Ebony and Ivy

by Craig Steven Wilder

  44. Joseph Bailey Witherspoon, The History and Genealogy of the Witherspoon Family (1400–1972) (Fort Worth, TX: Miran, 1973), 18–156; Daniel Walker Hollis, University of South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951–56), I:7–8, 98–99; Edwin L. Green, A History of the University of South Carolina (Columbia: State Company, 1916), 388, 441, 445.

  45. On the spread of Presbyterian academies in Mississippi, see David G. Sansing, The University of Mississippi: A Sesquicentennial History (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 1999), 3–19.

  46. Witherspoon, History and Genealogy of the Witherspoon Family; David Dobson, Scottish Emigration to Colonial America, 1607–1785 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 66–80; Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 195n–210n.

  47. Witherspoon, History and Genealogy of the Witherspoon Family, 18–109; Heads of Family at the First Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1790: North Carolina (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908), 131; Virginia D. Harrington, The New York Merchant on the Eve of the Revolution (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), 51, 209; John Witherspoon to David Witherspoon, Hampden Sydney, Virginia, 17 March 1777, John Witherspoon Collection, Box 1, Folder 20; Richard A. Harrison, Princetonians, 1769–1775: A Biographical Dictionary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 442–45; Samuel A. Ashe, ed., Biographical History of North Carolina: From Colonial Times to the Present (Greensboro, NC: Charles L. Van Noppen, 1906), V:487–88. A valuable census of Scots emigrants in the Carolinas is compiled in David Dobson, Directory of Scots in the Carolinas, 1680–1830 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1986).

  48. Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 1–3, 65–124; Charles W. J. Withers, Urban Highlanders: Highland-Lowland Migration and Urban Gaelic Culture, 1700–1900 (East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell, 1998), 4; Lefler and Powell, Colonial North Carolina, 210–12; Bumsted, The People’s Clearances, 2–80; Robert A. Dodgshon, From Chiefs to Landlords: Social and Economic Change in the Western Highlands and Islands, c. 1493–1820 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 102–18, 237–43; T. M. Devine, Clanship to Crofter’s War: The Social Transformation of the Scottish Highlands (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 177–84; Duane Gilbert Meyer, The Highland Scots of North Carolina, 1732–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961). On the scope and pattern of Highland outmigration in the nineteenth century, see T. M. Devine, The Great Highland Famine: Hunger, Emigration and the Scottish Highlands in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988).

  49. Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal (New York: Teachers College Press, 1971), 109–10; John Witherspoon to Benjamin Rush, 21 December 1767, 9 February 1769, John Witherspoon Collection, Box 1, Folder 13; New-York Gazette, 20 March 1769; Samuel Miller, Memoir of the Rev. John Rodgers, D.D.: Late Pastor of the Wall Street and Brick Churches, in the City of New York (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1840), 19–26, 140. John Rodgers delivered the eulogy at the memorial for John Witherspoon in Princeton. Argus, 22 June 1795.

  50. By the 1770s, New Jersey residents were less than a quarter of the student body, and Madison’s class included only one person from the colony. Collins, President Witherspoon, II:216–17; Edward C. Mead, ed., Genealogical History of the Lee Family of Virginia and Maryland from A.D. 1300 to A.D. 1866 with Notes and Illustrations (New York: Richardson, 1868), appendix; Gaillard Hunt, The Life of James Madison (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1902), 14–15; Harrison, Princetonians, 1769–1775, 301–8. Members of the classes of 1770 and 1771, respectively, Wallace and Madison, both Virginians, became close friends while in Princeton and even visited while home in Virginia. Richard Harrison, Princetonians, 1776–1783: A Biographical Dictionary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), xxix–xxxii, 116–22, 160–65; John Witherspoon to Colonel Henry Lee, 20 December 1770, John Witherspoon Collection, Box 1, Folder 11.

  51. Robert Polk Thomson, “Colleges in the Revolutionary South: The Shaping of a Tradition,” History of Education Quarterly, Winter 1970, 399; Sloan, Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal, 20–21n, 36–41; Donald G. Tewksbury, The Founding of American Colleges and Universities Before the Civil War with Particular Reference to the Religious Influences Bearing upon the College Movement (New York: Teachers College, 1932), 69.

  52. Elizabeth Brown Pryor, “An Anonymous Person: The Northern Tutor in Plantation Society, 1773–1860,” Journal of Southern History, August 1981, 363–92; J. Blake Scott, “John Witherspoon’s Normalizing Pedagogy of Ethos,” Rhetoric Review, Autumn 1997, 63–64.

  53. Hunter Dickinson Farish, ed., Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian, 1773–1774: A Plantation Tutor of the Old Dominion (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg, 1943), esp. 3–12; Harrison, Princetonians, 1769–1775, 216–21. On Fithian’s graduation and commencement, see Providence Gazette, 24 October 1772.

  54. Farish, ed., Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian, esp. 351, 113–14; Harrison, Princetonians, 1769–1775, 420–22.

  55. Robert Donald Come, “The Influence of Princeton on Higher Education in the South Before 1825,” William and Mary Quarterly, October 1945, 359–96; John D. Wright Jr., Transylvania: Tutor to the West (Lexington, KY: Transylvania University, 1975), 1–18; Thomas G. Dyer, The University of Georgia: A Bicentennial History, 1785–1985 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 1–45; Boston Post Boy, 25 July 1768; Lefler and Powell, Colonial North Carolina, 212–13; Marshall DeLancey Haywood, “The Story of Queen’s College or Liberty Hall in the Province of North Carolina,” North Carolina Booklet, January 1912, 169–75; William D. Snider, Light on the Hill: A History of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 3–37; Walter Clark, ed., The State Records of North Carolina: Published Under the Supervision of the Trustees of the Public Libraries, by Order of the General Assembly (1903; Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot, 1994), XXI:265, 325, 415–17, 709, 718.

  56. Tewksbury, Founding of American Colleges and Universities, 69–71; James McLachlan, Princetonians, 1748–1768: A Biographical Dictionary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 21–23, 157–60, 289–92.

  57. Witherspoon, History and Genealogy of the Witherspoon Family, 103–4; Come, “Influence of Princeton on Higher Education,” 365–76; Pryor, “An Anonymous Person,” 389.

  58. Harrison, Princetonians, 1769–1775, 116–22; “Negroes for Hire,” bill dated 19 December 1826, Washington College, Lexington, Virginia, John Spencer Bassett Papers, Box 32, Folder 13, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress; “Old College,” Tusculum College, no. Tenn-157, Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress.

  59. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island: With Reflections on Its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), I:278–79; Hollis, University of South Carolina, I:7–8; Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean (New York: Vintage, 1984), 132–33.

  60. Witherspoon, History and Genealogy of the Witherspoon Family, 59, 71; Marion Mills Miller, American Debate: A History of Political and Economic Controversy in the United States, with Critical Digests of Leading Debates, part I, Colonial, State, and National Rights, 1761–1861 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), 164–65.

  CHAPTER 4: EBONY AND IVY

  1. Wheelock arrived with some thirty scholars, most of them charity students supported under funds raised in Britain. Many of these boys were not in the college course. In 1771, the first graduating class comprised four students, including Wheelock’s son John, who transferred from Yale.

  Dow died in 1817 at age one hundred. Governor Wentworth was so generous that Wheelock proposed naming the college after him, but the honoree
declined. The minister then recognized another benefactor: William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth. One of the early campus buildings was named for Wentworth.

  Professor Deborah K. King of Dartmouth College is producing new work on gender and enslavement in colonial and early national New England, which she has generously shared over the years. Deborah K. King, “Still Embattled, Yet Emboldened: Contesting Black Female Embodiments,” Black Womanhood Symposium, 12 April 2008, Hood Museum, Dartmouth College; Eleazar Wheelock, A Continuation of the Narrative of the Indian Charity School, Begun in Lebanon, in Connecticut; Now Incorporated with Dartmouth-College in Hanover, in the Province of New-Hampshire (New Hampshire, 1773), esp. 3–5; Samson Occom to Eleazar Wheelock, 4 October 1765, #765554.2, Dartmouth College Archives; Eleazar Wheelock to George Whitefield, 27 August 1770, in Baxter Perry Smith, The History of Dartmouth College (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1878), 55–56; John King Lord, A History of the Town of Hanover, N.H. (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 1928), 148–49, 301–2; Leon Burr Richardson, History of Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Publications, 1932), I:102–7; Lawrence Shaw Mayo, John Wentworth: Governor of New Hampshire, 1767–1775 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921), 110; The Records of the Town of Hanover, New Hampshire, 1761–1818:The Records of the Town Meetings, and of the Selectmen, Comprising All of the First Volume of Records and Being Volume 1 of the Printed Records of the Town (Hanover, NH: By the town, 1905), 6–9; Elizabeth Forbes Morison and Elting E. Morison, New Hampshire: A Bicentennial History (New York: Norton, 1976), 22.

  2. Eleazar Wheelock to Sachem Gill at St. Francis, 1 November 1777, #777601, and “Roster of Names of Pupils Attending Charity School, Chiefly 1760–1775,” Rauner Library, Dartmouth College; Colin G. Calloway, ed., Dawnland Encounters: Indians and Europeans in Northern New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991), 243–45; Colin G. Calloway, The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), esp. 1–37; Dartmouth College, “Catalogus eorum qui in Collegio-Dartmuthensi (a Reverendo Eleazaro Wheelock S.T.D divinis auspiciis) Nov-Hantoniae …” (Hanover, NH: Alden Spooner, 1779); The General Catalogue of Dartmouth College and Associated Schools, 1769–1940 (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Publications, 1940), esp. 70.

  3. John and Isaac Lawrence owned land and slaves in New Jersey and New York. They supported the regional colleges. “Rutgers University Board of Trustees Records, 1778–1956, Series I: Queens College Board of Trustees, 1778–1829,” Folder 1, Special Collections and University Archives, Alexander Library, Rutgers University.

  4. Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 5; Herbert S. Klein, A Population History of the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 20, 139–40; Graham Russell Hodges, “Ethnicity in Eighteenth-Century North America, 1701–1788,” in Ronald H. Bayor, ed., Race and Ethnicity in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 21–40; Return of the Whole Number of Persons within the Several Districts of the United States, According to “An Act Providing for the Enumeration of the Inhabitants of the United States,” Passed March the First, One Thousand Seven Hundred and Ninety-One (Philadelphia: Childs and Swaine, 1791), esp. 3; Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), esp. 60–90.

  5. Greene and Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790, esp. 15–17, 49–50, 63, 71–72, 115–19; Boston News-Letter, 3 July 1704, in Charles J. Hoadly, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, from May, 1762, to October, 1767, inclusive (Hartford, CT: Case, Lockwood, and Brainard, 1850–), V:516, 534, VII:580–85; “Answers returned to the Queries sent the Governor and Company of His Majesty’s Colony of Connecticut from the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, A.D. 1762,” Massachusetts Historical Society.

  6. Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), esp. 272–75; Greene and Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790, 92–100; Gary B. Nash, “Slaves and Slaveowners in Colonial Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly, April 1973, 223–56; Jean R. Soderlund, “Black Importation and Migration to Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1682–1810, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, June 1989, 144–53.

  7. Robert V. Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America Before 1776: A Survey of Census Data (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 147; Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary, Slavery in North Carolina, 1748–1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 19; Peter H. Wood, “The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race and Region, 1685–1790,” in Gregory A. Waselkov, Peter H. Wood, and Tom Hatley, eds., Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 57–76; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Norton, 1975), 131–66; Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730–1775 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 59–87; Russell Thornton, The Cherokees: A Population History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 30–32; Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 121n; Governor William Gooch, “Report to the Lords of Trade,” 1749, Virginia Governor, 1741–1749, Virginia Historical Society.

  8. See Bishop François de Laval’s deeds transferring his property to the seminary and the trustees’ acknowledgment of his donations, April–November 1680, Archives du Séminaire de Québec, Séminaire 1, no. 17B, and Séminaire 2, no. 68 and 69, Centre de référence de l’Amérique française, Musée de l’Amérique française, Quebec, Canada. The deeds recording Laval’s land acquisitions are also available in the collection. Noël Baillargeon, Le Séminaire de Québec sous l’Épiscopat de Mgr de Laval (Quebec: Les Presses de L’Université Laval, 1972), 65–88, 193–97; H. Clare Pentland, Labour and Capital in Canada, 1650–1860 (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1981), 1–2; Marcel Trudel, Les Débuts du Régime Seigneurial au Canada (Montreal: Fides, 1974), 90–101, 275, 279; Gur Frégault and Marcel Trudel, Histoire du Canada: par les textes (Montreal: Fides, 1963), I:38–43. Also see William B. Munro, The Seigneurs of Old Canada: A Chronicle of New World Feudalism (Toronto: Brook, 1914); Richard Colebrook Harris, The Seigneurial System in Early Canada: A Geographical Study (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966).

  9. Nathaniel Byfield owned multiple slaves and at least one Scottish indentured servant, James Furdize, a nineteen-year-old. “John Leverett’s Diary, 1707–1723,” 64–72, 106–8, Papers of John Leverett, Box 8, Harvard University Archives; Samuel A. Bates, ed., Records of the Town of Braintree, 1640–1793 (Randolph, MA: Daniel H. Huxford, 1886), 725; Edward Field, ed., State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations at the End of the Century: A History (Boston: Mason, 1902), II:476; Thomas Williams Bicknell, The History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (New York: American Historical Society, 1920), III:1179; Nathaniel Byfield, An Account of the Late Revolution in New-England: Together with the Declaration of the Gentlemen, Merchants, and Inhabitants of Boston, and the Country Adjacent. April 18, 1689 (London: Richard Chiswell, 1689); Harriette M. Forbes, ed., The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman, of Westborough, Mass. (Westborough, MA: Westborough Historical Society, 1899), esp. vi; Boston News-Letter, 30 September 1706, 25 November 1706, 17 Feb 1707; New-England Weekly Journal, 25 March 1728.

  10. Yale’s estates were in slaveholding regions, and its tenants included slave owners. Entries on the leasing of the college farms, “Yale University Corporation and Prudential Committee Minutes,” Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library; Ebenezer Baldwin, Annals of Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut, from Its Foundation, to the Year 1831 (New Haven: Hezekiah Howe, 1831), 308; An Account of the Number o
f Inhabitants, in the Colony of Connecticut, January 1, 1774: Together with An Account of the Number of Inhabitants, Taken January 1, 1756 (Hartford, CT: Ebenezer Watson, 1774); A. G. Hibbard, History of the Town of Goshen, Connecticut with Genealogies and Biographies (Hartford, CT: Case, Lockwood, and Brainard, 1897), 22–25; Bureau of the Census, Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1790: Connecticut (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908), 57; entries for 25 January 1742, 15 August 1758, College of William and Mary, “Faculty Minutes, 1729–1784,” and College of William and Mary, “Bursars Books, 1743–1770,” Special Collections, Swem Library, College of William and Mary; “College Negroes,” William and Mary Quarterly, January 1908, 170.

  11. Edward Field, ed., State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations at the End of the Century: A History (Boston: Mason, 1902), I:584; Silas Cooke to Aaron Lopez, 27 August 1776, 7 and 16 September 1776, Aaron Lopez Papers, Box 14, Folder 7, American Jewish Historical Society; entries for 16 April 1746, 10 September 1760, 30 November 1762, 22 October 1766, 13 September 1769, “Yale University Corporation and Prudential Committee Minutes”; Susan Stanton Brayton, “Whitehall during the War of Revolution,” n.d., Rhode Island Historical Society; Census of the Inhabitants of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Taken by Order of the General Assembly, in the Year 1774; and by the General Assembly of the State Ordered to be Printed (Providence: Anthony Knowles, 1858), 10; Jay Mack Holbrook, Rhode Island 1782 Census (Oxford, MA: Holbrook Research Institute, 1979), 36; Census Record of the State of Rhode Island for 1782, copied by Mrs. Lewis A. Waterman, historian, Rhode Island Daughters of Founders and Patriots of America, 1941–1945, and typed by Mrs. Louis Oliver and Mrs. Albert Congdon, president and past president of the RIDFPA, 16, Rhode Island Historical Society.