Ebony and Ivy (38 page)

The greatest domestic questions of the nineteenth century were debated in racial terms, and thus they enhanced the authority of the academy in political affairs. Scholars acquired broad influence as they responded to anxieties about the makeup of the nation and crafted arguments for restricting membership in American society. Academics delineated the social boundaries of the United States and synthesized discordant regional definitions of citizenship into a common dream of a white Christian society.

The American Revolution and the Second Great Awakening had incited a sincere and prolonged critique of slavery on campuses that remained financially dependent upon slave owners and slave traders; however, efforts to challenge and dismantle slavery in the Mid-Atlantic and New England aggravated concerns about the composition of American society. In 1784 the New York State legislature reopened King's College as Columbia, changed its governance to recognize the disconnection from Britain, and named the continuing and new trustees. John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, John Lawrence, and Matthew Clarkson, all slaveholders, were on the new board. All four men were also founding members of the New York Manumission Society, established in January 1785 as the Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, and Protecting Such of Them as Have Been or May Be Liberated.
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The founders acknowledged a divine will that black people “share equally with us in that civil and religious liberty with which an indulgent Providence has blessed these states.” Such godsends led merchants such as Matthew Clarkson to doubt the morality of human slavery. In 1789 Moses Brown, of the Providence family
partnership that had funded the deadly voyage of the
Sally
in 1764 and helped found the College of Rhode Island (Brown), organized the Providence Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
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President Ezra Stiles maintained a religious fellowship with the black community of New Haven during his tenure at Yale. He had earlier held services for African Americans in the study of his Newport home, welcoming as many as ninety people at a time. He referred to black people as his brothers and sisters in Christ and fell to his knees with them in prayer. “This day died Phyllis a Negro Sister of our Church,” the minister noted with affection in March 1773, adding that Brother Zingo, her husband, had joined the church first and then urged his wife and children to attend. “She was brought hither out of Guinea [in] 1759 aet. 13 or 14 [years old], and has lived in Gov. [Josiah] Lyndon[']s Family ever since.” In August 1790 President Stiles and fourteen other men—most of them faculty and officers of Yale—drafted a constitution for the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom. They began meeting the following month with Rev. Stiles as their president.
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A lively antislavery discourse flowered on the young nation's campuses. Ashbel Green penned a position paper against slavery for the General Assembly of the New Jersey Presbytery, and he ministered to black people in the Princeton area. Peter Wilson, professor of Greek and Latin at Columbia, authored an antislavery tract, which he followed with other abolitionist essays. His colleague John Daniel Gros, a German immigrant and professor of the German language, moral philosophy, and geography, also began publicly condemning bondage. In 1789 Columbia awarded Rev. Gros an honorary doctorate of divinity. His fellow honorees included the Reverend Abraham Beach of Somerset, New Jersey, a Yale graduate and slave owner, who served more than a quarter century as a trustee of Columbia and nearly a half century on the board of Rutgers. In an address before President Stiles's antislavery society, the Reverend Jonathan Edwards Jr., later the president of Union College, charged that the slave trade had brought only brutality, inhumanity, bloodshed, warfare, upheaval, and immorality to Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
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Manumission societies were encouraging this antislavery dialogue. In 1785 Thomas Clarkson won a medal at Cambridge University for the best Latin dissertation on the morality of slavery. The New York Manumission Society ordered copies of that thesis. The following year the board supplied a similar essay award at Columbia, where the trustees voted that “a gold medal be given to the person who shall deliver the best oration at the next annual commencement of the College in New York, exposing in the best manner the injustice and cruelty of the slave trade, and the oppression and impolicy of holding negroes in slavery.” The effect was immediate. “Who gave you a better right, O ye Americans, to go to the coast of Africa, and betray and kidnap its quiet and peaceful inhabitants,” a graduate challenged his audience during a 1786 commencement, while reminding them of the evil of holding “your fellow men … in hopeless and perpetual slavery.” Moses Brown offered an antislavery prize to Rhode Island but learned that it would not be “agreeable” to the slave traders on the board. He then queried President Samuel Hopkins on the possibility of creating competitions at Harvard, Yale, or New Jersey.
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The era saw a measurable decline in slaveholding among northern faculty and administrators. In 1788 Timothy Dwight, later the president of Yale, made a contract with an enslaved woman named Naomi for her freedom. In 1807 Ashbel Green manumitted nine-year-old Betsey Stockton after the death of his wife, Elizabeth Stockton. The child continued to live with President Green, who also tutored her. That year Edward Dorr Griffin purchased a black boy named Samuel Skudder and made an emancipation agreement with the child's parents. During the next five years Professor Peter Wilson of Columbia freed two black women, Susan and Isabel. In 1817 the college patron and trustee Henry Rutgers liberated Thomas Boston. In September 1821 the trustee Abraham Beach brought Caesar Jackson before the justices of Franklin Township, New Jersey, to begin the manumission process.
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However, these steps toward the regional eradication of slavery aggravated fears of a multiracial future. By the early nineteenth century American Christians were missionizing the Hawaiian Islands, India, Palestine, and China. This enthusiasm for overseas outreach reflected, in part, a fracturing of the consensus for domestic evangelization. Foreign missions allowed white Christians to convert indigenous and colored peoples without strengthening the political and legal claims of nonwhite and non-Christian peoples upon the United States. Students from Yale tutored Henry Obookiah, one of five Hawaiian teenagers brought to Connecticut, and Obookiah later lived and studied with President Timothy Dwight. In 1817 the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) had established a school in Cornwall, Connecticut, to prepare colored youth for Christian missions. Yale president Jeremiah Day mentored Yung Wing, a Chinese student and the first Asian to graduate from a United States college. The place of people of color in North America was less clear. When Gallegina, or “The Buck,” a Scottish and Cherokee student from Georgia, arrived at Cornwall, he was surrounded by youth from Hawaii, India, China, Malaysia, and other nations. Gallegina became a ward of Elias Boudinot, the former president of the Continental Congress, the founding president of the American Bible Society, and a graduate and trustee of the College of New Jersey. At twenty-four years old, Betsey Stockton left Princeton for an ABCFM program—in Hawaii.
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Henry Rutgers's Manumission of Thomas Boston, 1817
SOURCE: New-York Historical Society

“Could they be sent back to Africa, a three-fold benefit would arise,” the Reverend Robert Finley promised a friend in 1816: “we should be cleared of them:—we should send to Africa a population
partially civilized and christianized
for its benefit:—our blacks themselves would be put in a better situation.” His father, James Finley, a Glasgow merchant and a parishioner of John Witherspoon, followed Witherspoon to Princeton. In 1787 Robert graduated from the College of New Jersey, and at fifteen he became a tutor in the South. Finley returned to Princeton to study for the ministry, and he later served as a professor and a trustee. As he began planning African colonization, Robert Finley was called to the presidency of the University of Georgia. He shared the colonization plan with his family and close friends. Finley saw the immediate task as convincing “the rich and benevolent [to] devise means to form a colony on some part of Africa” for the relocation of free black people. In
1817 United States Supreme Court justice Bushrod Washington, the nephew of George Washington, became the charter president of the American Colonization Society (ACS). Elias B. Caldwell recruited Washington power brokers to the cause. Caldwell was clerk of the Supreme Court, Finley's brother-in-law, and a charge of Elias Boudinot. Samuel John Mills, of the haystack communion, helped draw religious radicals to the cause. Charles Fenton Mercer, a 1797 graduate of New Jersey and possibly the originator of the colonization idea, established the Liberia colony in 1822.
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The ACS was born on campus. It was conceived from the collision between enthusiastic Christianity and the rigid racial definitions that governed social and political thought in the United States. Colonization was, at its genesis, a compromise between the evangelical urge to solve the moral problem of slavery and the political and social rejection of a multiracial society. It sought to balance the moral economy by answering the religious challenges of the Great Awakening while respecting the solidifying political configuration of the United States. Academics exercised disproportionate influence over this discourse. They advanced colonization as the best, perhaps only, chance to manage the political tensions resulting from the nation's diverging regional economies and demographic transformations.

White Americans had already made ethnic cleansing a preferred solution to their self-constructed racial dilemmas. President Thomas Jefferson ignited speculation about the fate of Native Americans when the Louisiana Purchase opened the possibility of the United States exchanging lands with the eastern Indian nations. The federal government subsequently used coercion, violence, cycles of debt, and deceit to reduce Native territories in the Southeast and displace Indians who stood in the path of white migrations and the expansion of plantation slavery. President James Madison faced increased pressure to dispossess Indians as the price of cotton climbed in international markets and overproduction exhausted the seaboard plantations. In his second inaugural address, President James Monroe belittled the
idea of Indian nations as a dangerous and misleading flattery that inhibited the federal government's administration of Native peoples, whom he cast as perpetual dependents. Monroe urged Congress to vacate Native Americans' land rights and settle Indians in such ways as to encourage the westward expansion of white people.
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Certificate of membership in the American Colonization Society
SOURCE: Library of Congress

The image of Indians as a barrier to progress supplanted earlier beliefs that Native peoples could be assimilated through the civilizing institutions of Christian society. Christians had once accused Native people of “savagery” and prescribed conversion as the antidote, but the social meaning of savagery was shifting from a cultural flaw to a fixed biological trait measured in the vulnerabilities of Indians and announced by their complexions. The racial constructs that coalesced in defense of slavery also allowed white people to redefine Native Americans as incapable of civilization. An Indian presence thus became incompatible with progress. Andrew Jackson's military campaigns popularized the image of Indians as defeated peoples. The immediate and complete removal of Indians to areas beyond white settlement, President Jackson later explained, promised to further economic
development in the South and end the political conflicts between the national and state governments over the status of Native people and their lands. In 1814 Jackson had led the forces that defeated the Creek and forced them to surrender twenty-three million acres, including most of Alabama and southern Georgia, to the United States.
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