Democracy Now! Daily Digest: A Daily
Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González – Friday, 29
November 2013
Stories:
Ebony and Ivy: The Secret History of How
Slavery Helped Build America's Elite Colleges
We spend the hour with the author of a
new book, 10 years in the making, that 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 America’s
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 they’re
actually located 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.
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 country’s major
universities—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Rutgers, Williams, the University
of North Carolina, to name just a few—are 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 America’s 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 to Democracy Now!
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Thank you very much.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about America’s 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 1769—fewer than 25 years, less than a quarter century—the
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. It’s precisely
the rise and the 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, let’s talk specifically
about particular universities.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Sure.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, you are—you 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: It’s a very Northern
story, actually. You know, when you think about the colonial world, until the
American Revolution, there’s actually only 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 they’re 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, who’s 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 it’s how he gets to
Cambridge. One is right after the Pequot War, the war in which the Puritans
defeat the Indians of southern Connecticut. There’s 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 it’s 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—
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah.
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 economic ties to
the South and the West Indies. And so, if you—one 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 everything—all the provisions that they needed to run the plantations.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to look at this
picture again.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Sure.
AMY GOODMAN: You’ve got Quincy. You’ve
got Everett. You’ve got—what 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 know—and 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 his slave, which was a person
given to him by his parish—he 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 influence—that they had
managed to achieve the kind of influence that they did—Sparks, 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, they—as one of their
chroniclers puts it, they come from the various towns to meet up, and they’re
followed by their menservants, or their slaves. The slave—the enslaved people
are actually at the founding of the institution. And once it’s established,
like most of the 18th century colleges—and especially by the 18th century as
the slave trade peaks—the 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
universities—and I think you talk about at Yale—say no to slaves?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yes, yes. Yeah,
there’s—at every moment that there’s a push toward slavery, there’s also
anti-slavery. There’s an anti-slavery tradition actually emerging from the 17th
century right through the 18th century. And much of it, because it’s an
intellectual movement, because it’s 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 Quincy’s administration, Charles Follen, the German historian—I’m
sorry, the German professor at Harvard, who was a rebel of the—in 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, that’s very
interesting. What you point out at places like Harvard is that a lot of the
endowments for the professor chairs—
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —come from the slave trade.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah. The
first—actually, 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 it’s 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 the—the 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 the Philadelphians and the New Yorkers were trying to catch
up.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk about
the DeWolf family, the largest slave-trading family, in a moment.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Sure, sure. Yeah,
yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re 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 of the schools. You know, they’re 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 deaths—including two deaths of the presidents. And they
recruit the Scottish minister John Witherspoon. One of the Princeton
alumni—then the College of New Jersey—is actually studying medicine in
Edinburgh, and he’s acting on behalf of his college to recruit John Witherspoon
of Paisley to come to New Jersey. Witherspoon eventually makes the decision—he
and his wife Elizabeth—to 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 that’s 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 this—he’s 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—
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —who was enslaved by an
early 19th century president of Princeton.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, yeah. Stockton
is actually the—was given to the wife of that president as a gift when she was
a younger woman, and then the—through marriage, actually comes into the
household of Ashbel Green, the president of Princeton—who ends up president of
Princeton. He eventually emancipates her. He also actually establishes—and this
is that tension between slavery and antislavery—he establishes a ministry with
many of the people in the black community surrounding Princeton. He emancipates
her. She lives in the president’s house and continues to work there, and
actually becomes quite famous as a biblical scholar. She becomes quite good at
biblical geography, and noted—
AMY GOODMAN: Spending most of her time in
his library.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, yeah—and 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 do with the book was to try and explain both
how slavery and the slave trade provided the foundations for the rise of the—of
higher education in North America, but I also wanted to explain the role that
colleges played in perpetuating slavery and the slave trade. And that’s where
you get to race science. That’s where race science becomes critical, because
it’s 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 States—its enslaved black people, often Native
Americans, and sometimes the Irish—for 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 you’re often
exploiting Ireland. In North America, it means you’re 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 college—it 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 1760s—the
first is at the College of Philadelphia, which is now the University of
Pennylvania, and the second is at King’s College, which is now Columbia—when
those institutions are founded, actually, they’re founded in part—part of what
allows them to be established is access to corpses, access to people to
experiment upon. And, in fact, it’s precisely the enslaved, the unfree and the
marginalized who get forcibly volunteered for that role.
AMY GOODMAN: Craig Steven Wilder is the
author of Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s
Universities . Oh, you can go to our website to read the book’s prologue at
democracynow.org. Professor Wilder teaches American history at MIT. He also
taught at Williams College, as well as Dartmouth. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!,
democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn to part
two of our discussion with Craig Steven Wilder, author of a new book. It’s
called Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s
Universities. It’s an astounding book.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about where you began
it. I mean, you’re a professor of American history, Professor Wilder, at MIT
right now.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: But you taught at Williams,
you taught at Dartmouth.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Dartmouth.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Dartmouth, actually,
it was one of the more interesting cases. I started the book when I got to
Dartmouth in 2002. And as I said, you know, it was supposed to be a tiny little
article on how black abolitionists became professionals. How do you become a
minister, a doctor, a teacher, in a nation where you can’t go to college? And
so, the African Americans who oppose slavery actually have this big push into
the professions, but they actually are excluded from colleges and universities.
And so, one of the things that intrigued me, and particularly because I was at
Dartmouth at the time, was the fact that Native Americans had been on campus,
for 200 years by then. Native American students had been on campus for 200
years. And that suggests, in fact, when you say it that way, that Native
Americans were somehow privileged, which we know is wrong. And so it really
requires a rethinking of the college itself, the role of the college in the
colonial world.
And in many ways, I think Dartmouth was a
perfect example of what I ended up arguing in the book, that we have to think
of colleges as animate, as actors in the colonial world and in the creation of
the nation that we know. Eleazar Wheelock, the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, who
arrives in Hanover—after he gets his charter in 1769, he arrives several months
later with eight enslaved black people, including a baby. He has more slaves
than he has faculty. He has more slaves than active trustees. He has more
slaves—if you do an honest accounting, he probably has more slaves than he has
students. And by that time, although he spent most of his life as a missionary
to Native Americans—and the college is founded, and certainly its supporters
believe that he’s continuing the Native American ministry—in fact, Native
American students had been relegated to what was basically a grammar school.
And Wheelock was in the process of building a college for white students. And
like a lot of colleges that took money for Native American evangelization, a
lot of that money actually ends up going to support white students and
transform them into missionaries and ministers.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, explain that. I don’t
think people quite understand that these universities would go out to raise
money.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: And they would raise it by
saying, "We’re educating Native Americans."
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And it wasn’t only
Dartmouth.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Particularly in the
18th century, in the decades before the American Revolution, in the 20 years
before the American Revolution, the colleges launched endless appeals and
campaigns to Europe, but particularly to Britain, in search of dollars. At one
point in the book, I point out that they’re literally bumping into each other
in London soliciting wealthy donors, and ofter under the claim that they were
educating Native Americans. Samuel Johnson, the founding president of King’s
College, which is now Columbia, has a great exchange which highlights this, in
which he proposes educating some Indian children from the Six Nations, the
Iroquois Confederacy, and sends out a loose letter about this, and then quickly
withdraws the idea because it’s just too hard to do. He’s not really interested
in educating Indian children, but he is interested in making that appeal. And
very often the colleges are sending ambassadors to Europe, in particular, under
the claim that they’ll be evangelizing Indians. That begins really in the early
17th century with the very first of the British colleges, Harvard.
AMY GOODMAN: What happened at Harvard?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Well, the sending
off appeals to England claiming to and championing the evangelization of Native
Americans. In 1649, the New England Company is established, and it’s a
missionary corporation, which actually becomes a model for later missionary
corporations like the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign
Parts. But throughout the 17th century, one of the continuing themes of
Harvard—the charter has changed to include Native American education as part of
the mission. The first brick building on Harvard Yard is the Indian College.
And I—
AMY GOODMAN: The first building in
Harvard Yard—
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: The first brick
building—the first brick building is actually the Indian College. And I point
out in the book that, you know, you can raise money hand over fist in Europe
for Indian evangelization. And these stories of radical Christians transforming
native people into religious perfectionists, into models of Christian virtue, are
actually, you know, just being eaten up in Europe.
AMY GOODMAN: Why in Europe?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Well, I think in
part because there’s a real use of Native Americans in—there’s a way in which
Native Americans have now captured the European mind: exotic people of a
different color and kind who both perplex and intrigue Europeans. And so you
get a lot of conversation about the origins of native people, where they come
from, how you explain them. You know, there’s a tremendous attempt to reconcile
their existence in the Americas with biblical narrative, and then to missionize
them.
AMY GOODMAN: And these people, who are
presidents of these universities, from Dartmouth to Harvard, are ministers.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, they’re
ministers, and they’re often missionaries.
AMY GOODMAN: And they have slaves.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: And they often have
slaves, and they’re—they’ve often been Indian missionaries. So Wheelock has
spent much of his—
AMY GOODMAN: The first president of
Dartmouth.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: The first president
of Dartmouth has spent much of his life as an Indian missionary. But he’s also
run a side business buying and selling people for labor, so that enslaved black
people have been part of his life’s work from his earliest years.
AMY GOODMAN: How did you feel about this,
Craig Steven Wilder, at Dartmouth yourself teaching, doing this research?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: This slow,
uncomfortable realization that you’re part of this world with this very broad,
deep, painful history is, to say the very least, awkward. It was—it also became
an intellectual challenge for me: How do I tell that story? And how do I get
that story to an audience and get them to understand its meaning, what it means
for us today and what it meant for us then? And so, I think, in some ways, as a
historian it’s probably easier to deal with that realization, because we have
the tools for then wrestling with it.
AMY GOODMAN: Did they ever try to get you
to stop telling this story?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: No, no. Actually
they didn’t. And I have to give everyone a lot of credit. You know, one of the
great things that happened is, you know, early in my career at Dartmouth I gave
a talk on a part of the book that—what’s now a small part of the book, you
know, and the president of Dartmouth at the time, Jim Wright, was sitting in
the front row of that talk and gave me a great handshake and a hug afterwards.
And, you know, I often tell the story of
going into archives to do the research for this book, from the Carolinas and
Virginia to eastern Canada and Scotland. And when I first started, I was
somewhat cautious about what I would say, you know, when they ask you on those
forms, "What are you studying?" And so, I would say vague things like
18th century education or colonial schools. And as the archivists and
librarians sort of—as I got to know them and they found out more about what I
was doing, one of the really wonderful things that happened is not only were
they quite supportive of the project, but they often in fact introduced me to
and brought me material that I would never have known was in the archives.
Sometimes they sort of slipped it to me across the table as if they were doing
something wrong, but they—
AMY GOODMAN: What were—
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: —were always supportive.
They were always warm.
AMY GOODMAN: What were some of your great
discoveries there?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: I think, you know,
the presidents who owned slaves, what happened to those enslaved people during
their lives. You know, at William & Mary, one of the early founders actually
ends up killing a child.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain that story.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: He orders—
AMY GOODMAN: Who was it?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: It’s Reverend Grey,
and he orders a child to be beaten. And the child is beaten so severely that he
later dies. The—his parish actually basically pays him in tobacco to leave. And
that was one of the sort of really quite difficult moments in writing the book,
because there’s a way to tell that story, but it’s a difficult story to tell.
And there’s something to be known about the nature of colleges in there, the
nature of the colonial world in there.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean there’s a
way to tell that story?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Well, I think
there’s a way to tell that, meaning that, you know, the—part of my job as a
historian is to make that story available to people, to explain it, and to let
them understand how that moment comes into being. And it’s one of many in which
children actually play a role in the book, because one of the patterns that I
had noticed as I was doing this research over years was just the number of
children who were owned by college presidents required some kind of
explanation, when you really think about how many of them had made specific
requests for children.
AMY GOODMAN: Go through them.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: And so I end
up—well, let—you know, let’s think of some. Ezra Stiles, who’s the president of
Yale during the American Revolution, earlier, as a Newport minister, purchases
a child, a boy, named Newport, in Newport, Rhode Island. He’s a Rhode Island
minister before he becomes president of Yale. And then he emancipates Newport
on the day before he becomes president of Yale, before he enters the
president’s house. Jonathan Edwards purchases a girl—I believe he names her
Venus—in Rhode Island.
AMY GOODMAN: And Jonathan Edwards is?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Is—becomes the
president of Princeton. He is earlier an Indian missionary in Connecticut, a
rather fantastic career as an evangelical minister and one of the leading
evangelicals of the 18th century, probably most famous for the founding
evangelical sermon, as it’s often called, "Sinners in the Hands of an
Angry God." Edwards purchases a girl. The—at Dartmouth, Wheelock owns
children. The trustees at Harvard are actually demanding children. Increase
Mather gets a boy when he’s president of Harvard.
And I needed to explain this phenomenon,
and so one of the things I looked at was I really tried to examine the history
around that decision-making process. And in the book, I point out that it has a
lot to do with the rising fear of slave revolts in the 18th century colonies
and the belief that children would be more easily socialized into slavery and
less likely to revolt. And so you end up with these extraordinarily descriptive
requests for slaves, the absentee planters of the West Indies who are living up
in Massachusetts writing back to their overseers with very exact descriptions
of the age, gender and type of personality that they want in a slave. You know,
one writes that "I lost my boy," meaning he died, "and I want to
replace him with another." And therefore you also end up with a slave
trade, an Atlantic slave trade, which deals in human beings, but about 20
percent of whom are children.
And I explore one of those voyages in the
book, in which dozens of children, some as young as two and three years old,
are being held captive on board and die during the journey. And that’s a
Livingston investment, the Livingstons who go on to become the funders of the
first professorship, endowed professorship, at Yale, founders of Columbia and
trustees at Princeton and at Rutgers.
AMY GOODMAN: Rutgers, you haven’t talked
much about.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us a little about
Rutgers.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: You know, the—it’s a
fascinating institution for a lot of reasons. And the original Queen’s College,
which is a Dutch Reformed college, the Dutch colonists are establishing their
own institution, and it’s, as we all know, really quite close to the College of
New Jersey, Princeton, and Princeton is originally founded in the eastern part
of the state over by Newark and then drifts over, and the governor, Governor
Belcher, actually helps it eventually settle in Princeton, New Jersey. And—but,
in fact, actually, one of the things that happened is there’s a lot of pressure
from the College of New Jersey, from Princeton, for the Queen’s College,
Rutgers, to actually fold in. But, in fact, the denominational allegiances are
too strong for that, so the Presbyterians remain at New Jersey, Princeton, and
the Dutch Reformed at Rutgers.
One of their earliest presidents, [Jacob]
Hardenbergh, the Reverend Hardenbergh at Queen’s College, manages to purchase
slaves despite the fact that the college is doing quite poorly. You know,
Queen’s is so financially strapped that it closes multiple times in its early
history, and for long periods. But on the eve of one of its first closures,
when it just has to shut down and stop operations, Reverend Hardenbergh manages
to buy a second slave for his household. And what does that tell us about
colleges in the 18th century? One of the things that it should remind us is
that colleges survived on the margins in the 18th century. You know, they were
constantly seeking sources of funding. And the most obvious and immediate
sources of funding were the rising wealthy traders of the big port cities,
dominated by the slave traders, and then the planters of the South and the West
Indies who had both cash and children but very few schools. As one historian of
the British West Indies puts it very nicely, the British West Indies actually
didn’t need colleges because of mainland North America. And there are very few
institutions of higher education, or even secondary education, established in
the West Indies during the colonial period, because those planters could sent
their sons to Europe or to North America, the mainland.
AMY GOODMAN: And how does the Civil War
play into this? Because you have all these Northerners who owned slaves, but
they not only owned slaves, they run institutions that justify slavery.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Sure.
AMY GOODMAN: It really challenges the
whole notion of the Civil War—the North against, the South for, and so you fight
over the evil of slavery.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: And I argue in the
book that one of the things that Northerners contribute to the—Northern
intellectuals contribute in the decades before the war is the attempt to
establish a common ground between the North and South, an intellectual solution
to the crisis over slavery as that crisis boils up. And they actually manage to
claim a new public position in this role. I argue in the book that actually
what allows the college to become—the university to become what we know today,
an independent, influential actor in public affairs, rather than an offshoot of
churches, which is what they are in the colonial period, right—what allows them
to break free of the church and establish themselves and their own prestige in
the public arena is the ability to articulate a new vision of the United
States, a new future for the United States. But it’s premised on racial
science. It’s premised upon a claim that academics, intellectuals, can make a
better, more informed, truer argument about the future of the nation and the
question of slavery. And they use race science to make that claim. And so, in
the final chapter of the book, I look at the overrepresentation of academics,
of college professors and college presidents, in racial cleansing movements.
AMY GOODMAN: Like?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Like the American
Colonization Society, which is established in 1817, originally with the aim of
removing free black people from the United States to some place outside of
North America. In 1822, the Liberia colony is established and named.
AMY GOODMAN: You mean the country in
Africa, Liberia—
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Right, Liberia.
AMY GOODMAN: —where—
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Where free black
people are to be transported to. And they’re also overrepresented in the
debates about Indian removal in the South. And they’re overrepresented, I point
out in the book, in debates about and the process of establishing missions to
convert Jews living in the United States or fund their removal from the United
States. And when you put it all together, what you end up with is this
extraordinary vision of the United States as a white Christian society,
racially cleansed and racially purified. But what that actually means is race
becomes the common ground between North and South. Academics, and Northern
academics in particular, begin to articulate a vision for the future of the
United States as a racially purified society, where slavery could continue to
exist as long as it was contained and as long as it served the interest of the
white South. But the goal of the nation, the future of the nation, the vision
of the nation, would be a white Christian society.
AMY GOODMAN: One image you have in the
book is from 1826. It’s a flier, and it’s Washington College, now Washington
and Lee, advertising, quote, "Negroes For Hire." It says,
"Twenty Likely Negroes belonging to WASHINGTON COLLEGE, consisting of Men,
Women, Boys and Girls, many of them very valuable," will be hired out for
the year. Explain the significance of this ad.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: This is one of the
institutions—and there are many of them—that owned slaves, owned slaves and
used their labor to run the campus, to take care of the faculty and the
students, and then in—as the seasonal demand for enslaved people changed,
further profited off of them by leasing them out and leasing out extra
laborers. We can think about this in a number of ways. Washington and Lee,
William & Mary in Virginia, in a single year at one point in its early
history, purchased 17 people for the campus. The University of North
Carolina—and then in the North, you have something similar. Eleazar Wheelock,
the founder of Dartmouth, as I said, you know, shows up with eight enslaved
people, and so that enslaved people are the—in some ways, the majority
population on the rough early campus of Dartmouth College.
And for a lot of people doing this kind
of work, studying the relationship between colleges and universities, I think
there’s been this look for the sort of smoking gun. And the smoking gun is
always—it seems to me to be, what they’re looking for is whether or not the
institution owned slaves. Well, lots of them do. But when their presidents do,
they effectively do. And when the—when the professors own slaves, the institution
effectively owns slaves.
AMY GOODMAN: And the students?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: And the students
bring slaves to campus. You know, George Washington’s son, Jacky Custis, his
stepson, Washington nixes the idea of sending him to William & Mary
because—
AMY GOODMAN: Washington himself didn’t go
to college.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, right, he
didn’t go to college. And General Washington doesn’t want to send Jacky to
William & Mary because Jacky already has bad habits, and he thinks his
habits will get worse among the sons of the elite planters in Virginia. And so,
he brings him up to New York and enrolls him at King’s College, what’s now
Columbia. And Columbia is glad to have him, in part because this creates
another entrance to the wealthy planters of the South and a new way of making
new ties with a new group of students and potential donors and enrollments. But
what’s fascinating is that, you know, Washington shows up in New York with his
stepson and his stepson’s slave Joe. Joe actually also comes to campus. And the
president of Columbia at the time, Myles Cooper, outfits Jacky with a suite of
rooms that then he has—that Jacky has painted and readied for himself, and Joe
is basically occupying what’s basically a large closet in one of the rooms.
That’s not unusual. You know, at William
& Mary, probably about 10 percent of the students in the 1760s brought
slaves with them to campus. And there are examples—you know, there are other
examples people are actually looking at right now, other scholars, of these same
phenomena, North and South.
AMY GOODMAN: In all of your research,
what were you most shocked by?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: I think, honestly,
the thing that most shocked me, there are these moments where you—you wrestle
with difficult questions. You know, certainly when you’re seeing—when I was
doing the work on the slave ship, The Wolf, which the Livingstons send out to
the African coast and which takes, you know—
AMY GOODMAN: And Livingston is tied to
Yale.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, Livingston is
tied to Yale, to Columbia, to Princeton and to Rutgers.
AMY GOODMAN: And the ship is called?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: The Wolf.
AMY GOODMAN: And it is sent to?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: It’s sent to the
African coast on a slaving mission that takes basically a year and a half, an
extraordinarily long time. The ship has—the captain has a hard time actually
purchasing enough captives to get a full complement, as his surgeon will say,
and so he’s holding people below deck for months as he hops between these
various ports on the African coast attempting to purchase more people. A lot of
the people on board, a lot of the captives on board, are actually small
children. And so, you know, this is a voyage in which the surgeon actually goes
through—the ship’s surgeon goes through a series of emotional crises himself,
which he records in his diary. Babies are dying, two and three years old. He’s
doing autopsies on them to try and figure out why they’re dying. He’s finding,
you know, that they’re dying of the flux. They’re dying—they have worms, some
12 inches long. It’s a horrific tale. The—
AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t people rise up on the
ship?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, there’s actually
an attempted slave revolt on board before the ship departs. More people
actually die on the return journey across the Atlantic. And when they arrive
back in New York and the Livingstons put them up for sale, they’ve probably
ended up killing as many people as they’ve sold.
AMY GOODMAN: So it was about 200 people,
or a little less, on board to begin with.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, right.
AMY GOODMAN: There’s like 88 or something
left.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, and the
population drops significantly. But the number of people who are killed just
along the African coast is just astounding and disturbing. And I want to
remember, as I sort of, you know, retell that story in the book, that for me
that’s probably the hardest and most shocking thing, but it’s shocking for all
of us. You know, it’s—I’m not making a sort of proprietary claim upon, you
know, emotional outrage to that kind of historical event. And so, the thing
that probably shocked me most was that you have those moments where you just,
as a historian, have to find a way to tell a gruesome story, because that story
is necessary to understanding in three dimensions this moment in time. But even
more shocking was how many of those stories there are. You know, you can find a
version of that story for every college that’s established in the colonial
world. You’re playing basically two degrees of separation from some horrific
slaving voyage.
AMY GOODMAN: Craig Steven Wilder, I want
to ask you to stay with us. We’re going to trace one family’s roots—
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Sure, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —to the largest
slave-holding family in America, and I’d like you to comment on it and how it
links to the universities of this country.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Sure.
AMY GOODMAN: Craig Steven Wilder is the
author of Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s
Universities .
---
Filmmaker Uncovers Her Family's Shocking
Slave-Trading History, Urges Americans to Explore Own Roots
As we continue our conversation on
slavery, we are joined by a woman who uncovered that her ancestors were the
largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. Katrina Browne documented her
roots in the film, "Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep
North," which revealed how her family, based in Rhode Island, was once the
largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. After the film aired on PBS in
2008, Browne went on to found the Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of
Slavery. We speak to Browne and Craig Steven Wilder, author of the new book,
"Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s
Universities."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not
be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: As we continue our
conversation on slavery, we’re joined by a woman who uncovered that her
ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. Katrina Browne
is with us. She documented her roots in the film Traces of the Trade: A Story
from the Deep North.
KATRINA BROWNE: One day my grandmother
traced back. I was in seminary when I got a booklet in the mail that she wrote
for all her grandchildren. She shared our family history—all the happy days.
She also explained that the first DeWolf, Mark Anthony, came to Bristol as a
sailor in 1744. And then she wrote, "I haven’t stomach enough to describe
the ensuing slave trade!"
What hit me hard was the realization that
I already knew this—knew, but somehow buried it along the way. What no one in
my family realized was that the DeWolfs were with the largest slave-trading
family in U.S. history. They brought over 10,000 Africans to the Americas in
chains. Half a million of their descendants could be alive today.
AMY GOODMAN: A clip from Traces of the
Trade: A Story from the Deep North, narrated, produced and directed by Katrina
Browne. After the film aired on PBS’s POV in 2008, she went on to found the
Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery to inspire dialogue and
active response to this history and its many legacies. Katrina Browne now joins
us from Washington, D.C. And still with us, MIT Professor Craig Steven Wilder,
author of the new book, Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History
of America’s Universities.
Katrina, take us from there. You
discover, though you say you knew, some kind of primal secret, what your
family—how significant the DeWolfs were in slave trading.
KATRINA BROWNE: It’s—in our family case,
it’s a bit of a stand-in for the region as a whole, because I heard things as a
child, but I didn’t allow them to sink in, because it’s so—it’s basically
cognitive dissonance, I would say, for white Northerners to think that we have
any relationship to slavery, because we’re so much—I think all of us— raised
and educated in our schools to believe the South were the bad guys and the
North were the—Northerners were the heroes. So, it was hard to comprehend and
shocking to discover as I dug more into it.
And because of this larger untold story
of the role of the North, I decided to produce a documentary. And what we did
was basically I invited relatives to join me on a journey to retrace the
triangle trade of our ancestors. And nine brave cousins came with me, and we
went to Rhode Island and then Ghana and Cuba, where the DeWolfs owned
plantations, in that pattern that Professor Wilder was talking about of, even
after slavery was abolished in the North, even after the slave trade itself was
abolished in the North, folks like the DeWolfs continued to be invested in
slavery through actual plantations in the Caribbean—in their case, Cuba—as well
as through that carrying trade of provisioning the islands and the American
South.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to another clip
of Traces of the Trade. You and your relatives, as you said, go to Ghana.
You’ve just visited the dark, dank rooms where Africans were kept until they
were sold and loaded onto ships. This is your relative, Tom DeWolf, describing
his reaction.
TOM DEWOLF: The thing that I guess
strikes me more than anything right now is that we’ve talked, when we were in
Bristol and we were in Providence and were listening to historians and
scholars, and we’ve heard people talk about, you know, "You’ve got to place
it in the context of the times," and, "This is the way things were
done," and "This is how, you know, life was." And I just—I sit
in that dungeon, and I say, "[bleep]. It was an evil thing, and they knew
it was an evil thing, and they did it anyway." And I couldn’t have said
that before—before tonight.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to another clip
from Traces of the Trade, when you and your relatives visit Bristol, Rhode
Island, where the DeWolf family lived and operated their slave trade. In this
scene, you’re visiting with local historians.
KATRINA BROWNE: The more historians we
talk to, the more sobering it got.
KEVIN JORDAN: The slave trade, you’ve got
to remember, is not just a few people taking a boat and sending it out.
Everyone in town lived off slavery—the boat makers, the ironworkers who made
the shackles, the coopers who made the barrels to hold the rum, the distillers
who took the molasses and sugar and made it into rum. So, literally the whole
town was dependent on the slave trade.
JOANNE POPE MELISH: All of the North was
involved. All these cities and towns along the coast—Salem, Boston, Providence,
New London, New Haven, New York, and the rural areas around them—either traded
slaves or manufactured goods or raised farm products for the slave trade.
AMY GOODMAN: That was historian Joanne
Pope Melish in a clip from Traces of the Trade. Katrina Browne, some members of
your family went on this journey with you. You were also shunned by others.
Where has this taken you? I mean, this is not, as you point out, just any
family involved with slavery, although that’s unbelievable to say in itself,
it’s the—your family is the largest slave-trading family in the United States,
and it’s in the North.
KATRINA BROWNE: Yeah, so, you know, it
wouldn’t shock you or listeners to hear that there was obviously a great deal
of anxiety and discomfort and nervousness about the idea of publicizing our
family history. And I think one of the things I’ve come to appreciate is the
depth of the emotions that get in the way for white Americans more broadly, not
just our family. We’re an extreme case, but I think it’s a—it’s a sort of an
example of a larger pattern, which is that defensiveness, fear, guilt, shame,
those emotions get in our way both from really confronting the history and
coming to appreciate the vast extent of sort of the tentacles of the
institution of slavery and how fundamental it was to the birth and success of
our nation and to paving the way for the waves of immigrants that came
subsequently.
So, you know, discomfort looking at that
history, but then also, obviously, discomfort around grappling with the
implications for today and really coming to grips with that. And I hear so many
black Americans say, you know, "We’re not trying to guilt-trip you. Quit
taking it so personally. We just want you white folks to show up for the work,
together with us, of repairing those harms that, you know, continue to plague
this country." So, I’ve noticed how I’ve gone from, like, you know,
extreme kind of major guilt reaction upon learning this about my family and my
region to a more grounded and, I would say, mature and calmer ability to take
stock of the inheritance that I think—you know, we’re an extreme case, again,
but it provides a view into what I think all white Americans need to look at in
terms of those legacies of white privilege and whatnot.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Katrina, what is your
family’s, the DeWolf family’s, relation to Brown? Of course, your last name is
Browne. But Brown University, of course, they’re based in Rhode Island. I know
the DeWolf—one of the DeWolfs wrote the alma mater of Brown.
KATRINA BROWNE: The—so, I’m Browne with
an E, so it is a different Brown. But, yeah, James DeWolf, who was one of the
more prominent slave traders in the DeWolf family, apprenticed with John Brown,
who was a slave trader, and they both ended up in Congress and worked together
to help preserve the slave trade, to help protect the Rhode Island slave trade
and all kind of—you know, in cahoots even with President Thomas Jefferson around
some of that. It’s a longer story. But in any case, the economy of Rhode Island
was steeped in the slave trade. It was actually—it usually shocks people to
hear that Rhode Island was the leading slave-trading state in the country, you
know, not South Carolina or Virginia. So—and that leads to the founding of the
university and some of the early funds for Brown University.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting
that Ruth Simmons, who was the former president of Brown, great-granddaughter
of slaves, first African-American president of any Ivy League university,
also—and I want to bring Craig Wilder back into this conversation—commissioned
the first Ivy League study of her university—
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Mm-hmm, right.
AMY GOODMAN: —Brown University’s
connection to slavery. Professor Wilder?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: I think this is
actually a critical moment in American history. And throughout the process of
sort of talking about the book, one of the things I’ve constantly returned to
is her decision in 2003 to commission a study of Brown’s relationship to the
slave trade. And this happened for a number of reasons. You know, there was a
blow-up at Yale at its 300th anniversary about Yale’s relationship to the slave
trade, which became quite controversial. That also helped spark rumors about
other institutions. And the public secret of Brown’s relationship became even
more pronounced and lively when she became president, when the first non-white
president of an Ivy League institution took office. It was tremendous—it took
tremendous courage to make that decision. The report in 2006 is an
extraordinary example of moral leadership, of how we actually get this
conversation happening.
And as Ms. Browne was saying about the
documentary, one of the things I think is fascinating about both President
Simmons’ decision, the subsequent report and the public reaction to it is that
much of the hostility and fear that people had anticipated, the problems that
they had anticipated when the report and the commission were first announced,
actually didn’t really materialize. And if you look at the recent history of
the way in which we have engaged with the question of slavery in America’s
past—the Brown report, documentaries like Traces of the Trade, the New York
Historical Society’s exhibit on slavery in New York, the anniversary of the end
of the slave trade in England—one of the things I found fascinating is that it
provides extraordinary evidence that the public is ready for a difficult
conversation, that in many ways we tend to underestimate the capacity of people
to really deal with, and their desire to deal with, these problems.
When her cousin, I believe it is, in the
documentary was saying that—you know, reacting to the slave-trading port and
this material culture of the slave trade that’s surrounding him, one of the
things I like to remember—remind people is that the things that white Americans
find difficult and horrific, that generate feelings of guilt and fear, are also
actually troubling and horrific and difficult for black Americans. And in that
very fact, there’s the possibility of a real, genuine and useful conversation
about slavery and American society. I think we’re moving toward that. We’re
moving there slowly, but we are getting there. And I think the public is
actually ahead of the rest of us at times. I think the media tends to be more
conservative and afraid of these discussions than the public are. And if you
look at the tremendous, you know, crowds that showed up for those exhibits, you
actually see evidence of that.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for
being with us. Craig Steven Wilder, his new book is Ebony & Ivy: Race,
Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. He’s a professor
of American history at MIT. I also want to thank Katrina Browne, producer and
director of the documentary, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North.
-------
HEADLINES:
-------
Mail Us: Democracy
Now!
207 W. 25th St., Floor 11
New York, NY 10001 United States
Call Us: +1
(212) 431-9090
Fax Us: +1
(212) 431-8858
-------
No comments:
Post a Comment