Ebony and Ivy (19 page)

Incoming presidents often brought enslaved people to campus
or secured servants after their arrival. Harvard president Benjamin Wadsworth owned an enslaved black man named Titus, who lived with the president's family. “I bought a Negro Wench,” Wadsworth wrote in October 1726, just two days before he moved into the president's quarters. “She came to our house at Cambridge this day, I paid no money down for her,” he added, but owed £85 on credit. Wadsworth later hired two free women servants, including Desire Simon, a Native American.
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As Harvard's chronicler had done, a Yale historian asserted that “it was a common custom of the times to own Negro or Indian slaves” to explain the conspicuous presence of bound people at the founding of the college. In October 1701 the Reverend James Pierpont of New Haven and a group of Connecticut ministers secured a colonial charter for the new “Collegiate School.” On November 11, seven of the ten trustees traveled by horseback to a meeting at the home of Thomas Buckingham in Saybrook. Timothy Woodbridge arrived from Hartford. Noadiah Russell came alone from Middletown. Israel Chauncy of Stratford and Joseph Webb of Fairfield met Samuel Andrew in Milford. James Pierpont joined them at New Haven, and they rode to meet Abraham Pierson in Kenilworth. This procession was “followed on horseback by their men-servants or slaves.”
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Abraham Pierson served as the college's first rector. His father had trained at Cambridge University and then migrated to the colonies to serve with John Eliot as an Indian missionary; he authored an early Algonquian guide to Christian scripture. Dissenters from New Haven organized a number of settlements. Pierson followed Robert Treat, who raised a Puritan outpost in Newark, New Jersey. The colony attracted freemen by offering grants of 150 acres and equal plots for each able male servant or half parcels for lesser servants. Rev. Pierson brought most of his congregation to the new town, which was named for his ancestral home in England, and he left his children large farms that they used to become a substantial slaveholding family. After graduating from Harvard in 1668, Abraham Pierson joined his father at First Church in Newark. The younger Pierson presided at the Newark church until about 1692, when he resettled in Connecticut.
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Two slaves—Tom and Pung—passed between the three Pierpont brothers, Benjamin, John, and James. They were by no means the only links to the slave economy in the Pierpont inventory. Benjamin Pierpont, a 1689 graduate of Harvard, took the pulpit of a congregation in Charleston, South Carolina, where he acquired slaves, a plantation, and several parcels of land. In 1685 James, Harvard class of 1681, was called to pastor First Congregational Church in New Haven, Connecticut. He eventually inherited Benjamin's “plantation in South Carolina … [along] the Ashley river” and two lots in Charleston. To provide for the spiritual health of the Palmetto City, Benjamin Pierpont gave two additional lots to support a Presbyterian minister. If unclaimed after five years, these lots would go to James.
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Slaveholding was common among Yale's early faculty and governors. Elisha Williams, Harvard class of 1711, acquired a significant estate, including land and slaves, from his marriage to Eunice Chester. Williams ran a preparatory school in Wethersfield, Connecticut. In September 1725 the Yale board appointed Williams rector of the college. With only a rector and a single tutor, Yale was a modest institution, and Williams spent the next fifteen years teaching, managing students, and stabilizing the college's finances. The Reverend Eliphalet Adams, who prepared boys for Yale and Harvard in his New London home, owned several slaves, including one person donated by his parish. He once baptized five of his servants in a single year. Fluent in Mohegan, Rev. Adams also served under the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel as an Indian missionary. The Reverend Thomas Clap, a 1722 graduate of Harvard, was a lifelong slaveholder. Clap became rector in 1740, and five years later the board named him president, the first in Yale's history. Rev. Clap and his wife made a personal pact to free their slaves; however, Clap's administration wedded Yale's fortunes to those of New England's Atlantic merchants.
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In 1756 the Reverend Ezra Stiles, a former tutor and a future president of Yale, placed a hogshead of rum aboard a ship leaving Rhode Island and instructed Captain William Pinnegar to trade it for a black child on the Guinea coast. The minister later named the boy Newport after his point of entry. As legend has it, Stiles
confronted the moral problem of his actions after the transaction was completed. Finding the ten-year-old child in his kitchen crying, “the whole truth flashed upon the master's mind, and he saw the evil he had done,” a fellow college president confessed. Stiles had separated Newport forever from his family and home, condemning him to a life of service in a foreign land. The minister promised to educate and train the boy in an attempt to partially repair that damage. On March 12, 1775, Rev. Stiles “baptized my Negro Man Newport … and admitted him into full Communion with the Church.” Three years later, Ezra Stiles assumed the presidency of Yale. “At noon arrived here two Carriages from New Haven a Caravan & Wagon sent by the Corporation of Yale College to remove my Family,” the new president noted. That week Rev. Stiles “freed or liberated my Negro Man Newport.”
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Such moments of moral reckoning were rare. When he organized the College of Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was a slave owner. He had purchased his first “negro boy” while he was in his twenties, and he later used several slaves in his shop and his home. He brought two enslaved people, including his personal servant, Peter, on his travels to England. “We conclude to sell them both the first good opportunity, for we do not like negro servants,” Franklin once protested to his mother. In fact, he did not manumit any of his servants. Although he later led the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Franklin's career as a master ended as his slaves died or fled. The Quaker communion expelled Stephen Hopkins, the founding chancellor of the College of Rhode Island, for continuing to hold slaves after the Friends had condemned the institution. Hopkins's slaves included St. Jago, who was named for the Caribbean port. The Reverend James Manning, a graduate of New Jersey, brought his slave with him when he assumed the presidency of the new college in Rhode Island. Hopkins and Manning eventually came to oppose slavery.
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A succession of eight slave owners presided over the College of New Jersey during its first seventy-five years. In 1733 Jonathan Dickinson, the charter president, purchased a black girl from a neighbor in Elizabethtown. The Newark minister Aaron Burr, who replaced Dickinson, bought a black man from the New York merchant John
Livingston. Jonathan Edwards, who took control in 1758, grew up in a slaveholding house in East Windsor, Connecticut, and he later used enslaved labor in his mission to the Stockbridge Indians. In June 1731 he had traveled to Newport, Rhode Island, to buy Venus, a fourteen-year-old black girl, for £80. During his years in Delaware and Virginia, the Reverend Samuel Davies taught enslaved people to read, welcomed them into his church and home, and baptized hundreds of black people. “A number of them,” Davies wrote while reflecting upon his own slaves and the larger black community, “are the genuine Children of Abraham.” When the Reverend Samuel Finley died, his estate, including six black people, was auctioned from the president's house in Princeton. John Witherspoon began buying slaves within a few years of his arrival from Scotland. By 1784 two enslaved black people were listed among the taxable property of President Witherspoon. Samuel Stanhope Smith, Witherspoon's son-in-law and successor, made observations about a house slave to inform his famous thesis on human complexion. Ashbel Green acquired an enslaved girl from his marriage to Elizabeth Stockton. The Greens later brought the child from Philadelphia to Princeton, where she worked in the president's house.
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Despite the dire financial situation of his school, President Jacob Hardenbergh of Queen's College in New Brunswick acquired a slave in 1793, just two years before the trustees were forced to close the college for more than a decade. In 1795 the board suspended classes, released the faculty, sent the students home, and vacated the campus; still, Father Hardenbergh managed to acquire a second slave that year. More than a decade passed before the governors could reopen the college.
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Although the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock had taken in his first Indian students in the 1740s to supplement his income, he did not formalize the Indian school until 1754, about the same time that he began buying and selling human beings. Early in 1757 the minister paid William Clark of Plymouth £50 for a “Negro man named Ishmael, being a servant for life.” In the spring of 1760 he bought Sippy (perhaps Scipio) from Timothy Kimball in Coventry. A few days later, the reverend paid Peter Spencer of East Haddam £65 for his “Negro man servant named Brister aged about twenty one years.”
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Jonathan Dickinson by
Edward Ludlow Mooney

Aaron Burr Sr. by
Edward Ludlow Mooney

Jonathan Edwards by
Henry Augustus Loop

Samuel Davies by
James Massalon

The first eight presidents of the College of New Jersey
SOURCE: Princeton University