Ebony and Ivy (23 page)

Once enslaved on the Princeton campus, Betsey Stockton finished her life a free woman, a teacher, and a missionary to Hawaii. Her death in 1865 brought numerous tributes. Leading citizens of Cooperstown, New York, raised a fund for a bronze tablet recognizing her mission but could not find a site that would accept it.
“She is one of the most remarkable women I ever conversed with,” remembered President James Marshall of Cedar Rapids College (Coe College). Late in 1822 Stockton had left New Haven on the
Thames
to teach and evangelize in Hawaii, where her facility with languages proved invaluable to the Lahaina and Maui missions. After her return in 1825 she taught at colored schools in Cooperstown and Princeton. An intellectual elite attended her Princeton funeral. President John Maclean officiated, assisted by the mathematician John Thomas Duffield and the theologian Charles Hodge. Stockton was buried in Cooperstown, in the family plot of the Reverend Charles Samuel Stewart, with whom she had worked in Hawaii.
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Pomps Pond, Andover, Massachusetts
SOURCE: Andover Historical Society

Phebe Ann Jacobs was born in Beverwijck, New Jersey, in the British and Dutch farming belt that stretched from Elizabeth to Trenton. Maria Malleville Wheelock—the daughter of Dartmouth president John Wheelock and Maria Suhm, who hailed from a slaveholding family with ties to New Jersey and St. Croix—had received Phebe as a gift from her mother. Malleville, as she was known, married Dartmouth professor William Allen. In 1820 they all went to Brunswick, Maine, after Allen accepted the presidency of Bowdoin. As slavery ended in Maine, black families
began relocating to several of the ungoverned coastal islands—commonly called the “Negro Islands”—including Malaga, not far from the college. There was also a “Negro Island,” originally named Gilman, just south of Dartmouth, near the falls in the Connecticut River from which the campus drew power. Enslaved people had been building Brunswick long before there was a college. Andrew Dunning, a signer of the petition for incorporation, brought slaves to settle the area. More than a dozen black people were living there a half century later, and the greater region had an active slaving history. When Maria Malleville Wheelock died, Phebe Jacobs moved off campus, supporting herself by washing and ironing for the students. Jacobs died alone in her “little habitation.”
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Betsey Stockton, from a photograph c. 1863
SOURCE: New York State Historical Association Library.

Campus folklore and place names record the story of slavery in college towns. These local legends and landscapes are a diary of the long, intimate association between the academy and slavery. Dartmouth president John Wheelock had inherited “Brister, Archelaus, Lavinia or Anna and the infant child,” his father's oxen, tools, “horses and as many swine as he shall have occasion for.” Under the second Wheelock administration, the number of enslaved people in Hanover doubled. Unfree people continued to toil at the college and in the Wheelock household until legislative decisions
and a changing international market eroded mastery in New Hampshire. Many of these free African Americans worked for the college and the students. Professor John King Lord recalled Jenny Wentworth as a “good nigger,” his term for a pious, hardworking black person. The black community clustered just south of the campus and apart from white residents, who now cast them as a nuisance and a problem. Evidence of the tension was written into the very geography of the place, which included the college, the town, and a modest elevation that was popularly derided as “Nigger Hill.”
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The number of purely white people in the world is

proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny;

Asia chiefly is tawny; America (exclusive of the new

comers) wholly so. … And while we are, as I may call

it, scouring our planet, by clearing America of woods,

and so making this side of our globe reflect a brighter

light to the eyes of inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why

should we, in the sight of superior beings, darken its

people? Why increase the sons of Africa, by planting

them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity,

by excluding all blacks and tawnys, of increasing

the lovely white and red?

—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, “OBSERVATIONS
CONCERNING THE INCREASE OF MANKIND
AND THE PEOPLING OF COUNTRIES” (1751)

Look round you! behold a country, vast in extent,

merciful in its climate, exuberant in its soil, the seat

of Plenty, the garden of the Lord! behold it given to

us and to our posterity, to propagate Virtue, to cultivate

the useful Arts, and to spread abroad the pure evangelical

Religion of Jesus! behold Colonies founded in

it! Protestant Colonies! free Colonies! British Colonies!

behold them exulting in their Liberty; flourishing in

Commerce; the Arts and Sciences planted in them.

—PROVOST WILLIAM SMITH,
THE CHRISTIAN
SOLDIER'S DUTY
(1757)

I am very sorry to hear by the publick Papers that the

Indian War is not at an End. I can not conceive what

it is these People are aiming at, but I am afraid, we

ourselves are not intirely blameless.

—SAMUEL BARD, EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY,
TO DR. JOHN BARD, NEW YORK, 1764

Colleges and the Racial Destiny of North America

On December 14, 1763, Edward Shippen rushed a letter to Pennsylvania lieutenant governor John Penn alerting him that “a Company of People from the Frontiers had killed and scalped most of the Indians at the Conestogoe Town early this morning.” Getting their name from the Paxtung Presbyterian Church in the backcountry, fifty well-armed “Paxton Boys”—a gang of Scots-Irish immigrants—rode into Conestoga and murdered several Susquehannocks: an elderly woman, three elderly men, a young woman, and a small boy. They butchered the corpses and torched the cabins. Before the attack, several residents had left for a local foundry to sell homemade baskets, bowls, and brooms, and thereby escaped the slaughter. Governor Penn delivered a message to the legislature condemning the cold-blooded murders and requesting funds to secure the remaining Indians, and Shippen, who was the Penns' agent in the backcountry, announced warrants for the perpetrators.
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“I am to acquaint your Honour that between two and three of the clock this afternoon, upwards of a hundred armed men … rode very fast into town … stove open the door and killed all the
Indians,” Shippen wrote apologetically on December 27, less than two weeks after the first massacre. That afternoon men armed with rifles, tomahawks, and other weapons stormed into town, invaded the workhouse where the Indians had been moved for safety, and murdered the three surviving families: three men, three women, three girls, and five boys. For decades before the massacres, European immigrants had pressed into Indian country, raising the values of lands held by the eastern elite and generating new social tensions and political disputes. In December 1763, however, the Paxtons shattered the founding covenant of Pennsylvania—peaceful coexistence with Native peoples—by destroying the Susquehannock in a surge of racial violence. On January 2, 1764, Governor Penn authorized a £200 reward for the leaders, having already ordered his justices and sheriffs to hunt them. A month later the Paxton Boys, rumored to be two hundred strong, headed toward Philadelphia to wipe out the Lenape people and display their power at the door of the proprietary regime. They made it to about Germantown before a gathering military response forced them to turn back.
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Edward Shippen was at least a passive conspirator in the destruction of the Susquehannock. He had, by his own account, at least two days' notice of the raiders' plans to attack Lancaster, where the Indians were being secured. He took no additional defensive actions. The Paxton Boys rode into town in the middle of the day, went directly to the workhouse, and, in a matter of minutes, entered the building and executed the remaining Susquehannock families. The sheriff and coroner tried to reason with the raiders but offered no physical resistance. Shippen did not even reach the scene until after the Paxtons were back on their horses and parading out of town.
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The fate of the American college had been intertwined from its beginning with the social project of dispossessing Indian people. For nearly fifty years Shippen sat on the board of the College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania); in fact, several officers and trustees had personal or professional interests in the back-country. The Penn family held sizable backcountry estates, and John Penn joined the board just months after the massacres.
Provost William Smith and trustee Richard Peters both owned property in Paxton. The most experienced land agent in the colony and the provincial secretary, Peters helped perpetrate the infamous Walking Purchase of 1737, in which William Penn's sons, John and Thomas, took more than a thousand square miles of Lenape land. James Logan, also a trustee, completed the swindle by forcing the arrangement on the Lenape and securing the support of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, who also helped remove the Lenape from eastern Pennsylvania. William Allen, chief justice of the colony and a charter trustee of the Philadelphia college, got ten thousand acres of disputed lands in a single grant and eventually established Allentown in the Walking Purchase territory. Peters also helped execute the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768), which resulted in the removal of the Lenape, Shawnee, and Ohio Iroquoian peoples in the rich Ohio Valley and the advance of white settlements across the Alleghenies.
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William Penn's colony was an enterprise. Individual colonists could purchase land directly from Penn, who also collected taxes. Colonists received incentives for importing servants. Penn sold tens of thousands of acres to land companies in Germany, Wales, London, and Ireland. Throughout the Mid-Atlantic, colonial authorities and land speculators recruited non-English Protestants to take up farms by purchase or tenancy. Scots-Irish immigrants poured into the Pennsylvania backcountry in the decades before the massacres. Tens of thousands of Germans—Palatines, Amish, Moravians, and Lutherans—went there too, carried to America on hundreds of vessels dedicated to that trade. In the 1740s the governor estimated that more than sixty thousand Pennsylvanians, three-fifths of the inhabitants, were German, a population that grew to more than a hundred thousand in the next decade. Swiss Mennonites settled as did Swedish Lutherans. Jews found acceptance as merchants and traders in Philadelphia and in the back-country. Nathan Levy and David Franks, for example, held land claims in Upper Paxton a decade before the massacres.
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