Ebony and Ivy (5 page)

Indians at the grammar level studied in English at both Harvard and the College of William and Mary. Those who entered the advanced course were required to think and speak in the language of imperial Europe. As the language of diplomacy, theology, philosophy, and law, Latin had served as a medium of power and authority in Europe. The hegemonic language of the Europeans displaced Native languages and their attendant values and ideas. Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck and Joel Iacoomis both forwarded Latin addresses to the
honoratissimi benefactores
of the New England Company with independent confirmations of their proficiency in classical languages. An Indian named Eleazar in the class of 1679 left a Latin poem eulogizing the Reverend Thomas Thacher, pastor of Old South Church in Boston. Eleazar died before graduation. A member of the class of 1716, Benjamin Larnel earned praise for his Latin and Greek poetry. He too died before graduating. The English immersed Native students in Christian history, its literatures, leaders, and governing values.
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Trained in colonial schools and colleges, Native youth returned to Indian villages as exemplars of the benefits of English culture, or they separated themselves from Indian communities to live among the colonists.

“The Lord delegated you to be our patrons … so that you may perform the work of bringing blessings to us pagans,” reads Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck's Latin oration. “We were naked in our souls as well as in our bodies, we were aliens from all humanity.” Harvard's Indian students were, in Cheeshahteaumuck's words, “instruments to spread and propagate the gospel among our kin and neighbours, so that they also may know the Lord and Christ.” The Puritans were, by this logic, mere media of providence—the unfolding will of God. At the outbreak of King Philip's War, Harvard president Increase Mather took a moment to catalogue the religious missions to indigenous peoples in the Americas to prove the Puritans' faithful execution of God's directives.
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African slavery and the slave trade subsidized the college and the colony. In 1636, the year Harvard was founded, a group of merchants at nearby Marblehead (Naumkeag)—where residents had unsuccessfully maneuvered to house the college—built and outfitted a small ship and named it
Desire
. The following summer,
Desire
became the first slaver to depart from the British North American mainland. Under John Winthrop's instructions, Captain William Pierce sold seventeen Pequot War captives into bondage at Providence Island in the Caribbean in exchange for cotton, tobacco, salt, and enslaved Africans. The sale of prisoners from hostile nations became policy in Boston and Plymouth, a practice that also brought hundreds of enslaved black people into the colonies.
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The birth of slavery in New England was also the dawn of slavery at Harvard.
Desire
“returned from the West Indies after seven months,” Winthrop noted in February 1638, and “brought some cotton, and tobacco, and negroes.” It is not clear if the “Moor” who served Harvard's earliest students came to Massachusetts in the belly of
Desire
, but he remains the first enslaved black person documented in the colony, and his life more tightly braids the genesis of slavery in New England into the founding of the college. Nathaniel Eaton, the first instructor and schoolmaster, owned this man. Master Eaton had studied at Trinity, Cambridge University, and the Harvard trustees empowered him to design the curriculum and supervise the social lives of the students. Using £400 from the legislature and Rev. Harvard's bequest, Eaton erected a hall, began cultivating the grounds, and gathered the first class, which, Winthrop boasted, included “the sons of gentlemen and others of best note in the country.” The boys took their meals from Mistress Eaton and paid the Eatons for room and board. A six-foot fence surrounded the college yard to help the Eatons control the movements of the students.
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The governors' faith in Master Easton was poorly repaid. Nathaniel Eaton was a volatile man who tussled with his own boarders and instructed the students by mixing whippings into lessons.
Students complained that they were regularly and severely beaten, their meals were either inedible or insufficient, the rooms were not cleaned, and the servants were recalcitrant and undisciplined. One student, Samuel Hough, returned to his room to find the Moor sleeping in his bed, and his classmates compared their plights to that of the slave. Some of the boys accused the Eatons of extorting money for services such as laundering. Rotting fish had been served, meat was scarce and foul when available, beer had been denied for extended periods, and on one occasion their “hasty pudding,” or porridge, had been tainted with animal excrement. In 1639 the General Court tried Master Eaton and levied fines against him. The overseers fired him and closed the college for reorganization.
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When Harvard reopened, the colony had more numerous links to Atlantic slavery. After the destruction of the Henrico college Patrick Copland had settled in Bermuda, where he began trading with New England. In the aftermath of the Pequot War, Governor Winthrop documented the sale of hundreds of women and children, a dozen of whom were traded to Copland. The minister recruited British students from the West Indian plantations for Winthrop, making Harvard the first in a long line of North American schools to target wealthy planters as a source of enrollments and income.
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“Our pinnaces had very good receipts in the West Indies,” the governor informed his son John. Merchants linked New England to the Caribbean and West Africa, where human beings were prime goods. After graduating in Harvard's first class, George Downing, Governor Winthrop's nephew, spent months preaching to the English in Barbados, Antigua, Santa Cruz, Nevis, and St. Christopher, where he measured demand for New England commodities and gathered advice on establishing slavery in the Puritan colonies. He explained that newcomers used English indentured servants until they could afford “to procure Negroes (the life of this place).” The plantations were so profitable that an enslaved African paid for himself or herself after only eighteen months. The Puritans quickly adopted slaveholding. In February 1641 “a negro maid” owned by Israel Stoughton—a founder and
early benefactor of Harvard—received baptism and admission to the Dorchester church. “You may also own Negroes and Negresses,” observed a Huguenot visitor in 1687; “there is not a House in Boston, however small may be its Means, that has not one or two. There are those that have five or six, and all make a good Living.”
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New England and its college were producing scores of young men who coveted futures in the British Caribbean as planters and traders. “If you go to Barbados, you will see a flourishing Island, many able men,” Downing enviously reported. “I believe they have bought this year no lesse than a thousand negroes.” By the end of the century enslaved black people outnumbered white colonists almost three to one in Barbados and the island had become England's most valuable possession in the Americas. Winthrop's son Henry went to Barbados. His son Samuel relocated to Antigua. Stoughton's son died during a failed voyage to Barbados. Downing returned to England, where he counseled James, Duke of York, on the conquest of New Netherland, and was knighted for his service to the crown.
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George Downing informed his cousin John Winthrop Jr. that fish and meat were the “certainest commodityes” to sell in the Caribbean. Exactly a century later, Jeremiah Dummer, a Harvard graduate and patron of Yale College, credited New England for the profitability of West Indian sugar in Europe and for helping the British Caribbean hold off French and Dutch competitors. Wheat, corn, horses, timber, and staves flowed south from New England, which also supplied “Barrel Pork, Mack[e]rel, and refuse Cod-Fish for their Negroes.” West Indian planters could reserve their laborers and lands for sugar production. Hundreds of ships left New England for the southern and Caribbean colonies, particularly Barbados, with virtually everything those colonies needed, an economic historian concludes, including low-quality fish for “the poor Guinea negroes whom the Royal African Company was pouring into the Spanish sugar Islands.”
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As the population of enslaved black people grew, New Englanders crafted laws to regulate the unfree. Massachusetts required the whipping of slaves found on the streets at night or away from
their owners' homes without consent, and moved to keep cash and arms out of the hands of black servants. No enslaved person could carry a stick or other potential weapon. The Boston selectmen maintained a census of free black men, who were required to maintain the roads and do other unpaid labor for the town. Curfews for enslaved people were imposed in Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island; the last of these extended its law to include free black people. The punishment for violators was public flogging. Governments penalized manumissions to limit the growth of the free black population. The colonists burned enslaved people at the stake, hanged them, and sold them out of the region for actions deemed threatening. In a single term in 1681, a Massachusetts court sentenced Maria and Jack, two enslaved black people, to death for two separate cases of arson. Maria was burned—the first person punished in this manner—and Jack was hanged. The judges ordered that Jack's corpse be tossed into the fire with Maria. In 1704 John Campbell, a Scottish immigrant, began publishing the
Boston News-Letter
, which provides a record of the rise of slavery in the colony. Not only merchants but carpenters, midwives, booksellers, and butchers were buying and selling Africans.
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New Englanders were partners in the rise of Atlantic slavery. Puritan merchants carried food, timber, animals, and other supplies to the expanding markets of the English, French, Spanish, and Dutch colonies. Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison argued that the West Indies rescued New England. Puritans also supplied the Carolinas and Virginia and brought the products of slave labor and other materials back to New England, where they built new ships and launched new ventures. New Englanders entered the Atlantic slave economy as shippers, insurers, manufacturers, and investors. For two centuries the Caribbean and southern markets buoyed the New England economy, and ships from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire filled West Indian ports.
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Colleges were imperial instruments akin to armories and forts, a part of the colonial garrison with the specific responsibilities to train ministers and missionaries, convert indigenous peoples and soften cultural resistance, and extend European rule over foreign nations. Christians launched their religious and educational missions to Native peoples from highly militarized spaces. The permanent French settlement in Canada began with a two-story wood building protected by raised cannons and a moat five yards wide and two yards deep. The ordered priests who evangelized the neighboring
sauvages
could measure their success as French colonists extended their commercial and military authority over the region.
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When they landed in Virginia in 1607, the well-armed English relied upon Powhatans for food and assistance, but in little time they began attacking Indians with impunity. Epidemics reduced the local Indian populations, and Christian expansionism and aggression pushed whole communities inland. Captain Samuel Argall, who arrived in 1609, was soon kidnapping, illegally trading, and waging private wars. He also forced the English claim upon Bermuda. The English fought the Appomattocs, Kecoughtans, and Paspaheghs, burning villages, taking hostages, stealing goods, and killing captives. In February 1611 Argall burned two Warraskoyak towns to punish a chief for violating a trade agreement. That same year Sir Thomas Dale, deputy governor and proprietor of the Henrico settlement, sent a hundred men in full armor against the Nansemonds. Long before the March 22, 1622, uprising, Indians were repelling the English invasion. The Henrico college was a symbol of subordination, a reminder of a decade of Christian triumph over Indians.
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In Jamestown and Plymouth, English colonists built palisades to protect their small makeshift settlements, hustled to supply themselves with food, and declared the governance of the Christian God by constructing churches. “One of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance Learning,” reported New England's ministers. Establishing a colony required enormous and continuous outputs of labor, but still, in Virginia and
Massachusetts, the settlers began organizing colleges within a decade of their arrival. Defending these settlements meant taking steps to hold off or defeat immediate and potential threats.
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Transatlantic travelers expected conflict, and weapons outnumbered Bibles on virtually every ship. The Pilgrims arrived at New Plymouth aboard a floating arsenal and were prepared to fight upon landing. Miles Standish stepped ashore with a small army to fend off the Wampanoag if necessary. He then organized the male settlers into companies and had them rehearsing for war before they could feed themselves. They finished the fort and a palisade, one mile in length and eleven feet high, to protect the buildings and farms. “Furbish up your Swords, Rapiers, and all other piercing weapons,” Edward Johnson instructed Puritan immigrants to Massachusetts Bay. Johnson, who came on the
Arabella
with Governor Winthrop, warned that the devil plotted against the children of God. Ship horses and every thing that you might need to defend this divine project, he continued. “Spare not to lay out your coyne for Powder, Bullets, Match, Armes of all sorts, and all kinde of Instruments for War.” Supporters in England donated funds for larger artillery pieces, bolstering the military capabilities of the network of fortresses that was Christian New England.
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