Ebony and Ivy (25 page)

The whitening of colonial society and the secularism of the Enlightenment created some space for Jews. In 1762 the Manhattan merchant and King's College (Columbia) trustee John Watts wrote to Moses Franks—the son of the New York slave traders Jacob Franks and Abigail Levy—recommending Dr. James Jay, who “has undertaken to serve our College & I hope may succeed.” Franks was a foreign agent for King's at the time of Jay's British fund-raising trip. Watts's business partner Oliver DeLancey, a trustee, was married to Phila Franks, Moses's sister. Franks had joined the Watts and DeLancey firm in numerous West Indies investments, and he had served as Watts's London representative. The contributions of Jewish merchants as privateers in the Atlantic colonial wars encouraged greater religious tolerance. Judah Hays, a prominent West Indies trader, was among the New York merchants whose ships attacked French interests. Moses Michael Hays, his son, was a founder of the Massachusetts Bank and a benefactor
of Harvard College. Rabbi Gershom Mendes Seixas later served three decades as a trustee of King's College. Jacob Rodriguez de Rivera and Aaron Lopez of Newport gave generously to the College of Rhode Island (Brown), where such gifts, large and small, moved the trustees to open the college to Jews. Rodriguez de Rivera also donated to Yale.
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By midcentury, colonial campuses were changing remarkably. In 1750 Isaac Isaacs graduated from Yale. Seven years later, a Jewish student enrolled at the College of Philadelphia. In 1772 Moses Levy finished Philadelphia, the least restrictive colonial school. A dozen Jewish students graduated from Philadelphia before the Revolution. In that same era, Isaac Abrahams completed the undergraduate course at King's. A woman, Richea Gratz, was one of four Jews—Hyman Gratz, and Jacob and William Franks, were the others—in the first graduating class of Franklin College.
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Many Americans saw this new strategic and social potential of colleges. As colonial and British troops were mustering in Albany, New York, during the summer of 1755, Colonel Ephraim Williams had looked to the future by designating funds in his will for a college. He was killed at the Battle of Lake George. In the following decades, hundreds of white families moved into western Massachusetts, where Williams had considerable property, and where the government was actively eliminating Indian claims. In 1793 the residents of West Township (Williamstown), Massachusetts, requested that endowment for Williams College.
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Although he never attended college, George Washington crafted a philosophy of education that emphasized the need for schools and the benefits of making higher education more accessible. He saw a danger in sending American youth to study abroad, where they were exposed to antirepublican ideas. The president bequeathed $4,000 in local bank stock to Alexandria Academy (1785), a school for poor and orphaned children; a hundred James River Company shares to Liberty Hall Academy (Washington and Lee); fifty shares of the Potomac Company for a proposed university in the District of Columbia; and stock from both land companies to fund “the establishment of a University in the central part of the United States.” Washington prayed that the latter institution would help Americans
overcome “local prejudices and habitual jealousies” by “spread[ing] systematic ideas through all parts of this rising empire.”
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Old and New Light, Anglican and dissenter, Tory and rebel, British and continental, the people of the North American colonies embraced a new future. Evangelized by their pastor, John Elder, the Paxton Boys believed that it was the racial destiny of white Christians to possess the earth. Enlightened humanism could easily be hijacked by racialism; it required only that the individual and natural value of human beings be assigned as a group characteristic rather than a universal one. For white Americans, racial beliefs intermingled with the spiritual promises of evangelicalism and the economic benefits of territorial expansion to affirm their future. Those who condemned the Paxton Boys objected to the means that the mob employed but not to the society that its members imagined. During the French and Indian War, William Smith urged greater militarization of the backcountry, and he mentored Thomas Barton, a backcountry apologist for the destruction of the Susquehannocks. A product of Trinity College in Dublin, Rev. Barton served as one of the first tutors at Philadelphia and took an honorary master's degree there a few years before the bloodshed.
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Even the most rhetorically affectionate pleas for Native people conceded a dreadful fate for Indian nations. These were not friends but eulogists.

The French and Indian War was a global conflict that American colonists also saw as a struggle between the races. The Reverend Samuel Davies prepared a company of his Virginia neighbors for battle with gory images of the torments that awaited them if they fell to “the savage Tyranny of a mungrel Race of French and Indian Conquerors.” Evangelical ministers on both sides of the Atlantic accepted the war as a punishment from God. Samuel Finley, who like Davies later served as president of New Jersey, instructed his Pennsylvania and Delaware parishioners that it was their spiritual duty to defend the Protestant God. Davies coordinated missions to the
Cherokee and other Indian nations in the Carolinas and Virginia, where the growth of the white population had sparked recent violence. He also urged his Scots Presbyterian neighbors to evangelize their slaves, but it would take more than vibrant preaching to convince southern slaveholders that “those stupid despised black Creatures, that many treat as if they were Brutes, are in this important Respect, upon an Equality with their haughty Masters.”
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Provost Smith told a Philadelphia battalion that they were defending their communities against the combined threat of “popish Perfidy, French Tyranny[,] and savage Barbarity.” Professor Paul Jackson, the Latin instructor at the college, assumed a captaincy. Rev. Davies warned a Virginia militia company that they were saving children from being “torn from the Arms of their murdered Parents,” educated by savages, and “formed upon the Model of a ferocious Indian Soul.” Smith even wrote a song to teach Indians' their social status:

Indian
Nations! Now repeat,—

“Heav'n preserve the
British
State!

“And the
British
Chief, and Race,

“And these Lands,—and bless the Peace.”
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As the conflict raged, the Reverend John Witherspoon addressed the annual meeting of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) at Edinburgh. Witherspoon cautioned that Britain was suffering God's wrath for its failure to evangelize the Native peoples of America. There was a divine warning in France's allegiance with the “Indians, a great part of whose territory we possess, and whom, with a contempt equally impolitic and unchristian, we suffer to continue in ignorance of the only living and true God.” Catholic missions were the foundation of the French-Indian union, and Protestants needed to counter the designs of that “politic, but fraudulent nation.” Military strategy and religious duty were one. The North American conflict proved the need for the British missionary companies' efforts among Indians, a strategically necessary “exercise of Christian charity.”
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American campuses became militarized spaces during the eighteenth-century imperial wars; they also became increasingly hostile to Indians. A commencement at the College of New Jersey included the singing of an ode that wedded the fate of the school, familiarly known as Nassau Hall, to the outcome of the French and Indian War:

Unmov'd at War's tremendous Roar,

That Consternation spreads from Shore to Shore,

O'er solid Continents, and tossing Waves,

From Haughty Monarchs down to Slaves …

Peaceful Nassau! In thee we sing—

We sing great George upon the Throne, And Amherst brave in Arms,

Amherst brave in Arms.

This was no hollow tribute. The graduates and audience specifically sang praises to General Jeffrey Amherst, the commander of King George III's North American forces, for pursuing the Indians to avenge “sacred British Blood.” A decade later, Rev. Witherspoon accepted the presidency of the Princeton college. His commitment to Native education largely evaporated. He tutored three Lenape students and a few other “Indian boys,” but no Native students graduated under his tenure and indigenous students were soon gone from the campus.
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On August 6, 1760, the merchant Abraham DePeyster, treasurer of the New York province and a founding trustee of King's College, collected duties on eighty-three enslaved people brought from Africa to Manhattan on the sloop
Sally
. Colonel Henry Bouquet, a Swede fighting in the British army and stationed in North America during the French and Indian War, purchased York, one of the Africans being held on board.
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Enslaved black people routinely
accompanied the British and colonial forces as cooks, laborers, and servants. Young black boys were often used as drummers. It is significant that Bouquet bought a slave during a prolonged and vicious military campaign.

The century of the Enlightenment brought the high point of the African slave trade and the rise of systematic racial extermination. At the end of the French and Indian War, Lord Amherst informed Colonel Bouquet of his continuing doubts about even friendly and allied Native peoples. “I never will put the least trust in any of the Indian race,” the general warned. That statement followed an intense summer of strategizing, during which Bouquet and Amherst had cursed Indians, conspired for revenge, made plans to kill any who had taken up arms, and plotted to eliminate the Native presence from all the territory between Fort Pitt and Lake Erie. The subject of racial cleansing bound these communications. “I will try to inoculate the [Indians] with some blankets that may fall into their Hands, and take care not to get the disease myself,” Bouquet replied. By distributing smallpox-infected blankets as gifts, the colonel promised to destroy Indian resistance and then hunt the survivors “with English dogs, supported by rangers and some light horse.” In just a few casual sentences, Amherst and Bouquet designed a campaign to “effectually extirpate or remove that vermin.”
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As Jeffrey Amherst and Henry Bouquet plotted, Councilor John Watts of New York, a trustee of King's College, fumed over the western forts and towns sacked by the Indians. A confederacy from more than a dozen nations, including the Ojibwa, Shawnee, Wyandot, Miami, and Lenape, had risen against the British forces and white settlers in the Great Lakes region in response to Amherst's violations of their sovereignty in the aftermath of the French and Indian War. Named Pontiac's Rebellion, after an Ottawa chief who exhorted pan-Indian resistance, the uprising shocked war-weary English colonists. In a letter to his occasional business partner Moses Franks, Watts concluded that “our formerly stupid Savages are become great Proficients in Warr.” In other exchanges, Watts estimated the size of the English forces being gathered to wipe out the Lenape and Shawnee, whom he dismissed as “human Beasts.” John Bard, a King's alumnus who was studying medicine
in Edinburgh, sent regrets to his father over the continued violence on the frontier but added his suspicion that the colonists might be responsible.
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Under the pseudonym “A Lover of This Country,” Rev. Smith published a laudatory history of Henry Bouquet's campaign against the Ohio Indians. The frontier remained tense. Edward Shippen was demanding that Bouquet compensate the backcountry settlers for their services. William Trent was representing Pennsylvania farmers who had lost crops, homes, cattle, and slaves to Indian war parties. Trent, Samuel Wharton, and other Pennsylvania lawyers and merchants pursued these claims against various, even random, Native nations and communities for years.
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The French defeat made even more tangible the colonists' sense that the continent was theirs, and Pontiac's Rebellion provided an immediate justification to pursue that claim. Several years later, a member of the first class of the College of Philadelphia, which graduated during the war, began a Caribbean fund-raising appeal for New Ark Academy in Delaware by rhetorically making indigenous people disappear to underscore the power of Christian education and English civilization: “A vast tract of land, which had been inhabited by a few small tribes of barbarous savages, in a short time is become the happy residence of
three millions of British subjects
.”
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The fates of the colleges were again fused with the hostilities. Among the odd pieces of business that appeared on General Amherst's desk were numerous petitions from schools. Eleazar Wheelock asked Amherst for a grant in New York, where the Mohegan minister Samson Occom's work in the Oneida nation had prepared the ground, and where Wheelock had been courting the Onondaga and the Mohawk. The remnants of several Indian nations from New England found refuge among the Iroquois, increasing Occom's and Wheelock's influence in the region. President Samuel Johnson accused the governors of King's College of failing to seek aid from the victorious general, but on May 10, 1763, after they installed a new president, the trustees formed a committee “to wait upon Jeffrey Amherst and Governor [Robert] Monckton with Subscription paper and request their Bounty.” Lord Amherst responded to Wheelock: “The Design is a very Commendable One, and I
should be Extremely happy in having it in my power to be any ways Instrumental in Civilizing the Indians; and in promoting Seminaries of Learning in this Country.” He declined to grant the minister's request, however, insisting that he lacked the power to dispense confiscated lands and forwarding Wheelock's appeal to England.
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