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Dirty Antebellum Secrets in Ivory Towers

Ebony and Ivy, About How Slavery Helped Universities Grow
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

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OCT. 18, 2013

When
Craig Steven Wilder first began digging around in university
archives in 2002 for material linking universities to slavery, he recalled

recently, he was a little bashful about what he was looking for.

I
would say, Im interested in 18th-century education, or something
general like that, Mr. Wilder said.
But as he told the archivists more, they would bring out ledgers, letters and
other documents.
Theyd
push them across the table and say, You might want to take a peek
at this, he said. It was often really great material that was cataloged in
ways that was hard to find.
Now, more than a decade later, Mr. Wilder, a history professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a new book, Ebony and Ivy:
Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of Americas Universities, which
argues provocatively that the nations early colleges, alongside church and
state, were the third pillar
of a civilization based on bondage.
He
also has a lot more company in the archives. Since 2003, when Ruth

Simmons, then the president of Brown University, announced a headlinegrabbing initiative

to investigate that universitys ties to slavery, scholars at
William and Mary, Harvard, Emory, the University of Maryland, the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and elsewhere have completed

their own studies.

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Ebony and Ivy, About How Slavery Helped Universities Grow - NYTimes.com

Craig Steven Wilder, an M.I.T. history professor, spent a decade researching Ebony and Ivy.

Charlie Mahoney for The New York

Times

And
that tide is far from over. Last spring, a historian at Princeton began
an undergraduate research seminar on the little-explored connections

between that university and slavery. In September, the president of the

University of Virginia announced a 27-member commission charged with

recommending ways to commemorate the universitys historical

relationship with slavery and enslaved people, in advance of its
bicentennial, beginning in 2017.
But
Mr. Wilder, scholars say, seems to be the first to look beyond particular
campuses to take a broader look at the role of slavery in the
growth of
Americas earliest universities, which, he argues, were
more than just
innocent or passive beneficiaries of wealth derived from the slave trade.
Craig
shows that what happened at one institution wasnt simply

incidental or idiosyncratic, said James Wright, a former president of

Dartmouth College, which is discussed in the book. Slavery was deeply
embedded in all our institutions, which found ways to explain and
rationalize slavery, even after the formation of the
American republic.
Ebony
and Ivy, published by Bloomsbury, documents connections
between slavery and various universities founding moments, whether it is

the bringing of eight black slaves to campus by Dartmouths first

president, Eleazar Wheelock, or the announcement by Columbia

University (then named Kings College) of the swearing in of its first

trustees on a broadside paid for with a single advertisement: for a slave

auction near Beekmans Slip in Lower Manhattan.
Mr.
Wilder also ventures into more unexpected territory, including the rise
of 19th-century race science and the evolution of university fund-raising.
Harvard, he notes, emphasized its mission to convert heathen Indians in
its early appeals for donations; by the late 18th century, its leaders were
competing vigorously with those of other institutions for the tuition dollars
and patronage of ascendant slave-owning West Indian planters.
Sometimes I chuckled at how contemporary some of these colonial
administrators were, Mr. Wilder said.
Ebony
and Ivy, with its cover image of a tendril of ivy wrapped around
a

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/19/books/ebony-and-ivy-about-how-slavery-helped-universities-grow.html[4/29/2015 4:55:12 PM]

Ebony and Ivy, About How Slavery Helped Universities Grow - NYTimes.com

chain, may not find a home on many alumni-office coffee tables. But Mr.
Wilder, a graduate of Fordham and Columbia who has also taught at

Dartmouth and Williams, says that some people are too quick to see

political motives behind work like his.

A 2001 report
on Yale Universitys connections with slavery, he notes, was

dismissed by some as a partisan hit job, written by graduate students with

connections to labor unions that were then battling with the Yale

administration. And the Brown report was begun at a moment when

northern
universities, along with banks and insurance companies, were
threatened
with class-action lawsuits demanding financial reparations for
their connections with the 18th-century slave trade.
There
has been a fear that theres something lurking in the archives that
will be devastating to these institutions, and that people doing this work
are motivated by hostility, Mr. Wilder said. But
history is a poor medium
for seeking revenge.

Ebony and Ivy, by Mr. Wilder, cites this ad for the sale of slaves by a trustee of the

Pennsylvania

University of Pennsylvania.
Gazette

The
reparations debate has faded, along with much of the controversy

surrounding research into universities and slavery. This movement, once

edgy and interesting, has been taken to the vet and defanged and
declawed, said Alfred Brophy, a legal historian who spearheaded a 2004
resolution at the University of Alabama apologizing for the antebellum
facultys mistreatment of slaves on campus.
Still, universities may not be eager to embrace the research
wholeheartedly. At Harvard, a student-generated report
on the universitys
connections with slavery released in 2011 received personal support and
financing from Harvards president, Drew Gilpin Faust, but no
institutional response, according to Sven Beckert, the professor who led
the project.
The
university itself has not reacted in any way, shape or form, Mr.
Beckert said. There has been no effort to make this into a broader
discussion.
At other campuses, the basic fact-finding is only beginning. When Martha
Sandweiss
joined Princetons history department four years ago, she was

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/19/books/ebony-and-ivy-about-how-slavery-helped-universities-grow.html[4/29/2015 4:55:12 PM]

Ebony and Ivy, About How Slavery Helped Universities Grow - NYTimes.com

surprised that no one had done a report like Harvards or Browns. A 2008
undergraduate thesis had established that Princetons first eight
presidents seem to have owned slaves, but little else was known.
This
semester, Ms. Sandweisss undergraduate research seminar, which

she said received informal support from the administration, is

investigating the universitys 18th-century financing and the slaveholding

practices of particular Princeton classes, with the goal of
answering deeper
questions about Princetons reputation as the most culturally Southern of
the Ivies.
Before
the Civil War, about half of the student body came from the South,
Ms. Sandweiss said. What was it about this place that made people feel
like it was a good place to send their sons?
Lurking
behind such historical questions, scholars say, is a more
contentious contemporary one: What should universities do today to make
African-Americans feel as if they fully belong?
Mr.
Wilder, a first-generation college graduate raised by a single mother in
the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, said that his own research
had only increased his sense of ownership of his own elite education.
He
cited the story of Betsey Stockton, an enslaved woman belonging to an

early-19th-century president of Princeton, who used her masters library to

study biblical literature and eventually became a missionary in Hawaii.
Something
like that changes the way you think about these institutions,

Mr. Wilder said. You realize, people of color have always been here.

A version of this article appears in print on October 19, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the
headline: Dirty Antebellum Secrets in Ivory Towers. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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