It was not the last. On Thursday afternoon, September 18, 1755, Phillis and Mark (Codman) were dragged on a sled through Cambridge to the commons just outside the gates of Harvard College. Drs. William Kneeland and William Foster, both Harvard graduates, testified against them during their trial for the murder of Captain John Codman of Charlestown. Before they decided to kill their owner, the two slaves had set fire to his workhouse. Enslaved people in Boston apparently knew of a successful poisoning, which they used as a model. It was a conspiracy of several slaves. Robin (Vassall), owned by Dr. William Clark of Boston, stole arsenic from his master’s apothecary for the Codman slaves. Some accused black people were sold out of the colony, but the court sentenced Phillis and Mark to death. “A terrible spectacle in Cambridge,” Professor John Winthrop exclaimed after watching the executions with students and other faculty. “Mark, a fellow about 30, was hanged; & Phillis, an old creature, was burnt to death.” Winthrop was Hollis Professor of Mathematics and twice declined the presidency of the college. The authorities suspended Mark’s corpse in chains at the Charlestown commons, where it remained for decades, long enough to serve as a landmark for Paul Revere during his midnight ride. This was not the first execution that the sophomore Edward Brooks—the father of Peter Chardon Brooks—had witnessed. During his freshman year, he saw William Welsh hanged for killing Darby O’Brien in a fight on the Boston wharfs. Westborough minister and Harvard graduate Ebenezer Parkman scornfully recorded the events in his diary: “Another barbarous Murder is Committed, and by another Irishman.”34
While Africans and African Americans were the vast majority of the bound laborers at colleges in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the South, they were not the only unfree people. In 1764 Patrick Field, a twenty-three-year-old Irish indentured servant, escaped from Manhattan in uniform: light brown livery with green fronting and a dark wig with a single curl. Before he departed, he compensated himself, breaking into a desk and taking $50 in silver and gold coins, rings, shirts, cravats, stockings, two silver buckles, and his letter of indenture, which he allegedly forged to pass as a free man. The clothing had the initials “M.C.,” and Myles Cooper, the president of King’s College, promised a £10 reward to anyone who captured and returned his servant. He described Field’s height, alerted readers to his “ruddy” complexion, and warned that he was often intoxicated and had a remarkable gaze when drunk.35
If servitude was ubiquitous on campus, then violence was also routine. “As we all know[,] Negroes will not perform their Duties without the Mistress’s constant Eye especially in so large a Family as the College,” President William Yates and the governors of William and Mary reminded their housekeeper. Enslaved people lived in the kitchens of the main hall and president’s house, and in slave quarters scattered around the campus. The governors also took it upon themselves to field complaints from students and to determine how slaves should be “corrected” in response. Students often violated such rules. In 1769 John Byrd, an undergraduate, picked up a horsewhip and ran after a slave when the servant, who was working for the housekeeper, failed to respond to his call. On February 6, 1773, Eleazar Wheelock ordered the sheriff to go to the kitchen and arrest his slave Caesar, the Dartmouth College cook. Accused of making defamatory remarks about Mary Sleeper, a white woman staying at the president’s house, Caesar was brought before Rev. Wheelock. The minister heard testimony from Caesar and the guest. Wheelock used his judicial authority to declare Caesar guilty, and he sentenced him to a £10 fine plus court costs. The president instructed the constable to take Caesar into town and deliver seven stripes with a whip if he failed to pay the fines.36
Not all the violence was physical—governors and officers also broke up families to acquire and sell enslaved labor. “This day my brother Augustus & myself have made a Division of all the moveables belonging to the Estate of our mother Judith,” wrote Cornelius Van Horne, “such as furniture, plate, linen, wearing apparel, Negroes & c.” Augustus Van Horne later served as treasurer of King’s College, and his family had close ties to other regional colleges. A month before the property division, James Van Horne put five prime family farms on sale. The set included his Perth Amboy seat, which was so large that it could be divided into four working farms with meadows, woods, a wharf, orchards, and other amenities. The rest of the farms were near Princeton and included such fixtures as barns, meadows, timberlands, orchards, mills, and a “Negro House.” These property divisions and sales included people. Their father and mother, Cornelius G. Van Horne and Judith Jay, had left their sons a sizable bequest, one enhanced by Cornelius’s first wife, Joanna Livingston of Livingston Manor. Cornelius Van Horne had invested in a slaving journey every year for more than a decade beginning in 1717. His sons split the family holdings, selling off many of the properties and collecting debts. In 1764 Augustus married Ann Marston, of the prominent slave-trading family. Ann and Augustus’s eight children then pulled the family even closer to the commercial elite through marriage.37
Belinda (Watts) was put on sale during the winter of 1762 despite her owner’s judgment that she was “a simple innocent Creature & a very good Cook” who had become “a most necessary Servant.” The King’s College trustee John Watts took the unusual step of contracting with a slave dealer to sell her in Virginia because his family disapproved of her religious practices. Frustrated with the low offers, Watts turned to business acquaintances to intervene. Increasingly, he blamed Belinda for the soft market:
She is not as the New England Men say dreadfull handsome, nor very young, yet I would be content to give for just such another harmless, stupid Being, that possessed only the quality she does of Cooking, a hundred pounds, with great readiness, that however can be no Government to you in the sale of her.38
President John Maclean Jr. of the College of New Jersey lived in slave households and on campuses with slaves for most of his formative years. His father had studied medicine and science at Glasgow, Edinburgh, London, and Paris, and came to the United States in 1795. Benjamin Rush arranged for Maclean to give a series of lectures in Princeton, and the trustees appointed Maclean, barely twenty-five years old, to one of the first chemistry professorships in North America. Maclean also became a slave owner. In January 1809 Maclean sold “a Negroe boy named Tom between twenty and twenty one years of age” from his home in Princeton. Professor Maclean later taught at William and Mary.39
“I regret to record that there were slaves,—some slaves by purchase, others by descent, or slaves born under our roof,” recalled Benjamin Silliman of his childhood in eighteenth-century Connecticut. Yale president Timothy Dwight had convinced Silliman—a 1796 graduate and a tutor—to drop his legal training and pursue chemistry. Silliman went to Philadelphia and Edinburgh to study science, then returned to New Haven to begin one of the most influential careers of the antebellum academy. “Our northern country was not then as fully enlightened as now regarding human freedom; there were house slaves in the most respectable families, even in those of the clergymen in the now free states.” Silliman’s mother and father had numerous enslaved black people on lands outfitted with separate slave quarters.40
Reflecting on his family history, Professor Silliman insisted that northerners had crafted “a mild form [of slavery] indeed.” In what became something of a custom for his generation, he portrayed himself as a victim of foreign decisions rather than familial ones, arguing that England “forced slavery and the slave-trade upon the colonies.” Whippings were uncommon and women servants were always spared that punishment, he argued. New England slaves rarely ran away, they were well fed, and their tasks were light. Northerners did not track human beings “by the gun and the bloodhound,” nor did they dress them in the “ball and chain” or “iron collar.” His own family history disproves many of those claims. With more slaves than any other household in Fairfield County, Mary Silliman was able to pay her sons’ tuition and fees at Yale by selling two enslaved people from her declining Holland Hills farm. By the time her boys grad
uated, she still owned about a dozen people, eight of them children less than twelve years old. Benjamin returned to be overseer of Holland Hills, to rebuild their estate, and to help his mother maximize her profits under Connecticut’s gradual emancipation law, which the Sillimans freely violated.41
Even on college campuses, slaveholders could not maintain the fiction of gentle or humane servitude. Violence undergirded bondage. “The record of slaves who were branded by their owners, had their ears nailed, fled, committed suicide, suffered the dissolution of their families, or were sold secretly to new owners in Barbados in the last days of the Revolutionary War before they became worthless never seems sufficient to refute the myth of kindly masters,” Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck conclude.42
SLAVERY ON CAMPUS
In the daily routine of a college there was a lot of work to be done, and enslaved people often performed the most labor-intensive tasks. In the mornings, the professors and scholars needed wood for fires, water for washing, and breakfast after morning prayers in the chapel. As students ate, their rooms were cleaned, chamber pots emptied, and beds made. Multiple meals had to be produced every day in the kitchens. Ashes needed to be cleared from fireplaces and stoves, and floors needed sweeping. Clothes and shoes were cleaned and mended. Fires were lighted and maintained. Buildings wanted for repairs, and servants were impressed into small- and large-scale projects. There were countless errands for governors, professors, and students. “Titus my serv[a]nt, brought from mr. Treasurer [James] Allen (to whom I sent a Rect) Ninety Pounds Bills of Credit, being for the third Quarter, ending 17 Mar. last,” President Wadsworth recorded in the spring of 1728. Workers on more remote campuses cultivated farmlands, purchased and traded at markets, kept animals and butchered meat, and manufactured other goods on-site. In Princeton, President John Witherspoon consolidated a five-hundred-acre estate, a mile from the college and with an uninterrupted view of the campus. At least one slave remained at Tusculum, where the president maintained a working farm to pursue his agricultural interests while renting the remaining lands to tenants.43
Faculty and officers often testified to the difficult lives of enslaved people, but not always sympathetically. Professor Hugh Jones of William and Mary bitterly demanded that the slaves be segregated, “for these not only take up a great deal of Room and are noisy and nasty, but also have often made me and others apprehensive of the Danger of being burnt with the College thro’ their Carelessness and Drowsiness.” The Reverend Samuel Kirkland, founder of Hamilton College, encountered numerous enslaved and free black people during his early missions among the Iroquois. The Indian commissioner Sir William Johnson had slaves at his Mount Johnson estate along the Mohawk River in New York. There were also numerous black people living as residents and adoptees in Iroquoia. “I should not come here and live so much like a negro as I do,” Rev. Kirkland complained to his mentor Eleazar Wheelock; “I have lived more like a dog than a Christian minister.” Kirkland believed that his miserable living conditions were hurting the prestige of the faith among the Indians.44
Access to enslaved people could be the difference between success and failure for colonial schools. Eleazar Wheelock spent his early years in Hanover supervising the building of a sawmill, gristmill, and two barns to supply the campus and to generate income. By the 1773 printing of his Narrative of the Indian Charity School—itself a fund-raising tool—he had overseen the raising of several outbuildings and was in the process of finishing a malt house. The college had eighty acres of cleared land, twenty planted with English grain and eighteen with Indian corn. Nearly fifteen tons of hay had been stacked to lessen the cost of keeping cows and oxen. His pamphlet promised additional progress: “My labourers are preparing more lands for improvement.” Nathaniel Hovey, who settled in a neighboring town in 1773, confirmed the progress over the next decade. Captain Hovey estimated that “there have been cleared upwards of three hundred acres of land at the expence of Dartmouth College and of Moors [Indian Charity] School, that there has been a gristmill & a sawmill built and not less than two miles of road laid out and made.”45
After the 1764 chartering of the College of Rhode Island, the trustees began soliciting money to prepare the grounds and build an academic hall. The active slaving towns of Providence and Newport housed a number of wealthy merchant families and high proportions of slaveholders. The prosperous slave trader Jacob Rodriguez de Rivera donated ten thousand linear feet of wood during the subscriptions for the first college building. Henry Laurens, another prominent slaver, also contributed supplies. Other residents donated the labor of their slaves. Henry Paget promised Pero, his sixty-two-year-old slave, for about a month. Another local master offered Job, an Indian slave, for more than a week.46
A small army of slaves maintained the College of William and Mary. “I promise you the College is very large & well built, with gardens and outhouses proportioned,” the proud parent William Gooch wrote to his brother. “The more wealthy scholars had negro boys to wait on them,” adds a historian of the college. In 1754 alone, eight students, including the brothers Charles and Edward Carter, paid fees to house their personal slaves on campus. The college also owned dozens of people.47
In 1773 George Washington escorted his stepson, John “Jacky” Custis, and Jacky’s slave, Joe, to New York City. The general had vetoed the idea of placing the young man at William and Mary, fearing that the combination of planter wealth and loose discipline would only aggravate his son’s personal faults. Washington hoped that living in the North would tame Jacky’s penchant for gambling and expensive luxuries. He also wanted to control Jacky’s indecent behavior—womanizing, secret engagements, and having sex with slaves. But King’s College was not a place to learn self-discipline. Rev. Cooper outfitted Jacky with a suite of rooms, catered to his every desire, and sent misleading reports on his progress to Mount Vernon. The teenager informed his mother that he was being treated “in a particular Light” because of his status, and that he appreciated the “distinction made between me & the other students.” On his way to New York, Washington had a string of dinners and celebrations with governors, generals, leading merchants, and the members of elite social clubs—the strata of society that administrators needed to access. Although he had plenty of privileged boys under his charge, Cooper seized this chance to cultivate the southern aristocracy. “I dine with them (a liberty that is not allow’d any but myself),” Jacky boasted of his relationship to the faculty, and “associate & pertake of all their recreations.” An unreformed Custis left college after two years. He wasted much of his fortune, died within a decade, and left his children to be raised by his mother and stepfather.48
Jefferson’s University of Virginia. Detail from an 1827 map by
Henry Schenck Tanner after a drawing by Benjamin Tanner
SOURCE: University of Virginia Library
The American campus stood as a silent monument to slavery. In September 1793 William Richardson Davie presided at the laying of the cornerstone for the new campus of the University of North Carolina. The ceremony employed the rituals and symbols of Freemasonry. Davie described the “great doings of the Masonic brethren, with your correspondent wielding a silver trowel and setting a stone in mortar.” Once the ceremonies were concluded, black laborers filled the area to begin constructing the university. When the founders of South Carolina College (University of South Carolina), began planning the architectural style of their campus, they looked not to their southern peers but to the colleges in New Jersey, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire for inspiration and advice.49
Enslaved black people built Thomas Jefferson’s intellectual monument: the University of Virginia. Construction materials came in large loads along the James River and were hauled up to Charlottesville. Black workers, including youth, were used to bring supplies to the campus and raise the buildings. As construction began, expenditures for the dozens of enslaved people “hired” by the university totaled more than $1,000 per year. The individual cost was determi
ned by age and perceived physical ability, and the college calculated the expense of feeding and maintaining each slave through the contracted period. At the end of their terms of service, enslaved workers were outfitted with fresh outer- and undergarments and shoes before being returned to their masters.50
BOYS WILL BE MASTERS
Governors and faculties used slave labor to raise and maintain their schools, and they made their campuses the intellectual and cultural playgrounds of the plantation and merchant elite. They sought the loyalty of wealthy colonists such as the Newport merchants Christopher and George Champlin, who sent ships to Africa, Asia, and the West Indies. “After being detained two days at Providence and having an agreeable Journey to Boston, I arrived at Cambridge the Saturday after the Vacation was up,” Christopher Grant Champlin informed his father. “I have been in [Harvard] College about a week.” After painting and papering his room, young Christopher was satisfied with his accommodations.51
Officers catered to these children. One doting father sent President Samuel Johnson of King’s College “schemes” for turning his son into a responsible man. “This child of mine is I find already … adept in the little arts of shifting,” he cautioned. The board of the College of Philadelphia promised to “look on the Students as, in some measure, their own Children, treat them with Familiarity and Affection.” That attention continued after graduation. The governors vowed to “establish them in Business Offices, Marriages, or any other Thing for their Advantage.” There were rewards for such devotion. Godfrey Malbone, a Virginian who settled in Newport, Rhode Island, after his graduation from Harvard, entered the slave trade, created one of the region’s largest fortunes, and became a benefactor of colonial schools.52
The combination of wealthy patrons, privileged students, and ambitious regional promoters brought colleges into the service of the colonial elite and brought large numbers of enslaved people into college towns. By the mid-eighteenth century there were nearly nine hundred enslaved black men and women in Boston and fifty-five in Cambridge. Professor Winthrop of Harvard estimated that 15 percent of Boston’s residents were black, while official figures put the black population at 10 percent. Several dozen black people lived in New Haven during that time, and the African American population climbed to nearly three hundred by the eve of the Revolution. Most white families in Princeton and New Brunswick owned at least one black person. By the 1780s enslaved people were more than a fifth of the population of New Brunswick, while one of every six residents of Princeton was enslaved.53
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