Transcription
Wife's on the phone. It's a pleasure to welcome to the program, Professor Craig Steven Wilder. Love MIT, author. I love the new book, Ebony and Ivory: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of American Universities. Dr. Welcome to the program, Professor.
I'm glad to be here with you and thank you. So, this is a book that was 10 years in the making. Yeah. Talk to us about what you set out to do. Ten years ago, honestly, when I started, I set out to do something much more modest, which was just to write an article about the difficulty that black abolitionists, the African Americans, free black people in the North who opposed slavery, had accessing higher education. And a key element of their ability to make it, make an argument, and to build a campaign against slavery rested on their capacity to enter the professions, to access higher education, to enter the world of ideas. And so I just wanted to write an essay about an article about how they got around, how they managed to become professionals in a world where they couldn't attend college, at least a nation where they couldn't attend college.
It led me to become just much more interested in the deep and troubled and conflicted relationship between colleges, slavery, and early American history. The way that the college was not just an innocent bystander in that world, but it helped to shape that world.
When you started with that, when you set out to write that piece, and what was your assumption? It was based on the assumption, obviously, and not just the assumption, but the historical record, that it was difficult for these African Americans to get into the university. What was your assumption at that point? Was it simply that delineation between, sort of, the passive versus an active role in supporting the institution of slavery?
Yeah, I tended to actually probably did think that the exclusion was more passive than active. It emerged out of a body of tradition and a different, have the Academy to the ruling social order. And you do these incredible stories, as a young black man, James McCune Smith in Manhattan, who as a teenager, nestled, teamed, is put on a boat in the early 1830s, shipping, he's sent to Scotland, where in five years, he earns three degrees, two bachelor's, two master's, and a doctorate of medicine at the University of Glasgow. And he returns one of the best-trained physicians in New York and then establishes a medical practice and a pharmacy. But the extraordinary lengths that these young men and young women were going through to access education. And I didn't think at the beginning that the American colleges were excluding them largely because they deferred to the greater racial civilization. But I look more and more into it, you could see actually colleges factoring, you could see them shaping that world rather than just surrendering to it.
Yeah, I don't want to get to that, because it is the, it's the, it's the, do one other things that I really find fascinating about your book is the third, the aggressive nature, the use of colleges in colonization. If at first, it's Native Americans in this community, and I want to get, I want to get to that.
In a moment, but the, the notion, I guess, and obviously also how the, the, the issue of Scotland being somewhat ironic is it, is it, it comes back into play. But let's, let's, let's start just by talking about what that, that relationship was in terms of, you know, folks, slavery, and in, and in building and boat-building the colleges, and in perpetrating the, I guess, the intellectual foundations of slavery at that time.
Sure. And I think there's, we didn't think about this. And American colleges have multiple relationships to slavery. The first two, and most significant, and I think most of us think about when they, most people will think about when they get a cut of the book, it's actually the relationship between colleges and the slave trade. The rise of the Atlantic slave trade, the African slave trade in the Atlantic world, allowing for and ultimately founding the institutional development of the colonies, including colleges. And so almost from the beginning of the American colonies, in New Spain, the Spanish colonies, in New France, in the British colonies, New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the American, now, the ability to actually institution-build was closely tied to the rise of the slave trade. And you can actually see this in the mid-18th century, between 1746 and 1769, when the number of colleges in the British colonies triples from three to nine. The first three corporate in Massachusetts, William and Mary in Virginia, and Yale in Connecticut. And then there are six colleges built in less than 25 years. But that's precisely the moment when the African slave trade reaches its peak. And new colleges are actually the beneficiaries of these new colleges are actually filled with merchants who engaged in the slave trade or engaged in the trade to supply these slave colonies in the South and the West Indies.
And on one level, I mean, it seems almost wonderful. You know, when, when, yeah, at first, I guess there's a sort of a predisposition to assume that the, the, you associate with the rise of these universities with the Enlightenment and, you know, the idea that there would be a more enlightened vision of other human beings. I guess on the other hand, it sort of seems like almost everything that developed in this country at that time was in some way at least financed, or, you know, secondarily financed by the rise of the slave trade.
I mean, right. And I think actually one of the striking things that you, I hope people will take away from the book is actually colleges provide an extraordinary lens for looking at and rethinking the 17th and 18th century Atlantic world and the centrality of slavery to that world. I think you're absolutely right about that. And there's a suitable assumption that one can make that everything in that world was closely tied to slavery. But in the case of colleges, you can go a little further with the argument. It's not just that they're of that world, because that actually makes colleges a sort of passive participant in the trade and in human slavery. It's actually that the colleges are pursuing wealth and wealth is precisely where, at Princeton, then the College of New Jersey, at Columbia, King's College, at Harvard and Yale, these are sending out ambassadors to the West Indies to solicit students and donations from wealthy planters. So the president of the College of New Jersey, John Witherspoon, who comes from Scotland in 1768 to take over what was a struggling, in fact, failing college. When the first thing he does is actually publish a missive to the West Indies promising planters that their sons will be taken care of very carefully and dutifully got into manhood if they're sent to Princeton, while in other parts of the world, they might be neglected or exploited.
And so the American colleges actually don't just live in a world with slavery, they actually do everything that they can to ensure their ability to continue depends upon their ability to exploit trade and that institution.
And I want to jump back, I guess, just go back a little bit in history from that moment, because the dynamic with the West Indies seems to be that's where the money is. And because that's where we're soliciting the money, we must make our universities amenable to the predispositions of those who have that money. But when the colleges are first formed, you referred to them almost as a, I think, a chapter one, as colleges in the arsenal of imperialism, as if these are a weapon for colonization. You did talk about, you know.
Sure, sure. You, I make the argument that in fact, actually, the early role that the college in the colonial world is to facilitate and accelerate conquest. That colleges are deployed, in part, their mission is to evangelize indigenous people, to bring them to Christianity, both for religious reasons, but also for strategic reasons. And the two things, you know, I often make no differentiation between the two, because the expectation is that as indigenous people get Christian, they will actually come under the government of Christians, and be strategically managed. And so colleges get deployed in that way. And one of the reasons I actually moved in that direction in both my own research and my thinking about that early part of the book and how to write that early story was actually just looking at the history of colleges in England and the British Empire. Because in the centuries just before the founding of Harvard, we have to remember that England began to establish universities in Scotland and Ireland for the purpose of rooting out the remnants of Catholicism, for making royal and colonial control more simple, and for pacifying the people of the colonized society.
And in its, in its, and my understanding is that, you know, you have these, the, the, I guess, the educators who are these, these are the men who want to establish these colleges, they need money. They go to England and find that the idea of using the university as a form of bringing these Native Americans within the context of Christianity is their best selling point.
Will, right. And was that their agenda, or was it, you know, this is the way that we're going to get the cash?
My heart on liberty. Yeah. Yet, no. You know, and I think it's easy to be cynical about them. And I, and I try not to, you know, I really did struggle with this to try and see the desire for the Christianization and for the spread of Christianity to be both sincere and strategically necessary. And I think we often draw a sort of forced division between the two. It has to be one or the other. And in fact, actually, that division I reject. I actually think that they can be sincere and be pursuing strategic advantages at the same time. Now, there is a period, certainly by the 18th century, when new colleges are being built in the, in the quarter-century, the 25 years before the American Revolution, there is a period then when they're sending ambassadors to England, to Britain, under the claim that they're eventually, I think, Native people, using Native people to raise money. And it's, in fact, actually quite pinnacle at one point in the book, okay, when you're there, some of these guys are literally just bumping into each other soliciting the same wealthy donors, from royals to writing merchants, under the claim that they're evangelizing Native people. And when, in fact, actually, there are virtually no Native students on their campuses, and they're not particularly interested in recruiting Native students.
And really, you have to remember that what happened just before this is the Seven Years' War, from 1754 to 1763, the French and Indian War in North America. And one of the legacies is the rising hostility and increasingly racialized hostility toward Native people. So we're raising money to educate them, under the claim, at the same time that there is in fact, extraordinary hostility toward Native people on a lot of these campuses. And in fact, at Harvard, the first, the brick building, the maybe you, you note, was, I am, with the, what would they call it? It was pursued by the Indian College. It was the Indian College. And yet, the Indian College is the first brick building.
And in the first, is it, hey, did I read this correctly, that the first, I am, the first recorded slave was it in the country was at Harvard?
No, not in the country, but actually one of the earliest slaves recorded in New England is a man referred to in the records as Samuel, who is brought to Massachusetts somewhere around 1630. Harvard is just established two years earlier, and it's forced to close for a year shortly after to establish. And when it reopens, it reopens basically with this man, Samuel, on campus, whose owned by Master Eden, who's an instructor at the student at the school, the prime interest to the student at the school, and one other least resident of corporate yard. It actually an enslaved person. This is the beginning of slavery in New England. And so I write in the book that the dawn of slavery in New England is also the birth of slavery at Harvard.
And let's, let's turn to that. And I want to come back to the idea of the university being deployed as a, because it's, it's, it seems to me that dynamic has ramifications obviously through history in terms of colonization, but also, you know, even today, in, sort of, I guess, less nefarious ways, but, but before we do, talk about the, the way that the, the, the Scottish immigrants, and their migration to the United States, forms an idea of race in this country, and it's one that we're, I think, we're still very much living with today, when you look at sort of the electoral politics in this country.
Yeah. And if you think about, you know, early colleges, the first colleges in the Americas were actually in New Spain, and they founded, actually, a hundred years before Harvard. Harvard was founded in the 1530s, Harvard was founded in the 1630s, a century later. The first colleges, I argue in that early chapter, are actually largely there, and one of their major roles is to facilitate the eventual assimilation of indigenous people in South America, Central America, the West Indies, and the North American mainland. The second wave of colleges, but I talked about just a bit ago, the 12, the ones that are founded in the quarter-century before the American Revolution, and this includes Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth. That group of colleges actually has a somewhat different role. And they're founded, you know, from the 1740s on. And by that time, in most of those regions, the great military struggle between Native American nations and the colonists has been decided. The colonists have actually achieved military supremacy on the Atlantic seaboard. And what these new colleges begin doing, if they actually help to bind together, one of their key functions, if they begin to help to bind together the colonists, European colonists of very different backgrounds, with deep religious divisions and deep ethnic and national divisions, Germans in the Pennsylvania backcountry, who arrived many of them as indentured servants in the decade before the American Revolution, Scots and Scots-Irish, both in Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, some of whom, many from, arrive as indentured servants and become free over time. Unifying those colonists into a coherent group of people requires, in fact, articulating a vision for the future of the colonies in a language for seeing both a common history and a common destiny. And I argue in the book that colleges are actually one of the key institutions for providing that. And one of the ways that they do it is if they take the social description of race, the idea that the colonists had begun to form about their relationship to other people in the Americas, but also throughout the world. And colleges become the places that we find these ideas and give them intellectual legitimacy, using the language and the structures of theology and science.
And what, what, what did those, I mean, what, what, how did they break down? In other words, what, what, what were those definitions? I mean, was it a simple, I mean, and on some level, we have this huge slave trade, which creates a web trade, and a web development, and the university plays the role you just expressed, I guess, indentured creator of some type, and cohesion for the college, and that's by defining basically defining all those white colonists as superior to the.
Yeah. It becomes, you know, in the chapter that really deals with this directly, I described as the widening of the North American whole region. What I mean by that is the colonists here increasingly see themselves as unified in this symbol of their unification, the symbol of their common history and destiny becomes the color of their skin. Which also means that they decrease, not emphasizing the religious and national cleavages, the linguistic cleavages that had actually defined their identities earlier. So rather than being German and Scott, Presbyterian, an Anglican, or being a Puritan, Congregationalist, and Swede, they increasingly come to see themselves as white people.
To really quite wonderful Native American historian, sister, into Native American, argued some time ago that the ideas that get formed to defend the slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries ultimately get deployed to racialized Native Americans. But I also add to that that in fact, those ideas move unbound through the western part and may begin to accelerate in the mid-18th century, particularly at the game, intellectual legitimacy into it. Whiteness is the symbol of the unification of these regions and their people, one common history and a common destiny. It also becomes an expression, an assertion of their supremacy and their superior right to both the land, the territory, and one vision of the future.
This is certainly a dynamic I think that obviously continues to play out in some of the, in, in America, probably in other societies as well. I mean, this idea that the, the, the melting pot, was the creative, to the extent that it existed, it was, it needed, on some level, the fire, if you will, of racial inferiority or superiority to heat up the cauldron, to bring everybody together, where in fact, actually, exclusion becomes one of the dynamics of the inclusion. You used, we create the nation also by defining who can't belong to it. And that definition is not just a rhetorical one, that also rests upon the roles that various populations of people will play in the construction of the new nation. The exclusion of African Americans also, in fact, means the conquest, the final finishing the project of conquering Native people. And exclusion of people of African descent also means the continuation of an economy based upon their labor and the forced extraction of labor.
And which is something that was manifested in the curriculum of other colleges at this time. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things that I really looked, tried to do in the book was to show not just that these ideas emerged, and not just that colleges had become a place for refining these ideas and returning them to the public with the kind of intellectual legitimacy, but one thing I wanted to do in the book was really look at the ways in which students learned race and practiced race on campus. And you can actually see this at the very beginning of the book. The introduction is a story of a young Connecticut man, Henry Wotton Jr., who goes to watch Trinity, it was called Washington College at the time, now Trinity College in Connecticut, and then finishes his education at Harvard. And what he's done in the early 1830s, I think he graduated in 1830, or 1831, at the time, he had now to become a plantation owner, to do the children of wealthy planters, he's going to support himself and make money to eventually attend law school by touring and selling met. Project actually doesn't go that well. He returns, he goes to law school, many eventually he had south again, and people come to one of the leading planters in the Alabama, Mississippi region in his lifetime. And a decade before the Civil War, he's not just a, he owns more than a hundred people, he owns, you know, a rather enormous plantation. And he becomes a statement, helping to represent, define the Southern Review, the defense of slavery. If you look at what he was learning on campus when he was at Harvard, one of the people he took a course with was John Collins Warren, whose father, Connecticut, established a medical school at Harvard, and who was a leading medical anthropologist. And part of the inferiority of the college, racism, the world, in fact, he got, Henry Wotton Jr. got a vigorous and robust education in the scientific basis of inequality and a scientific justification for the unequal treatment of human beings.
And in, we, in some level, we still see the, I guess, the ripple effects of that. And then then works like The Bell Curve and Brett, the legacies are the things we live with. Absolutely.
And what, and did the, the things that the, these ideas that were disseminated throughout the country from the graduates of these colleges at that time, what did they have, ultimately, more resonance in some parts of the country than others? Or was that a function of how they supported the economics of the time, anyway? Why was it that in some areas, this stuff, it held more than others?
Well, yeah, I think, money, I think we have to remember is that the regions participated in the national culture in different ways, but not necessarily in conflict. And West, into after slavery, largely in the northern states, once the United, to the establishment in the decade before the Civil War, slavery, largely in the northern states. Northern colleges continue to depend heavily upon the South for both funding and for students. And northern colleges are becoming tax pipes for producing a lot of the ideas that come to defend labor. Northern students are still heading south, and northern intellectuals had south for career opportunities. Southern academies begin to expand. One of the things I do in the book, I try to show actually that, you know, at the beginning of the American Revolution, there's only one college in the, William and Mary.
And then founded after that, but in fact, actually, many were founded by northerners who had now to basically begin the institutional development of other southern colonies. And as a quick example, I can just give you the example of William Barton Rogers, the founder of MIT, where I work. Right now, Rogers went to William and Mary. His father became professor of chemistry there when he was a teenager, and he and his brother actually attended college there. And then William Barton Rogers replaced his father on the faculty, had a long career in the South. He went on to teach at the University of Virginia, where he became dean of the Faculty. Both colleges owned slaves. Rogers actually lived in a house that the student and as a faculty member that was served by enslaved black people. And then in the 1850s, he eventually headed North. He does drift toward anti-slavery and abolitionism. And he founds MIT here in the North. But MIT is in part, the engineering schools that were established in the decades before the Civil War in the North, or in part, actually, the incentive for establishing them is to help produce engineers, construct and textile manufacturing towns that are manufacturing cotton textile cloth, wave cotton from the, himself, transported North, and then manufactured into cloth.
Into the intimate economic, intellectual part they continue between the North and the South long after slavery declined in the North.
The counterfactual, sure, obviously a little bit tricky. But I mean, what, what if there was, I mean, what if they had not been able to get the funds for these colleges? And I just want to let you know, to what extent are these universities, I mean, there's obviously very hard to parse out to what extent these universities are a reflection of the culture in which they exist, and to what extent they're driving it. But, but in the absence of these colleges, and what, what could have been different?
Well, I think one way to pick up on that is actually, a historian of higher education a few decades ago, gave us a really important reminder that in the period before the American Civil War, hundreds of colleges were founded, and about 70 to 80 percent of them failed. You know, colleges in the rugged world of the colonies and early national America survived by finding funding sources, donations, and students. And to small towns raised up academies and advanced schools, but most of those projects failed. But the ones that survived, from, I argue in the book, part of their survival rested upon their ability to access wealth. And that wealth is largely coming from the South and from the West Indies, and from the merchants of the Northeast, which in the 18th century, in the 17th century, from are dominated by the slave trade. But by the 19th century, is increasingly dominated by the industrialists, whom the cotton manufacturers are a leading group.
So, so it's almost, in other words, it was so systemic that universities couldn't have existed but for their adoption of, I guess, the driving this culture and this belief system that justified slavery. And, you know, you can actually see this. You know, my colleague, Sen, back at Harvard, is actually producing an extraordinary study that we're all anticipating of cotton. And, you know, but cotton is the single largest export to the United States in the years before the Civil War. And when you add in sugar, tobacco, and indigo, the American economy rests happily upon the product of labor in the South. And the intimate ties between the rise of their manufacturing and southern slavery, and in many ways, actually, colleges are a perfect site for revealing those connections because you can see real people moving back and forth between these regions, and you can see the way in which that movement, that commerce in human beings, actually shaped ideas.
And so when did it, when they returned for these colleges, immediately, it says, it is it over the course of your, I am researching this book, there was, I am, a series, I guess, at Brown, reports on these institutions' relationship with slavery at their founding. I am, when, when they returned for these universities, as they were decoupled from slavery as a funding source, or yeah?
You know, I think one of the things we have to remember is that slavery and anti-slavery existed on the campus, but campuses simultaneously. You know, a degree of contradiction. One of the other interesting paradoxes of the early colleges is that slavery, slave labor, existed for quite some time. Yeah, at Yale, as Resto, who becomes the president during the Revolutionary period, owned, purchased, and employed black boys earlier in his career in Newport, and he emancipated him the day that he became, the day before he leaves to become president. Although Resto eventually joined in New Haven, Styles then goes on to establish an abolitionist society in New Haven, which he's the president of, and which basically operates on the calendar for college, and your faculty are participating rather fully in the abolitionist, in that early abolitionist or anti-slavery society. And so slavery and anti-slavery existed on campus at the same time. At the University of North Carolina in the early 19th century, and one of the commencement addresses is actually from an abolitionist, and the university trustees actually publish that address and keep it in print for quite some time.
One of the things that happened in the decades before the Civil War, the tolerance for anti-slavery discourse on campus declines. Increasingly, there's a rather harsh reaction against, rather harsh and violent, to starkly anti-slavery discourse and abolitionist discourse from American campuses, in part in defense of these economic times, and in an attempt to cultivate them and maintain them. And one can see this in a rather extraordinary violent moment at Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1835, at their commencement, when a young undergraduate from Tennessee pulled out a club and begins beating a classmate from New Hampshire over that New Hampshire student's abolitionist views. He bludgeoned him.
Well, I am, and so, and lastly, I just want to get back to this idea because the concept of these colleges being used, I mean, I think you referred to them as weapons of social destruction. And I wonder if today we see, I mean, you know, I spend a lot of time talking about the education reform movement in this country, but the idea of education being used, a.m., specifically in the way that it's funded, being used to pursue an agenda. And I don't know that it is explicitly, I am, that it's the, I don't know exactly what those agendas are, per se. And, and I think there's a certain corporatization. But it's interesting to see that dynamic where the funding of educational institutions serves as much as a cajole and a spear in some ways. And do you, do you have a sense that education is being used that way in other aspects?
You know, I think in the book, when I think they point out is that the early colleges are an instrument of colonialism. It accelerates that project, and it's a key ingredient in the destruction of Native American nations in the Americas. Right. And part of the, could be apparatus of conquest and colonialism. When we draw an analogy to the present, the one, I think that's safest to draw is actually the one that, the takeaway from me after 11 years working on this project, I struggled with how to talk about universities. You know, I went to the schools as a kid from Brooklyn, New York, you know, first-generation college students. The schools changed my life, changed my sister's life. You know, they gave us also extraordinary opportunities. You know, I, it's now that I share the history department at MIT because at the school, it so I wrestled with how to talk about them and how to describe them. And one of the things that I, the takeaway from me after 11 years was I had to be honest about what social institutions do. Just social institutions, they keep a beloved great good, and they're also capable of extraordinary destruction. And but they do the task that we assign. And that's, I think, the hard lesson that we need to learn. That as we talk about schools and as we talk about education, the question of how they get deployed and what they get deployed to do matters. Whose deploying them? Who's in charge? And ultimately, what the project is managed. And I think we have to spend a lot more of our political, social, and intellectual energy thinking about not the structure of the schools, but the nature of the project that they're engaged in. And in many respects, that's a function of their funding.
It's a function of funding. It's the disempowerment of low-income people in poor communities in the decision-making process. The rise, you know, consultancy and a new kind of expertise that tends to either discredit or marginalize the voices of parents and communities, teachers, etc. You know, the ease with which we attack teachers, I think, is troubling to me. And this is not what my book is about, but it certainly, you know, what one of the takeaway lessons that I have from it. And when I think about contemporary society and contemporary education, yeah, absolutely. It's about money. It's about power. And it's about whether the objectives of American society, what matters to us as people, matter.
Thank you, Craig Stevens. While the book is Ebony and Ivory: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of American Universities. Thanks so much for your time today, and I really appreciate it.
Thank you. I really appreciate your time.