Ebony and Ivy

by Craig Steven Wilder

  By midcentury, colonial campuses were changing remarkably. In 1750 Isaac Isaacs graduated from Yale. Seven years later, a Jewish student enrolled at the College of Philadelphia. In 1772 Moses Levy finished Philadelphia, the least restrictive colonial school. A dozen Jewish students graduated from Philadelphia before the Revolution. In that same era, Isaac Abrahams completed the undergraduate course at King’s. A woman, Richea Gratz, was one of four Jews—Hyman Gratz, and Jacob and William Franks, were the others—in the first graduating class of Franklin College.20

  Many Americans saw this new strategic and social potential of colleges. As colonial and British troops were mustering in Albany, New York, during the summer of 1755, Colonel Ephraim Williams had looked to the future by designating funds in his will for a college. He was killed at the Battle of Lake George. In the following decades, hundreds of white families moved into western Massachusetts, where Williams had considerable property, and where the government was actively eliminating Indian claims. In 1793 the residents of West Township (Williamstown), Massachusetts, requested that endowment for Williams College.21

  Although he never attended college, George Washington crafted a philosophy of education that emphasized the need for schools and the benefits of making higher education more accessible. He saw a danger in sending American youth to study abroad, where they were exposed to antirepublican ideas. The president bequeathed $4,000 in local bank stock to Alexandria Academy (1785), a school for poor and orphaned children; a hundred James River Company shares to Liberty Hall Academy (Washington and Lee); fifty shares of the Potomac Company for a proposed university in the District of Columbia; and stock from both land companies to fund “the establishment of a University in the central part of the United States.” Washington prayed that the latter institution would help Americans overcome “local prejudices and habitual jealousies” by “spread[ing] systematic ideas through all parts of this rising empire.”22

  THE RACIAL DESTINY OF AMERICA

  Old and New Light, Anglican and dissenter, Tory and rebel, British and continental, the people of the North American colonies embraced a new future. Evangelized by their pastor, John Elder, the Paxton Boys believed that it was the racial destiny of white Christians to possess the earth. Enlightened humanism could easily be hijacked by racialism; it required only that the individual and natural value of human beings be assigned as a group characteristic rather than a universal one. For white Americans, racial beliefs intermingled with the spiritual promises of evangelicalism and the economic benefits of territorial expansion to affirm their future. Those who condemned the Paxton Boys objected to the means that the mob employed but not to the society that its members imagined. During the French and Indian War, William Smith urged greater militarization of the backcountry, and he mentored Thomas Barton, a backcountry apologist for the destruction of the Susquehannocks. A product of Trinity College in Dublin, Rev. Barton served as one of the first tutors at Philadelphia and took an honorary master’s degree there a few years before the bloodshed.23 Even the most rhetorically affectionate pleas for Native people conceded a dreadful fate for Indian nations. These were not friends but eulogists.

  The French and Indian War was a global conflict that American colonists also saw as a struggle between the races. The Reverend Samuel Davies prepared a company of his Virginia neighbors for battle with gory images of the torments that awaited them if they fell to “the savage Tyranny of a mungrel Race of French and Indian Conquerors.” Evangelical ministers on both sides of the Atlantic accepted the war as a punishment from God. Samuel Finley, who like Davies later served as president of New Jersey, instructed his Pennsylvania and Delaware parishioners that it was their spiritual duty to defend the Protestant God. Davies coordinated missions to the Cherokee and other Indian nations in the Carolinas and Virginia, where the growth of the white population had sparked recent violence. He also urged his Scots Presbyterian neighbors to evangelize their slaves, but it would take more than vibrant preaching to convince southern slaveholders that “those stupid despised black Creatures, that many treat as if they were Brutes, are in this important Respect, upon an Equality with their haughty Masters.”24

  Provost Smith told a Philadelphia battalion that they were defending their communities against the combined threat of “popish Perfidy, French Tyranny[,] and savage Barbarity.” Professor Paul Jackson, the Latin instructor at the college, assumed a captaincy. Rev. Davies warned a Virginia militia company that they were saving children from being “torn from the Arms of their murdered Parents,” educated by savages, and “formed upon the Model of a ferocious Indian Soul.” Smith even wrote a song to teach Indians’ their social status:

  Indian Nations! Now repeat,—

  “Heav’n preserve the British State!

  “And the British Chief, and Race,

  “And these Lands,—and bless the Peace.”25

  As the conflict raged, the Reverend John Witherspoon addressed the annual meeting of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) at Edinburgh. Witherspoon cautioned that Britain was suffering God’s wrath for its failure to evangelize the Native peoples of America. There was a divine warning in France’s allegiance with the “Indians, a great part of whose territory we possess, and whom, with a contempt equally impolitic and unchristian, we suffer to continue in ignorance of the only living and true God.” Catholic missions were the foundation of the French-Indian union, and Protestants needed to counter the designs of that “politic, but fraudulent nation.” Military strategy and religious duty were one. The North American conflict proved the need for the British missionary companies’ efforts among Indians, a strategically necessary “exercise of Christian charity.”26

  American campuses became militarized spaces during the eighteenth-century imperial wars; they also became increasingly hostile to Indians. A commencement at the College of New Jersey included the singing of an ode that wedded the fate of the school, familiarly known as Nassau Hall, to the outcome of the French and Indian War:

  Unmov’d at War’s tremendous Roar,

  That Consternation spreads from Shore to Shore,

  O’er solid Continents, and tossing Waves,

  From Haughty Monarchs down to Slaves …

  Peaceful Nassau! In thee we sing—

  We sing great George upon the Throne, And Amherst brave in Arms,

  Amherst brave in Arms.

  This was no hollow tribute. The graduates and audience specifically sang praises to General Jeffrey Amherst, the commander of King George III’s North American forces, for pursuing the Indians to avenge “sacred British Blood.” A decade later, Rev. Witherspoon accepted the presidency of the Princeton college. His commitment to Native education largely evaporated. He tutored three Lenape students and a few other “Indian boys,” but no Native students graduated under his tenure and indigenous students were soon gone from the campus.27

  WHITENING THE PROMISED LAND

  On August 6, 1760, the merchant Abraham DePeyster, treasurer of the New York province and a founding trustee of King’s College, collected duties on eighty-three enslaved people brought from Africa to Manhattan on the sloop Sally. Colonel Henry Bouquet, a Swede fighting in the British army and stationed in North America during the French and Indian War, purchased York, one of the Africans being held on board.28 Enslaved black people routinely accompanied the British and colonial forces as cooks, laborers, and servants. Young black boys were often used as drummers. It is significant that Bouquet bought a slave during a prolonged and vicious military campaign.

  The century of the Enlightenment brought the high point of the African slave trade and the rise of systematic racial extermination. At the end of the French and Indian War, Lord Amherst informed Colonel Bouquet of his continuing doubts about even friendly and allied Native peoples. “I never will put the least trust in any of the Indian race,” the general warned. That statement followed an intense summer of strategizing, during which Bouquet and Amherst had cursed Indians, con
spired for revenge, made plans to kill any who had taken up arms, and plotted to eliminate the Native presence from all the territory between Fort Pitt and Lake Erie. The subject of racial cleansing bound these communications. “I will try to inoculate the [Indians] with some blankets that may fall into their Hands, and take care not to get the disease myself,” Bouquet replied. By distributing smallpox-infected blankets as gifts, the colonel promised to destroy Indian resistance and then hunt the survivors “with English dogs, supported by rangers and some light horse.” In just a few casual sentences, Amherst and Bouquet designed a campaign to “effectually extirpate or remove that vermin.”29

  As Jeffrey Amherst and Henry Bouquet plotted, Councilor John Watts of New York, a trustee of King’s College, fumed over the western forts and towns sacked by the Indians. A confederacy from more than a dozen nations, including the Ojibwa, Shawnee, Wyandot, Miami, and Lenape, had risen against the British forces and white settlers in the Great Lakes region in response to Amherst’s violations of their sovereignty in the aftermath of the French and Indian War. Named Pontiac’s Rebellion, after an Ottawa chief who exhorted pan-Indian resistance, the uprising shocked war-weary English colonists. In a letter to his occasional business partner Moses Franks, Watts concluded that “our formerly stupid Savages are become great Proficients in Warr.” In other exchanges, Watts estimated the size of the English forces being gathered to wipe out the Lenape and Shawnee, whom he dismissed as “human Beasts.” John Bard, a King’s alumnus who was studying medicine in Edinburgh, sent regrets to his father over the continued violence on the frontier but added his suspicion that the colonists might be responsible.30

  Under the pseudonym “A Lover of This Country,” Rev. Smith published a laudatory history of Henry Bouquet’s campaign against the Ohio Indians. The frontier remained tense. Edward Shippen was demanding that Bouquet compensate the backcountry settlers for their services. William Trent was representing Pennsylvania farmers who had lost crops, homes, cattle, and slaves to Indian war parties. Trent, Samuel Wharton, and other Pennsylvania lawyers and merchants pursued these claims against various, even random, Native nations and communities for years.31

  The French defeat made even more tangible the colonists’ sense that the continent was theirs, and Pontiac’s Rebellion provided an immediate justification to pursue that claim. Several years later, a member of the first class of the College of Philadelphia, which graduated during the war, began a Caribbean fund-raising appeal for New Ark Academy in Delaware by rhetorically making indigenous people disappear to underscore the power of Christian education and English civilization: “A vast tract of land, which had been inhabited by a few small tribes of barbarous savages, in a short time is become the happy residence of three millions of British subjects.”32

  The fates of the colleges were again fused with the hostilities. Among the odd pieces of business that appeared on General Amherst’s desk were numerous petitions from schools. Eleazar Wheelock asked Amherst for a grant in New York, where the Mohegan minister Samson Occom’s work in the Oneida nation had prepared the ground, and where Wheelock had been courting the Onondaga and the Mohawk. The remnants of several Indian nations from New England found refuge among the Iroquois, increasing Occom’s and Wheelock’s influence in the region. President Samuel Johnson accused the governors of King’s College of failing to seek aid from the victorious general, but on May 10, 1763, after they installed a new president, the trustees formed a committee “to wait upon Jeffrey Amherst and Governor [Robert] Monckton with Subscription paper and request their Bounty.” Lord Amherst responded to Wheelock: “The Design is a very Commendable One, and I should be Extremely happy in having it in my power to be any ways Instrumental in Civilizing the Indians; and in promoting Seminaries of Learning in this Country.” He declined to grant the minister’s request, however, insisting that he lacked the power to dispense confiscated lands and forwarding Wheelock’s appeal to England.33

  President Eleazar Wheelock of Dartmouth College

  SOURCE: Hood Museum, Dartmouth College

  An early supporter of the Susquehannah Land Company, Dr. Wheelock also considered relocating his school to Pennsylvania despite the resistance of Commissioner William Johnson, who privately labeled this one “of the Schemes that had their birth in N[ew] England” and were “calculated with a View of forming Settlements so obnoxious to the Indians.” Johnson was concerned about the New Englanders’ territorial ambitions in New York and Pennsylvania, having already sided with the Penn family in the controversies over Connecticut’s western claims. The Susquehannah Company offered Wheelock a sixty-square-mile grant for his Indian academy.34

  Nonetheless, even as the enmity between the colonists and Native peoples peaked, college officers were promoting Indian education to raise money in Britain. In 1753 the Presbyterian Synod of New York sent Samuel Davies and Gilbert Tennent to England on behalf of New Jersey, the school’s second tour in fewer than five years. “And oh! how transporting the Tho’t, that these Barbarians may be cultivated by divine Grace in the use of the proper Means, and polished into genuine Disciples of the Blessed Jesus!” Rev. Davies prayed before his departure. They raised £3,000 during a two-year tour.35

  By the time Samson Occom arrived in England on behalf of Rev. Wheelock’s school, these American agents were bumping into one another as they rushed to meet potential donors. In 1762, during the war, Provost William Smith took the dangerous trip to England, only to find James Jay appealing to the same patrons for King’s College in New York. The Archbishop of Canterbury combined the campaigns and divided the proceeds between the two schools; altogether the Pennsylvanians took away nearly £7,000, while the New Yorkers claimed £10,000. In letters to the English clergy and the crown, Smith and Jay stressed that their colleges were struggling to recover from “the Ravages of a destructive War, which laid waste a considerable part of both Provinces.” Occom’s tour had modest results in Ireland because the Reverend Morgan Edwards had just finished scouring the Protestant settlements for the College of Rhode Island. In London, Rev. Occom ran into Jay in the midst of an appeal. Jay was emphasizing the religious and strategic benefits of converting Native peoples, countering popish missions from Canada, and unifying what had always been an especially diverse colony. He was knighted for his efforts.36

  Although he still promoted himself as an Indian teacher, Rev. Wheelock was shifting his energies to the college and its white students. He confronted an Anglican hierarchy suspicious of Congregationalist expansion, eroding support for Indian instruction in New England, and power brokers such as William Johnson who controlled access to more promising western missionary fields. A special SSPCK committee held a portion of the £12,000 collected by Samson Occom, and forwarded the interest to the college at a time when the Indian academy was a minor concern.37

  The Mohegan minister Samson Occom

  There was, in fact, little Native education at Dartmouth. On June 15, 1774, Dr. Wheelock penned a letter introducing and recommending Levi Frisbie to Arent DePeyster, the commander of Fort Michilimackinac, at the nexus of Lakes Huron and Michigan. A year earlier he had sent Captain DePeyster a copy of his history of the Indian mission, and now he was calling on their acquaintance to help Frisbie gain access to the northwestern nations. Three days later Rev. Frisbie pushed a well-stocked canoe into the Connecticut River and paddled toward Canada to settle some of Wheelock’s students among the northern nations, where they planned to learn the northern and western languages and recruit Indian children. The four-month expedition, much of it by water, was disappointing. The delegation never reached the western territories. Where they did go, they found it difficult to evangelize under the gaze of Catholic priests. Frisbie returned with several boys for the charity school: “the oldest is not above fifteen years old; and they all have a good deal of English blood in their veins.”38

  Wheelock had developed a preference for “white Indians” from lower Canada—many of whose ancestors were English captives—whom he bel
ieved were better suited to Christian education and Anglo culture. He seems to have acquired a similar preference for “white Negroes.” In 1770 Caleb Watts began privately studying geography, rhetoric, theology, and philosophy under Wheelock. Watts was the son of an English woman and a black man. Wheelock had initially intended to use Watts for a West Indies mission. At the outbreak of the Revolution, Wheelock sent Watts to the South in hopes that the black preacher could help the colonists prevent slave revolts during the upheaval of the English invasion. Not only were there few Indians at Dartmouth, but Indian students were increasingly unwelcome. Colonel Samuel Stevens warned Wheelock that he would remove his brother from the college if the young man was required to live in quarters with Indians rather than boarding in town with a white family.39

  “From what I can gather it is to be a grand Presbyterian College, instead of a School for the poor Indians,” President James Manning of Rhode Island commented upon Wheelock’s New Hampshire initiative. Manning feared that Dartmouth was a hundred miles from any sizable Indian community, and it had but a few highly assimilated Native students “who are brought up like us.” The Rhode Island president predicted that the money that Nathaniel Whitaker and Samson Occom raised in Britain would be “greatly prostituted.” Two years later Ezra Stiles confirmed Manning’s doubts: “Dr. Wheelock[’]s Indian College … has already almost lost sight of its original Design.” The task of finding Native students became less attractive as tensions between England and the colonies extinguished British funding. The same shifting fortunes soon led the trustees of William and Mary to close their Indian College and convert the building, Brafferton Hall, into a dormitory for white students. “Doc[to]r Wheelock’s Indian Academy or Schools are become altogether unprofitable to the poor Indians,” proclaimed an outraged Rev. Occom, who complained that his mentor had done “little or no good to the Indians with all that money we collected in England.”40