Ebony and Ivy (37 page)

“I am a slaveholder, and, if I know myself, I am ‘sound on the slavery question,'” President Frederick A. P. Barnard responded to critics at the University of Mississippi. Toward the end of 1859 several students entered Barnard's house while the president was away, with “shameful designs” upon an enslaved young woman named Jane. They assaulted Jane, beating her so severely that she carried scars and wounds for months, and one of them, Samuel Humphreys, raped her. When the faculty declined to dismiss Humphreys on the testimony of a black woman, the president ordered his expulsion. A divided faculty vote—the northerners voting with the northern-born president—and Barnard's decision to dismiss the student brought accusations of race treason. Detractors accused the president of using “Negro evidence” against a white man.
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The faculty response to Barnard constituted a public unpacking and examination of the lineage and quality of the ideas that informed his moral and social judgments; it was an attempt to display the regional specificity of knowledge. “There were scores of thousands of [northern-born] men at the South in much the same position as he,” a biographer estimated, and many of them were scholars. Jefferson Davis, soon to be the president of the new Confederate government, sided with Barnard, making a public show of shaking the president's hand during the controversy. Jacob Thompson, a university trustee, sent Barnard a note of support for exercising an honorable “paternalism” over his slaves. If Barnard's actions signaled hostility toward slavery, Thompson added, “then I am a downright abolitionist.” Barnard left Mississippi at the outbreak of the Civil War, eventually taking the presidency of Columbia University, where he served for a quarter century. The trustees commemorated his death in 1889 with the dedication of Barnard College.
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Despite its troubled reputation, the University of Virginia saw its largest undergraduate classes in the years before the Civil War. Most of these students were southerners bound by the knowledge that they would soon take guardianship over an increasingly isolated region. They solidified their bonds with violent rituals, drunken games, and other passages into manhood. They had a well-known appetite for whiskey. Spirited contests and public disorder on campus—such as the chemistry faculty's annual “Laughing-Gas Day”—were common and taxed the patience of administrations, but the campus soon became infamous for outright insurrections. On Thursday, November 12, 1840, a masked student began shouting and firing a pistol outside the house of John Davis, chairman of the faculty. Earlier that day, the student had borrowed a gun from a classmate, and declared his intention to defend his right to riot. When Davis went to the door to investigate the disturbance, the young man turned and shot him in the stomach. “He died a Christian hero, blessing his family and his weeping colleagues and friends,” William Barton Rogers, now a professor in Charlottesville, wrote to his brothers. It was part of a long and dangerous period, during which the administration and prominent
alumni struggled to reestablish order. Still, in 1852 John S. Mosby, a sophomore, shot a classmate during an altercation. The following year, Rogers resigned his chair as the undergraduate population at Virginia reached its antebellum peak.
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Politicians, editors, and academics in the South urged the necessity of expanding the educational infrastructure of the region to defend slavery. Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright, a Virginian who studied at Philadelphia under Benjamin Rush and then practiced and taught in Mississippi and Louisiana, used Thomas Jefferson's call for the anatomical dissection of colored people to argue for a distinct southern science. The climate, conditions, and history of Europe reduced the value of modern science for southerners, Cartwright argued. The slave states shared more with the ancient civilization of Greece, where Hippocrates had anticipated the peculiar influence of climate and region on medical knowledge. Proslavery thought found academic expression in the desire to free the South from external intellectual influences. Editors cried for southern medical schools to address unique regional realities, and hundreds of southern students withdrew from northern medical colleges in the years before the Civil War.
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Southern intellectuals did not conjure the idea that there was knowledge particular to the slave societies of the Americas. For more than a century American and European scholars had presumed that the plantations were distinct environments for understanding natural science, and they assigned unique authority to researchers from those areas. They acknowledged the expertise of doctors from the slave colonies on questions of race. Physicians who practiced in the South and the Caribbean had held sway during the
Whistelo
proceedings. As bondage became peculiar to their region, southerners made a discrete claim to this knowledge and seized upon its political potential.

The sectional crisis hastened the rise of a regional intellectual elite. In the summer of 1857 the Episcopal bishops of ten southern states gathered on Lookout Mountain in Tennessee to approve a plan for the University of the South, which they envisioned as a rival to the elite universities of the world and the headquarters of southern intellectualism. They chose a site on the Cumberland Plateau
and began designing the campus. Vermont bishop John Henry Hopkins, a northern apologist for slavery, resided six months in the Tennessee woods while he assisted the engineers and officers in laying out the grounds and buildings. A grand ceremony to place the cornerstone attracted some five thousand guests—including an envoy from Trinity Church in New York City—catered to by a parade of slaves brought from Nashville.
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As proslavery ultraism radicalized higher education in the South, northern scholars sought political common ground at the logical extremes of race. They did not retreat; they lagged behind. Faced with an increasingly divided nation and their own ambivalence about the place of black people in American society, a new generation of northern researchers expounded upon the mental and physical gaps between the races—an academic project with immediate relevance to the political conflicts over slavery. New York City became a clearinghouse for translating and circulating new developments in race science, particularly polygenist theories. The physician John Van Evrie ran a small industry translating, reworking, and publishing new scholarship from Europe asserting the distinct origins and development of the races.
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American scholars constructed two ideological paths to a national reconciliation: positive defenses of slavery grounded in history, theology, and economics; and scientific attacks upon the humanity of the colored races that denied black people the moral status of persons and forced them into the moral sphere of brutes.

The ship
Indian Chief
, Captain Cochran, chartered by

the American Colonization Society, sailed from this

port on Wednesday last, the 15th inst. for the Society's

settlement at Cape Montserado, on the Coast of

Africa. She takes out one hundred fifty-four free

people of colour, with supplies for the Colony.

—
AFRICAN REPOSITORY AND
COLONIAL JOURNAL
, 1826

It is the most ludicrous Society that ever yet was dreamed

of
. … There is no reason for removing the negro from

America but his color.

—DANIEL O'CONNELL, M.P., 1833

Heigho! it is a fine thing to be an Indian. One might

almost as well be a slave. … I greatly doubt that any

missionary has ever thought of making the Indian or

African his equal. As soon as we begin to talk about

equal rights, the cry of amalgamation is set up, as if

men of color could not enjoy their natural rights

without any necessity of intermarriage between the

sons and daughters of the two races. Strange, strange

indeed!

—REV. WILLIAM APESS, 1833

When an enlightened and Christianized community

shall have, on the shores of Africa, laws, language and

literature, drawn from among us, may then the scenes

of the house of bondage be to them like the remembrance

of Egypt to the Israelite,—a motive of thankfulness

to Him who hath redeemed them!

—HARRIET BEECHER STOWE,
UNCLE TOM'S CABIN
(1852)

Colleges and the Quest for a White Nation

In the summer of 1806, several students at Williams College were overtaken by a sense of the presence and grace of God. As a teenager in Torrington, Connecticut, Samuel John Mills Jr. had witnessed the spiritual fervor of the Second Great Awakening. He began praying for a similar rebirth on campus. James Richards, Francis L. Robbins, Harvey Loomis, and Byram Green joined him. During one prayer meeting, they ran into a haystack to seek shelter from a storm. That haystack assembly committed to spreading the Gospel around the world. New colleges—Williams (1793), Bowdoin (1794), Union (1795), and Middlebury (1800)—amplified the social effects of the Awakening. Faculty and students on the older campuses also experienced revivals of faith. “The divine influence seemed to descend like a silent dew of heaven,” President Ashbel Green reported from Princeton, “and in about four weeks there were very few individuals in the college edifice who were not deeply impressed with a sense of the importance of spiritual and eternal things.” Green noted that every space on the campus was turned over to prayer.
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Williams president Edward Dorr Griffin later identified the haystack meeting as the beginning of a religious revolution that led to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1812), the New York–New Jersey Synod's African School (1816), the American Bible Society (1816), the United Foreign Missionary Society (1817), and the American Colonization Society (1817). The Awakening had earlier roused Griffin's church in Newark, New Jersey. “I never before witnessed the communication of a spirit of prayer so earnest and so general,” he recalled with awe, “nor observed such evident and remarkable answers to prayer.” It began when the deaths of the Reverend Alexander Mc-Whorter—a trustee of the College of New Jersey (Princeton) and a founder of Newark Academy—and other prominent Christians shook the community. A hundred people joined the congregation in a single day, and the converts came from all strata of the society, “including poor negroes,” Griffin celebrated. Union College awarded Rev. Griffin an honorary degree for his contributions to this national revival.
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This religious renewal sent American Christians crusading across the globe to fulfill the agenda of the compassionate and protective God who had guided them through the Revolution and into political liberty. It also further exposed the moral conflict between their declarations of individual and group freedom and their continued reliance upon the enslavement and dispossession of other peoples. As it swept the campuses, the revival forced intellectual engagement with these social injustices.

The Awakening occurred as the people of the United States were defining themselves as a nation, and it ultimately revealed the social limits of religious humanitarianism in American society. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, white people selected deeply racialized criteria for membership in the United States to defend their material aspirations from the challenges of their political and religious declarations.

The language of race was the vernacular of the campus. The political struggles to decide the composition of the United States marked the first time that college professors and officers occupied the public sphere as an interested class. They exercised expertise
over the pressing social question of who belonged in the new nation. “I am not accustomed to speak in public, except on subjects connected with my own profession,” Calvin Stowe, a professor of biblical studies and the husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe, confessed at the beginning of a lecture on what to do with the nation's black population.
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