Ebony and Ivy (22 page)

Jefferson's University of Virginia. Detail from an 1827 map by
Henry Schenck Tanner after a drawing by Benjamin Tanner
SOURCE: University of Virginia Library

The American campus stood as a silent monument to slavery. In September 1793 William Richardson Davie presided at the laying of the cornerstone for the new campus of the University of North Carolina. The ceremony employed the rituals and symbols of Freemasonry. Davie described the “great doings of the Masonic brethren, with your correspondent wielding a silver trowel and setting a stone in mortar.” Once the ceremonies were concluded, black laborers filled the area to begin constructing the university. When the founders of South Carolina College (University of South Carolina), began planning the architectural style of their campus, they looked not to their southern peers but to the colleges in New Jersey, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire for inspiration and advice.
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Enslaved black people built Thomas Jefferson's intellectual monument: the University of Virginia. Construction materials came in large loads along the James River and were hauled up to
Charlottesville. Black workers, including youth, were used to bring supplies to the campus and raise the buildings. As construction began, expenditures for the dozens of enslaved people “hired” by the university totaled more than $1,000 per year. The individual cost was determined by age and perceived physical ability, and the college calculated the expense of feeding and maintaining each slave through the contracted period. At the end of their terms of service, enslaved workers were outfitted with fresh outer- and undergarments and shoes before being returned to their masters.
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Governors and faculties used slave labor to raise and maintain their schools, and they made their campuses the intellectual and cultural playgrounds of the plantation and merchant elite. They sought the loyalty of wealthy colonists such as the Newport merchants Christopher and George Champlin, who sent ships to Africa, Asia, and the West Indies. “After being detained two days at Providence and having an agreeable Journey to Boston, I arrived at Cambridge the Saturday after the Vacation was up,” Christopher Grant Champlin informed his father. “I have been in [Harvard] College about a week.” After painting and papering his room, young Christopher was satisfied with his accommodations.
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Officers catered to these children. One doting father sent President Samuel Johnson of King's College “schemes” for turning his son into a responsible man. “This child of mine is I find already … adept in the little arts of shifting,” he cautioned. The board of the College of Philadelphia promised to “look on the Students as, in some measure, their own Children, treat them with Familiarity and Affection.” That attention continued after graduation. The governors vowed to “establish them in Business Offices, Marriages, or any other Thing for their Advantage.” There were rewards for such devotion. Godfrey Malbone, a Virginian who settled in Newport, Rhode Island, after his graduation from Harvard, entered the slave trade, created one of the region's largest fortunes, and became a benefactor of colonial schools.
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The combination of wealthy patrons, privileged students, and ambitious regional promoters brought colleges into the service of the colonial elite and brought large numbers of enslaved people into college towns. By the mid-eighteenth century there were nearly nine hundred enslaved black men and women in Boston and fifty-five in Cambridge. Professor Winthrop of Harvard estimated that 15 percent of Boston's residents were black, while official figures put the black population at 10 percent. Several dozen black people lived in New Haven during that time, and the African American population climbed to nearly three hundred by the eve of the Revolution. Most white families in Princeton and New Brunswick owned at least one black person. By the 1780s enslaved people were more than a fifth of the population of New Brunswick, while one of every six residents of Princeton was enslaved.
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First Church in Cambridge—an extension of Harvard—reflected the racial order of elite colonial society. In 1757 the college paid a seventh of the cost to replace the old church. The trustees decided the location and orientation of the new meetinghouse. They selected a pew for the president, reserved the entire front section for the students, and dictated the size and configuration of the scholars' seats. In a later exchange, the Harvard Corporation agreed to a modest reduction in the size of the students' gallery, “provided, that the part we thus cede to the Parish shall not be occupied by the negroes.” First Church baptized, buried, or administered other rites to scores of black people owned by prominent Harvard families, including Philip (Danforth), Zillah (Brattle), Cuffy (Phipps), Jack (Tufts), and Cuba (Vassall). “Titus, Presid[en]t Wadsworth's Man Servant … was also admitted to full Communion,” reads an entry on October 13, 1729. In 1741 Edward Wigglesworth, the first Hollis Professor of Divinity, watched his slave Hannibal receive communion, and twelve years later Gerald, Hannibal's son, was baptized. Edward Wiggles-worth and his son of the same name held the Hollis Professorship as a family entitlement for most of the eighteenth century. Even after slavery was outlawed in Massachusetts, college officials continued to rely upon black labor. In October 1789, a decade after the state courts had erased the legal foundations for servitude, Harvard president Joseph Willard had his “negro man Servant” Cesar baptized.
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Students often used enslaved people for amusements ranging from boxing to singing, dancing, and fiddling—diversions that were common at colonial colleges. Samuel Curwen, a student during Wadsworth's administration, carried a small notebook in which he had transcribed the college laws in Latin, but such reminders did little to calm the campus. In the spring of 1737, the Harvard faculty barred Titus, “a Molatto slave of the late Rev[eren]d Pres[iden]t Wadsworth,” from entering the students' rooms or even coming to campus after he was found drinking with the undergraduates. Three years later, the professors had to repeat their prohibition on students associating with the Wadsworths' slave. In September 1751 they punished several undergraduates for “making drunk a Negro-man-servant belonging [to] Mr. Sprague, & that to Such Degree as greatly indanger'd his Life.” Included among the culprits were four members of Harvard's class of 1754: Samuel Foxcroft, the future minister of the First Congregational Church in New Gloucester, Maine, and the son of the pastor of Boston's First Church; Samuel Quincy, later a loyalist solicitor who prosecuted British soldiers after the Boston Massacre; John Hancock, the shipping heir, future governor, and signer of the Declaration of Independence; and Samuel Marshall, who went on to study medicine in London and then established a practice in Boston.
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Harvard's supposedly pious young students proved especially unruly. The faculty had to suppress everything from “foolish talking” to fornicating. Garishly dressed boys bedeviled the seventeenth-century governors, who responded with strict prohibitions on “strange ruffinalike or New-fangled fashions,” including gold and silver adornments and long, curled, parted, or powdered hair. President John Leverett dealt with John Nutting, who forged money to pay his tuition, and Benjamin Shattuck, who engaged in sexual misconduct. On election day in 1711 a student named Hussey walked through town in women's clothing, accompanying “scandalous p[eo]ple.” President Wadsworth would have his own stories to tell. In the middle of the night, Nathaniel Hubbard Jr. and John Winthrop Jr. stole ropes that they used to hang the dog of a local resident. In June 1726 Eliza Bacheldor's father was searching the yard for Jonathan Hayward, who had had sex with his daughter. In 1733
the Jamaican planter Leonard Vassall sued a tutor who slapped William Vassall in the face for failing to remove his hat. Students disturbed the peace with fireworks and bonfires, and their undergraduate years could be measured in busted fences and broken windows. “The Glass [was] broken in the Chamber next over the Kitchen & the Hebrew School,” the governors complained during their March 1753 meeting. Several months later they were investigating the students' “abusive & insolent” behavior toward the Hebrew instructor. The faculty imposed fines and punishments for this “great Disorder.” The overseers warned Edward Brooks's freshman class of heavy penalties for using the valedictory address or their status as head of class to make threats.
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Yale's officers also policed vandalism, violence, and other disorders. Citizens began complaining about intoxicated undergraduates as soon as the college moved to New Haven. Things got worse with time. Jesse Denison, of the class of 1756, was keeping a pistol in his room. In February 1753 he carried the loaded gun into town and used it to threaten a local resident during a disagreement. Denison then fired his pistol in public, “tho, as he says, not with any Design to do them any Mischief.” Several years later the freshmen celebrated commencement by patrolling the yard with clubs, making menacing gestures and frightening sounds. One student even “brandished a naked sword.” The trustees had to lock the college to keep the boys from dancing and carousing at night. They punished “extravagant” dress and barred local taverns from selling students “any rum, brandy or distilled spirits, or any liquor mixed of either of them on any occasion whatsoever.” Nonetheless, by 1765 the officers were asking the New Haven authorities to police the commencement.
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Perhaps taking a lesson from the older schools, the trustees of New Jersey and King's prepared lengthy lists of infractions and punishments for their first classes. The New Jersey officers threatened to expel any student found guilty of “Drunkenness, Fornication, Lying, Theft or any other Scandalous Crime.” They prohibited the scholars from bringing wine or liquor into their rooms, playing dice or cards, frequenting taverns, or associating with disreputable people. King's governors also forbade cockfighting, dice, and other gaming, and warned the students to pass by houses of vice and
prostitution and avoid “any persons of known scandalous behaviour.” The governors set fines for slandering and maiming other people. Several years later they banned all women from residing at the college—except for the cook—and then had the campus fenced and hired a porter to watch the gate. Despite these precautions the Manhattan campus remained volatile. John Jauncey, a senior, challenged President Myles Cooper “to fight with pistols, before ye whole Class, whilst they were engaged in their Recitation.” He was expelled.
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College boys felt particularly entitled to terrorize slaves and servants. In April 1772, while President Cooper and the faculty examined the senior class in the chapel, Beverly Robinson, an upperclassman, attacked one of the servants. “Robinson spit in the Cook's Face, kicked, & otherwise abused him,” reads the record. Despite his violent temper and consistently poor academic performance, Robinson received a mild punishment: confinement to campus for two weeks and additional academic assignments from Cooper. The son of a trustee and the heir to an elite slave trading line, Robinson graduated in 1773. He later became a trustee.
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At Williams College, the students paid a black man, whom they nicknamed “Abe Bunter,” to see him smash his head with wooden boards and barrels. “Probably no more formidable battering-ram of this species could be found anywhere,” joked a historian of the college. The author was decidedly unconcerned with the real name of “Abe Bunter”—a moniker that mocked this unfortunate career—or the grotesqueness of the transactions. Instead, he insisted that “Bunter” had a “phenomenally thick skull” and described him as a “barbaric figure” who “haunted the campus” with “his one tremendous ‘talent.' “
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The students at the University of North Carolina enjoyed “pranking” slaves in Chapel Hill. George M. Horton, an enslaved man who sold fruit in town, learned to read and write by manipulating these exchanges, and he became known in town for his poetry. Such encounters could easily turn violent. In September 1811 dozens of students began rioting, destroying property, ransacking the rooms and halls, and attacking the college servants. The undergraduates accused the faculty of imposing harsh and unfair
punishments and disregarding student opinions. The teachers and officers remained in the buildings into the evening to restore order. Culprits were brought in for questioning, but explosions of gunpowder interrupted the meetings. When the faculty went to locate the new disturbances, they reported, “a little Negro was found in a corner of the room of one of these young men” hiding because one of the students had just fired a gun at him. Just a few years later, three students got drunk and broke into a local house, where they threatened the residents and assaulted a slave.
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Little places named for forgotten black people dot the northern states. Many of these secluded communities have ties to American colleges. Jonathan Jackson, class of 1761—a third-generation Harvard student, preceded by his father and his maternal grandfather—used his education and an inheritance to establish himself as a merchant, selling rum and other goods to Africa traders and dealing to the West Indies. The Harvard network brought repeated public appointments that rescued him from serial business failures and allowed him to maintain his household: “one discrete Woman and a Negro Fellow.” On the eve of the Revolution, Jackson emancipated Pomp Jackson, who then fought with the colonists. Pomp Jackson removed to Pomps Pond, near Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, at about the same time that future Harvard presidents John Thornton Kirkland, the son of the Indian missionary Samuel Kirkland, and Josiah Quincy, the nephew of the headmaster, were there preparing for college. The pond was named not for the black veteran but rather for Pomp Lovejoy, a black man who retreated to this remote spot after gaining his freedom from Captain William Lovejoy.
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