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Yale Naked: A Story of Slavery, Sex and Mammon

by

Kenneth Maxwell

Friday, August 24, 2001

Notícia e Opinião

Timing is everything in the news business, and the timing of three post graduate students at Yale University was perfect. 2001 is the year Yale, the third oldest U.S. university, is celebrating its tercentenary. On May 21 the current occupant of the White House, George W. Bush, Yale Class of 1968, was invited back to New Haven, Connecticut, for the commencement ceremonies, where he extolled the merits of his fellow "C" students. And from August 31 until September 7, 2001, the predictably contentious UN World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance will be underway in South Africa.

Against this background in mid-August 2001, Anthony Dugdale, J. J. Fueser, and José Celso de Castro Alves released a remarkable polemic entitled "Yale, Slavery and Abolition." They also launched a website: www.yaleslavery.org. Here their work was made accessible to a wider audience. In lean prose and with solid documentation they draw attention to some very inconvenient facts about their university: how can the buildings of Yale's residential colleges, the core of undergraduate life at the university, carry the names of Yale alumnae that were not only slaveholders, but who beyond that were also ardent advocates of slavery. And how could Yale have chosen to honor them not during the time of slavery but as late as the 1960s at the height of the struggle for civil rights in the United States? Within a few days of the report's release, Dugdale, Fueser and Castro Alves had received a full article, an editorial comment, and an approving Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, an extended note on the AP wires and CNN, and a chiding editorial in the "Review and Outlook" section of the weekend Wall Street Journal which complained they had "presented Yale with something that is less a scholarly inquiry than a legal brief."

The brochure Yale University put out for its tercentenial year summarized Yale's official view on its relationship to slavery. Yale graduates, it says, "have a long history of activism in the face of slavery and a modern history of scholarship about it. Today the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, located at Yale, is the first of its kind in the world." True in as far as it goes, but as Dugdale, Fueser and Castro Alves point out, Yale also helped in 1831 to stop the effort to expand higher education to African Americans in New Haven, and in the twentieth century chose to name most of its colleges after slave owners and pro-slavery leaders.

The three authors are active members of Yale's GESO, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (Dugdale was the recent chair of the group), which is an affiliate of the federation of hospital and university employees union (HERE local 34). The GESO has been locked in a bitter dispute with Yale over recognition of the right of graduate student instructors to unionize. Their report is published under the auspices of the New Haven Amistad Committee, successor to the original Amistad Committee based in New Haven. In February 1839, Portuguese slave traders had taken a large group of Africans from Sierra Leone to Havana, violating the Treaties then in effect against the slave trade. Fifty-three Africans had been purchased and put aboard the Cuban schooner Amistad for shipment. On July 1, 1839, they seized the ship, killed the Captain and attempted to sail back to Africa, arriving instead off Long Island where the schooner was seized by a U.S. warship. The Africans were imprisoned in New Haven and charged with murder. The cause was taken up by abolitionists, and the case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1841 former president John Quincy Adams argued the defendants' case, and the Court ruled in the Africans' favor. Thirty-five eventually returned to Africa. The Amistad Committee, formed in 1839 and supported by Yale students and faculty, led the campaign to free the Amistad captives. The story was the subject of a recent Steven Spielberg movie.

The challenge laid down to Yale is not only one to historical memory. The authors of "Yale, Slavery and Abolition" in addition to choosing their timing with care, have been equally selective in the institutions with which they wish to associate their findings. In the process they have picked at scabs over some of the most sensitive evasions that lie at the core of America's-not just Yale University's-benign historical view of itself.

There is also something heroic about what these three postgraduate students have done at such a critical moment in their careers. Because of the incestuous structure of U.S. graduate education, they are indentured now more than at anytime to the good or ill will of their principal faculty advisers. They are thereby vulnerable to the multiple and subtle retribution that can be exacted in the future by the very cosseted professors whose hypocrisy they have exposed by their research and whose comfortable privileges their union challenges. Like all good scholars they have succeeded in turning over a long buried rock; yet even they underestimate all the slimy creatures that may sully forth from sundry dark places when exposed to the sunlight.

What is it precisely that Dugdale, Fueser and Castro Alves uncovered? First they undermine conventional wisdom by showing that slavery was not only a Southern phenomenon. In fact, slavery underpinned many facets of the economy in the North and in colonial New England, "from household to the field, from the legal system to religious education." Prominent New Englanders owned slaves, and many financial transactions at some point depended on slavery. Emancipation in the North took place gradually. The Connecticut emancipation law passed in 1784 envisioned a gradual phase out of slavery which would allow it to slowly disappear. No slaves were immediately freed in 1784. The law provided for children born to slaves to remain bonded while children, but to attain freedom on reaching 21 years of age (at first the age was set at 25). In 1774 there were 6,562 slaves in Connecticut, but by 1790 the number had fallen to 2,759 and to 97 by 1820. There were none by 1850. Yet even as slavery withered away in New England, many at Yale remained apologists for the institution of slavery. Yale in fact graduated twice as many pro-slavery clergy as its peer institutions.

Second, they reveal that some of the critical financial endowments which helped establish Yale University as a preeminent national institution of higher education were slavery-based. Yale's first endowed professorship, the Livingstonian Professorship of Divinity, was named for its benefactor, Col. Philip Livingston of New York, one of the most prominent slave traders of the mid eighteenth century. The first scholarship fund was named after Bishop George Berkeley and funded by the income from his slave-worked plantation in Newport, Rhode Island. Yale's first endowed library fund was named after Rev. Jared Eliot of Killingworth, a reforming agriculturist for whom slave labor was key.

Moreover, when Yale did have a choice between graduates who held high places within the political establishment of the country and who took opposing views over slavery, it chose to honor a slave owner and apologist of slavery. James Hillhouse, for instance, who served for fifty years as Yale's treasurer, was an outspoken anti-slavery leader as a U.S. Senator. Hillhouse, as others in the North, hoped that slavery in the South would wither away as it had in Connecticut. It did not, of course, spurred in large part by the expansion of cotton plantations based on the invention of the cotton gin by another Yale graduate, Eli Whitney (Class of 1792). But Yale nowhere honors the abolitionist Hillhouse as it does John C. Calhoun, Yale Class of 1804, a South Carolinian who benefited greatly from the expansion of the world cotton market. Elected to Congress in 1811, Calhoun became Secretary of War from 1817 to 1825; was elected Vice President of the United States serving under two presidents until 1832; became a Senator and then Secretary of State; and later was elected a Senator again. Calhoun was one of the most vociferous and successful defenders of American slavery over his long and turbulent political career. In the Senate Calhoun engineered passage of the gag rule that precluded discussion of slavery and arranged the annexation of Texas as a slave state. His defense of slavery led him to reject democracy itself. In a famous speech in the U.S. Senate chamber in 1837, Calhoun argued "concession or compromise" over slavery "to be fatal." And he continued: "…let me not be understood as admitting, even by implication, that the existing relations between the two races in the slaveholding states is an evil-far otherwise; I hold it to be good." In 1930 Yale named one of its residential colleges after him.

As late as 1961 Yale also chose to honor another alumnus with a residential college: Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, but a man who was the North's most virulent defender of slavery. Slavery, he wrote, was divinely ordained: "the greater declared object of the Savior's mission to earth." Morse also regarded the Declaration of Independence as a "mixture of truths, qualified truths and fallacious maxims." The special tercentennial edition of the Yale alumni magazine lists Morse as among the top graduates from its entire 300 year history. The invention of the telegraph was no mean feat, and he doubtlessly deserves on this count to be there; but as Dugdale, Fueser and Castro Alves point out, the alumni magazine nowhere mentions Morse's pro-slavery views, or his leadership of pro-slavery societies during the Civil War, much less Morse's attack of President Abraham Lincoln as "the Fanatic on the Throne." Ten of Yale's 12 residential colleges are named after prominent men in Yale's history; eight owned slaves or preached in favor of slavery.

The third story Dugdale, Fueser and Castro Alves bring to light is the fate of the attempt to establish a "negro college" in New Haven in 1831. The project for a multiracial educational institution was promoted by two local white men: Simeon Jocelyn, founding pastor of the African American Congregation in New Haven, and Arthur Tappan, who purchased land for the building and committed 1,000 dollars to the fundraising drive. They were supported by the famous abolitionist William L. Garrison. The proposal met a stone wall of resistance from the town and Yale College, led by the mayor of New Haven and prominent members of the Yale faculty, including Yale's then one professor of law, four of the five practicing lawyers in New Haven, three judges and the U.S. representative in Congress.

As one of the resolutions passed at the town meeting to protest the idea stated bluntly:

...Yale College, the institutions for the education of females, and the other schools, already existing in this city, are important to the community and the general interests of science, and as such have been deservedly patronized by the public, and the establishment of a College in the same place to educate the colored population is incompatible with the prosperity, if not the existence of the present institutions of learning, and will be destructive to the best interests of the city....

In New Haven, where town and gown rarely agreed on anything over the centuries, on the question of the establishment of a black college there was near unanimous sentiment. The vote at the town meeting opposing the "negro college" was 700 to 4.

The second resolution passed that day was no less revealing. It reads:

....the propagation of sentiments favorable to the immediate emancipation of slaves in disregard of the civil institutions of the States in which they belong, and as an auxiliary thereto the contemporaneous founding of Colleges for educating colored people, is unwarrantable and dangerous interference with the internal concerns of other States, and ought to be discouraged.

The day after the resolution was passed a mob attacked Arthur Tappan's house. Simeon Jocelyn's home was also ransacked by a mob, and he was forced to end his leadership of the African American church. But a few years later both men were founders of the New Haven Amistad Committee and prominent advocates of justice in the Amistad affair. Undoubtedly Yale was concerned with the negative impact of the proposed "Black College" on their university's fundraising prospects, a concern clearly present in the twentieth century as well. As the Boston Courier put it in 1831: "The real objection to the [Black] College appears to have been the apprehension of giving offense to the Southern patrons of Yale." But mammon was not all that was at stake here

The editorials and comments in the Connecticut newspapers in 1831 make it evident that the citizens of New Haven and the professors at Yale were as much concerned about sex as they were with race; or more explosively to their way of thinking, they were worried specifically about interracial sex. The New Haven Connecticut Journal in an editorial argued that:

The location of a college of blacks here would be totally ruinous to the city.... whose certain effect will be to lower the town's public morals-to drive from our city its female schools-its throngs of summer visitors-and stop the vital stream to the city, the influx of young men to Yale College.

The Connecticut Middletown Gazette agreed:

…the support of Yale College and the numerous female seminaries, depends in no inconsiderable degree, on the character of the inhabitants. Hitherto, New Haven has been distinguished.... But now, if the young ladies are to be elbowed at every corner by black collegians, and the students of Yale are to be met by them in all pride of supposed equality, the interest of the city, identified as it is with the prosperity of the institutions, will suffer material injury.

Dugdale, Fueser and Castro Alves cite these reports, but they do not follow them up, which is a pity because therein lies a fascinating and revealing adjunct to their story. The New Haven paper on the day of the town meeting had made a recommendation:

If it is necessary to have an African college in Connecticut, may the projectors of it, on mature consideration, conclude to locate it in the town of Cornwall.... Cornwall possesses many advantages for such an institution, over other places; and it is not among the least of them, that the ladies of that town readily give themselves, better for worse, to the colored gentlemen.

I was struck by the reference in Cornwall, Connecticut. It is a remote place, and must have been even more so during the early nineteenth century. The township of Cornwall spreads over the higher elevations of the Litchfield hills and the steep valley where the Housatonic River cuts sharply through northwestern Connecticut. It is an upland landscape consisting of three parallel valleys with wooded ridges between them. The ridges, not the valleys, were settled first. It is a rough broken country with clear streams and little peaks. Today its small resident population is augmented by weekend residents from New York City, including several celebrities-most recently Whoopi Goldberg, the NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw, and the tennis great Ivan Lendl among others. I have in my library a History of Cornwall, a leather-bound volume published for private subscribers in 1926 by the Reverend Edward Comfort Starr, who had for twenty four years served a pastor of the Cornwall congregational church and was a graduate of Yale College and its theological seminary. I remembered reading something of the story of the Cornwall missionary school and its misadventures, the evident origin of the aspersions about the proclivities of the girls of Cornwall, to which the New Haven press and Yale worthies referred disparagingly in 1831.

The Rev. Starr's account provides the bare-bones of the history of the Foreign Mission School which opened in Cornwall in 1817 and closed its doors in 1827. The school's origins were said to go back to 1810 when Edwin Dwight found a "dark skinned youth on the college steps at Yale crying because he had no means of getting an education." Edwin took the young man, a Hawaiian who New England sailors had brought to America and called Henry Obookiah, to his father, Yale's President Timothy Dwight. Partly inspired by Henry Obookiah, the clergy of Connecticut turned to the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions to establish a school to train Obookiah and other Hawaiians as missionaries for the Pacific Islands. Cornwall was chosen because it was "apart from the temptations and distractions of the larger towns."

Obookiah had a remarkable story. Born in 1792 in Ka'u at Ninole near Punalu'u on the big island, he had survived the deaths of his parents, victims of warfare on the island. He was then schooled in the rituals of priesthood by his uncle at Hiki'au Heiau, where Captain Cook had been killed two decades earlier in 1779. Taken aboard a New England ship in Kealakakukua Bay, he and a young friend, Hopo'o, voyaged to the North Pacific, later on to Macao and around the Cape of Good Hope to New York. The two young Hawaiian boys then moved to New Haven to live with the captain of the vessel that had taken them from Hawaii, where they met Edwin Dwight.

By 1814 Henry Obookiah was speaking publicly, translating the Bible, and beginning a grammar dictionary on the Hawaiian language. Henry Obookiah (or Opukaha'ia as he is now known in Hawaii) became famous after his early death in 1818 from typhus fever at the age of 26, when Edwin Dwight published a small book entitled Memoir of Henry Obookiah, a native of the Sandwich Islands, who died at Cornwall, Connecticut. This memoir comprising Obookiah's account of his life, feelings, and philosophies inspired 14 American missionaries to volunteer to evangelize the Hawaiian Islands (or Sandwich Islands as they were then known). Obookiah was buried at Cornwall where his tombstone but not his body remains. He was, the inscription reads, "a worthy member [of the Mission School] he was once an Idolater, and was designed for a Pagan Priest; but by the grace of God and by the prayers of pious friends, he became a Christian." In 1993 a group of his descendants claimed the body which was returned to the big island of Hawaii and re-interred.

Beginning with twelve pupils, the number of students at the Cornwall Mission School tripled over the nine and a half years of its existence. Students were of several races, including many Native Americans, so that the school, the Rev. Starr said, was sometimes spoken of as "the Indian School." But Starr also reports that "two marriages of Indians who had been at the school, with white girls of the village, had produced great excitement and are popularly said to be the cause of the breaking up of the school... it also aroused much unpleasant gossip about the people of Cornwall." In fact, Starr tells us in a footnote, the editor of the Litchfield Eagle had declared that the Cornwall girls were left alone at unreasonable hours with the mission boys and were seen walking arm in arm with them.

The real history is more complicated and tragic. Among the "Indian" students at the Cornwall Mission School were two Cherokees: John Ridge and "Buck" Oowatie (later known as Elias Boudinot). John was the son of Major Ridge and Buck's father was Ridge's half-brother. Major Ridge led a body of Cherokee Indians in alliance with the United States under the command of General Andrew Jackson fighting against other Native Americans during the Creek War and first Seminole War, where he earned his military title. Ridge's Cherokee name was "kah-nung-da-tle-ghe," the man who walks on the mountaintop. He was a leader of the Cherokee nation settled at Pine Log, in present day Bartow County, Georgia, under the orders of President George Washington. Here the Cherokees evolved an experiment in acculturation merging U.S. and Cherokee traditions and greatly prospering as settled farmers. John, Major Ridge's son, was educated by Moravian missionaries before being sent by the major to the Cornwall Mission School as a paying pupil. Major Ridge was a man of substantial property; his estates contained 240 acres under cultivation, 1,142 peach trees, 418 apple trees, a ferry, and a store. He also owned 30 black slaves.

At the mission school, both John Ridge and Buck Oowatie fell in love with local girls. John met Sarah Bird Northrupt, the daughter of the Steward of the Mission School, John P. Northrupt. In the face of strong opposition from Major Ridge as well as Sarah's parents, they eventually married in 1824. Major Ridge had consulted the Moravian missionaries if "there was anything in your Bible to prevent such a marriage." They assured him there was not.

John Ridge's cousin, Buck Oowatie, on his way from the Cherokee nation in Georgia to the Cornwall Mission School had visited the former president Thomas Jefferson at his residence Monticello in Virginia as well as James Madison at his country house Montpelier. In Washington, DC, Buck Watie had also met Dr. Elias Boudinot, briefly president of the United States under the Articles of Confederation and an early abolitionist and philanthropist who believed the American Indians were descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel. In appreciation of his support of the Cherokee nation, Buck took Boudinot's name as his own from then on. At Cornwall, the newly named Elias Boudinot fell in love with Harriet Gold, daughter of Colonel Benjamin Gold, a scion of one of Cornwall's most eminent families. Elias and Harriet were married in 1826 despite the fact the pastor, Rev. Timothy Stone (honorary Yale MA 1804), refused to officiate at the ceremony at the Cornwall congregational church fearing his congregation would eject him. Elias was burnt in effigy in the town. These two interracial marriages led to the closing of the Mission School in 1827.

Both John Ridge and Elias Boudinot were to play a key role in one of the most somber chapters in American history. In 1830 the Indian Removal Act, vigorously promoted by President Andrew Jackson, forced the expulsion of the Cherokee from their fertile lands in Georgia. Under military escort tens of thousands of tribesmen were marched west to barren territory in the present state of Oklahoma. Over a third died en route. This shameful resettlement of 1838-1839 coincided ironically with the Amistad affair. The State of Georgia distributed the lands of the Cherokees by mean of a lottery. The disastrous trek of the Cherokees to Oklahoma from Georgia became known in history as "the trail of tears." Major Ridge, his son John, as well as Elias Boudinot, had all signed the Treaty of New Echota in 1835 which accepted the removal against the majority opinion of the Cherokee.

President Andrew Jackson was more responsible than most for the betrayal of the experiment of peaceful co-existence, alliance, and mutual respect between the United States of America and the Cherokee Nation, which Major Ridge had espoused and lived by. Pathetically, he called on his former commander at his home in Tennessee on the way to Oklahoma. But Ridge already knew that by signing the Treaty of New Echota he had also signed his own death warrant. Within days he was assassinated by Cherokees who saw his continued trust in the white man as base treachery. Within six months after the arrival of the Cherokee in Oklahoma, both John Ridge and Elias Boudinot had also been brutally murdered by Cherokee braves. John Ridge's wife Harriet had died in 1836 on the eve of the removal to Oklahoma and is buried in Calhoun, Georgia. Elias Boudinot's wife Sarah survived his assassination, moving with her children to Fayetteville, Arkansas. Their eldest son went to California where he became a newspaper editor and politician.

How sadly revealing it is that in opposing the "negro college" in 1831 the good citizens of New Haven, with the support of the worthy faculty of Yale, should have transformed the story of what was by all accounts two happy marriages into gossip about "the ladies of town [Cornwall, who] readily give themselves, better for worse, to the colored gentlemen." And how banal is the reduction of the tragedy that befell the brightest students of the Cornwall Mission School to a racist evocation of the danger of blacks on the street in New Haven "elbowing" the young ladies of the seminaries and discomforting the students at Yale College who would be confronted with this assertion of "supposed equality."

Yet this painful excursion into the underside of American history would undoubtedly have appealed to Antônio de Castro Alves, the namesake of one of the co-authors of the report on "Yale, Slavery and Abolition." Castro Alves, the nineteenth-century Brazilian romantic poet from Bahia, capital of Brazil's vibrant Afro-Brazilian culture, also lived a tragic life, was thwarted in love, and died at the age of 24 from tuberculosis with only one volume of his poetry published. Posthumously he became, and remains, one of Brazil's most powerful anti-slavery voices, author of The Slaves (Os Escravos, 1883), an oration from Africa imploring God's justice called Voices of Africa (Vozes d'África, 1880), and, above all, The Slave Ship (O Navio Negreiro, 1880), a powerful portrayal of the horrors of the middle passage. A disciple of Victor Hugo, he was a model for the late Jorge Amado, who praised Castro Alves as a poet who saw Brazil naked in all its contradictions and full of social and racial prejudices. In 2001 Dugdale, Fueser and Castro Alves have seen Yale naked, and we are all the better for it.

Copyright 2000 Notícia e Opinião

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