Ebony and Ivy (20 page)

Samuel Finley by
Charles Walker Lind

John Witherspoon after
Charles Willson Peale

Samuel Stanhope Smith by
Charles B. Lawrence

Ashbel Green by
an unknown artist

Slavery subsidized Wheelock's mission. In 1762 he gave Ann Morrison £75 for “a negro man named Exeter of the age of forty ought years[,] a negro woman named Chloe of the age of thirty five years[,] and a negro male child named Hercules of the age of about three years[,] all slaves for life.” Worried that Chloe might be afflicted with rheumatism, the minister secured a guarantee from Morrison, who promised in writing to give him a £5 rebate in case “that difficulty should return upon her by means whereof she be disabled from business.” Wheelock also made deals to protect the spiritual and physical health of enslaved people. “Nando [perhaps Fernando] will not hear anything of coming to Dartmouth,” Gideon Buckingham responded in February 1772. A year earlier, Wheelock had requested that the Buckinghams transfer ownership of Nando and his wife, Hagar, to erase a £100 debt and to end what Wheelock saw as Nando's abusive behavior toward Hagar. “I believe the situation here would be very agreeable to Nando as it is to my negroes who have agreeable company enough and live well,” Wheelock surmised. “I have a great variety of business I can employ Nando in.” Apparently Nando had already been promised his freedom. Wheelock offered to liberate him and provide a twenty-acre farm if he accepted Christ and changed his behavior.
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Of course, the minister's primary concern was accessing labor. In the spring of 1773 Rev. Wheelock found himself in competition for Caesar, an enslaved man whom he was renting. Wheelock wrote to Caesar's owner, Captain Moses Little, confused over two different messages that arrived about the fate of the enslaved man. One instructed him to return Caesar by canoe, while a neighbor claimed to have permission to employ Caesar at his house. Dartmouth's president had his own designs. “I have concluded to buy the Negro if he proves to be the slave which you take him to be,” Wheelock began, provided the price remained £20. The minister promised payment as soon as a title was secured. As the American Revolution approached, Rev. Wheelock found himself short of cash but in need of supplies and labor. “I understand the money must be paid down for the cheese, I have expectation of getting
the hard money & I am not quite certain of paper,” he begged Asa Foot. “As to the Negro, I don't know when I shall be able to pay for him.” Nonetheless, Wheelock alerted Foot that he would likely want another man and a woman the following summer.
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Dartmouth College in an 1834 engraving
SOURCE: Library of Congress

Such transactions fill the historical records of American colleges. In 1770 Domine Johannes Ritzema accepted “a young Negro, valued at £45,” from John Van Zandt to satisfy rents owed to the Dutch Reformed Church of New York City. That exchange cleared Van Zandt's obligations, and the church agreed to a new fifteen-year lease on the property. Father Ritzema was both a founder of Queen's College and, as the senior Dutch Reformed minister in Manhattan, a charter trustee of King's College. Ritzema had also been a delegate and signatory to a 1765 New Jersey convention that endorsed Eleazar Wheelock's British fund-raising campaign. As William R. Davie was organizing the groundbreaking for the University of North Carolina, he stopped his work to sell a “negroe girl slave [named] Dinah,” whose age he estimated to be thirteen, to Elijah Crockett to compensate him for his “negroe man called Joe,” who had died while under Davie's supervision.
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College governors were quite comfortable negotiating the slave economy. Wheelock's last will and testament reveals no great anxiety about mastery. Brister was to remain enslaved, although he had served the Indian mission for two decades and had been a trusted personal attendant to the president. Wheelock's will freed only a single person. “To my servant Boy Archelaus[,] I give his freedom from slavery when he shall arrive at the age of twenty five years,” the president promised, while giving the boy a fifty-acre plot in Landaff, New Hampshire, Emancipation was conditioned upon Archelaus proving to the satisfaction of the county presbytery that he could support himself and be “trusted with his freedom.”
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Wheelock's son and successor, John, increased the family's slaveholdings.

Shortly after his graduation from Harvard, Benjamin Wadsworth served as chaplain for a Massachusetts delegation to negotiations in Albany, New York, between the English and the Iroquois. The Bay Colony committee, led by Samuel Sewall and Penn Townsend, was made up of Harvard graduates. New York governor Benjamin Fletcher and the wealthy landholders Stephen Van Cortlandt and Peter Schuyler hosted the August 1694 meeting. John Allen and Caleb Stanley came from Connecticut. Governor Andrew Hamilton of New Jersey arrived with his aid John Pinchon. Twenty-five Iroquois sachems from the Five Nations attended the negotiations. On the third night of their journey from Boston, the Massachusetts delegates saw “a negro coming from Albany,” which led them to become “very suspicious.” Concluding he was a runaway slave, they seized him. Wadsworth and his companions tied the man up and then camped for the evening, intending to bring their prisoner to the Albany authorities. The captive managed to get free while they slept, take a gun and possibly a sword, and escape. “We thought of him,” Wadsworth noted in disappointment.
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When Rev. Wadsworth acquired his first slave is not certain, but the future president of Harvard seemed quite displeased with the results of his early foray into slave catching.

Masters regulated their slaves with violence. In 1698 the Reverend Samuel Gray, a founding trustee of the College of William and Mary, murdered an enslaved child for running away. Rev. Gray struck the boy on the head, drawing blood, and then put a hot iron to the child's flesh. The minister had the boy tied to a tree, and then ordered another slave to whip him. The boy later died. Gray argued that “such accidents” were inevitable, a position that seems to have succeeded, as a court declined to convict him. The congregation at Christ Church in Middlesex County gave him a considerable quantity of tobacco to resign. The following year, Gray settled at a parish in Westmoreland. He later became the pastor of St. Peter's Church in New Kent.
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When Benjamin Wadsworth ministered the First Church in Boston, he gave his parishioners a series of sermons on household order, including a lecture on slavery. Wadsworth warned his congregation not to “pinch” their servants by denying them the food, drink, clothing, medical attention, and periods of rest necessary to their health. They should give their slaves time for prayer and private contemplation, give them to God and pray for them, and let them read the Bible and other books that would enhance their faith. Householders should protect their slaves, he continued, and keep them busy enough to avoid sin, but not so exhausted as to impair their well-being. Leaning on biblical references, the future Harvard president also instructed his congregants to beat their slaves. Corporal punishments were needed to chastise and deter wrong, for “a servant will not be corrected by words.” Preferring the biblical term “correction,” the pastor warned his audience to avoid “rage and passion” and “cruel and unmerciful” acts, instead always choosing the mildest penalty that would effectively cure the fault, remembering that a good master needed neither tyranny nor terror. Rev. Wadsworth instructed the slaves sitting in his church to willfully submit to every godly action and demand made by their masters, including physical punishments. A servant's life should be consumed in work and prayer, interrupted by brief moments of rest for sustenance.
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Perhaps Wadsworth's call for Christian mastery and thoughtful violence responded to the long history of brutality in the colony.
Neither church nor academy moderated the horrors of slavery. A “negro woman was burned to death,” the Reverend Increase Mather had written in his diary in September 1681, adding that this was the first “such death in New England.”
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It was not the last. On Thursday afternoon, September 18, 1755, Phillis and Mark (Codman) were dragged on a sled through Cambridge to the commons just outside the gates of Harvard College. Drs. William Kneeland and William Foster, both Harvard graduates, testified against them during their trial for the murder of Captain John Codman of Charlestown. Before they decided to kill their owner, the two slaves had set fire to his workhouse. Enslaved people in Boston apparently knew of a successful poisoning, which they used as a model. It was a conspiracy of several slaves. Robin (Vassall), owned by Dr. William Clark of Boston, stole arsenic from his master's apothecary for the Codman slaves. Some accused black people were sold out of the colony, but the court sentenced Phillis and Mark to death. “A terrible spectacle in Cambridge,” Professor John Winthrop exclaimed after watching the executions with students and other faculty. “Mark, a fellow about 30, was hanged; & Phillis, an old creature,
was burnt to death
.” Winthrop was Hollis Professor of Mathematics and twice declined the presidency of the college. The authorities suspended Mark's corpse in chains at the Charlestown commons, where it remained for decades, long enough to serve as a landmark for Paul Revere during his midnight ride. This was not the first execution that the sophomore Edward Brooks—the father of Peter Chardon Brooks—had witnessed. During his freshman year, he saw William Welsh hanged for killing Darby O'Brien in a fight on the Boston wharfs. Westborough minister and Harvard graduate Ebenezer Parkman scornfully recorded the events in his diary: “Another barbarous Murder is Committed, and by another Irishman.”
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While Africans and African Americans were the vast majority of the bound laborers at colleges in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the South, they were not the only unfree people. In 1764 Patrick Field, a twenty-three-year-old Irish indentured servant, escaped from Manhattan in uniform: light brown livery with green fronting and a dark wig with a single curl. Before he departed,
he compensated himself, breaking into a desk and taking $50 in silver and gold coins, rings, shirts, cravats, stockings, two silver buckles, and his letter of indenture, which he allegedly forged to pass as a free man. The clothing had the initials “M.C.,” and Myles Cooper, the president of King's College, promised a £10 reward to anyone who captured and returned his servant. He described Field's height, alerted readers to his “ruddy” complexion, and warned that he was often intoxicated and had a remarkable gaze when drunk.
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