Ebony and Ivy (13 page)

John Witherspoon spent virtually all of his first forty-five years in a narrow corridor, roughly seventy miles of the Scottish Lowlands, stretching from Fife on the east coast to Paisley on the west, where he acquired his education and ministerial experience. He watched as the Atlantic merchants gilded cities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh, transforming their universities, their populations, and their prospects. He took account of Scottish and Scots-Irish emigrants, including his own relatives, pouring from Britain into
the Americas. The political philosopher Adam Smith was born the same year as Witherspoon, also in the Lowlands. Smith attended the University of Glasgow while Witherspoon enrolled at St. Andrews. Witherspoon then headed to Edinburgh and Smith to distant Oxford. Smith became professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow. Witherspoon took the pulpit of the church in neighboring Paisley. Atlantic slavery and the British imperial system framed their intellectual and professional lives. “Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to,” Smith protested against the enslavement of Africans by the “sordid master(s)” of Europe. He treated the subject again when he argued the economic irrationality of slavery in his
Wealth of Nations
. By that time, Witherspoon had chosen a radically different course: he had emigrated to the Americas to become a college president, a minor colonial proprietor, a slave owner, and a supplicant of the planter class.
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Nassau Hall at the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University
SOURCE: Library of Congress

In 1768 Benjamin Rush visited the home of Elizabeth Montgomery Witherspoon to convince her to let her husband take charge of the struggling College of New Jersey (Princeton). The young Pennsylvanian was in Scotland finishing his medical degree at the University of Edinburgh when the passing of President Samuel Finley left his alma mater in turmoil. Rush was a frequent dinner guest at the Witherspoons'. He believed the minister predisposed to moving to the Americas, but Elizabeth Witherspoon was not excited about the colonies. Rev. Witherspoon declined the offer more than once and even nominated other clergy for the presidency. “I think the College of New-Jersey would flourish, as much under him as ever it has done under any of his Predecessors,” Rush assured a fellow graduate, praising the Scottish minister's fine manners, nimble mind, and broad intellectual interests. He compared Witherspoon to the two prior presidents: “He appears to be Mr. [Samuel] Davies and Dr. [Samuel] Finley united in one man.” Rush was delighted that Rev. Witherspoon commanded the pulpit and preached without resorting to a written text for his sermons. The student's enthusiasm helped sway the Witherspoons. John Witherspoon resigned his church in Paisley, began raising money for their journey and for the college, sold his home, and prepared to depart. Several local families accompanied him. “I believe you must look out for an Island to settle a Colony[,] 4 or 5 families seem determined to go,” the incoming president jested.
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That was no fantasy. An extended family that reached across Britain's colonial empire prepared the way for Witherspoon's journey to North America and inspired new strategies for rescuing the College of New Jersey.

Catholics dominated higher education in the first two centuries of the European invasion of the America, but Harvard enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the wealthy inhabitants of the Protestant colonies. Even the founding of academies in Virginia and Connecticut did
little to break the Cambridge college's grip on the American elite. William and Mary operated as a regional college, and Yale lacked the facilities, staff, and connections to seriously rival Harvard.

The first potential challenge came from the West Indies. In 1710 General Christopher Codrington's bequest for a West Indian college was transferred to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG)—a London-based missionary corporation chartered by William III in 1701—to supply the British colonies with orthodox ministers. Queen Anne's governor general in the Leeward Islands, Codrington had arranged for the SPG to receive perpetual funding from the labor of hundreds of enslaved black people.

I give and bequeath my two Plantations in the Island of Barbados to the Society for the propagation of the Christian Religion in Foreign parts erected and established by my late Good master King William the third, and my Desire is to have the Plantations Continued Entire and three hundred negroes at Least always Kept thereon, and a Convenient Number of Professors and Scholars maintain'd.

The SPG held title to the plantations, people, and money. Christopher Codrington had designated funds to establish a college in Barbados. That endowment included more than three hundred enslaved black people on two estates totaling eight hundred acres. The general also left large gifts to Oxford University, his alma mater, to support its faculty, students, and religious missions.
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The Codrington experiment drew attention in New England and Britain. George Berkeley, the Anglican dean of Derry, Ireland, doubted that such a plan could work. An advisor to and supporter of several American schools, including Harvard, Yale, and, later, King's (Columbia), Berkeley had visions of establishing his own colonial academy. Burdened by “so much wealth and luxury,” Barbados, he predicted, would ruin a college. Just provisioning faculty and scholars would be prohibitively expensive on an island where virtually every inch of soil had been turned to commercial agriculture under slave labor and where food and other necessities were generally imported. Money and privilege had corroded the
morals of the island Christians, who would be unsuitable neighbors for students. Rev. Berkeley warned that such proximity to crass commercialism “might tempt the readers or fellows of the college to become merchants, to the neglect of their proper business.”
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Hugh Hall Jr., a Barbadian who attended Harvard, confirmed many of Berkeley's suspicions. He returned to the island to discover that there was little for a Renaissance man to do. The son of a judge and councilor, Hall was sent at age seven to live with his grandmother in Boston. In 1713 he graduated from Harvard and took a master's degree three years later. His father then called on him to apprentice in the family's merchant house. In 1718 the younger Hall wrote his British factors confirming his successful entrance into the slave trade: “We have sold ye Number of Seventy one Negroes, of which Forty three are Men, seven Woemen, Fifteen Boys, & Six Girls; whose whole Amount is Nineteen Hundred & thirty five Pounds.” Smallpox and dysentery reduced the number of survivors and lessened their value, he confessed, although the investment still proved profitable. Hall soon returned to Boston, where he built a thriving merchant house, continued slave trading, and administered his Barbadian plantations. “Several very likely Young Negro's of each Sex just Arrived to be Sold by Mr. Hugh Hall[,] Merchant, on Credit, with Good Security,” reads a May 1728 advertisement in the
New-England Weekly Journal
. Customers who came to his warehouse could also buy West Indian rum, sugar, and goods from Europe.
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Several Harvard alumni and officers purchased slaves from other graduates of the college in a fairly cozy commercial network. Hall moved slaves into New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the South. For more than twenty years Thomas Hubbard of Boston served as treasurer of Harvard. A 1721 graduate, Hubbard invested routinely in slaving voyages and sold “fine young Negro Boys and Girls; also Cotton Wool and Old West India Rum” from his Summer Street home. “Sale of Three Negroes, Eight barrels of Sugar & one h[ogs] h[ea]d of Rum,” Hall recorded in one journal entry during a year in which he sold scores of black people from Barbados alone. The Reverand Benjamin Colman bought Frank, an enslaved man from Barbados, through Hugh Hall. Rev. Colman served nearly fifty years as an overseer of Harvard. He was also minister of the Brattle
Street Church and a governor of the New England Company. The fellows chose Colman to succeed John Leverett as president of Harvard, but the legislature declined to ratify his appointment over concerns about his religious orthodoxy.
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Hugh Hall, Barbadian native, Harvard alumnus, and
prosperous slave trader
SOURCE: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Although half of the graduates of the earliest colleges became ministers, that fact had little impact upon the pattern of alumni slaveholding. Northeastern parishes routinely gave black people to ministers, and divines bought and sold human beings, distributed slaves in their wills, advertised for runaways, and sold people at auction. A 1698 graduate, the Reverend Thomas Symmes, recorded the births of four enslaved people in his house. In the decade beginning in 1701, Harvard graduated at least twenty young men who became ministers and masters, virtually all of whom took pulpits in New England. Slaveholding clergy occupied some of the
most influential churches in the colonies, including several in Boston, Charlestown, and Cambridge.
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Harvard-trained divines often dabbled in mastery. “His kindliness took such forms as the spending of hours in teaching his negro slaves, some of them raw from the Guinea Coast,” a biographer noted of Benjamin Colman; however, that benevolence “did not prevent his advertizing them for sale ‘on reasonable terms.'” In 1709, two years after his graduation, Thomas Prince boarded the
Thomas and Elizabeth
for a journey to Barbados. Prince was horrified by his first glimpse of Caribbean slavery. The Africans were “all absolute slaves, till kind Death … [wrenched the]m out of ye hands of Tyrannick masters” who had brazenly deprived black people of any chance at salvation or thoughts of a future independent of their owners'. Minister of South Church in Boston and a historian of New England, Prince possessed a thorough understanding of the intimate economic connections between New England and the British West Indies. Still, on August 9, 1729, Rev. Prince bought Ocraqua, an enslaved African carried to Boston on one of Hall's ships. The York minister Samuel Moody, a 1697 graduate, received a black woman as a gift from his congregation. The parishioners rethought the propriety of that gesture a year later and sold her for a male slave who could serve in the minister's house without raising suspicions. Rev. Moody also owned Dinah, an enslaved Indian woman.
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Harvard's West Indian ties paralleled New England's commercial and social connections to the British Caribbean. Dorothy Saltonstall and her husband, John Frizell, gave Harvard hundreds of pounds from a fortune built in the Barbados trade. Born in Windsor, Connecticut, Dudley Woodbridge finished his life as a Barbados planter. In 1717 Woodbridge, class of 1696, traveled to London, where he presented a grand scheme to the directors of the Royal African Company for restructuring the slave trade in the Caribbean. By regulating the quality of the slaves and licensing traders, the company could make commerce safer and more efficient, extend plantation slavery into the less developed islands, and increase profits. West Indian traders, including Hugh Hall, regularly complained that business in the islands was chaotic and poorly governed. The African Company accepted Woodbridge's
plan and appointed him director general and attorney in Barbados with authority in the Windward Islands and Cuba.
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Cultivating this West Indian elite became an important task for any successful college administrator. Harvard's officers had earlier missed an opportunity with Woodbridge. “I formerly had intentions of sending my Eldest Son, Dudley, for New England,” he wrote to Rev. Colman, “but now resolve him for London in a few days.” Losing the tuition of an island official and slave trader was a major blow, worse still because Woodbridge was a native son and an alumnus. Woodbridge tried to mellow the impact by promising his two-year-old to Harvard. However, his uncle, the Reverend Timothy Woodbridge, had recently founded Yale College, where Timothy and Abigail Woodbridge sent their sons, and where the family redirected its giving.
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