PROLOGUE

A Connecticut Yankee atan Ancient Indian Mound

"Remember me to all my friends and relations—I wish you andothers of the family as many as can write to write to me often andtell me about every thing and any thing," Henry Watson beggedhis father, "about every body and thing I care any thing about."Written from New York in November 1830, where the young manhad booked passage on the schooner Isabella to Mobile, Alabama,the letter mixed a premature homesickness with a sense of youthfulexpectation. Watson was from East Windsor, Connecticut,just north of Hartford, and he was heading south to find work as ateacher in an academy or on a plantation. He carried a packet ofintroductory letters from his professors at Washington College(Trinity) in Hartford and Harvard College in Cambridge, familyfriends including Professor Benjamin Silliman of Yale College, andhis father's business acquaintances. After graduating from Yale,Silliman had considered a job in the South, and his brother Selleckdid leave Yale to become a tutor in Charleston, South Carolina.

College initiated Henry Watson into the slave regimes of theAtlantic world. The founding, financing, and development of highereducation in the colonies were thoroughly intertwined with theeconomic and social forces that transformed West and CentralAfrica through the slave trade and devastated indigenous nationsin the Americas. The academy was a beneficiary and defender ofthese processes.

College graduates had exploited these links for centuries. Theyapprenticed under the slave traders of New En gland, the Mid-Atlantic,and Europe. They migrated to the South and to the WestIndies for careers as teachers, ministers, lawyers, doctors, politicians,merchants, and planters. The end of the slave trade and the decline ofslavery in the North did not break these ties. The antebellum Southrepresented a field of opportunity, where the wealth of the cottonplanters was funding the expansion of the educational infrastructure.

The Isabella could carry a handful of passengers, and Watson hada small, comfortable cabin. He stored his trunk on board and thenexplored New York City while he waited for departure. He detailedhis spending, documented his efforts to be frugal whereverpossible, and sent weekly updates on his progress to his father. Thosecommunications were also filled with complaints about things likethe cost of the books that he needed to further his education. LikeSelleck Silliman, Watson did not intend to spend his life as a plantationteacher. He wanted to earn a salary for a year, improve hishealth in a warmer climate, and then study law. Later that month,this twenty-year-old aspiring tutor boarded the schooner for thevoyage south.

An education in Hartford and Cambridge was reasonable preparationfor living among the slaveholders of Alabama. The presidentsof Connecticut's colleges and universities led one of the mostextreme branches of the American Colonization Society—foundedin 1817 to transplant free black people outside the United States.New En gland's colonizationists cast African Americans as a threatto democracy and social order, encouraged campaigns to halt thedevelopment of free black communities, and even destroyed schoolsfor African American children. They silenced debate about slaveryand vehemently attacked abolitionism as the cause of political tensionsbetween the slave and free states.

Harvard was approaching its two hundredth anniversary, whichmeant that it was also nearing the bicentennial of its intimate engagementwith Atlantic slavery. Beginning with the first graduatingclass, boys from Cambridge had been seeking fortunes in theplantations. By the time Henry Watson matriculated, Harvard'shistory was inseparable from the history of slavery and the slavetrade.

College had armed Watson with theories of racial difference andscientific claims about the superiority of white people. The academyrefined these ideas and popularized the language of race, providingintellectual cover for the social and political subjugation of nonwhitepeoples. In a class with the Harvard anatomist John CollinsWarren, Watson learned that in physical development, culturalaccomplishment, and intellectual potential, black people sat at thebottom of humanity. Professor Warren also revealed that the mostadvanced scientific research confirmed the biological supremacy ofthe boys in that room. It is likely that Henry Watson Jr. alreadybelieved in the natural dominion of white people, and that thescientific certainty with which most of his professors argued theprimacy of Europeans and the backwardness of Africans only confirmedhis views. Harvard, like Washington College, was a pillarof the antebellum racial order. Not only were the students, thefaculties, the officers, and the trustees white, but people of colorcame to campus only as servants and objects.

From Mobile, Watson traveled north toward Greensboro, throughterritories where "plantations are very thick." It was now Decemberand he was focused on securing a salary. "These regions seemto be a fine place for female teachers, they are in great demand," hereported despondently to his father. He still could not find a teachingjob at an academy or on a plantation, and an opening at thepublic school "would but little more than pay my board." While inGreensboro, he called upon Dr. John Ramsey Witherspoon—aSouth Carolina relative of the Reverend John Witherspoon, presidentof the College of New Jersey (Prince ton) and signer of theDeclaration of Independence—who was rumored to be in need ofa teacher. The six months since Watson left home had been spentto little profit, which was all the more disappointing and insultingin a place he believed to be dominated by greedy planters, and where"the people are almost ignoramuses on some things. The Doctorsare miserable, the Lawyers are not much better." To make mattersworse, he lost his purse from a torn coat pocket. "It was one of theChristmas holidays and the streets were full of negroes," he explained,"so that I hardly expect to hear from it again." He wentout with his host in search of the wallet but found nothing. Thenext morning, apparently unconscious of irony, he dispatched "anegro to hunt for it but unsuccessfully."

"I PASSED AN INDIAN MOUND"

In May 1831 this would-be tutor packed his belongings and preparedto leave Alabama on horse back. The idea of returning toNew En gland by horse likely had come from Caleb Mills, a NewHampshire resident who graduated from Dartmouth College in1828. The two men passed near Northampton, Massachusetts, asWatson was beginning his trip south. Mills later became professorof Greek and Latin at Wabash College and superintendent of educationin Indiana. Watson took note of a particular piece of informationduring the exchange: "He said he had rode that same horse5 or 6000 miles at the rate of 40 & 50 miles a day. Had just comefrom Kentucky." Short on cash, the young tutor chose that samemethod for his return. It was the perfect way to learn the geographyand history of the region. "I passed an Indian mound differentfrom most.... It appeared like a pyramid with a square base cutof about 15 ft. high. It is a regular square," Watson excitedly jottedwhile outside Tuscaloosa. He had already seen Indian mounds,and had stopped to carefully examine one near Carthage. He begansearching for mounds and artifacts. The very next day, Watsonrode through a portion of the "lands of the Cherokee nation" nearthe Tennessee border, but he "saw no indians or indian relics."

That area was part of an enormous expanse of territory—tens ofmillions of acres—that the state and federal governments seizedfrom Native nations and tribes, the most recent in a succession ofhuman tragedies that transformed the demography of North America.Prior to the "Great Dying," an estimated four million peoplelived in the greater Mississippi Valley. New waves of death hadcome with the expansion of Europe an outposts two centuries beforeWatson's journey. Violent raids into the interior from the Carolinacolonies transferred microbes inland, forced flights and migrationsthat upset the socioeconomic order of indigenous societies, alteredage distributions, and caused abrupt changes in diet and healththat made the new diseases more deadly. Watson's attention hadbeen drawn to the remnants of these civilizations—monumentalarchitecture constructed at least a millennium before Stonehenge.The largest ruins in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, equal in sizeand crafting to the pyramids of Egypt, could hold St. Peter's Basilicaand its gardens. These sites were once the centers of civilizationssupported by trading networks that stretched across thecontinent.

There is a background to Watson's interest in these archaeologicalremains. As an undergraduate he had lived on campuses thatwere decorated with Indian bones and artifacts and that hostedlively discussions of the impending extinction of Native peoples,legacies of a long relationship between colleges and conquest. European nations founded academies to secure their colonial interests,and they supported these schools by exploiting the decline ofIndian nations and the rise of African slavery.

A young college graduate riding horse back over ethnicallycleansed lands carved into slave plantations had plenty to ponder.Watson's mind was quite busy. He marveled at the beauty and richnessof the region. He saw planters driving Indians from the path ofcotton, and took notes on the crop economy, hauling distances,and regional markets. At the home of a man whom he met on theroad, he watched forty enslaved black people working 350 acres."Cotton plantations go as far as the eye can reach. Corn, rye, andwheat abound. Large bodies of Negroes at work," he recorded ashe passed from Alabama to Tennessee through Cherokee country.He was, it is fair to note, impressed with the rewards of humanslavery. When he reached Kentucky in June, he used his letters ofrecommendation to gain an audience with Henry Clay. "Said to bewell off but not rich," Watson added after a lengthy and pleasantvisit with the Great Compromiser, the senator and colonizationistwho for a generation managed the political conflicts between theslave and free states.

Henry Watson's generation had begun to wrestle, albeit poorly,with the moral and social implications of this history. In September1831—shortly after Watson had returned to Connecticut—JamesKent delivered the Phi Beta Kappa lecture during Yale's commencement.In 1793 Kent had become the first law professor at ColumbiaCollege in New York City. He bought a house, purchased an enslavedwoman, and became a colonizationist and a prominent opponentof extending suffrage to free black people in New YorkState. Kent celebrated his chapter's fiftieth anniversary with a lecturethat used science, theology, and history to proclaim the inevitablerise of the Europe ans. It was the will of God that "the red menof the forest have ... been supplanted by a much nobler race ofbeings of Europe an blood," he began. It would have been a sin and"a perversion of the duties and design of the human race" to permit"roving savages of the forest" to maintain these lands as "a savageand frightful desert."

YANKEES AND PLANTERS

Henry Watson was quite happy to get back to northern soil, but hewas also allured by the wealth that he had seen in the South. Hestudied law under Henry Barnard, a Yale graduate who later servedas a state and federal education commissioner. Although he claimedto hate slavery, Watson left Connecticut for Greensboro, Alabama,after just a couple of years, set up a law practice, and became aslave owner—a "sin," he confessed, but one that promised greatbenefits. Shrewd investments following the Panic of 1837 increasedhis wealth. He snatched up plantations and slaves in what oncehad been the home of the Creek. He referred to his enslaved blackpeople as his children and discovered the "charm" of mastery. Hespent his summers in New En gland, where cotton traders weredominating the commodities markets and massive cotton workswere catalyzing an industrial revolution. Within a decade Watsonowned more than fifty people. Letters to his parents show that hismotive was money. He disdained southerners: their religious practiceswere noisy and rude, their company was unenlightening, andtheir culture was organized around avarice. For all his harsh judgmentsabout the region and its people, he had become an excellentsouthern planter. Within two de cades he counted more than ahundred black people as property, became a founder and the presidentof the Planters Insurance Company, and emerged as a staunchdefender of human slavery. On the eve of the Civil War, this ConnecticutYankee belonged to the planter elite.

Long after the collapse of slavery in the Mid-Atlantic and NewEn gland, northern colleges continued sending young men like Watsonto the South and the Ca rib be an. The most successful cottonplanter in the antebellum era was born, raised, and educated inPennsylvania. Dr. Stephen Duncan moved to Mississippi after hisundergraduate and medical training in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Hehad graduated from Dickinson College, which was founded byBenjamin Rush—an opponent of slavery and a signer of the Declarationof Independence—to democratize education. Duncan marriedinto a Mississippi family, and, by the outbreak of the Civil War,owned several cotton plantations, two sugar plantations, and morethan a thousand human beings.

EBONY AND IVY

Henry Watson Jr.'s career as master of a "degraded race" forced towork the lands of a "vanished people" embodies central themes inthe history of the American college. It provides glimpses into thecomplexity of that past. The course of Watson's life flowed throughgrooves that were carved across the society by emotionally wrenchingand brutal historical events. Watson likely never appreciatedthe intimacy of his connections to Native and African peoples—theways that their lives unfolded into his and his into theirs, but hischoices reflect that reality. His college education helped him accessthe rewards of centuries of violent conflicts and demographicupheavals, and afforded him the privilege of turning the physicalreminders and cultural legacies of those events into objects of tourismand fascination.

Ebony and Ivy expands upon this history. The book is organizedinto two parts with chapters that advance fairly chronologicallyfrom the early colonial era to the nineteenth century. Thechapter themes explore the relationships between colonial collegesand colonial slavery and the legacies of slavery in American intellectualcultures.

Part I, "Slavery and the Rise of the American College," examineshow and why the earliest American academies becamerooted in the slave economies of the colonial world. Colleges arrivedin the Americas in response to Europe an nations' attempts toseize territories and hold off rivals. Europe an powers deployedcolleges to help defend and regulate their colonial possessions andthey turned to African slavery and the African slave trade to fundthese efforts. Chapter 1, "The Edges of the Empire," focuses on thestrategic and cultural functions of the first colleges in New Spain,New France, and the British American colonies. Chapter 2, " 'Bonfiresof the Negros,' " looks at the socioeconomic environment thattransformed slave traders and slave owners into college foundersand trustees in the British colonies. The high point of the Africanslave trade also marked, not coincidentally, the period in whichhigher education in the colonies expanded most rapidly. Chapter 3,"'The Very Name of a West-Indian,'" reveals how college governorsnurtured their academies upon the slave economy—a pursuitencouraged by the demands of colony building and the sources ofwealth in the Atlantic world. College administrators struggled forthe loyalty and patronage of wealthy colonial families, and the survivalof colonial schools often depended on their success in tappingthe fortunes of American merchants and planters.

Chapter 4, "Ebony and Ivy," explores the ties between collegesand the regional slave economies. Radical demographic shifts inthe colonial world changed the culture of the campus and thepurpose of education. In the de cades before the American Revolution,money from slave traders and planters transformed collegesinto playgrounds for wealthy boys and drew these institutions furtherinto the ser vice of the colonial elite.