Ebony and Ivy (11 page)

Philip Livingston, a founding benefactor of King's College
(Columbia) and Queen's (Rutgers)
SOURCE: Brooklyn Historical Society

King's was a merchants' college. In its first two decades it enrolled nearly ninety sons of the commercial class, more children of Atlantic traders than any other college in British North America. Although a fire destroyed many of the treasurer's reports for colonial New York, the slaving activities of the trustees show through even
this damaged and incomplete record. In the month before the execution of the charter, several governors or patrons traded slaves. In September 1754 the sloop
Polly
docked in Manhattan holding seven enslaved Africans with its other cargo. Two people died during the
Polly
's return. This was just a few weeks before Nathaniel Marston, a partial owner of the venture, became a trustee. That same month Philip Livingston's sloop returned from the African coast, and the following month John Livingston's ship completed a voyage to Jamaica. In the years before he became a trustee, David Clarkson had partnered in several slaving voyages. Matthew Clarkson, a future trustee, was active in the trade long after the opening of King's. The number of trustees trading in slaves increased through the 1750s.
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In May 1755 Governor DeLancey brought the charter—which Attorney General William Kempe, a trustee, had prepared—to Edward Willett's house to swear in the new board. Trinity donated two square blocks north and south of Robinson Street between Church and Chapel. In exchange the Reformed Dutch and Presbyterians accepted Anglican affiliation, which meant an Anglican president and the use of that church's prayers. Samuel Johnson accepted the presidency and Anglicans dominated the original trustee board. Justice Daniel Horsmanden, a trustee who donated at least £500 to the college, administered the board members' oaths.
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The influence of the merchants rested in large part on their willingness to leverage the slave economy. “I Do give and bequeath unto my said Nine grandchildren after the Decease of my said Wife Sarah Each and every one of them a Negro slave such as my said son in Law & Daughter or the survivor of them shall think proper,” wrote Peter Van Brugh. He left his grandson Peter Van Brugh Livingston a portion of a family house, lot, and furnishings, and he gave his granddaughter Sarah Livingston ownership of his “Negro Bett,” or a surviving black woman, upon his wife's death. His wife, Sarah, took possession of a collection of properties in Albany and New York City along with “all my Negro slaves, Horses, Cattle, households of furniture, utensills, and all my moveable and personall estate.” His daughter Catrina Van Brugh and son-in-law Philip Livingston took a half share in a house, lot, and furnishings,
and a piece of the larger estate upon Sarah Van Brugh's death. Philip Livingston received slaves and commercial slaving interests from his parents and his in-laws, and he left both to his own children, including Peter Van Brugh and Philip, as did their in-laws. For example, James Alexander added to this fortune after his son William married Philip and Catrina's daughter Sarah.
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Advertisement from Charles Willing, trustee of the College of
Philadelphia, today's University of Pennsylvania
SOURCE: Pennsylvania Gazette

A landless Scottish noble who had trained as an attorney in Glasgow and London, James Alexander became a wealthy lawyer and land speculator in East Jersey. He married Mary Sprat, a Provoost widow and daughter of the DePeyster family, whose considerable business experience as a merchant trader aided his rise. By the time of his death, Alexander held large estates in New York and owned as much as sixty thousand acres of land in New Jersey.
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Preserved in the records of Peter Van Brugh Livingston, James Alexander's 1745 will included a grant to support the new enthusiasm of the merchants: “I do give to the use of a colledge for the education of youth to be erected in the Province of New York the Sum of one hundred Pounds New york money.” Alexander increased his gift to the planned “colledge” with payments that the colony
owed him for his service in the assembly. Public money for the new school came directly and indirectly from slavery and the slave trade. “The Dutys on Rum Wine & Negroes have heretofore supported our Civil List” is how the trustee John Watts described that dependence. For two decades the colonial treasurer Abraham DePeyster collected taxes on the human merchandise moved through the port. Ship's captains entering New York vouched to DePeyster for the accuracy of their manifests for “Slaves, Wine, Rum, or other distilled Liquors, Shrub, Cocoa, or dutiable Dry-Goods.” James Alexander also donated £50 “to the use of a colledge for the Education of youth to be erected in the Province of New Jersey.”
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The traders could afford to be magnanimous. Churches, hospitals, libraries, and colleges were the rewards of a broad social investment in Atlantic slavery. The
New-York Post-Boy and Weekly Gazette
broadside that announced the trustees' swearing-in ceremony carried a single advertisement: “
TWO likely Negro Boys, and a Girl, to be Sold. Inquire of
William Griffith,
opposite
Beekman's Slip.” The symbolism of that sheet being paid for by a notice for the sale of black children is appropriate, for the participation of the founders in slave trading was one of their more distinguishing characteristics.
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Throughout the Mid-Atlantic and New England, higher education had its greatest period of expansion as the African slave trade peaked. In September 1742 the merchants of Philadelphia set exchange rates in response to a shortage of hard currency. Those endorsing that published agreement included most of the men who later served as the governors of the College of Philadelphia. Quaker Philadelphia was a hub in the transatlantic commercial network. The founders of the new school included the Quakers James Logan and Lloyd Zachary. By the mid-eighteenth century there were more than eighty Quaker slave traders in London. David and John Barclay, who freed their Jamaican slaves shortly after inheriting a plantation, donated to the Philadelphia college and served as its London agents. Philadelphia traders carried provisions and enslaved people to Barbados and the rest of the British Caribbean. Several of the trustees were West Indies merchants, and the board actively sought donors and students from those
islands. Provost William Smith had come to mainland North America with Josiah Martin, a royal councilor and planter from Antigua, whose slaves had participated in the rebellion of 1736. Martin was a founding trustee of King's, and he enrolled two of his sons at Philadelphia.
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The board included a number of men who traded in indentured British and German servants and enslaved Africans. The bifurcation of the Pennsylvania economy between agriculture and a rising system of manufactories brought calls for laborers with different skills and backgrounds. Meeting these demands had lasting political and social consequences. It sparked cyclical struggles between the Quaker minority and a growing population of European immigrants, who demanded political representation and sought the freedom to war against Indians for control over lands at the western border of the colony. Those who arrived as indentured servants often carried an even greater sense of entitlement upon their emancipation.
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Commerce strained the Quaker ethic. In 1684 a British firm had brought 150 enslaved Africans to Philadelphia. “It were better they were blacks,” William Penn, the founding proprietor, decided the following year while addressing the colony's labor needs, “for then a man has them while they live.” In the eighteenth century the number of Pennsylvania merchants in the Africa trade jumped significantly. William Allen and Joseph Turner, both founding trustees of the College of Philadelphia, formed a partnership that brought slaves from the British Caribbean and servants from Europe. David Barclay represented Allen and Turner in London. The two investors advertised for runaways, including people fleeing their New Jersey iron foundry; used their firm to facilitate slave catching; and sold people from their offices. Aging Philadelphia merchants often drifted into manufacturing to limit their exposure in the riskier Atlantic trade. Prominent families such as the Allens, Turners, and Whartons shaped the iron industry, which used enslaved black and indentured white labor. Allen and Turner invested more than £20,000 in a single foundry. One of Pennsylvania's wealthiest men, William Allen, sent three sons to the college, two of whom also became trustees.
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Samuel Johnson teaching his first class at King's College,
in a nineteenth-century illustration
SOURCE: New York Public Library

Philadelphia mayor Charles Willing, a charter trustee of the academy, owned three ships and organized at least six slaving expeditions. A 1747 advertisement he took out announced that “several likely Negro Men and Boys” were to be sold from “the Brigantine
George
from Guinea.” He was also offering rum and sugar from Barbados and a variety of goods from England. Thomas Willing, the mayor's son, partnered with Robert Morris in one of the colony's largest slaving outfits, Willing and Morris, which sold hundreds of Africans into the Pennsylvania and Delaware markets. Later the president of the Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, Thomas Willing also spent more than thirty years on the board of the college.
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The Philadelphia college was a beneficiary of these trades in unfree people. A Scot who first settled the Caribbean, John Inglis
relocated to Philadelphia, where he sent four slavers to the Carolinas and West Indies in less than a decade. His father-in-law, George McCall, and brother-in-law, Samuel McCall, also a founding trustee, invested in more than fifteen slaving voyages. William Plumsted, another charter trustee and also a son-in-law of George McCall, sent two slaving vessels to sea while serving on the board; one, in partnership with David Franks, brought a hundred enslaved people from Guinea to Philadelphia. John Searle, the son of a slaver and an experienced Madeira trader, was part of a second generation of merchants who became trustees as slave importations into Pennsylvania and Delaware peaked.
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The merchants pulled the school into the unfree economy. “A Likely young Negro Woman, who can Wash, Iron, and cook well; also a young Negro Girl, about 14 Years of Age,” began John Inglis's 1739 announcement for two slaves whom he advertised as smallpox survivors. Inglis also sold British indentured servants—primarily tradesman and farmers—and Caribbean and English wares from his Front Street store. After advertising the wide variety of dry goods at his merchant house, he noted that he “had to sell two likely young Negro Men fit for Town or Country Service.” Thomas Lawrence moved black people in the local markets, including a Barbadian woman named Hannah who ran away in 1739, and Elizabeth Gregory, born on Long Island, who escaped in 1749.
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