Ebony and Ivy (44 page)

Although Quincy was genuinely shaken, he acknowledged only a portion of the sin. The issue was quite a bit worse than northern ambivalence toward southern slavery, the ubiquitous call to elevate the union over the question of human suffering, and the cozy relations of the northern, southern, and West Indian aristocracies. The problem of slavery in the antebellum North, like the problem of slavery at Harvard, could not be solved by rhetoric or emotion. It was located in the entangled economies, histories, institutions, and lineages of the South, the free states, Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa. It was a problem so ugly and so personal that it invited dishonesty.

“The soil of New England is trodden by no slave,” Quincy asserted in his history of Boston, crediting a commitment to an “equality of rights” that he traced back to the Pilgrims and Puritans. Harvard president Jared Sparks authored a series of books on the lives and letters of the Founding Fathers that raised his prestige and earned him firm friendships in the South. In 1822 Everett had married Charlotte Brooks, the daughter of Peter Chardon Brooks, the wealthy Atlantic maritime insurer and college benefactor. Antebellum presidents often turned to history, producing national and regional studies, and biographies of leading political and economic figures. From Princeton came accounts of the Presbyterian Church, the college, the region's leading families, and the African colonization movement. President William Alexander Duer of Columbia wrote about society and life in New York City
and the heroism of his English and West Indian ancestors.
¹⁶
This turn to the past was not peculiar to universities. The antebellum nation saw a broad social concern with history.

Harvard University Presidents, 1829–1862
SOURCE: Harvard University Libraries

Popular fixations with history often reflect popular anxieties about the future. If history is a search for distant truths, then it is also an attempt to regulate the judgments of coming generations. White northerners removed slavery from their accounts and memories by driving the descendants of slaves from view and crafting new explanations for their wealth and regional development. Not coincidentally, President Quincy and the Harvard Corporation dismissed Charles Follen on the eve of Harvard's bicentennial, a moment of ritual historical revision. The attack on abolitionists and abolitionism began the process of hiding the college's long, sordid affair with slavery and the slave trade.

The most active slaving house in the nation, the DeWolfes, opened a firm and purchased plantations in Cuba to circumvent the United States' 1808 prohibition on the slave trade. Such families became the new patrons of higher education. Israel Thorndike, whose fortune came from the Caribbean trade and a Cuban estate acquired from the DeWolfes, gave $500 to endow the Massachusetts Professorship of Natural History at Harvard, the same amount to the theology school, and $100 for the Professorship in Mineralogy and Geology. In 1818 he spent several thousand dollars on the Americana collection—ten thousand maps and more than three thousand books—of the Hamburg professor and librarian Christoph Daniel Ebeling. Thorndike's son, Israel Augustus, graduated from Harvard in 1835, and in 1841 he married Frances Maria Macomb, the daughter of a Cuban sugar planter. In 1838 Elisha Atkins opened a trading house in Boston to import sugar from Cuba, where he also purchased plantations. Edwin Atkins bought Soledad and other sugar estates during the violent and unstable demise of slavery on the island. The family owned one of the largest sugar-producing and -refining operations in Cuba, which they maintained after the 1886 emancipation. Atkins created the Harvard Botanical Garden at Soledad, and later donated the estate to serve as the tropical laboratory for Harvard science faculty and students.
¹⁷

Merchants and manufacturers with economic ties to the cotton and sugar plantations of the South and the Caribbean transformed higher education in the antebellum North. The Boston Associates, a combination of investors and industrialists from roughly forty families, planned dozens of cotton mill towns across New England, and branched into finance and railroads. John Lowell Jr., the son of the cotton textile magnate Francis Cabot Lowell, bequeathed $250,000 to support the Lowell Institute (1839) in Boston. Edward Everett of Harvard gave the inaugural address on the history of the founder. Yale's Benjamin Silliman followed with a lecture on geology, and returned for an introduction to chemistry. In its first years, the institute offered talks on anatomy, Christian philosophy, botany, electromagnetism, religion, optics, American history, and
astronomy from scholars such as Jared Sparks of Harvard and Mark Hopkins of Williams.
¹⁸

Industrialists were retooling universities to meet their needs. Under Everett's presidency, the practical sciences significantly expanded at Harvard. In 1847 Abbott Lawrence, the cotton textile manufacturer, gave $50,000 to establish the Lawrence Scientific School, motivated by his own frustrations locating qualified engineers and planners to build his mills and towns. He later bequeathed an additional $50,000. His brother Amos, also a manufacturer and college benefactor, celebrated the historic donation as the “last best work ever done by one of our name.” The Lawrences donated to Williams, Amherst, Bowdoin, and other colleges across the nation. This was not detached benevolence. Realizing the vision of an industrialized nation required mechanics and engineers. “Buying up vast stretches of land and water, and plunking down whole cities where none had been before,” Robert F. Dalzell writes of this manufacturing elite, displayed the possibilities of technology and capital.
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More than a dozen engineering and science schools had opened in the United States before the Civil War. In 1824 Stephen Van Rensselaer chartered Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. By the 1830s William and Mary and the University of Virginia, where William Barton Rogers held professorships, were offering practical science courses. In 1846 Rogers sent an outline for a polytechnic school to John A. Lowell, of the cotton manufacturing empire. His influences came from the more advanced technical schools in France and Germany. Among the founding trustees of the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (1855) were James C. Brevoort, who had finished his education at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris, and James Stranahan, a civil engineer who had planned the manufacturing town of Florence, New York, for the abolitionist Gerrit Smith. Charles Pratt's oil refinery and the Havemeyer sugar works were driving a production revolution that transformed Brooklyn from a small town to an industrial city. “Among the people themselves,” Frederick Barnard, then of the University of Mississippi, said in a speech in New York City that year, “there has sprung up a demand for something more practical” in education. In 1859 the iron
industrialist and abolitionist Peter Cooper opened the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. Two years later, Rogers became the president of the new Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with support from the Lowells.
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Awful Conflagration of the Steam Boat Lexington
SOURCE: Library of Congress

On January 13, 1840, Rev. Follen left New York for New England to preach the dedicatory sermon at a new church in East Lexington, Massachusetts, which he helped to build and was to pastor. If not for his humility, he might have touted it as a triumphant return. He and his family had survived Harvard's punishment, he had sustained his moral and political opposition to human slavery, and he had grown his reputation. But his career ended on the ill-fated
Lexington
.
²¹
Slavery shaped much of Follen's life in the United
States, and it also influenced his death: a professor, minister, and abolitionist was consumed in a fire that began in a cargo of slave-grown cotton steaming toward free New England.

Even as the sun began setting on Atlantic slavery, the leaders of American colleges were chasing the darkness.

Brown University president Ruth Simmons's courageous articulation of the academic obligation to pursue truth and the forthright presentations of James T. Campbell, Anthony Bogues, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, and the committee that authored
Slavery and Justice
(2006), the report on Brown's ties to the slave trade, came at a time when I was considering giving up on what then seemed to be too massive an undertaking. Brown's self-study was not the first of these recent investigations. Graduate students and staff at Yale had authored
Yale, Slavery, & Abolition
(2001) during the university's three hundredth anniversary. But President Simmons's call for a reckoning with this past resonated well beyond the walls of her campus.

Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy organized a historic conference on slavery and the university at Emory. Sven Beckert and Katherine Stevens's seminars at Harvard led to the collection
Harvard & Slavery
(2011). Terry L. Meyers has published on slavery at William and Mary. Mark Auslander has been researching and teaching the history of slavery at Emory. Deborah K. King is recovering the lives of enslaved people at the northern New England colleges. Shanti M. Singham has guided students in discovering these connections at Williams College.
Martha Sandweiss is leading an undergraduate research seminar on slavery at Princeton. Faculty, librarians, and students at other schools—including William and Mary, Duke, Amherst, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, and Maryland—have been producing detailed studies of the relationship between colleges and slavery. Campus by campus, they are providing complex portraits of slavery and the university at a speed that is difficult to follow. They are also beginning to synthesize this scholarship online, in museum exhibits, and in major publications like the forthcoming
Slavery and the University
volume from the Emory conference.

I took an unusual path to this subject. A decade ago, I began research for an article on how black abolitionists entered the professions given the racial barriers at American colleges. I had just arrived at Dartmouth College, a perfect site for exploring stories that often began or concluded in New England. The work of Colin G. Calloway, Celia Naylor, Dale Turner, and other colleagues and students in Dartmouth's Native American Studies Program reshaped my interests. I became more curious about the uneven statuses of Native people and Africans on early American campuses, and the differing ideas about their educability. The contrasts are striking. The first attempt to establish an Indian college in the British colonies came more than two centuries before the first movement to found a black college. The first Native student to graduate from a college in what is now the United States did so nearly one hundred and seventy years before the first African American graduated. The first ordained Native minister in the Protestant colonies preceded the first black clergyman by about a century and a half. These differences do not signal a privileging of Native Americans over Africans; rather, they reflect the troubling role of colleges and education in the colonial world.

James Wright, president emeritus of Dartmouth, and Ozzie Harris, now at Emory, were sources of constant support during the early years of this project. I presented some of this work at the Black New England Conference at the University of New Hampshire, where James T. Campbell offered concrete advice and encouragement. Jonathan Veitch, now the president of Occidental
College, arranged for a visiting professorship at the New School, where I benefited immeasurably from workshops and exchanges with David Plotke, Robin Blackburn, Ferentz Lafargue, Frederico Finchelstein, Sam Haselby, and Oz Frankel. I also enjoyed a semester as a visitor in the history department at University College London. Simon Renton, Bernhard Rieger, John Sabapathy, Nicola Miller, Adam Smith, and the graduate students at UCL invited me to present material and they gave me good guidance on locating British and European sources. My thanks to the Urban History Seminar, Chicago History Museum, where I discussed an early version of the chapter on race science. Kate Fermoile and Deborah Schwartz hosted a talk on the medical sciences and slavery at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Colin G. Calloway generously reviewed the first full draft of the book, certainly a difficult assignment.