Shackles and Ivy

8/13/2019 Shackles and Ivy

1/7

Display full version

Shackles and Ivy: The Secret History of How Slavery Helped

Build Americas Elite Colleges

A new book 10 years in the making examines how many major U.S. universities

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Rutgers, Williams and the University of

North Carolina, among others are drenched in the sweat, and sometimes the blood,

of Africans brought to the United States as slaves. In "Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and

the Troubled History of Americas Universities," Massachusetts Institute of

Technology American history professor Craig Steven Wilder reveals how the slave

economy and higher education grew up together. "When you think about the colonial

world, until the American Revolution, there is only one college in the South, William

& Mary ... The other eight colleges were all Northern schools, and theyre actuallylocated in key sites, for the most part, of the merchant economy where the slave

traders had come to power and rose as the financial and intellectual backers of new

culture of the colonies," Wilder says.

Click hereto watch part 2 of this interview.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN:We turn to a new book 10 years in the making that looks at how

some of the countrys major universitiesHarvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Rutgers,

Williams, the University of North Carolina, to name just a feware drenched in

sweat, and sometimes the blood, of Africans brought here as slaves. The book is called

Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of Americas Universities. In

it, MIT history professor Craig Steven Wilder reveals how the slave economy and

higher education grew up together. He writes, "the American campus stood as a silent

monument to slavery." Well, this history is silent no more. Professor Craig Steven

Wilder joins us here in New York.

Welcome toDemocracy Now!

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Thank you very much.

AMY GOODMAN:So, talk about Americas most elite universities. What relation do

they have to slavery?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:I think there are multiple relationships. The first and

probably most poignant, most provocative, is the relationship to the slave trade itself.

In the middle of the 18th century, from 1746 to 1769fewer than 25 years, less than a

quarter centurythe number of colleges in the British colonies triples from three to

nine. The original three were Harvard, Yale and William & Mary, and all of a sudden

there were nine by 1769. And it triples in that 25-year period. That 25-year period

actually coincides with the height of the slave trade. Its precisely the rise and the

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2013


2/7

elaboration of the Atlantic economy, based on the African slave trade, that allows for

this sort of fantastic articulation of new growth of the institutional infrastructure of

the colonies.

AMY GOODMAN:So, lets talk specifically about particular universities.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Sure.

AMY GOODMAN:I mean, you areyou do look at some universities in the South

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN:but also in the Deep North.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN:Harvard.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Its a very Northern story, actually. You know, when

you think about the colonial world, until the American Revolution, theres actuallyonly one college in the South: William & Mary. There are a couple of other attempts,

but they fail. The other eight colleges are all Northern schools. And theyre actually

located in key sites, for the most part, of the merchant economy and where the slave

traders had sort of come to power and rose as the sort of financial and intellectual

backers of the new culture of the colonies.

AMY GOODMAN:So talk about Harvard.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Sure. Harvard, actually, from its very beginnings in

1636, the college, by 1638, actually has an enslaved man living on campus, whos

referred to as "the Moor." And

AMY GOODMAN:The Moor.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:The Moor. And that actually is directly related to two

slave trades. I imagine its how he gets to Cambridge. One is right after the Pequot

War, the war in which the Puritans defeat the Indians of southern Connecticut.

Theres a Pequot slave trade into the West Indies. The captive Pequot are actually sold

into the West Indies. That ship actually returns with enslaved Africans. And its right

after that moment that the Moor appears on campus and becomes part of the sort of

legend of early Harvard.

AMY GOODMAN:Toward the end of the book, you include a photograph that

shows five men who served as president


AMY GOODMAN:of Harvard University from 1829 to 1862. Talk about their

significance and relation to slavery.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:What I wanted to show in that final chapter, that final

epilogue, was the ways in which slavery, even after the end of slavery in the Northeast,

even after the Northern colonies and Northern states had actually moved toward

emancipation and finished their emancipation processes, they continued to have


3/7

economic ties to the South and the West Indies. And so, if youone of the ways you

can trace that is just by looking at who became the president of these universities, who

the presidents were. And the presidents were virtually always the sons or the

sons-in-law of merchant traders, people who were West India suppliers. And so, after

the slave trade ends and after slavery ends in the Northern states, one of the

businesses that continues is supplying the South and the West Indies with

everythingall the provisions that they needed to run the plantations.

AMY GOODMAN:So, I want to look at this picture again.


AMY GOODMAN:Youve got Quincy. Youve got Everett. Youve gotwhat is it?

Sparks?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Yeah, Sparks.

AMY GOODMAN:Mather.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Jared Sparks.

AMY GOODMAN:And Felton.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN:Explain. For example, Mather. In fact, at Harvard University,

there is a house named after Mather.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Yeah, the Mathers actually go back a long way. And so,

you knowand they actually are part of the colonial story of slavery, too. Increase

Mather, of the second generation, is actually a president of Harvard, and he uses hisslave, which was a person given to him by his parishhe uses his slave to actually run

the business of the college in the colonial period. This slave runs errands between the

various trustees. And he writes in his diary that he sent his Negro to do various bits of

work for the college.

And if you think about, you know, Edward Everett, Jared Sparks, one of the ways that

their influencethat they had managed to achieve the kind of influence that they

didSparks, for instance, becomes rather famous, actually, for his writings about

early American history. He becomes something of a really quite polished American

historian, but that was actually a way of also creating ties with the South, intellectual

relationships with the South. And so, his writings as a historian also allowed him to

create intellectual connections to these very important regions, and regions that

remained important in the financing of higher education long after slavery ends in the

Northeast.

AMY GOODMAN:What about Yale University?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Yale actually is a very similar story. Yeah, in 1701,

when the original founders were actually meeting to establish what was then the

Collegiate School, theyas one of their chroniclers puts it, they come from the various

towns to meet up, and theyre followed by their menservants, or their slaves. The

slavethe enslaved people are actually at the founding of the institution. And once its


4/7

established, like most of the 18th century collegesand especially by the 18th century

as the slave trade peaksthe new business of higher education, the financial model

for a successful college, requires in fact tapping into these new sources of wealth in

the Americas. And that means the slave trade in the plantations of the South and the

West Indies.

AMY GOODMAN:Did anyone at these universitiesand I think you talk about at

Yalesay no to slaves?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Yes, yes. Yeah, theresat every moment that theres a

push toward slavery, theres also anti-slavery. Theres an anti-slavery tradition

actually emerging from the 17th century right through the 18th century. And much of

it, because its an intellectual movement, because its a moral and religious movement,

is actually housed on campus. And so you have this tension on campus. And I try and

actually point that out at various times in the book.

One of the examples that I use, actually, relates to the image that you showed of the

presidents, and particularly Quincy. Under Quincys administration, Charles Follen,the German historianIm sorry, the German professor at Harvard, who was a rebel

of thein Germany and who was chased out for his radicalism, comes to the United

States, gets appointed professor of German at Harvard, and then is immediately

attracted to the abolitionist movement. Follen is actually punished for that decision.

He eventually loses his professorship. And when you trace the origins of the

professorship, the funding had largely come from families with ties to the slave trade

and slavery.

AMY GOODMAN:I mean, thats very interesting. What you point out at places like

Harvard is that a lot of the endowments for the professor chairs


AMY GOODMAN:come from the slave trade.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Yeah. The firstactually, the very first endowed

professorship at Yale, the Livingston professor of divinity, actually comes from the

Livingston family of New York and New Jersey. And its the second generation, Philip

Livingston, gives it in, basically, recognition of the fine education that his sons had

received at Yale. And Livingston is one of thethe Livingstons are one of the larger

slave-trading families out of New York City, the rivals for places like Newport, Rhode

Island, and Providence, which dominates the North American trade. Certainly thePhiladelphians and the New Yorkers were trying to catch up.

AMY GOODMAN:Were going to talk about the DeWolf family, the largest slave-

trading family, in a moment.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN:Were going to be joined by one of the DeWolfs, Katrina Browne,

and how she traced the trade in her family. But I want to ask you about Princeton

University.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Sure. Princeton is, to me, one of the more interesting


5/7

of the schools. You know, theyre all distinct in some ways. But, you know, founded in

1746 and founded in a religiously radical tradition, evangelical tradition, Princeton

finds itself struggling in its early years. In 1768, it had just had a sequence of short

presidencies, two deathsincluding two deaths of the presidents. And they recruit the

Scottish minister John Witherspoon. One of the Princeton alumnithen the College

of New Jerseyis actually studying medicine in Edinburgh, and hes acting on behalf

of his college to recruit John Witherspoon of Paisley to come to New Jersey.Witherspoon eventually makes the decisionhe and his wife Elizabethto cross the

Atlantic and go to New Jersey.

And one of the things I argue in the book is that: What would make this successful

minister from Scotland attracted to a relatively unsuccessful college in a colony thats

actually not in fact a powerhouse in North America? And the answer is really the

extraordinary network, Scottish network in the Americas, the ways in which the

Witherspoon family, in particular, had reached out across the Americas and branched

out across the Americas and provided Witherspoon a way of actually securing and

stabilizing the College of New Jersey by exploiting these family and national

connections, the Scottish diaspora, in the Americas. And it included, particularly,

Scots who were moving into the Carolinas and Virginia, into the backcountry of

Virginia and the Carolinas, and into the Caribbean.

AMY GOODMAN:And what did that have to do with slavery?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:That means that actually what he ends up doing is sort

of pointing and looking south for new sources of students and money, as soon as he

arrives. In fact, shortly after he arrives, he publishes a missive to the West Indies, in

which he promises the planters of the British West Indies that their sons would be

better off in Princeton, New Jersey, which is intimate and close enough where the

faculty take very good care of the boys, rather than sending them to England, where

young men from the West Indies are known to be wealthy and get preyed upon by

people of loose morals and broad ambitions. So sending them to Princeton actually

would be better for them, but it would also be better for Princeton. And he makes

thishes not the only one to do this. I should point out that if you look at those

colleges that are founded in the mid-18th century, they all send ambassadors to the

West Indies in search of money and students.

AMY GOODMAN:Tell us about Betsey Stockton


AMY GOODMAN:who was enslaved by an early 19th century president of

Princeton.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Yeah, yeah. Stockton is actually thewas given to the

wife of that president as a gift when she was a younger woman, and then thethrough

marriage, actually comes into the household of Ashbel Green, the president of

Princetonwho ends up president of Princeton. He eventually emancipates her. He

also actually establishesand this is that tension between slavery and antislaveryhe

establishes a ministry with many of the people in the black community surrounding

Princeton. He emancipates her. She lives in the presidents house and continues to

work there, and actually becomes quite famous as a biblical scholar. She becomes


6/7

quite good at biblical geography, and noted

AMY GOODMAN:Spending most of her time in his library.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Yeah, yeahand noted for her geographic skills, her

biblical geographic skills. She then eventually becomes a schoolteacher in New York

and heads off to a mission to the Sandwich Islands, to Hawaii, where her skill with

language and religion become actually critical to the success of the mission. And so,

you have this person who is born enslaved and lives as an enslaved person on a college

campus, and then who leads this extraordinary life afterwards.

AMY GOODMAN:You also talk about race science.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Mm-hmm, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN:You talk about the search for cadavers for scientific research at

these universities.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Yeah, right, yeah. And one of the things I wanted to dowith the book was to try and explain both how slavery and the slave trade provided

the foundations for the rise of theof higher education in North America, but I also

wanted to explain the role that colleges played in perpetuating slavery and the slave

trade. And thats where you get to race science. Thats where race science becomes

critical, because its precisely on campus that the ideas that come to defend slavery in

the 19th century get refined. They get their intellectual legitimacy on campus. They

get their scientific sort of veneer on campus. And they get their moral credentialing on

campus.

And so, I wanted to trace that process. And one of the ugliest aspects of that is the use

of marginalized people in the Americas, in the United Statesits enslaved blackpeople, often Native Americans, and sometimes the Irishfor experimentation, the

bodies that were accessible as science rose. And science is rising in the 18th century in

part by turning dissection and anatomy into the new medical arts. But that requires

bodies. It requires people. In the British islands, that means youre often exploiting

Ireland. In North America, it means youre often taking advantage of people who have

no legal and moral protection upon their bodies: the enslaved.

AMY GOODMAN:Can you give an example?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Sure. Actually, at Dartmouth, the medical collegeit

would be unfair to say that the medical college begins with this moment, but the

teaching of science in Hanover begins when the physician to the president, the

founder of Dartmouth, Eleazar Wheelock, drags the body of an enslaved black man,

who is deceased, named Cato, to the back of his house and boils that body in an

enormous pot to free up the skeleton, to wire it up for instruction. That act is not

unusual. In fact, when the first medical colleges are established in North America in

the 1760sthe first is at the College of Philadelphia, which is now the University of

Pennylvania, and the second is at Kings College, which is now Columbiawhen those

institutions are founded, actually, theyre founded in partpart of what allows them

to be established is access to corpses, access to people to experiment upon. And, in

fact, its precisely the enslaved, the unfree and the marginalized who get forciblyvolunteered for that role.


7/7

AMY GOODMAN:Craig Steven Wilder, I want to ask you to stay with us. Were

going to trace one familys roots

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER:Sure, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN:to the largest slave-holding family in America, and Id like you

to comment on it and how it links to the universities of this country.


AMY GOODMAN:Craig Steven Wilder is the author ofEbony & Ivy: Race, Slavery,

and the Troubled History of Americas Universities. Oh, you can go to our website to

read the books prologueat democracynow.org. Professor Wilder teaches American

history at MIT. He also taught at Williams College, as well as Dartmouth. Stay with us.

Click hereto watch part 2 of this interview.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies

of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may beseparately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Shackles and Ivy

Documents

Transcript of Shackles and Ivy