Ebony and Ivy (7 page)

King Philip's War also hastened the death of the Indian College. Morison argued that President Henry Dunster had promoted the Indian school to get the New England Company to pay for repairs to the Old College and subsidize English students. As soon as the building opened, President Charles Chauncy “began to hint that Harvard could find better use for it than to house Indians.” The year before the war began, Daniel Gookin lamented that many Puritans took the deaths of Indian students as a sign that God was not yet ready to save them. A decade later, the New England Company “doth finde that there is only one Indian youth maintained and educated at the Colledge in New England.” The board wanted ten Native students at Harvard, but most colonists saw few strategic benefits to enrolling additional Indian boys. President Mather was still including the “ancient Indian” preacher Hiacoomes in his new reports on the missions. Harvard's governors moved the printing press into the Indian College, where it was used to publish a Hebrew Bible and other material for English students. Supplies of the Algonquian Bible and catechism were destroyed during the war, and that inventory became a minor concern. The Labadists Jaspar Dankers and Peter Sluyter, who visited the colony after the war, found virtually no Indian-language publications when they called upon John Eliot to learn more about his mission. Mather sent some remaining copies of the Eliot Bible to the universities in Leiden and Utrecht in Holland.
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The Indian College came to a rather ignoble end. In November 1693 the corporation resolved that “the Indian Colledge be taken
down, provided the charges of taking it down amount not to more than five pounds.” The board then sought the New England Company's permission to reuse the bricks, which were eventually sold for £20.
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Reports of King Philip's success in New England heightened Virginians' fears of Native people. In 1675 the young, well-to-do English immigrant Nathaniel Bacon, to whom Governor William Berkeley had given a handsome plantation in the Virginia back-country, gathered his own army. Bacon encouraged hostility toward Indians, including the Appomattox, the Occaneechee, and other friendly nations. He promised economic freedom to the colonists and physical freedom to any servants who joined his army. In 1676 his forces overthrew the governor, burned Jamestown, and brought Virginia under rebel rule for several months. Later that year Bacon died of dysentery. His death and the arrival of a royal fleet ended the uprising. The restored colonial government quickly executed two dozen of Bacon's lieutenants.
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Bacon's Rebellion did not lead to the establishment of the first college in Virginia, but the decision to organize a college responded to the lingering problems of defending the colony's expansive borders with Indian nations, regulating a large population of enslaved people, and governing a free population with a history of resisting political and religious authority. In 1693 King William III and Queen Mary II granted a charter. The trustees were primarily planters and merchants from the colony's leading landholding and slaveholding families. The Reverend James Blair, a graduate of Aberdeen and Edinburgh in Scotland, served as president for life, and governed the school for its first fifty years. The charter funded the College of William and Mary from the profits of slave labor, assigning a duty of a penny per pound on tobacco exported from Virginia and Maryland to support a president and professors. The crown also gave two 10,000-acre grants and the Virginia assembly allocated a duty on liquor, furs, and skins traded in the colony.
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The mission was to educate Christian youth, supply a trained ministry, and ensure that “the Christian faith may be propagated amongst the Western Indians, to the Glory of Almighty God.” Rev. Blair and Governor Francis Nicholson promoted Indian evangelization. The trustees sent Blair on a fund-raising trip to England to publicize the progress of the colony. Well-placed friends such as John Locke, who had intellectual and financial interests in the Americas, proved useful as Blair sought donors. Indian missions were particularly marketable. Several Native boys attended William and Mary during its first years. In 1723 the trustees began the construction of a brick Indian college, Brafferton Hall.
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Brafferton Hall, originally the Indian College, at the College
of William and Mary
SOURCE: Library of Congress

The Reverend Hugh Jones, the chaplain to the colonial assembly and a faculty member at William and Mary, argued the urgency of Indian conversion. He saw an intelligence and artistry in Indians that could be cultivated, but there was no similar divine light in black people, whom the minister viewed as “by Nature cut out for hard Labour and Fatigue.” The trustees excitedly received “1000£ to buy Negroes for the College Use and Service.” In 1718 alone the board purchased seventeen enslaved black people—hardly remarkable in a colony that paid its ministers in tobacco and where
the preachers were quick to fuss about exchange rates. Rev. Jones designed a course of instruction for Native students, but he relegated the education of black people to the whim of slave owners and even ignored the spiritual fate of the college's slaves.
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The strategic rewards of Indian missions were again paramount. Codified in August 1695, the Brafferton Fund, which paid for Indian education at Harvard and William and Mary, had regulations to ensure that a swift current of trained Indian ministers flowed back into their respective nations. The administrators encouraged the college officers to get as many Indian children as possible, from friendly or enemy nations, by invitation, purchase, or kidnapping. They placed Indian scholars under the direct supervision of the president and required regular censuses of Native students and reports on their progress. They set rates for boarding and educating Indian youth. The board then insisted that the governors “shall keep at the sd colledg soe many Indian children in sickness and healthe, in meat drink washing lodging clothes Medicines books and Education from the first begining of letters till they are ready to receive orders and be thought sufficient to preache be sent abroad to preach and convert the Indians.”
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If the conquest and devastation of Indian peoples were mere expressions of providence, then attempts to hasten their fall could hardly be sinful. In 1711, when colonists in North Carolina were at war with the Tuscarora, Virginia governor William Spotswood demanded that the chiefs and leaders of the neighboring friendly nations surrender “Two Sons of the Chief Men in Each Town … to the Number of Twenty” to the College of William and Mary. President Lyon G. Tyler later admitted that the campus became a prison “where they served as so many hostages for the good behavior of the rest.” Ultimately, about twenty Native children were being held on campus—including the sons and daughters of the chiefs of the Nottoway, Pamunkey, and Meherrin—and other Tuscarora were held for more than a year.
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Shortly after his graduation from Harvard, Jonathan Belcher, the son of a colonial slave trader, presented an Indian child as a gift in Europe, an act that symbolized the demographic devastation and violent conquest of the New England Indians and the ordinariness of unfreedom in the Christian empires of new Spain, New France, and British America. Academies and colleges, teachers and ministers, religion and science were as responsible for that ruin as forts, soldiers, armor, guns, and swords. Free and unfree, Indians were now relics of the English empire whom Belcher could treat as trophies, displaying them as the marvels of
his
country.

You negroes are treated here with great humanity and

tenderness; ye have no hard task-masters, ye are not

laden with too heavy burthens … ye grow cruel by too

much indulgence: so much are ye degenerated and

debased below the dignity of human species, that even

the brute animals may upbraid you; for the ox knoweth

his owner, and the ass his master's crib, even the very

dogs also will, by their actions express their gratitude

to the hand that feeds them, their thankfulness for

kindness. … Such is the fidelity of these dumb beasts;

but ye,
the beasts of the people
, though ye are clothed and

fed, and provided with all necessaries of life, without

care; in requital of your benefactors, in return for

blessings ye give curses, and would scatter firebrands,

death and destruction around them, destroy their

estates and butcher their persons. Thus monstrous is

your ingratitude!

—SENTENCING OF TOM (BRADT),
NEW YORK CITY, 1742

Oh Reader whoever thou art, it is impossible for you

to conceive or me to describe the torture I sustain at

the loss of these Slaves we have committed to a wat[e]

ry grave[,] one of w'ch boys was to have been my

own. … [I]n the afternoon got our slaves up and gave

them an airing two more of which [I] imagine will die

this night to my inexpressible grief, how unhappy is a

person who undertakes the care of slaves.

—DR. WILLIAM CHANCELLOR, MAY 1750

The Bloody Journey from Slave Traders to College Trustees

In 1771 a sixteen-year-old orphan assumed the day-to-day management of a St. Croix shipping house when his employer, Nicholas Cruger, returned to New York City. The wealthy St. Croix merchant Thomas Stevens had taken the boy in after the child's mother died. Apprenticing him in a merchant house was a predictable and somewhat generous act. Cruger supplied the Caribbean plantations with everything from fish and flour to mules. He also sold human beings. The teenager skillfully administered Cruger's ships and merchandise as they moved through a network of Caribbean ports, maximized profits by adjusting points of sale and seeking prime markets, and kept Cruger abreast of the performance of his captains and factors. His published poems and short essays brought him local fame. Two years earlier, he had written Stevens's son Edward to wish him well in his studies at King's College (Columbia) in New York City. He worried about his prospects in life and swore that he “would willingly risk my life tho' not my Character to exalt my Station.” Now this precocious manager boarded one of Cruger's ships with funds from a subscription among the local merchants and set off for the
North American mainland. Nicholas Cruger's father and uncle were founding trustees of King's College, the Crugers and their in-laws served on the board through the American Revolution, and several of their sons attended the college. Hamilton's guardians placed him at the Presbyterian academy in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The following year Alexander Hamilton matriculated at King's. A job with a slave trader had rescued him from poverty. Donations from slave traders saved him from despair. His new life began with his arrival on a slave trader's ship. His New York and New Jersey sponsors included Crugers, Livingstons, Boudinots, and other elite families who enrolled him at a college funded and governed by merchants. His tuition and fees were paid from the sale of barrels of rum, manufactured on slave plantations, that Cruger's firm sent to New York.
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