West Indies agents. President Witherspoon’s missive to the plantations laid out the appeal: It was safer for planters to send their children to New Jersey than to England, he cautioned, where unscrupulous men preyed upon privileged youngsters from the Americas. An education at Nassau Hall had other advantages. Princeton had all the comforts of urban life without “the many temptations in every great city, both to the neglect of study and the practice of vice.” The latter comment was aimed especially at New York and Philadelphia, but also at New Haven and Cambridge. And if colonial colleges were dangerous, then British universities were damned. In the colonies, teachers lived on campus and supervised the students, he explained, while English universities were too large and too decentralized for instructors to properly guide the scholars. New Jersey was close enough to the Caribbean to allow parents to visit and expect regular communication, but distant enough to keep students from running home and becoming idle. Rev. Beatty died shortly after he arrived in Barbados, and the trustees quickly formed a new committee to plan another West Indies campaign. How much income they raised in the Caribbean is unclear, but Witherspoon drafted forms for donating money and property, and the number of West Indian students at the college increased in the following years.41

  Rev. Witherspoon had his own colonial investments. He authored his appeal to the British Caribbean at the same time that he was using his name to recruit displaced Highlanders to take up tenancies through his Nova Scotia land partnership. In league with John Pagan, a Glasgow merchant, Witherspoon lured Scottish tenants to North America with free passage. A historian of the Scottish clearances highlighted this particular investment as evidence of the “real abuses” suffered by people forcibly displaced and pushed to emigrate during the systematic transformations of tenancy and landholding in the Highlands. Such forced émigrés were vulnerable to exploitation, and Witherspoon’s project was rife with it. In the summer of 1773, the passengers of the Hector departed for Nova Scotia too late to clear ground for farming and only to discover on arrival that their allotted territories were inland and unsuitable. Tradition holds that they physically took supplies from Witherspoon’s agents, left a receipt for these materials, and suffered through a string of desperate seasons. President Witherspoon later invested his Nova Scotia profits in new lands in New Hampshire.42

  THE WITHERSPOON LEGACY IN AMERICA

  “Killed, people say, by family troubles—contentions, wrangling, ill blood, among those nearest and dearest to her,” Mary Chesnut gossiped in September 1861 after learning of the death of Betsey Witherspoon, a prominent widow of Society Hill, South Carolina. “Cousin Betsey” became a greater topic of discussion than the Civil War during the following days. The local elite, some relatives, shed tears over the loss, but suspicions that Betsey Witherspoon had been killed soon transformed their mourning into rage. “Murdered by her own people. Her negroes,” Chesnut cried. Witherspoon’s son hired a detective, and other relatives demanded that the slaves be hanged or burned. Confessions revealed a new version of the events: John Witherspoon had learned that his mother’s servants had taken her china, silver, and linens to a party in a neighboring town while she was away from the estate. He came to the house to accuse them and threatened to return the next day to deliver whippings. That night the servants took action, according to the son, smothering the elderly woman in her sleep and arranging the scene to suggest a natural death, but an examination of the corpse and the scene found bruising and some blood. “These are horrid brutes—savages, monsters,” Chesnut wrote in shock as memories of other uprisings and plots among enslaved people filled her mind and her diary. She cursed New England for its slaving past, northerners for their anti-slavery righteousness, and “those pernicious Africans,” upon whom she wished a fate that most white people reserved for Indians: “free them or kill them, improve them out of the world.”43

  The Witherspoons of Society Hill were part of President John Witherspoon’s family web. In 1732 a large group of Witherspoons, including a second cousin named Gavin, had left the Scottish colonies in Ireland for the Americas. They decided upon South Carolina, where the proprietors were recruiting white settlers with offers of large land grants. Branches of the Witherspoon family were already there and, in the following year, more Witherspoons arrived from Ireland and Scotland. It was the Witherspoons who helped bring Presbyterianism to Carolina even as Harvard divines were rushing into the colony. Gavin Witherspoon’s sons became legislators and his grandsons matriculated at South Carolina College (University of South Carolina). There were more than a hundred thousand enslaved people in the Tidewater region. The Witherspoons acquired numerous plantations and significant wealth, and some later fought and died for the Confederacy. Grandson John Dick Witherspoon and his wife, Elizabeth “Betsey” Boykin Witherspoon, had owned as many as five hundred black people by the time her body was discovered in September 1861.44

  The long, broad shadow of the great Scottish minister John Witherspoon has obscured the prominent role of his relatives, including his sons, daughter, and grandchildren, in the story of American slavery. Rev. Witherspoon used the family networks of the Scottish diaspora to revolutionize higher education in America. By the era of the Civil War, his Presbyterian communion had brought the American college to the banks of the Mississippi River by carrying it on the backs of enslaved black people.45

  Witherspoons were immigrating to the Americas before the divine agreed to leave Paisley, Scotland, for Princeton, New Jersey. President Witherspoon helped reconstitute this kin network while traveling and raising funds for the college. His near and distant relations included planters, merchants, and statesmen in Virginia, the Carolinas, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, Kentucky, Texas, and the Caribbean. By the time the diarist Mary Chesnut recorded her Civil War experiences, at least four generations of the president’s family were wound into many of the wealthiest families of the South.46

  Witherspoons had spread throughout the colonies. Rev. Witherspoon named his youngest surviving son after David, his favorite brother and a West Indies merchant. Dr. Witherspoon’s boys attended New Jersey during his presidency. David became a lawyer and then married the wealthy widow Mary Jones Nash of North Carolina, daughter of Governor Abner Nash. With that union David Witherspoon acquired the largest holding of slaves, 113 people, in New Bern, and set himself on the path to becoming chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. A founding trustee of the co
llege, the merchant Peter Van Brugh Livingston and his brother-in-law William Alexander helped make New Bern the center of a trade in furs and naval stores with New York. David Witherspoon’s will distributed slaves and land to his children, and directed that three slaves be hired out and the income from a plantation with slaves be designated to pay for his son, John, to attend college in Princeton. (The grandson of the president ultimately chose the University of North Carolina.) Rev. Witherspoon’s estranged son John junior, a medical doctor, settled in South Carolina with a distant cousin. Daughter Frances married the Charleston, South Carolina, physician, historian, and legislator Dr. David Ramsey, a graduate of New Jersey.47

  Outnumbered only by enslaved Africans, more than one hundred thousand Scots-Irish immigrants—Scottish Presbyterians who left the Ulster Plantation in Ireland—had made the journey to North America in the sixty years before the Revolution. They clustered along the westernmost British settlements, particularly in Pennsylvania, and then migrated south and west to the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Samuel Finley, Witherspoon’s predecessor at the College of New Jersey, arrived in this wave. In his two-decade reign as governor of North Carolina, Gabriel Johnston, a Scot and a former professor at St. Andrews University in Scotland, pushed the legislature to accept a common school system and began the first movement for a university in the colony. Turmoil in the heavily Presbyterian Scottish Lowlands pushed rural tenants into the migrations. The transformation of landholding, tenancy and land use, the imposition of a cash economy, and escalating rents broke up Highlands clans, creating, by the 1760s, new migrations to eastern Canada and North Carolina. About ten thousand Highlanders left for North America in the decade after the Seven Years’ War, and such outmigrations continued into the nineteenth century.48

  John Witherspoon decided that the real competition between colleges would be determined not in New England or the Mid-Atlantic but in the southern and Caribbean plantations. When he had arrived in Princeton on August 12, 1768, John Witherspoon found “the low state of the College” and chastised his Presbyterian communion: “What a shame it was that while Episcopalians & Dutch and all others had endowed their colleges … only [we] should be in a desperate State.” He brought three hundred new library volumes from Holland and London. Other books were on order, and the range of topics reflected the new president’s liberal intellectual leanings. He established a feeder program—a grammar school under his authority and styled on an academy in Glasgow. Rev. Witherspoon began a comprehensive restructuring of the college, with an enhanced curriculum and frequent, lengthy fund-raising trips. He had the Rev. John Rodgers of New York introduce him to prominent New Englanders. Witherspoon then presided at his first commencement, and swiftly departed for the South to raise money and find students.49

  Princeton was a useful marketing tool. Founded to defend religious freedom, the College of New Jersey under Witherspoon forged intimate ties to human slavery. With high proportions of slaveholding families, Princeton was among the most welcoming places in the northern colonies to the sons of planters. A biographer boasted of the minister’s striking success at attracting the children of the colonial elite: Virginia’s Washington, Randolph, Lee, and Madison lines; the Macon and Hawkins families of North Carolina; Reeds from Delaware; Livingstons, Stocktons, and Patersons from New Jersey; and the Morris and Van Rensselaer families of New York. The pattern of recruitment and enrollment at New Jersey conformed to the geography of American slavery. The percentage of young men from the South more than doubled during Witherspoon’s tenure, while the proportion of students from elite backgrounds more than tripled. The population of students from New Jersey fell as the president engineered classes with slaveholding majorities, including prominent Virginians such as Henry Lee Jr., future United States president James Madison, and Caleb Baker Wallace, later a minister and college founder. “I learn from Messrs Madison & Wallace how much I am indebted to you for your favourable Opinions & Friendship,” Witherspoon wrote to Henry Lee Sr., “the Continuance of which I will do best to deserve.”50

  When the American Revolution began, William and Mary was the only college in the South, but seventeen colleges were founded in that region by the end of the eighteenth century. A Scot, James Blair, was the key figure in the establishment of William and Mary, an Anglican college, and Scottish Presbyterians were over-represented among the founders and governors of southern colleges between the Revolution and the end of the century. The third-largest Christian church—but considerably smaller than the Baptists and Methodists—the Presbyterians built more colleges than any other denomination in pre–Civil War America.51

  Scottish migrations informed Witherspoon’s vision; ultimately, the Scottish influx and the Presbyterian ascendance helped the Princeton college supplant Harvard as the most influential institution in the South. Witherspoon turned his students into an army of preachers and educators who pursued the Scottish and Scots-Irish pioneers. These graduates bound the Presbyterian communion across regions and became Witherspoon’s ambassadors. Affirming a commitment to education that defined the Scottish Enlightenment, the Presbyterians imposed themselves upon the intellectual and political cultures of the colonies. Presbyterians, for example, were overrepresented among tutors in the South. Well-to-do planters and merchants routinely turned to college presidents to find “suitable” scholars, and President Witherspoon used these requests as opportunities to solidify ties to the southern elite.52

  In 1773 Colonel Henry Lee—the grandfather of General Robert E. Lee—asked his son to help locate a tutor for the children of their family friend Robert Carter, of the Nomini Hall plantation. Henry junior recommended Philip Vickers Fithian, a Connecticut native who had just graduated from New Jersey. “Dr. Witherspoon is very fond of getting a person to send to him,” a friend wrote. The young man met with the president on the morning of August 9 to hear about the job: teaching English to Colonel Carter’s five daughters, and English, Latin, and Greek to two of his sons and a nephew. It was a generous offer: £35 sterling per year, room, board, and the use of a handsomely equipped library, a horse, and a slave. With Witherspoon’s blessing, Fithian accepted and prepared to leave for Westmoreland County, Virginia, in the fall.53

  Young Fithian recoiled from the cruelty inflicted on enslaved people and the bravado of southern male culture. In one particularly poignant moment, he returned to his room to record the gruesome boasts of a dinner guest:

  For Sulleness, Obstinancy, or Idleness, says he, Take a Negro, strip him, tie him fast to a post; take then a sharp Curry-Comb, & curry him severely til he is well scrap’d; & call a Boy with some dry Hay, and make the Boy rub him down for several Minutes, then salt him, & unlose him. He will attend to his Business, (said the inhuman Infidel) afterwards!—But savage Cruelty does not exceed His next diabolical Invention—To get a Secret from a Negro, says he, take the following Method—Lay upon your Floor a large thick plank, having a peg about eighteen Inches long, of hard wood, & very Sharp, on the upper end, fixed fast in the plank—then strip the Negro, tie the Cord to a staple in the Ceiling, so that his foot may just rest on the sharpened Peg, then turn him briskly round, and you would laugh (said our informer) at the Dexterity of the Negro, while he was relieving his Feet on the sharpen’d Peg!

  Fithian lasted only a year. John Peck, another of Witherspoon’s students, replaced him. Born in Deerfield, New Jersey, Peck had little trouble adjusting to plantation society. He easily adapted to living off black people’s labor and fully embraced southern civilization, eventually marrying Anne Tasker Carter and settling in Richmond County, Virginia, with a gift of land and slaves from the colonel.54

  New Jersey alumni were key architects of the academic revolution in the South. They organized Transylvania College (1783) in Lexington, Kentucky, the first college west of the Alleghenies. Governor Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia legislature provided the charter, a small band of proprietors negotiated with the Cherokee to secure the territory, and the Reverends John Todd
and Caleb Baker Wallace, both graduates of New Jersey, joined the board. Princeton men were the most conspicuous delegation promoting the University of Georgia (1785). New Jersey graduates also established the University of Tennessee (1794). Before the Revolution Presbyterians had supported the ill-fated Queen’s College in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 1771 Governor William Tryon and the legislature chartered the college—funded by a levy on liquor in Mecklenburg County—but their act was rejected in London. Princeton men were the decisive lobby behind the chartering of the University of North Carolina, and one of them, David Witherspoon, was serving in the North Carolina legislature during the debates about the university. In 1794 New Jersey graduates chartered Greeneville College (Tusculum) in Tennessee.55

  Products of a northern academy funded by Atlantic slave traders, New Jersey alumni were ready for the task of planting colleges among slaveholders. Bondage subsidized these labors. Born in Ireland and raised in Pennsylvania, John Todd entered the second class at New Jersey. After graduation, the presbytery assigned him to an underserved district outside Richmond, Virginia. The “frontier minister” helped found Hampden-Sydney College (1783) and Transylvania. Todd also acquired more than fourteen enslaved black people and twenty thousand acres of land. Alexander Martin, class of 1756, served as the first president of the board of trustees for the University of North Carolina. A native of New Jersey, Martin had taken a well-worn professional path. He had a long business and public career, served three terms as the governor of North Carolina, and owned a plantation with nearly fifty slaves. Samuel Spencer, a member of the 1759 New Jersey class, was also on the board of the new University of North Carolina. Born in Connecticut, he went south after college and amassed a personal estate that included five thousand acres of land and about twenty slaves.56