Ebony and Ivy (14 page)

Administrators cherished the West Indians. Hall informed Colman that Barbados's ministers and planters had “miserably Neglected & Disregarded” General Christopher Codrington's bequest and instructions. Colman saw the philanthropic and missionary aims of the gift as a model for work in New England. Hall warned that there was little chance of raising a college in Barbados, and, he added, “I am Afraid the Pious Legacy of General Codrington's for the Propagation of the Gospel among our Poor Negroes here will be Imprudently Thrown away if not wickedly Murthered.” Unfortunately, General Codrington had never visited “our Cambridge,” Hall continued, since Harvard would have put the gift to better use. It was not until 1745 that the SPG and the governors founded Codrington College, thirty-five years after the bequest, as a small seminary.
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The general dedicated a fraction of his estate to educate a fraction of the enslaved population, but even that gesture was received poorly among the planters. Many leading white Barbadians had lived through the 1675 conspiracy, which involved slaves on the majority of the plantations. One of the chief conspirators came from the Halls' estate. In 1693, the year Hugh Hall Jr. was born, the enslaved population rose up again. The colonial government responded with a campaign of terror that included castrating dozens of black men. It is little wonder that his Barbados neighbors were gutting the Codrington grant. White Barbadians believed that Africans “had no
more Souls than Brutes, & were really a Species below Us,” Hall responded in disgust. Such scorn, coming from a slave trader and slaveholder, was a telling measure of how rapidly racial ideas were coalescing in the minds of Christian colonists throughout the Americas. In the aftermath of the 1712 revolt in Manhattan, white New Yorkers also stridently rejected the religious training of Africans, cursed the men who instructed them, and, as the Reverend John Sharpe of the New York garrison lamented, developed “a vile conceit that the Negroes have no immortal Souls but are a sort of speaking brute destined by God to a State of Servitude.”
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Codrington College in Barbados
SOURCE: New York Public Library

The southern plantations captured the imagination of Harvard's students. An alumnus and the college librarian, John Gore abandoned the academic life to become a ship's captain. In the summer of 1711, Gore was almost killed when a French privateer attacked his ship off Antigua. Hugh Hall confided to President Leverett that he was somewhat torn at having “strangely Metamorphosed from a Student to a Merchant.” Many alumni were making that choice. “If you have a good Trade for Negroes [you] may purchase forty or Fifty Negroes,” William Ellery, a 1722 graduate, instructed Captain Pollipus Hammond, “get most of them mere Boys and Girl[s], some Men, let them be Young, [but] No very small Children.” Ellery built
his merchant house in Newport, Rhode Island, where he launched multiple slaving ventures. During his final year at Harvard, Cotton Tufts “meditated on what I've learnt that's worth the knowing,” and concluded that he had gained little. When Tufts graduated from Harvard in 1749, his ambition was to use “this small [college] Degree” to open “a Rich lasting & large store.”
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Tufts had innumerable role models. In 1729 the Jamaican planter Leonard Vassall donated land in Boston for Trinity Church at about the same time that his son William enrolled at Harvard. In 1743 William inherited his family's plantations, which he governed from New England. Vassall sought a more genteel and learned life than he could lead in Jamaica, and the revenue from his Jamaican plantations and manufactories afforded him that leisure. In a single month he sent letters instructing his overseer to purchase thirty “choice new Negroes” and asking his retailers to find the best available translations of
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
, a rare volume on rhetoric, and a complete leather-bound edition of Cicero's works in Latin: “If you cannot get the best Latin Paris edition do not send any.” Vassall was unusual in his concern about the conditions on his Jamaican estates, routinely reminding his overseer and manager to avoid the excesses of violence that were so common on the islands and which he had seen during his childhood.

I am glad ye have got the promise of the first Choice of 10 Ten Gold coast Negroes at £60 p[er] head, & hope by the time of this reaches you you'll have purchase the whole of the 80 new Negroes I desired ye would buy for my Estate. I greatly approve of your Method of managing my Estate particularly my Negroes, and am greatly Obliged to ye for your attention and earnestly beg the continuance of it. I am more & more persuaded of the propriety of having sufficient strength on my estate to do all the Work on it without hiring and without pushing or overworking the Negroes so as to hurt & discourage them.
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Many Harvard men built their careers on the Caribbean and Africa trades. By the end of the eighteenth century, Peter Chardon
Brooks was on his way to becoming the wealthiest man in New England, having amassed a fortune by insuring ships in the West Indies, Africa, Europe, and Asia trades. Brooks was named by his father, the Reverend Edward Brooks, after Peter Chardon, a friend and Harvard classmate who was the son of a successful Boston merchant and who died in the West Indies in October 1766, a few months before young Brooks's birth. Hugh Hall of Barbados and Boston and Peter Chardon Brooks of Medford and Boston typified a generation of planters, merchants, investors, and underwriters who rationalized and integrated the financial and commercial economies of the Atlantic world.
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Founded in 1670, South Carolina was, in Peter Wood's description, “the colony of a colony”—a beneficiary of the success, agricultural overdevelopment, and rigid hierarchy of Barbados, which caused many experienced islanders to move to the mainland. Not just the lower orders but wealthy planters relocated in hopes of expanding their holdings for future generations. About half of the early colonists came from the British West Indies, and Barbadians dominated that migration, bringing administrative skills, slaves, and money. More than half of the slaves came from Barbados and, as on the island, enslaved people soon were the majority of the population. The northward migration of the Barbadians helped to make Harvard the most influential college in the colonial South. The islanders and New England's Puritans had long been kindred colonial adventurers. William Sayle, the first governor of South Carolina, had earlier recruited Puritans to come to the Caribbean and now brought experienced island settlers to the new colony. In 1696 the South Carolina legislature codified the links between the colonies when it copied the Barbados slave code.
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From 1670 through 1715, English and Scottish immigrants sold as many as fifty thousand enslaved Indians to the British West Indies. In fact, they exported more enslaved people than they imported. The immigrants lacked capital. By trading with neighboring
nations for furs and enemies captured during wars and raids, the Carolinians created the wealth to purchase enslaved Africans. “The four Indian Women with their two Children, put to sale on Satturday the 9th Instant, were sold together for seventy-five Pounds,” notes a February 1717 entry in the journal of the Indian trade commissioners. The commissioners licensed agents with the authority “to trade, deal and barter within the English Settlements of this Government, with any Indians in Amity with the same, for Skins, Furs and Indian Slaves” and authorized outposts where friendly Indians could bring in goods, rest, and wait for other traders. One of the most important factories was in Cherokee country, where Indian captives were held before being marched into Charleston. The Indians-for-Africans trade reduced the risk of enslaved Indians fleeing to their own lands or inciting conflicts and brought a population of African slaves who lacked knowledge of the local geography and languages but possessed important agricultural skills, particularly in rice production.
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The Scottish immigrants at Stuarts Town were poor but formed commercial relationships with the Yamasee, who supplied them with Indian slaves from raids into Florida. The Yamasee acquired a range of goods, including arms and powder, that shifted the balance of power with their rivals. By the early eighteenth century, Yamasee and Creek raiding in Florida had destroyed the Apalachee and dealt a serious blow to Spain's Indian allies. Carolina's Indian slave trade reached Florida and the Mississippi Valley. The English armed the Chickasaw and conducted joint campaigns against the Arkansas and the Choctaw. West Indian planters could avoid taxes on servants since Indians were “duty free” in this intercolonial trade and such exchanges operated outside the monopoly of the Royal African Company. Two slave economies, one Indian and one African, built Carolina, and both escalated violence in the region, provoked an arms race between Native nations, and left innumerable communities destroyed and depopulated.
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Colonial officials had great difficulty controlling this volatile marketplace. The arming of allied nations adjusted relations between Native powers and between Europeans and Indians. The incentive among the British settlers to view all Native people as
hostile added to the tensions. The commissioners struggled to keep settlers from enslaving friendly and free Indians living near the colonies. The Cherokee were particularly vulnerable. A large and well-armed nation, the Cherokee lodged numerous complaints about the capture and sale of their citizens. In 1713 Thomas Welch, who was authorized to trade with the Chickasaw, threatened a commissioner with a gun when he came “to sett free two free Indian Women and their Brother detained … as Slaves.” The commissioners also had trouble regulating their factors and colonists, who routinely demanded that Indians deliver slaves as compensation for injuries, real and imagined, or as payment for debts.
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As the proprietors turned to the Caribbean to shape the political economy of Carolina, they gazed north to secure its spiritual well-being. In 1695 William Norman went to New England in search of ministers and missionaries. Joseph Lord, who graduated from Harvard in 1691, accepted the challenge. Lord joined a band of young men who headed south in December 1695. They formed Dorchester, along the Ashley River and about twenty miles from Charleston, with a grant of several thousand acres. Rev. Lord returned to New England to encourage other migrations, securing Hugh Adams, a fresh Harvard product, who assisted the Charleston church after the untimely death of Harvard's Benjamin Pierpont. Abigail Hinckley, the daughter of the governor of Plymouth, married Lord and joined him in the endeavor. The younger John Cotton, Harvard class of 1657, became the new pastor at Charleston. William Grosvenor, a 1693 graduate, left for Carolina after failing to raise a church in Brookfield, Massachusetts. Daniel Henchman, class of 1696, joined the original Ashley River settlement. Would-be Harvard president Benjamin Colman had planned to go to Carolina after his graduation but changed his mind when he got a chance to travel to London. Rev. Lord ministered in the colony for twenty years, eventually returning to New England when the Yamasee War—a two-year conflict beginning in 1715 between the English and several Indian nations—threatened the area and the consolidation of Anglican power in the colony made life increasingly uncomfortable for dissenters.
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Wherever the Barbadians traveled, Harvard followed. The
college showered South Carolina with its graduates, who served as ministers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and tutors. After graduating in 1710—as the Carolina colonies were separating, north and south—William Little began a career as a merchant and lawyer in North Carolina, where he later became chief justice of the colony's supreme court. Jonathan Belcher, a 1699 alumnus, pleaded in England for the governorship of the young colony. When the Reverend Josiah Smith, class of 1725, suffered a stroke that limited his ministry at the Presbyterian Church in Charleston—one of innumerable slaveholding churches in the Americas—the congregation hired Samuel Fayerweather, class of 1743, as an assistant pastor.
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On the eve of the American Revolution, Josiah Quincy Jr. took a spring journey to South Carolina to recoup his health. “His plantations, negroes, gardens, & c. are in the best order I have seen,” Quincy observed while relaxing at Joseph Allston's Oaks estate. In a letter to his brother Samuel, he complained that liquor outpaced stories and jokes at every table and any worthy topic was always vulnerable to being displaced by a discussion of “rice, indigo, Negroes, & horses.” During his three-month stay, the father of a future Harvard president documented the “mischief” of slavery and the undemocratic realities of planter rule, but he also vacationed with the plantation aristocracy by following the commercial and religious ties between Harvard and Atlantic slavery.
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