In 2003, President Ruth Simmons of Brown University commissioned a report on the institution’s historical ties to the slave trade and slavery. The committee published its findings in the report “Slavery and Justice” three years later. News coverage spread the most-sensational findings: Prominent slave traders had shaped the early history of the college in the colonial period, enslaved people had helped build the campus, and some of the first officers and trustees of the college were slave owners.
Perhaps the only flaw of “Slavery and Justice” is that it left Brown seeming peculiar.
After the American Revolution, Northerners crafted an image of slavery as a Southern institution as they slowly and often reluctantly disengaged from slaveholding, and as the U.S. prohibition on importing any more slaves, which took effect in 1808, began to reshape merchant economies in New England and the mid-Atlantic. “But slavery existed in all 13 colonies and, for a time, in all 13 original states,” the Brown committee found. Indeed, settlers had enslaved American Indians and Africans, intertwining slavery in the social and institutional fabric of the colonies.
The fact that the Brown committee was also empowered to help the university community reckon with that past created a deep public interest—and a backlash. The “justice” part of the charge brought accusations of irresponsibly stirring up history, seeking to influence contemporary political issues, and tarnishing the institution and the region.
For years, many scholars seemed to share concerns about too vigorously investigating the histories of the nation’s most cherished institutions. That has changed. The past two decades have seen a new scholarly determination to explore their ties to slavery. Those projects have not sought to expose the hypocrisy of colleges, but to better understand the rise of the United States.
In more than a decade of research, I have encountered voluminous evidence of links between early colleges in America and slavery, and of the legacies of slavery in American intellectual culture.
The American campus stood as a silent monument to slavery.
Churches of varied denominations founded colleges in British North America to evangelize American Indians and supply colonial administrations. The governors and officers of those institutions tapped into the colonies’ commercial networks for support. Local merchants, landlords, and planters who made their fortunes in the West Indies and the South provided much of the initial funds, but the success and stability of colleges required finding a steady supply of students and multiple sources of support. So officials sent emissaries to the Caribbean in search of benevolent planters—and their college-age sons. They also dispatched representatives for longer fund-raising trips to Britain, where they begged for patronage from friendly royals and rich absentee planters.
The founding generation of Harvard University, America’s earliest college (1636), followed the commercial links between New England and the plantations of the West Indies and the South to solicit donors and students. The Rev. Patrick Copeland, who had tried and failed to found a college for American Indians, settled in Bermuda and began trading with mainland North America. At the bequest of Gov. John Winthrop, of Massachusetts, he also began recruiting British students from West Indian plantations for Harvard.
The governors of the College of William & Mary (1693) and Yale College (1701) behaved in much the same way. Long a slave owner, the Rev. Thomas Clap became rector of Yale in 1740, and five years later its first president. Although Clap and his wife decided to free their own slaves, his administration secured Yale’s future by establishing close ties to New England’s slave traders and owners.
In fact, long before Brown was chartered, Providence was fending off rivals in New York City and Philadelphia for dominance over the American arm of the African slave trade. The success of the merchants underwrote the institutional expansion of the colonies. Slave traders became deacons, founders of hospitals, patrons of libraries—and college trustees.
From 1746 to 1769, the number of colleges in Britain’s mainland colonies tripled, to nine. Not coincidentally, the African slave trade was reaching its peak. The great merchant families, like the Livingstons, Browns, and Crugers, filled the boards of new mid-Atlantic and New England colleges—Princeton (the College of New Jersey, 1746), the University of Pennsylvania (circa 1751), Columbia (King’s College, 1754), Brown (the College of Rhode Island, 1764), Rutgers (Queen’s College, 1766), and Dartmouth (1769).
Those colleges produced generations of young men who made their fortunes as planters, merchants, and slave traders. In 1680, for instance, Andrew Belcher brought more than 100 Africans to Rhode Island for sale. His business success allowed his son Jonathan to be educated at Boston’s Latin School and at Harvard. Jonathan became a governor of Massachusetts. Later, as governor of New Jersey, he granted a second charter for the College of New Jersey and generously patronized the new college.
The colonial American college was an intimate world of slaves, students, and faculty. Slaves accompanied the original trustees of Yale to its founding meeting. Students often used enslaved people to provide amusements like boxing, singing, dancing, and fiddling—diversions common at colonial colleges. Enslaved people helped build the campuses of William & Mary and Brown. In 1793, William Richardson Davie presided over the laying of the cornerstone for the University of North Carolina. After the ceremonies, black laborers began construction. Slaves also helped build Thomas Jefferson’s intellectual monument, the University of Virginia.
Slaves and indentured servants cleaned the rooms and prepared the meals at Harvard and Columbia. Donors offered the labor of their slaves to the colleges and occasionally transferred ownership to the institutions. Indeed, enslaved people were very likely the largest group of residents in the rough set of buildings that housed Dartmouth College in its infancy. In a sense, the American campus stood as a silent monument to slavery.
The story gets worse. The exploitation of African peoples and their bodies did not end at death.
The founding of the first medical schools in the colonies—at the College of Philadelphia, in 1765, and King’s College, in 1767—generated new ways to make use of oppressed people. Modern science needed human subjects. Academics dragged the corpses of slaves to the cutting table for instructional dissections, wired their bones into skeletons for anatomical lectures, prepared their organs for display, even exhibited their skins or used them for decoration. An early college museum could be best judged by its collection of bits and pieces of subjugated peoples.
Colleges were not innocent occupants of a world with slavery; rather, they helped bring that world into existence. If the success of the officers and trustees in exploiting the slave economy assured the survival of these institutions, then the ability of the faculty to generate new ideas about human populations and religious and scientific defenses of slavery and conquest increased the prestige of the academy in public affairs. By the early 19th century, scholars had positioned themselves as experts in debates about the demographic future of the nation.
College faculty argued the racial merits of the campaign to relocate American Indian nations in the South across the Mississippi River. President Jeremiah Day of Yale, and most of the college presidents in the Northeastern states, were drawn into the movement to move free African-Americans to the coast of Africa. Scholars like Louis Agassiz threw off the final vestiges of church authority by asserting expertise over race and assuming a new social status as the intellectual defenders of the white nation.
What is most surprising about this history is that it was never hidden. University archives, libraries, and museums are filled with evidence of the relationship between the American academy and slavery. The people who wrote the histories of our oldest colleges—often campus librarians, archivists, faculty, and alumni—had available documentation of the presence of enslaved people, slave owners, and slave traders in their institutions’ pasts.
Most often they simply erased slavery from the narrative or reduced its importance by treating it as part of an abstract regional economy. Evidence could be used strategically. Portraits of the graduates of elite colleges—like Harvard Graduates (first volume, 1873, by the Harvard librarian John Langdon Sibley) and Princetonians (first published in 1976, by the university historian James McLachlan)—often treated slaveholdings as a loose measure of alumni wealth, without acknowledging the role the colleges themselves had played in slavery.
Moreover, early histories typically presented the enslaved as caricatures whose grotesque behaviors and outsized flaws vacated any moral concern about their status. Samuel Eliot Morison, famed historian of Harvard, did not see any substantive role for slavery in the rise of the college, although he noted the presence of slaves and the portrayals of the “Moor"—an enslaved man who served the first instructor and the students—as lazy and recalcitrant. In many histories, President Benjamin Wadsworth’s slave, Titus, became a drunk, a source of disorder, and, perhaps even a danger to the college boys. Emphasizing the burdens of mastery shifted sympathies from the enslaved to their enslavers.
It is only in recent decades that scholars have begun to explore colleges as sites for understanding enslaved people as three-dimensional beings with identities, aspirations, and familial and social worlds of their own. In 2011, Sven Beckert and Katherine Stevens produced the report “Harvard and Slavery,” based on research from a seminar at the university. That same year, scholars at Emory University planned a historic conference on “Slavery and the University,” in part leading the Board of Trustees to declare the “undeniable wrong” of the college’s early engagement with slavery and its “decades of delay in acknowledging slavery’s harmful legacy.” Other universities are moving in the same direction, or at least are discussing the subject. There are a number of studies under way today that will enhance our understanding of the lives of enslaved people on campus.
And as they do, the story will get worse.
