“The soil of New England is trodden by no slave,” Quincy asserted in his history of Boston, crediting a commitment to an “equality of rights” that he traced back to the Pilgrims and Puritans. Harvard president Jared Sparks authored a series of books on the lives and letters of the Founding Fathers that raised his prestige and earned him firm friendships in the South. In 1822 Everett had married Charlotte Brooks, the daughter of Peter Chardon Brooks, the wealthy Atlantic maritime insurer and college benefactor. Antebellum presidents often turned to history, producing national and regional studies, and biographies of leading political and economic figures. From Princeton came accounts of the Presbyterian Church, the college, the region’s leading families, and the African colonization movement. President William Alexander Duer of Columbia wrote about society and life in New York City and the heroism of his English and West Indian ancestors.16 This turn to the past was not peculiar to universities. The antebellum nation saw a broad social concern with history.
Harvard University Presidents, 1829–1862
SOURCE: Harvard University Libraries
Popular fixations with history often reflect popular anxieties about the future. If history is a search for distant truths, then it is also an attempt to regulate the judgments of coming generations. White northerners removed slavery from their accounts and memories by driving the descendants of slaves from view and crafting new explanations for their wealth and regional development. Not coincidentally, President Quincy and the Harvard Corporation dismissed Charles Follen on the eve of Harvard’s bicentennial, a moment of ritual historical revision. The attack on abolitionists and abolitionism began the process of hiding the college’s long, sordid affair with slavery and the slave trade.
COTTON COMES TO HARVARD
The most active slaving house in the nation, the DeWolfes, opened a firm and purchased plantations in Cuba to circumvent the United States’ 1808 prohibition on the slave trade. Such families became the new patrons of higher education. Israel Thorndike, whose fortune came from the Caribbean trade and a Cuban estate acquired from the DeWolfes, gave $500 to endow the Massachusetts Professorship of Natural History at Harvard, the same amount to the theology school, and $100 for the Professorship in Mineralogy and Geology. In 1818 he spent several thousand dollars on the Americana collection—ten thousand maps and more than three thousand books—of the Hamburg professor and librarian Christoph Daniel Ebeling. Thorndike’s son, Israel Augustus, graduated from Harvard in 1835, and in 1841 he married Frances Maria Macomb, the daughter of a Cuban sugar planter. In 1838 Elisha Atkins opened a trading house in Boston to import sugar from Cuba, where he also purchased plantations. Edwin Atkins bought Soledad and other sugar estates during the violent and unstable demise of slavery on the island. The family owned one of the largest sugar-producing and -refining operations in Cuba, which they maintained after the 1886 emancipation. Atkins created the Harvard Botanical Garden at Soledad, and later donated the estate to serve as the tropical laboratory for Harvard science faculty and students.17
Merchants and manufacturers with economic ties to the cotton and sugar plantations of the South and the Caribbean transformed higher education in the antebellum North. The Boston Associates, a combination of investors and industrialists from roughly forty families, planned dozens of cotton mill towns across New England, and branched into finance and railroads. John Lowell Jr., the son of the cotton textile magnate Francis Cabot Lowell, bequeathed $250,000 to support the Lowell Institute (1839) in Boston. Edward Everett of Harvard gave the inaugural address on the history of the founder. Yale’s Benjamin Silliman followed with a lecture on geology, and returned for an introduction to chemistry. In its first years, the institute offered talks on anatomy, Christian philosophy, botany, electromagnetism, religion, optics, American history, and astronomy from scholars such as Jared Sparks of Harvard and Mark Hopkins of Williams.18
Industrialists were retooling universities to meet their needs. Under Everett’s presidency, the practical sciences significantly expanded at Harvard. In 1847 Abbott Lawrence, the cotton textile manufacturer, gave $50,000 to establish the Lawrence Scientific School, motivated by his own frustrations locating qualified engineers and planners to build his mills and towns. He later bequeathed an additional $50,000. His brother Amos, also a manufacturer and college benefactor, celebrated the historic donation as the “last best work ever done by one of our name.” The Lawrences donated to Williams, Amherst, Bowdoin, and other colleges across the nation. This was not detached benevolence. Realizing the vision of an industrialized nation required mechanics and engineers. “Buying up vast stretches of land and water, and plunking down whole cities where none had been before,” Robert F. Dalzell writes of this manufacturing elite, displayed the possibilities of technology and capital.19
More than a dozen engineering and science schools had opened in the United States before the Civil War. In 1824 Stephen Van Rensselaer chartered Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. By the 1830s William and Mary and the University of Virginia, where William Barton Rogers held professorships, were offering practical science courses. In 1846 Rogers sent an outline for a polytechnic school to John A. Lowell, of the cotton manufacturing empire. His influences came from the more advanced technical schools in France and Germany. Among the founding trustees of the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (1855) were James C. Brevoort, who had finished his education at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris, and James Stranahan, a civil engineer who had planned the manufacturing town of Florence, New York, for the abolitionist Gerrit Smith. Charles Pratt’s oil refinery and the Havemeyer sugar works were driving a production revolution that transformed Brooklyn from a small town to an industrial city. “Among the people themselves,” Frederick Barnard, then of the University of Mississippi, said in a speech in New York City that year, “there has sprung up a demand for something more practical” in education. In 1859 the iron industrialist and abolitionist Peter Cooper opened the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. Two years later, Rogers became the president of the new Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with support from the Lowells.20
Awful Conflagration of the Steam Boat Lexington
SOURCE: Library of Congress
“STRICKEN FROM YOUR SIGHT”
On January 13, 1840, Rev. Follen left New York for New England to preach the dedicatory sermon at a new church in East Lexington, Massachusetts, which he helped to build and was to pastor. If not for his humility, he might have touted it as a triumphant return. He and his family had survived Harvard’s punishment, he had sustained his moral and political opposition to human slavery, and he had grown his reputation. But his career ended on the ill-fated Lexington.21 Slavery shaped much of Follen’s life in the United States, and it also influenced his death: a professor, minister, and abolitionist was consumed in a fire that began in a cargo of slave-grown cotton steaming toward free New England.
Even as the sun began setting on Atlantic slavery, the leaders of American colleges were chasing the darkness.
Acknowledgments
Brown University president Ruth Simmons’s courageous articulation of the academic obligation to pursue truth and the forthright presentations of James T. Campbell, Anthony Bogues, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, and the committee that authored Slavery and Justice (2006), the report on Brown’s ties to the slave trade, came at a time when I was considering giving up on what then seemed to be too massive an undertaking. Brown’s self-study was not the first of these recent investigations. Graduate students and staff at Yale had authored Yale, Slavery, & Abolition (2001) during the university’s three hundredth anniversary. But President Simmons’s call for a reckoning with this past resonated well beyond the walls of her campus.
Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy organized a historic conference on slavery and the university at Emory. Sven Beckert and Katherine Stevens’s seminars at Harvard led to the collection Harvard & Slavery (2011). Terry L. Meyers has publi
shed on slavery at William and Mary. Mark Auslander has been researching and teaching the history of slavery at Emory. Deborah K. King is recovering the lives of enslaved people at the northern New England colleges. Shanti M. Singham has guided students in discovering these connections at Williams College. Martha Sandweiss is leading an undergraduate research seminar on slavery at Princeton. Faculty, librarians, and students at other schools—including William and Mary, Duke, Amherst, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, and Maryland—have been producing detailed studies of the relationship between colleges and slavery. Campus by campus, they are providing complex portraits of slavery and the university at a speed that is difficult to follow. They are also beginning to synthesize this scholarship online, in museum exhibits, and in major publications like the forthcoming Slavery and the University volume from the Emory conference.
I took an unusual path to this subject. A decade ago, I began research for an article on how black abolitionists entered the professions given the racial barriers at American colleges. I had just arrived at Dartmouth College, a perfect site for exploring stories that often began or concluded in New England. The work of Colin G. Calloway, Celia Naylor, Dale Turner, and other colleagues and students in Dartmouth’s Native American Studies Program reshaped my interests. I became more curious about the uneven statuses of Native people and Africans on early American campuses, and the differing ideas about their educability. The contrasts are striking. The first attempt to establish an Indian college in the British colonies came more than two centuries before the first movement to found a black college. The first Native student to graduate from a college in what is now the United States did so nearly one hundred and seventy years before the first African American graduated. The first ordained Native minister in the Protestant colonies preceded the first black clergyman by about a century and a half. These differences do not signal a privileging of Native Americans over Africans; rather, they reflect the troubling role of colleges and education in the colonial world.
James Wright, president emeritus of Dartmouth, and Ozzie Harris, now at Emory, were sources of constant support during the early years of this project. I presented some of this work at the Black New England Conference at the University of New Hampshire, where James T. Campbell offered concrete advice and encouragement. Jonathan Veitch, now the president of Occidental College, arranged for a visiting professorship at the New School, where I benefited immeasurably from workshops and exchanges with David Plotke, Robin Blackburn, Ferentz Lafargue, Frederico Finchelstein, Sam Haselby, and Oz Frankel. I also enjoyed a semester as a visitor in the history department at University College London. Simon Renton, Bernhard Rieger, John Sabapathy, Nicola Miller, Adam Smith, and the graduate students at UCL invited me to present material and they gave me good guidance on locating British and European sources. My thanks to the Urban History Seminar, Chicago History Museum, where I discussed an early version of the chapter on race science. Kate Fermoile and Deborah Schwartz hosted a talk on the medical sciences and slavery at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Colin G. Calloway generously reviewed the first full draft of the book, certainly a difficult assignment.
Numerous friends have read or listened to parts of the book on more than one occasion. My departmental colleagues Harriet Ritvo and Elizabeth Wood read chapters. Graham Russell Hodges, Joseph Cullon, John Ehrenberg, Jonathan Soffer, and Diana Linden were kind enough to critique parts of the manuscript. Michael Green and Deborah K. King read final versions of the book. I have presented this work with colleagues and students in the Bard Prison Initiative and on the Bard campus. Jeff Ravel, Jack Tchen, David Gerwin, and other friends have provided opportunities for me to share this material. As this project expanded, I had to give up the fantasy that I could acknowledge in writing all the librarians and archivists who have assisted me during a decade of research, but I have thanked them all in person.
I could not have completed this project without Zoë Pagnamenta, who placed the book with Peter Ginna and the Bloomsbury Press USA group. Several years ago, Zoë and I bonded over a cup of coffee and a long chat that drifted from British sitcoms to colonial history. She has been a reliable advocate for my work ever since. Peter Ginna patiently permitted the project to evolve and skillfully helped me move ideas into words. He allowed me to make mistakes and discoveries. I deeply appreciate his dedication to telling this story.
Finally, I have to thank my sister. For two decades, Dr. Gloria has provided medical care to thousands of children living in Washington, D.C. I have had the honor of sitting in audiences to watch my sister receive awards, but I have not had a chance to acknowledge her influence on me. Long before these successes, she protected me, time and time again, from the dangers of growing up black, male, and poor in the United States. Gloria believed that we had something to offer. I was, truthfully, quite doubtful. This is a little tribute to my first and best friendship.
Notes
PROLOGUE: A CONNECTICUT YANKEE AT AN ANCIENT INDIAN MOUND
1. Henry Watson Jr. to Henry Watson, 10 November 1830, 16 November 1830, and 16 December 1830, Henry Watson Family Papers, 1803–1823, in the John Spencer Bassett Papers, Box 32, Folder 23, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Chandos Michael Brown, Benjamin Silliman: A Life in the Young Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 35–49.
2. Henry Watson Jr. to Henry Watson, 10 November 1830; Brown, Benjamin Silliman, 35–49.
3. On 18 May 1705, Tamar, a slave, was accepted into First Church in Hartford. Historical Catalogue of the First Church in Hartford, 1633–1885 (Hartford, CT: By the Church, 1885), 26; Bushrod Washington, “Address of the American Colonization Society to the People of the United States,” Christian Herald, 13 September 1817; Memorial of the President and the Board of Managers of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States: January 14, 1817. Read and Ordered to Lie upon the Table (Washington, DC: William A. Davis, 1817).
4. Henry Watson Jr., “Dr. [J. C.] Warren’s Anatomical Lectures, Harvard College, May 1829,” in Henry Watson Jr. Lecture Notes, 1829, II:139, Rare Books and Special Collections, Neilson Library, Smith College; Samuel J. May, Discourse on the Life and Character of the Rev. Charles Follen, L.L.D., Who Perished, Jan. 13, 1840, in the Conflagration of the Lexington. Delivered Before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, in the Marlborough Chapel, Boston, April 17, 1840 (Boston: Henry L. Devereux, 1840), 7–22; “Biographical Notices of the Late Dr. Charles Follen,” Monthly Miscellany of Religion and Letters, February 1840.
5. Henry Watson Jr. to Henry Watson, 16 December 1830, 30 December 1830, John Spencer Bassett Papers, Box 32, Folder 23, Library of Congress.
6. General Catalogue of Dartmouth College and the Associated Schools, 1769–1900, Including a Historical Sketch of the College Prepared by Marvin Davis Bisbee, the Librarian (Hanover, NH: For the College, 1900), 169; Henry Watson Jr. to My Dear Father, 19 June 1830, John Spencer Bassett Papers, Box 32, Folder 23, Library of Congress; Henry Watson Jr., “Journal of Horseback Ride from Erie, Alabama, to East Windsor Hill, Conn[ecticut], May 20th to July 8th, 1831,” Rare Books and Special Collections, Neilson Library, Smith College.
7. Roger G. Kennedy, Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization (New York: Free Press, 1994), 7–22; Gregory D. Wilson, The Archaeology of Everyday Life at Early Moundville (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008); William Leete Stone, The Mound-builders: Were They Egyptian, and Did They Ever Occupy the State of New York? (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1878); Paul Kelton, Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492–1715 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 1–46, 101–59.
8. Watson, “Journal of Horseback Ride from Erie, Alabama, to East Windsor Hill, Conn[ecticut].”
9. James Kent was a charter member of the Yale chapter. In 1793 Kent began lecturing on law at Columbia. Chief Justice John Jay, Justice John S. Hobart of the New York State Supreme Court, Dr. Samuel Bard, and
Edward Livingston helped secure him an appointment as professor of law. The trustees approved a law school in 1858. The abolitionist William Jay eventually drew Kent out of the colonization movement. James Kent, An Address Delivered at New Haven, Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, September 13, 1831 (New Haven: Hezekiah Howe, 1831), 14–15; James Kent, Dissertations: Being the Preliminary Part of a Course of Law Lectures (New York: George Forman, 1795); Theodore W. Dwight, “Columbia College Law School, New York,” The Green Bag, 1889, 141–60; John Theodore Horton, James Kent: A Study in Conservatism, 1763–1847 (1939; Union, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2000), 310n; Robert A. Trendel, William Jay: Churchman, Public Servant, and Reformer (New York: Arno, 1982), 188; William Kent, Memoirs and Letters of James Kent, LL.D., Late Chancellor of the State of New York, Author of “Commentaries on American Law,” Etc. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1898), 54–59, 99–100, 180, 229.
10. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is a novel about slavery; perhaps more accurately, it is about a people who had failed to acknowledge their long reliance upon the enslavement of other human beings. Mark Twain assures his readers that the history beneath his story is factually if not chronologically accurate. He wrote and published the novel a quarter century after the Civil War, while he was living in Hartford, Connecticut, in a house neighboring that of his friend Harriet Beecher Stowe. A postbellum American would not likely imagine a journey through time that did not include encounters with Africans and Native Americans. “Negroes” and “Indians” are present throughout this ironic juxtaposition of the sixth and nineteenth centuries. Struck on the head in his Connecticut workshop, Hank Morgan wakes to find himself shackled and sold alongside the king of England, who is shocked to discover how easily a free man can be converted to chattel, offended by the injustice of his own laws, and humbled by his unflattering market value. Twain uses the fictionalized world of Morgan’s enslavement to unleash a passionate indictment of the real slavery that had only recently existed in the United States. This abolitionist lament, however eloquent, was merely retrospective. Moreover, Twain’s references to Native peoples treat them as romantic primitives, noble savages, and cultural artifacts. Morgan describes King Arthur’s Camelot as a barbaric society governed by bravado, force, and honor, but never intelligence. The Round Table is “just a sort of polished up court of Comanches, and there isn’t a squaw in it who doesn’t stand ready at the dropping of a hat to desert to the buck with the biggest string of scalps at his belt.” James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Vintage, 1983), 121, 125, 199–209; James L. Roark, Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Norton, 1977), 71–72, 132; Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Vintage, 1956), 386; Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Vintage, 1976), 155–67; Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (New York: Harper, 1917), esp. 102, 119, 186–90, 298–99.
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