Ebony and Ivy (15 page)

At a time when colonial colleges were actively courting merchants and planters for survival, George Berkeley insisted that academies had to avoid the influences of that crude economic gentry. Britain had financed colonial schools, churches, and missions in the seventeenth century, but the rise of the North American merchants freed colonists to fund their own projects without metropolitan interference. The minister unfolded an ambitious plan to open a seminary independent of the commercial centers at the exact moment when merchants were coming to dominate the British colonies.

In the 1720s Rev. Berkeley won Parliament's support for his
proposal to build an Anglican college on the island of Bermuda to advance the Christian faith in the plantations and increase religious orthodoxy. He sought a large enough supply of Native children to allow him, in little time, to graduate about a dozen Indian ministers with master's degrees each year. Rev. Berkeley planned to attract youngsters from the friendly communities near the English settlements and kidnap children from hostile nations. He warned that these young “savages” should be no older than ten—mature enough to have mastered their native languages, and immature enough to have not fully embraced the “evil habits” of their nations. Snatched as children and educated at St. Paul's College in Bermuda, these Indians would return home as “men of their own blood and language” to stamp out the vestiges of indigenous civilization and cultural resistance. In 1729 George Berkeley arrived in Newport, Rhode Island, to wait for the Royal Treasury to release £20,000 that had been appropriated for his project. He bought a farm, renamed it Whitehall, and began buying enslaved black people.
²⁵

The deployment of academies to subdue Indians repeats in colonial history. Just a few years before he became provost of the College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania), the Reverend William Smith urged Protestants to adopt Jesuitical—that is, mischievously cunning—tactics against the Indians. The plan was similar to Berkeley's: settle a few scholars among the Native nations of New York, where they could master the Indian languages and then build “one good School for Education.” However, Rev. Smith was far more comfortable relying upon the wealth of the commercial elite. Rev. Smith believed that educating Native children would catalyze cultural transformations in Indian country, permanently tilting the sympathies of these nations toward the English.

In these Schools, some of the most Ingenious and Docile of the young Indians might be instructed in our Faith and Morals, and Language, and in our Methods of Life and Industry, and in some of those Arts which are most useful. … To civilize our Friends and Neighbours;—to strengthen our Allies and our Alliance;—to adorn and dignify Human Nature;—to save Souls from Death; to
promote the Christian Faith, and the Divine Glory, are the Motives.

Before he became the president of the College of New Jersey, the Reverend Samuel Davies used his success evangelizing black Virginians to show the practicality of a new “scheme” to send missionaries and teachers to the Cherokee and the Catawba. “This little harvest among the Africans,” Davies prayed, “is but a Presage of one more extensive among the Indian Natives of America.”
²⁶

Berkeley objected only to the location of such schools. Harvard and Yale, the seminaries of the dissenting churches, had disappointing results and “have so long subsisted to little or no purpose,” he bluntly concluded. Poorly trained American preachers and the cast-offs of the English clerical community preyed upon the colonists, to the detriment of the faith. Samuel Johnson of Connecticut and Stephen Hopkins of Providence traveled to Newport to attend meetings with Berkeley, decades before they became founding officers of King's College and the College of Rhode Island (Brown), respectively. Berkeley planned St. Paul's as an Anglican seminary removed from the corrupting influences of avaricious settlers. Traders and planters did not dominate Bermuda as they did Barbados, Jamaica, and the other British possessions. Berkeley particularly doubted Barbados with its “high trade” and “dissolute morals.” Bermuda had ample supplies of food and other necessities, and it was independent of but still accessible to the more populous colonies.
²⁷

In 1732 Berkeley's Bermuda college plan unraveled after political transitions in England eliminated his funding. The defeated priest gave Whitehall, which totaled about ninety-six acres and was valued at £3,000, to Yale. The rents from this small slave plantation funded Yale's first scholarship, for the best students in Greek and Latin, and its first graduate-level courses. A member of the Yale class of 1733, Eleazar Wheelock—later an Indian missionary and founder of Dartmouth College—was the first recipient of the Berkeley grant. The faculty awarded the Berkeley scholarship to several young men who became college presidents, including Aaron Burr, later of New Jersey, and Thomas Clap of Yale.
²⁸

Berkeley also distributed his supplies. He gave Harvard
a selection of literary, philosophical, and theological texts. Yale received a large library, which Thomas Clap praised as the best single collection to cross the Atlantic. Yale also got portraits from Berkeley's holdings, and a share of the subscriptions for St. Paul's. (The trustees later named a section of the campus and one of the residential colleges for Bishop Berkeley.) “The daily increase of learning and religion in your seminary of Yale College give me very sensible pleasure, and an ample recompense for my poor endeavors to further those good ends,” Berkeley wrote to Rev. Clap.
²⁹

The idea of separating the religious and commercial cultures of the colonies effectively died with Berkeley's project. In 1738 Chauncey Whittelsey won the Berkeley scholarship at Yale, which he used to finish his education and acquire a tutorship. A few years later, he declined invitations to pastor churches, resigned his academic post, and became a merchant.
³⁰

In 1759 the trustees of King's College sent solicitations to select “gentlemen in the several Islands in the West Indies.” Likely influenced by George Berkeley, the governors promoted the New York school as a royalist institution—unflinchingly loyal to the crown, a tool for bolstering Anglican authority in the British colonies, and a check on the power of the dissenting churches. A few years after their initial plea, the trustees were recruiting West Indian agents: Richard and William Moore in Barbados; Henry Livingston, Tileman Cruger, and Daniel Moore in Jamaica; Josiah Martin and David Williams in Antigua; and William Coventry and John Willett in St. Christopher. The board authorized multiple West Indies campaigns, using paid and volunteer lobbyists, during the following years.
³¹

“The stupidity of many of our Gov[ernor]s is such that it looks as if they would let their Coll[ege] come to nothing,” President Samuel Johnson complained to his son in 1762. Rev. Johnson accused the trustees of injuring the college by neglecting meetings and privileging fund-raising. The board cared little about academic matters. The prior graduating class had had only three students, all from elite local families. “But what need for so many Tutors for so few scholars?” the president challenged. In 1762 the trustees solicited the archbishop of Canterbury, the boards of the universities in Oxford and Cambridge, the Royal Society, the Antiquary Society, the Lord of Trade and Plantations, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, while also approving another Caribbean campaign and authorizing James Jay to seek donations in Europe. A year later they accepted Rev. Johnson's resignation and installed a new president: the Reverend Myles Cooper, a twenty-five-year-old Anglican priest who had recently arrived as professor of moral philosophy, earned the moniker “Rambling Cooper” for his eagerness to travel for fund-raising or any other purpose, and lacked Johnson's intellectual gravity and academic myopia. Cooper and the governors significantly expanded the college, added a medical school, and, on the eve of the American Revolution, initiated a plan to draw all the colleges in New England and the Mid-Atlantic into a single Anglican university governed from New York.
³²

President Myles Cooper of King's College
SOURCE: Columbia University

Such fantastic designs reflected an unbounded confidence in the power of the slave economy. John and Isaac Lawrence were successful New York merchants, the former a trustee of King's and the latter a graduate of New Jersey. Their family business had connections to the Caribbean and South America, and included a brother, William, a planter in Demerara, Guyana. That trade funded their social lives: public offices, college and hospital trusteeships, and serving, under Philip Livingston's presidency, as board members and officers of the New York arm of the First Bank of the United States.
³³

In the second half of the eighteenth century, American colleges faced south. The board of Rhode Island sent Hezekiah Smith, himself a trustee, to canvass the large Baptist communion in South Carolina and the congregations in the neighboring colonies. In 1770 the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock settled in Hanover, New Hampshire, to build Dartmouth. For decades he had kept an Indian school in Connecticut to supply Native nations with trained ministers, improve the security of the colonies, and extend his political and social influence. His marriages—to Sarah Maltby, the daughter of the famed Connecticut minister John Davenport and the widow of a ship's captain, and Mary Brinsmead—increased his social status and property. He used his social ties to solicit donors in the colonies and in Europe. In 1765 he sent the Mohegan minister Samson Occom, his first Indian student, on a two-year fund-raising tour of Britain. Within months of his arrival in Hanover, Rev. Wheelock accepted his first black student, Caleb Watts, whom he began privately preparing for a mission to the West Indies.
³⁴

College officers sought slave traders and slaveholders as governors, competed for the fees of young men from slave-owning families, and sent emissaries to the plantations in search of gifts and students. Struggling to meet their debts, the board of the College of Philadelphia directed Provost William Smith to appeal to the wealthier residents of South Carolina, where the school, particularly through its medical program, had social connections. Smith was an Anglican priest and, because of the Barbados migration,
Anglicans had come to power in South Carolina. The provost returned early in 1772 with more than £1,000 in subscriptions. Solicitations to the prosperous families of Jamaica and the other British West Indian islands quickly followed. This time the trustees dispatched Professor John Morgan, a member of the first undergraduate class and a founder of the medical school. Morgan secured £6,000 in one trip.
³⁵

Rev. Smith's prayers for students naturalized these transactions. Instructing his students to pray for all colleges, seminaries, and academies that advanced the faith, he noted that each person, no matter how rich or mean, had to excel at his or her station for Christian institutions to blossom. Campuses revealed the divine plan beneath even the most basic social hierarchies. “Bless all Orders of Men amongst us, from the highest to the lowest,” he told his boys. “Lord give them all Grace in their several Stations to be instrumental to the Spreading abroad of thy holy Christian Religion, and promoting the publick Good.”
³⁶

More than one Philadelphian was canvassing the British Caribbean. “The Brig[.]
Nancy
, Capt. Hanse, sailed last Saturday for Jamaica, in whom went Passenger Dr. Hugh Williamson, of this City. His Business, we hear, is to collect Benefactions for the Academy at Newark,” reported the
Pennsylvania Chronicle
. A member of the first graduating class of Philadelphia, Williamson studied for the Presbyterian ministry and then became professor of mathematics at the college. He left in 1764 to study medicine under William Cullen at Edinburgh, finishing his medical degree at Utrecht, Holland. Now a charter trustee of the New Ark Academy (University of Delaware), he sailed for the Caribbean in search of donors and scholars. The board had also taken subscriptions in Maryland and South Carolina, but there was diminishing value to vying for patrons who had repeatedly been petitioned by other colleges. To lay the ground for his tour, Dr. Williamson penned an address to the people of Jamaica that celebrated the New Ark mission and the advantages of an education in Delaware. Besides lower tuition, the academy offered a comfortable and safe environment for training young minds. “The noise and tumult of such places are unfriendly to study, they are dangerous to the morals of
youth,” he wrote of the urban centers of Europe and North America while lauding the serenity of Delaware.
³⁷