The Yale & Slavery Research Project

1636

Violence between Pequots and English colonists intensifies in areas surrounding Long Island Sound. Disease, displacement, and warfare have taken a toll on Indigenous communities. By this time, the Pequot population has declined by nearly 80 percent to around 3,000 people. Pequot culture and security are under tremendous threat.

Map of New England, Yale University Library.

Map of New England showing "Pequod" territory

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War, Captivity, and Bondage

1637 May

English troops with some Native allies massacre an entire village of 400 Pequot men, women, and children in their fort near the Mystic River. “The fires… in the centre of the fort blazed most terribly,” writes a captain in the English force, “and burnt all in the space of half an hour.”

William Hubbard, “A narrative of the troubles with the Indians in New-England…” Yale University Library.

William Hubbard, A narrative of the troubles with the Indians in New-England.... (1677)

1638

The first known Africans in Massachusetts, purchased with proceeds earned by selling Pequot captives, arrive on a ship with cotton and tobacco. This trade continues, and in 1646, the New England Confederation codifies that Native captives should “be shipped out and exchanged” for enslaved Black people.

English Castle at Anamabou, Yale University Library.

“English castle at Anamabou” (present-day Ghana)

1638 April

New Haven Colony, led by John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton, is founded.

The Reverend John Davenport, Yale University Art Gallery.

Reverend John Davenport (1597–1669/70) Artist: Davenport Limner (American, active ca. 1670)

1638 September

The Treaty of Hartford is forced upon the Pequots, designed to both humiliate and liquidate them as a people. The term “Pequot” is outlawed and the Pequot people are declared extinct (though they still survive until today). The first Africans in the Connecticut colony, meanwhile, likely arrive during the Pequot War, probably in trade for Indigenous people who are taken prisoner and enslaved.

1639

Although it is uncertain exactly when the first Africans arrive in Connecticut, their presence is initially recorded at this time, when an enslaved Black boy named Louis Berbice, from Dutch Guiana, is killed by his owner in Hartford. Africans may have been present in New Haven even earlier, likely from its founding; Lucretia, a Black woman, belonged to the colony’s founder and governor, Theophilus Eaton, and may have arrived with him.

African Captives Arrive in New England Most were shipped via British colonies in the West Indies, although some were transported directly from Africa.

CHAPTER 1 African Captives Arrive in New England

The first Africans in the Connecticut colony likely arrived during the years of the Pequot War, perhaps as a result of trade in Native men who were taken prisoner and enslaved. In fact, the first known Africans in neighboring Massachusetts were bought from the proceeds of selling Pequot captives; they arrived in 1638, on a ship with cotton and tobacco. This trade continued, and in 1646, the New England Confederation codified that Native captives should “be shipped out and exchanged for Negroes.”

New Haven, home of Yale College, was an integral node in the vast world-wide network of commerce in human beings and cultural transformations.

Although it is uncertain exactly when the first Africans arrived in Connecticut, their presence was initially recorded in 1639, when an enslaved Black boy named Louis Berbice, from Dutch Guiana, was killed by his owner in Hartford. And Africans may have been present in New Haven even earlier, likely from its founding. Lucretia, a Black woman, belonged to the colony’s founder and governor, Theophilus Eaton, and may have arrived with him.

Africans came to New England generally via British colonies in the West Indies, although some were transported directly from Africa. They hailed from the Senegambia basin of West Africa, the Grain Coast, the Windward Coast, Benin, Biafra, Dahomey, West Central Africa, and once in a while even as far east as Madagascar. But after 1700, the majority had been swept from the coastal and inland regions of modern-day Ghana, known by the eighteenth century as the Gold Coast or the “slave coast” to European slave traders.

The ghastly business of the slave trade was a three-to-four-century-long commercial enterprise in which Africa provided the one product Europeans most wanted—people—in exchange for firearms, textiles, and other manufactured goods. Its scale, methods, and consequences have defined the meaning of inhumanity, as well as forged humane mass movements against oppression, ever since the emergence of a modern world. New Haven, home of Yale College, was an integral node in the vast world-wide network of commerce in human beings and cultural transformations.

In 1700, on the eve of the creation of the Collegiate School that would soon become Yale, one in ten property inventories in the colony of Connecticut included enslaved people. The prominent property-holding families in the principal towns of New London, New Haven, Norwich, and Hartford were slaveholders. Fully half of all ministers, doctors, and public officials in the colony owned at least one or two enslaved Africans. One could not live and work in or near a Connecticut town without seeing enslaved Black people.

They were, of course, people—with identities, although too often recorded only by first names. In Farmington, an Isaac Miller owned Phebe, Cuff and their son, Peter. Cuff was sold to a Joseph Coe in 1744, and Phebe to the same slaveholder ten years later. A notation in Coe’s deed of sale demonstrates the enslaved man’s demand for a last name that he himself chose: “Cuff desires to have the Sir Name Freeman annexed to his Name.”

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

1662

New Haven Colony is incorporated into the larger colony of Connecticut.

1675

King Philip’s War breaks out, pitting Native inhabitants of coastal Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut against English colonists supported by some Indigenous allies. The war is fought over land and water, but also stems from hatred and fear among the English that, in living so close to people they consider barbarous, they are losing their faith and purpose. Many Natives, for their part, have come to loathe the English for their greed, arrogance, and conquests; many Indigenous leaders, or sachems, also fear the conversion to Christianity of some of their rival neighbors. Despite opposition from some (not all) clergy, kidnapping and a regional slave trade in Native refugees intensifies as a profitable business during and after the war.

A 19th century depiction of Metacom, known to the English settlers as "King Philip."

1676 August

A Native marksman serving the English kills King Philip, a sachem of the Wampanoag of southeastern Massachusetts whose real name is Metacom. The sachem’s body is dismembered and decapitated, and his body parts are circulated as mythic objects by English colonists for years to come. His son is one of countless Native children sold into slavery by the English.

Image above: A 19th century depiction of Metacom, known to the English settlers as “King Philip,” Yale University Library.

Yale’s Beginnings The early theology school was born of colonial conquest and a “diseased form” of Christian imagination.

Chapter 1 Yale’s Beginnings

In the fall of 1676, during the brutal and destructive conflict that came to be known as King Philip’s War, James Noyes wrote to John Allyn, a colonial military and political official, pleading for Native captives. Noyes, a Harvard-educated minister, was serving as chaplain to a company of colonial settlers. Feeling wronged and overburdened, he reminded Allyn he had “been 3 times in your war service,” and on each occasion he was cheated out of the wages and captives rightfully due him.

The Reverend James Noyes, who would become one of Yale’s founding trustees, wanted a captive to enslave who “maye be worth having.”

Already in possession of four captives—a fourteen-old girl, a five-year-old girl, their sick mother, and “a Gentleman never used to work, [who] had been sick & lame in his limbs”—Noyes wanted Allyn to send him a young, healthy captive. The minister had sent the sick man away, presumably to die, but, regrettably, he returned to him, and Noyes had been nursing him with food and medicine for three weeks.

Noyes seemed well informed about the other available captives and was not interested in any of them; “I know of none I like lately come in,” he said. Still others, he knew, had been sent to Barbados—a reminder of this war’s global reverberations in the West Indies and throughout the Atlantic. Noyes was willing to keep the girl, her mother “if she live,” and the five-year-old, but he hoped to receive “a young man a fourth when I can light of one that maye be worth having.” Worth having; the Reverend Noyes wanted a laborer to own in body and perhaps soul.

In this wartime emergency as well as in more stable times, the Reverend Noyes viewed enslaved Native Americans and eventually Africans as saleable property, commodities at his disposal as a Christian Englishman in a colonial frontier society. In their ambitions, their theological certainties, and their material quests, the Puritans at war in seventeenth-century Connecticut were also the drivers of an early form of commercial expansion and conquest.

As the theologian Willie James Jennings writes, the Christian “imagination” of the English colonists in New England produced a “breathtaking hubris” demanding that “the natives, black, red or everyone not white, must be brought from chaos to faith. The land, wetlands, fields, and forests must be cleared, organized and brought into productive civilization.” In this lethal mixture of historical circumstances forged by mercantile empire, religious migration, displacement into new worlds, and war for survival and dominance, the Christian imagination, writes Jennings, fell into a “diseased form” increasingly linked to slavery and conquest, to a concept of property in man that demanded ever more creative justifications.

Twenty-five years after writing his letter to Allyn, in 1701, Noyes was one of the ten trustees who established the Collegiate School, the forerunner to Yale College, in Saybrook, on the shoreline of Long Island Sound. When Noyes and his contemporaries set out to found their school, they did so within a political, cultural, and demographic landscape that had been transformed by decades of warfare—by the blood shed—between settlers and indigenous peoples. Yale’s New England origins lie in these seventeenth-century stories of destruction, migration, and enslavement, both Indigenous and African.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

1690

The Connecticut Colony bans Black and Indigenous people from occupying public roadways after 9 p.m.

1700

On the eve of the creation of the Collegiate School that would become Yale, one in 10 property inventories in the colony of Connecticut includes enslaved people.

1701 October 9

The General Assembly in New Haven authorizes the creation of a college and names 10 clergymen as trustees. The following month, seven of those ministers gather in Saybrook, Connecticut, for their first meeting. Enslaved people are likely present; at least seven of the 10 minister-trustees owned enslaved people. An early 20th-century history of Yale College describes the clergymen as “followed on horseback by their men-servants or slaves, into old Killingworth Street.”

Image above: 1701 Yale Charter, Yale University Library.

Images below, left to right: A New Map of the Most Considerable Plantations of the English in America. Dedicated to His Highness William Duke of Glocester, Yale University Library; Portrait of Mary Hooker Pierpont, Yale University Art Gallery.

Yale’s Founders and Slavery At least seven of the ten first trustees of what became Yale University owned one or more enslaved people.

CHAPTER 2 Yale’s Founders and Slavery

On October 9, 1701, the general assembly in New Haven authorized the creation of a college and named ten clergymen as trustees of the new school. The next month, seven of these ministers, all but one trained at Harvard, gathered in Saybrook, Connecticut on the shores of the Long Island Sound, for their first meeting.

Enslaved men, women, and children in the archives of Yale’s founders have remained nearly invisible for three centuries, but to a degree they have been hiding in plain sight.

In attendance were Samuel Andrew of Milford, Thomas Buckingham of Saybrook, Israel Chauncey of Stratford, James Pierpont of New Haven, Abraham Pierson of Kenilworth, Noadiah Russell of Middletown, and Joseph Webb of Fairfield. Together, what they established was essentially the idea of a college, with a few rules about how degrees were to be administered and a stipulation that its leader would be called “rector.”

Fledgling to say the least, this school had been authorized by the colonial assembly, which began with a grant of £120 as well as the assembly’s approval to spend an additional £500 per annum. A wealthy landowner, James Fitch, also donated a farm the college might use for rental revenue. And so instruction of a sort began, with one undergraduate degree given in 1702, along with a handful of master’s degrees.

Some slaves were likely present at the first trustees’ meeting. An early twentieth-century history of Yale describes the journey to Buckingham’s house, picturing the clergymen “followed on horseback by their men-servants or slaves, into old Killingworth Street.” In early eighteenth-century Connecticut, laborers of all sorts, particularly those who served the clergy class, were frequently enslaved or indentured servants. Indeed, of the ten first trustees of what became Yale College, at least seven, and possibly others, owned one or more slaves.

The Reverend Buckingham, in his will, left to his son, Hezekia Buckingham, “my negro boy called Peter to be his Slave Servant,” and to his “son-in-law John Kirtland of Saybrook my negro boy called Philip to be his Slave Servant.” The Reverend Chauncy, in the inventory of his estate, listed “A Negro girl” valued at £40, below “An horse” and “eight sheep” and above “a Great Brass kettle.” Other founders left similar such calculations and matter-of-fact statements of human chattel property in their estates and inventories.

Enslaved men, women, and children in the archives of Yale’s founders have remained nearly invisible for three centuries, but to a degree they have been hiding in plain sight. Of the founding trustees, the Reverend Woodbridge—namesake of Woodbridge Hall—was the largest slaveholder. Church records show that he and his wife owned and baptized Black individuals named Isabella, Cesar Diego, Thomas, and a thirteen-year-old boy named Thorn, whom he sold “in plain and open market.” Furthermore, Abigail Woodbridge, his wife, inherited from her first husband a man named Andrew, who eventually married Tamar, a slave owned by the Reverend Woodbridge. Tamar and Andrew had children named Lydia, Isabella, and Daniel.

Parents, children, and siblings were often separated, sometimes as gifts or when an estate was broken up.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

Early 20th century depiction of the first commencement in New Haven, held in 1718

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Yale’s Founders and Slavery

1704 map of New England also shows Jamaica, Bermuda, and Barbados, indicating close relationship between Caribbean and northern colonies or "plantations" at the time of the Collegiate School's founding

Portrait of Mary Hooker Pierpont, wife of James and granddaughter of Thomas Hooker.

1713–1721

Elihu Yale, a wealthy Bostonian who had moved to England as a child, sends hundreds of books, a portrait of King George I, and “goods and merchandizes” to support the Collegiate School of Connecticut. Some portion of Elihu Yale’s fortune is derived from his commercial entanglements with the slave trade; as the governor of Madras, India, for the East India Company, he had a direct role in the trafficking of enslaved people.

Images, left to right: Elihu Yale Snuffbox, Yale University Art Gallery; Elihu Yale with His Servant, Yale University Art Gallery; Fort St. George, Yale Center for British Art; Elihu Yale, Yale University Art Gallery.

Elihu Yale snuffbox, Maker: John Obrisset

Elihu Yale with his Servant Artist: James Worsdale (British, ca. 1692–1767)

Fort St. George. Print made by Gerard van der Gucht. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1978.43.272.

1716

Thirteen-year-old Jonathan Edwards begins his studies in Wethersfield, Connecticut, just south of Hartford, one site where Collegiate School students are educated at the time. That same year, the Collegiate School, after conducting classes in Saybrook, Wethersfield, and other Connecticut towns for more than a decade, moves permanently to New Haven.

1717–1718

In honor of the contributions of Elihu Yale—and to entice him to make additional donations—the Collegiate School constructs a building called “Yale College.” This house, the first school building for instruction in New Haven, stands three stories high, 170 feet long, and 22 feet wide, and contains some 50 studies for students.

Elihu Yale with Members of his Family and an Enslaved Child, Yale Center for British Art.

How Yale Got Its Name In hopes of attracting more gifts and funds, the founders of the Collegiate School renamed the institution after a British colonial benefactor.

CHAPTER 2 How Yale Got Its Name

The small Collegiate School, Yale’s precursor, conducted classes in Saybrook, Wethersfield, and other Connecticut towns until it moved permanently to New Haven in 1716. During this period the college found a major benefactor and future namesake from abroad.

Elihu Yale oversaw many sales, adjudications, and accountings of enslaved people for the East India Company.

Elihu Yale was a wealthy man, born in Boston, who had moved to England as a child and grown up as landed aristocracy in Wales. He spent many years in Madras, India, first as a clerk, then as a writer, eventually becoming governor of the East India Company in that lucrative outpost of the British empire.

The East India Company conducted enormous commerce out of Madras, on India’s southeast coast, and it sanctioned and regulated part of the Indian slave trade. Yale himself oversaw many sales, adjudications, and accountings of enslaved people for the East India Company. When he was governor, the “Consultation Books” frequently would report such decisions, as in 1687, when he and his agents, over Yale’s signature, “Order’d that ten Slaves be sent upon each of the Europe ships for St. Helena, to supply that Island.”

Because of a famine in 1687, enslaved people were frequently sold off to Indian Ocean coastal ports and islands. The governor’s office reported that year “that one hundred Slaves bee sent them … they being by the famine, extreamly cheap.” In 1689, Yale reported that the frigate Pearle returned from Vizagapatam. Part of the cargo was shackles “for well secureing the slaves.”

Sometimes Yale and his fellow agents dealt out enslavement as punishment for crimes, as on September 24, 1687, when “Three people were punished for a crime by being sentenced to life slavery for the company.” Dozens more of these kinds of reports exist in records of Fort St. George.

Precisely whether or how many people Yale personally may have owned is not yet discernable, nor perhaps even the key question. Some portion of Yale’s considerable fortune, amassed while British governor-president in Madras, derived from his myriad entanglements with the purchase and sale of human beings.

In an otherwise highly favorable history of Yale College’s origins, written in 1918, Franklin Bowditch Dexter leaves a remarkable statement about the governor’s character, saying he left a “record of arrogance, cruelty, sensuality, and greed,” and compares him to the biblical king Nebuchadnezzar.

Between 1713 and 1721, Yale sent hundreds of books, a portrait of King George I, and “sundry goods and merchandizes” to support the Collegiate School of Connecticut. As per Yale’s instructions, the goods were sold, and the proceeds went to the building of the college house. It was not an insignificant donation, but in the context of Yale’s enormous wealth, the college was hoping for more.

In honor of his contributions, and to entice him into additional donations, the Collegiate School constructed a building called Yale College. From that day forward, the third-oldest institution of higher learning in America would be known by that name.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

Attributed to John Verelst, ca. 1675–1734, Dutch, active in Britain (by 1697), Elihu Yale with Members of his Family and an Enslaved Child, ca. 1719, Oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Andrew Cavendish, eleventh Duke of Devonshire, B1970.1.

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The Elihu Yale Group Portrait

1718 September 12

Yale College holds a “splendid Commencement” ceremony, presided over by Connecticut governor Gurdon Saltonstall, a passionate defender of slavery. From this day forward, the third-oldest institution of higher learning in America is known as Yale.

Image above: First Commencement, Held in 1718, Yale University Library.

Image below: Governor Gurdon Saltonstall, Yale University Art Gallery.

Governor Gurdon Saltonstall (1666–1724)Artist: Unknown

1720

Jonathan Edwards receives his baccalaureate degree from Yale College. Over the nearly four decades that follow, he becomes America’s most renowned theologian.

Images, left to right: Valedictory Oration, in Latin, delivered at the Yale College commencement of September 1720, Yale University Library; Jonathan Edwards, Princeton University Art Museum.

The Contradictions of Jonathan Edwards He envisaged a time when Indians and Blacks would be “divines” and write “excellent books,” but he also owned enslaved people.

CHAPTER 1 The Contradictions of Jonathan Edwards

In 1720, Jonathan Edwards, an extraordinarily well-read teenager, completed his baccalaureate degree in New Haven at what had become Yale College. Over the next nearly four decades he became America’s greatest theologian.

Edwards, perhaps Yale’s most prominent graduate in its first century, was a willing and representative slaveholder, a famed model for so many other Yale leaders and graduates.

Edwards viewed all races of people as descendants of Adam and Eve, and therefore of the same original sin and human possibility, and he saw Africans and Native Americans as equal to Europeans in their potential for godliness and evil.

In 1739, he surmised that when the millennium arrived in a few hundred years, “Negroes and Indians will be divines.” They would write “excellent books,” become “learned men, and “shall then be very knowing in religion.” Edwards contended that a slaveholder should not abuse his servant because “we are made of the same human race.”

Although he would condemn slave trading in the Atlantic, he never opposed the ownership of enslaved Africans in his community and his household. Indeed, Edwards, perhaps Yale’s most prominent graduate in its first century, was a willing and representative slaveholder, a famed model for so many other Yale leaders and graduates.

A genius with rhetoric and the most probing founder of American theological and philosophical literature, Edwards embodied multiple contradictions or “Puritan dilemmas.” Piety and oppression, deep personal religious faith and a fully hierarchical view of human society, marched together in the Puritan worldview.

The Puritans came to accept the existence of slavery, while endeavoring to control and condemn the abuses of slaveholders. They tried to infuse the inhumanity of slavery with ethical guards against the tyranny of the slave owner. Servitude was somehow natural, including chattel slavery, but the slaveholder must not abuse his terrible power, an ethically untenable proposition. Such a complex paradox in the life of Edwards informs much of the evolving early history of Yale College as well.

During his undergraduate years at Yale, the young Edwards kept a spiritual diary, attempting to record the nature and growth of his faith. Intensely intellectual, anti-social, and constantly questing to embrace an elusive “holiness,” Edwards struggled with inner “wicked inclinations,” as “God would not suffer [him] to go on with any quietness.” And there is little surprise that Edwards’s inward “violent struggles” did not concern the fate of the Black and Native people he saw around him, free or enslaved. Their fate, though, walked within and without his life and that of Yale College.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

Valedictory Oration, in Latin, delivered at the Yale College commencement of September 1720

portrait of Jonathan Edwards / he became 3rd president of Princeton; see https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/jonathan-edwards-jr

1721

As Yale expands, much of its funding comes from commerce dependent on enslaved labor—including the West Indies rum business. The Connecticut General Assembly this year passes “An Act for the better Regulating the Duty of Impost upon Rhum,” which includes the provision, “That what shall be gained by the impost on rum for two years next coming shall be applied to the building of a rectors house for Yale College.”

Map of New Haven, Yale University Library.

Map of New Haven / drawn by Joseph Brown, 1724 ; copied by Prest. Ezra Stiles, 1782.

1730

The Connecticut Colony passes a law stating that Black, Indigenous, or mixed-race people would be “whipped with forty lashes” if they “uttered or published… words” about a white person that were deemed “actionable” under law. At this time, Africans number roughly 700 out of 38,000 people in Connecticut, or 1.8 percent of the population.

1739

Jonathan Edwards surmises that a few hundred years hence, “Negroes and Indians will be divines,” and will write “excellent books,” become “learned men,” and “shall then be very knowing in religion.” Although he condemns slave trading in the Atlantic, he and his wife enslave several Black people. Edwards never opposes the ownership of enslaved Africans in his community or his household, which serves as a model of behavior for many other Yale leaders and graduates.

1745

Philip Livingston Sr. a businessman and human trafficker, donates the considerable sum of £28, ten shillings to Yale College in recognition of the education his sons have received there. The Livingston fortune is derived in part from investments in slave ships transporting hundreds of Africans from the continent to forced labor in the Americas, and from the provisioning of plantations in the Caribbean. In 1756, Livingston’s gift becomes the basis for the Livingstonian Professorship in Divinity, the college’s first professorship and one of its most prestigious for many years.

Robert Livingston, Yale University Library.

Follow the Money Proceeds from slavery helped fund the university from its earliest days.

CHAPTER 3 Follow the Money

From its founding, Yale received financial and political support from some of the most influential and prominent families in Connecticut and beyond. These same families were often involved, personally and through their business interests, in slaveholding.

By the 1730s, Philip Livingston, Sr., with his own sons attending Yale, owned shares in at least four slave ships operating out of New York harbor; all told, he and his sons invested in at least fifteen slave voyages to and from Africa.

Among the wealthiest and most significant family benefactors of Yale were the Livingstons of New York, a dynasty of three generations of human traffickers and merchants. In 1690, New Yorker Robert C. Livingston first invested in a slave voyage to the west coast of Africa.

Robert’s son, Philip Livingston Sr. (1686-1749), patriarch of the eighteenth-century extended family, sent four of his six sons to Yale College, including Philip Livingston, Jr., who later signed the Declaration of Independence. For the senior Livingston, an education at Yale for most of his sons represented the kind of learning as well as prestige he sought for his family’s ascendance into the world of the New York mercantile elite.

By the 1730s, Philip Livingston, Sr., with his own sons attending Yale, owned shares in at least four slave ships operating out of New York harbor; all told, he and his sons invested in at least fifteen slave voyages to and from Africa. The family’s trade routes reached all the way to Madagascar off the eastern coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean.

The Livingstons imported enslaved Africans directly from the continent; records exist for at least seven ships that disembarked 549 slaves in New York. Their wealth also stemmed from a steady trade of grain, flour, and meat to the islands.

Many in the family, moreover, were significant slaveholders. A Columbia University study found that, by the 1790 federal census, a tally of all branches of the family tree came to some 170 people enslaved by the Livingstons.

In 1745, Philip Livingston Sr. donated the considerable sum of £28 10s. to Yale College “as a small acknowledgment of the sence [sic] I have for the favour and Education my sons have had there.” Livingston’s gift, one of the largest in the middle of the eighteenth century, was originally intended to finance building projects. However, the ambitious president of Yale, Thomas Clap, asked that the money instead be used to create an endowment for the college’s first professorship. Combined with other funds, Livingston’s gift became the basis for the Livingstonian Professorship in Divinity in 1756, one of the most prestigious at Yale for many years. The New York clan remains well commemorated at the university: at the Memorial Quadrangle, the Livingston Gateway was dedicated in 1921.

Without such merchant families, the college would not have prospered into the leading American institution of higher learning that it became by the time of the American Revolution. The West Indian trade, rooted so deeply in slavery, was an indispensable element in Yale College’s birth, growth, and eventual prosperity.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

Portrait of Robert Livingston, the elder (1654-1728)

1749

The Black population of the Connecticut Colony reaches 1,000, a number that will grow to 3,587 by 1756.

A plan of the town of New Haven with all the buildings in 1748… Yale University Library.

A plan of the town of New Haven with all the buildings in 1748 taken by gen. Wadsworth ... Wm Lyon 1806.

Later photos: Osborn Hall and South Middle College (Connecticut Hall) with elm trees in foreground. Circa 1880/1889. Scrapbook owned by John W. Sterling.

1750 April 17

The first stone is laid in the construction of Connecticut Hall. This prized work of architecture—now the oldest surviving brick structure in the state—is built in part by Black workers enslaved by Yale luminaries.

Image above: Osborn Hall and South Middle College, Yale University Library.

Images below, left to right: Plan of the City of New Haven, Yale University Library; Connecticut Hall ca. 1930s, Yale University Library; Connecticut Hall ca. 1890s, Yale University Library.

Building Connecticut Hall Black workers, almost all enslaved and unpaid, worked a total of at least 672 days constructing this prominent Yale structure.

Chapter 3 Building Connecticut Hall

Constructed from 1750 to 1753, Connecticut Hall is a prized work of architecture at Yale, the oldest building on campus, and the oldest surviving brick structure in the state. Its large meeting room on the second floor, lined with portraits of Yale deans, long served as the site of Yale faculty meetings. The building is well-marked with commemorative dates on plaques, but nowhere does it record how and by whom it was constructed. Connecticut Hall was built, in part, by Black workers who were enslaved by Yale luminaries.

One can only wonder if Clap and the trustees of Yale College ever arranged any recognition of the many people, enslaved and free, Black and white, who built this new edifice.

Yale’s first president, the Reverend Thomas Clap, had to secure donors to pay the bills and provide the construction materials. He was remarkably assiduous in pursuing both aims. Among eight donors Clap recorded who specifically made gifts to the building of the “new college,” at least three were slaveholders. They included Reverends Jared Eliot of Killingworth, Solomon Williams of Lebanon (brother of Elisha Williams), and Jonathan Todd of East Guilford, Connecticut.

In 1748, Clap’s construction team, under the direction of Thomas Bills and Francis Letort, began to purchase and amass the materials, which included door locks, shingles, masonry of all kinds, hay, thousands of bricks, kilns, lime, stones, carts for hauling, long beams, joiners, pine boards, nails, “oyl,” “White Lead,” “41 Squares of Glass for Round Windows,” and various tools.

Clap was extraordinarily meticulous in his recordkeeping, assembling notes on the approximately twenty-two laborers who worked over two to three years. Some were paid, and some were not. “Jethro’s Gad,” a free person of color, and the son of Jethro Luke, worked 161 ½ days. “Mr. Noyes’s Negro” (named Jack) put in 172 ¾ days. “Theophilus Munson’s Negro” (named Dick) labored 68 days. “Mr. Bonticou’s Negro” (his name as yet unknown) spent 96 days on the job. “Mingo,” enslaved by Archibald McNeil, worked 92 ¾ days. Finally, “Mr. President’s Negro”—that is, one of the people enslaved to Clap himself, possibly George—gave 83 days of strength, sweat, and skill to the job. This record demonstrates that Black workers (almost all unpaid) worked a total of at least 672 days in building this prominent Yale structure.

Many of the white workers, though perhaps not all, are named with their days of labor as well in the president’s “Account of the Cost of New College.” They include Letort and Bills, Samuel Tharp, Samuel Griffin, Daniel Sperry, Joseph Stacey, Nicolas Wood, Abel Wood, John Osborn, Daniel McConnelly, and Richard Cutler.

One can only wonder if Clap and the trustees of Yale College ever arranged any recognition of the many people, enslaved and free, Black and white, who built this edifice in the heart of the educational enterprise at the corner of Chapel and College Streets. Gad Luke worked elbow to elbow with Samuel Sharp and Joseph Stacey, and they may have spent days mixing mortar together. Mingo must have carted bricks and lifted beams with Daniel Sperry. Dick and Abel Wood likely dug the cellar or fired up a kiln on numerous mornings.

On several pages of Clap’s accounts, he describes payments for “team work,” a term with no irony in the listing of people and numbers at that time. It took a team to raise beams or install a window or large door. Some days Gad broke from the “team” on the construction site and worked “culling tobacco” personally for President Clap.

The students, rectors, teachers, and anyone who lived or worked around Yale College as it grew from the 1730s to 1760s would have known Jethro Luke and his family, and perhaps Jack, Dick, Mingo, and other enslaved workers. Do these early workers who laid the foundations of Yale also deserve the title, “founders?” How might we break the silence about their vivid visibility in the university’s archives?

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

A view of Old Brick Row, including Connecticut Hall, 1807. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

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The Building of Connecticut Hall

Later photo: Historic or contemporary image of Connecticut Hall ca. 1930s

Historic or contemporary image of Connecticut Hall ca. 1890s

1773

James Hillhouse graduates from Yale. He will go on to serve in the state legislature, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate, and will leave his mark on both Yale and New Haven, helping design Old Brick Row, draining and beautifying the New Haven Green, organizing Grove Street Cemetery, and serving as Yale’s treasurer for 50 years. Though he takes public stances against slavery, he and his wives own enslaved people.

Images, left to right: A view of Old Brick Row, including Connecticut Hall, Yale University Library; James Hillhouse, Yale University Library; Elevations and Plans of Present and Projected buildings of Yale College by John Trumbull, Yale University Library.

Plans for buildings that would become Old Brick Row. By John Trumbull, 1793.

1773

Jonathan Edwards, Jr., son of the famous theologian, writes a series of five articles anonymously in The Connecticut Journal and the New-Haven Post-Boy, entitled “Some Observations on the Slavery of Negroes.” The articles establish a theological basis for the antislavery cause, challenging slavery and the slave trade as Christian hypocrisy.

1774

The Connecticut colony outlaws further importation of enslaved people into its borders, a statute not easily enforced. A census the same year counts 6,464 Black people in Connecticut, the largest number in any New England colony, representing 3.2 percent of the population. New Haven County contains 854 enslaved people, and the town of New Haven records 262 people held in bondage.

Names of the Enslaved Enslaved people were part of New Haven and Connecticut from the beginning days of European settlement and of the extended community of Yale University from its founding as the Collegiate School in 1701.

Interlude Names of the Enslaved

Enslaved people were part of New Haven and Connecticut from the beginning days of European settlement and of the extended community of Yale University from its founding as the Collegiate School in 1701. The people whose names are recorded here were enslaved by the founding and successor trustees, rectors and presidents, and major early donors in Yale’s first century.

The vast majority of the people listed here were identified as Black, but in some cases they were identified as Indigenous. Records of inheritances, sales, baptisms, and other events provide some details, such as family relationships and ages, but in many cases, their names are all that the surviving evidence provides.

This list, although it contains the names of over two hundred human beings, is incomplete. Research has focused on wills, estate papers, church records, and the federal census. Estate documents present an accounting of a household only at the time of a person’s death. Yale’s leaders, like fellow elites of church and society in Connecticut, often enslaved other people earlier in their lives whose names were not recorded in their wills (because they died, were sold, or were manumitted). For this and other reasons, further research would likely show evidence of additional enslaved people connected to Yale.

The names listed are those given, in most cases, to these people by slaveholders. Individual names listed may thus differ from names given at birth by their parents. In some instances, the available records note a person without including any name, and these people are included as well. The absence of a name in the records does not constitute the absence of a life.

Flora
Ishmael
Ishmael
James
Phillis
Polag
Sylvanus
unnamed man
York
Ziba
unnamed person
Bristo
Agnes
Anthony
Philip
Peter
Philip
Devonshire
Jethro
unnamed girl
George
Phillis
Pompey
Sylva
Tamar
Cloe
Dick
Dinah
Ann
Moll
Primus
Aaron
Lettice
Ollive
Sue
Maria
Naomi
unnamed “next youngest”
York
Joab
Binney
Joseph
Leah
Rose
Sue
Titus
Venus
Coke
Hager
Lilly
Peg
Samson
Kate
Kedar
unnamed person
Dauphin
Toney
Jenny
Phillis
unnamed person
unnamed person
Benjamin
Cesar
Daniel
Hannibal
Jack
Joe the Miller
Mary
Piet
Pietvlek
Saar
Son of Joe the Miller
Tom
Jenne
Cato
Chiman
Chloe
Daphnis
Dina
Dinah
Elus
Eolus
Exeter
Fortune
Pero
Pero
Rubie
Scipio
Sylve
unnamed 14th child of Dinah
unnamed 15th child of Dinah
unnamed 16th child of Dinah
unnamed 17th child of Dinah
unnamed 18th child of Dinah
unnamed 19th child of Dinah
unnamed 20th child of Dinah
Cesar
Juba
Nero
Rose
Betty
Dolle
Linus
Michael
Ceaser
York
Dinah
unnamed girl
unnamed girl
unnamed man
unnamed woman
Ashor
Cloe
Jack
Luke
Sabina
Arabella
Benjamin
Pung
Thomas
Elle
unnamed man
Cuff
Jane
Libs
Sampson
Don
Lettice
Sampson
Andrew
Pompey
Presey
Amos
Annise
Clary
Cloe
Ely
Lago
Jerusha
Job
Job
Levi
Lowes
Peter
Rachel
Rhoda
Rose
Sue
Tego
Newport
Hagar
Jenny
Zylpha
Easter
Williams
London
unnamed person
Cate
Grigg
Hagar
Lemmon
Mabel
Peg
Bristol
Grace
Hector
Isaac
Rose
Phillis
Cloe
Flora
Isabel
Phillis
Rhoda
Dick
Jenny
Tully
unnamed boy
unnamed woman
unnamed man
unnamed woman
Ambo
Cass
Desire
Flora
Jude
Merea
Newport
Peter
Pitt
Polan
unnamed woman
Cash
Dinah
Pero
Pompey
Cato
Prince
Sarah
Silvi
Tony
Andrew
Candace
Cesar
Diego
Daniel
Dinah
Isabella
Isabella
Jacob
John Waubin
Lydia
Sam
Tamar
Thomas
Thorn

1774 October

In Connecticut, “a humble petition of a number of poor Africans,” signed by Bristol Lambee on behalf of many others, asks for “deliverance from a state of unnatural servitude and bondage.” The petitioners assert “that LIBERTY, being founded upon the law of nature, is as necessary to the happiness of an African, as it is to the happiness of an Englishman.” Lambee and his friends beg those inclined toward revolution against Great Britain to “hear our prayers.” Just as the revolutionaries of the colony protest those who “would subject you to slavery,” they write, African Americans demand that those same revolutionaries reflect upon their own “unnatural custom” of holding people as property.

John Trumbull, The Battle of Bunker’s Hill, June 17, 1775, Yale University Art Gallery.

Questions of Freedom Slaveholders fighting against Britain for their political liberation exposed contradictions at the root of the American Revolution.

Chapter 4 Questions of Freedom

Many Africans and African Americans, some born in Connecticut or Pennsylvania or Virginia, some fighting as soldiers in the Continental army or the British Army, demanded their “rights” to the various “liberties” at stake in this inspiring, if bloody, new age. As the historian J. Franklin Jameson wrote, “the stream of revolution, once started, could not be confined within narrow banks, but spread abroad upon the land.”

The Black petitioners asserted “that LIBERTY, being founded upon the law of nature, is as necessary to the happiness of an African, as it is to the happiness of an Englishman.”

In late 1774, a “humble Petition of a Number of poor Africans,” addressed to the “Sons of Liberty in Connecticut,” declared the case boldly. Signed by Bristol Lambee on behalf of many others, the petition considered the radical Sons of Liberty the “most zealous assertors of the natural rights and liberties of mankind” and asked for help in their own “deliverance from a state of unnatural servitude and bondage.”

The petitioners further asserted “that LIBERTY, being founded upon the law of nature, is as necessary to the happiness of an African, as it is to the happiness of an Englishman.” They claimed, “in common with other men, a natural right to be free.” Their “services” could only be exerted by “voluntary compact,” they maintained, stating in clear language the doctrine of consent. They had been captured and taken to “this distant land to be enslaved… to serve like a horse in a mill,” and they established, in light of such dehumanizatioun, a right to resist in self-defense.

Their deepest sense of family, of “endearing ties,” had been sundered; they were “strangers” in their new land. They felt blocked from properly serving God because they were chattel, under “absolute controul “of a “master.” And finally, Lambee and his friends knew the religious teachings of slaveholders. “So contrary is slavery to the very genius of Christianity,” they argued, that the good men of Connecticut risked their own eternal damnation.

The Connecticut petitioners begged those with the revolutionary spirit against Great Britain to “hear our prayers.” As the revolutionaries of the colony protested those who “would subject you to slavery,” the petitioners demanded they reflect upon their own “unnatural custom” of holding property in man. All of Jefferson’s four first principles in the later Declaration of Independence are addressed in Lambee’s eloquent petition: natural rights and consent explicitly, equality and the right of revolution more implicitly.

Black people, enslaved and free, did not stop articulating their hopes that the country would make good on the promises of the Revolution. In the 1780s, a group of Black New Haveners, living not far from Yale College, produced yet another extraordinary petition for freedom. It likely found its spirit in resistance to the nature of Connecticut’s long-term gradual emancipation scheme.

The petition was crafted with verve and passion for the same natural rights and Christian religious inclusion as the earlier document. These people considered themselves “Africas Blacks,” declared themselves still in “Chaine Bondage” and “Cruil Slavirre.” They wanted their “human Bodys” recognized as such. They had “fought the grandest Battles… in this War,” the petition maintained, demanding “Rite and justes” if America was ever to become a “free contry.”

They felt the power of natural rights in their bones and their souls. The New Haveners, in the shadow of the famous college at Yale, declared their right to “Pubblick woship,” and to “larning… our C A B or to reed the holy BiBle. Simple justice, born of a revolution for human liberty, had rarely been stated so directly.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

Trumbull’s “The Battle of Bunker’s Hill, June 17, 1775,” including Asaba;

1776

Samuel Hopkins, Yale Class of 1741, delivers a sermon appealing to the consciences of American patriots. “Rouse up then my brethren and assert the Right of universal liberty;” Hopkins declares, “you assert your Right to be free in opposition to the Tyrant of Britain; come be honest men and assert the Right of Africans to be free in opposition to the Tyrants of America.”

Samuel Hopkins, The New York Public Library.

Yale’s Christian Abolitionists Samuel Hopkins and Jonathan Edwards Jr. helped establish biblical arguments for the antislavery movement.

Chapter 4 Yale’s Christian Abolitionists

Yale-trained white ministers laid the foundations for biblically grounded abolitionism in the nineteenth century. One of the most prominent among them was Samuel Hopkins (Yale 1741).

“Rouse up then my brethren and assert the Right of universal liberty,” pronounced Hopkins. “You assert your Right to be free in opposition to the Tyrant of Britain; come be honest men and assert the Right of the Africans to be free in opposition to the Tyrants of America.”

Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, the Reverend Hopkins came under the profound influence of the New Light revivalists while at Yale, especially Jonathan Edwards. But Hopkins did not merely adopt Edwards’ teachings; he undertook, according to scholars Kenneth Minkema and Harry Stout, a “major revision” of Edwards’ theology.

To Hopkins, slaveholding was a mortal personal and social sin. He was a staunch supporter of American independence but converted republican ideology into a rationale for abolitionism as well as for resistance to Britain. He became Edwards’ “most renowned intellectual heir.”

In a sermon Hopkins delivered in 1776, he appealed, as firmly as the latter-day radical abolitionists of the early nineteenth century, to the consciences of American patriots. “Rouse up then my brethren and assert the Right of universal liberty,” pronounced Hopkins. “You assert your Right to be free in opposition to the Tyrant of Britain; come be honest men and assert the Right of the Africans to be free in opposition to the Tyrants of America.”

Hopkins was considered dull in the pulpit, but with his pen he penetrated to the heart of the matter: “We cry up Liberty but know it the Negros have as good a Right to be free as we can pretend to.” Hopkins may rightly be said to be present at the creation of moral suasion, the appeal to the conscience and the heart in American abolitionism.

Another disciple of Edwards forged his own approach to abolitionism in these years. Jonathan Edwards Jr., the theologian’s own son, was born in 1745—a full generation younger than Hopkins, although very much his protégé. Always in the shadow of his famous father, Edwards Jr. was orphaned by age thirteen. While a boy living in Stockbridge at the Indian School, he studied Indigenous languages and was sent to live with the Iroquois near Albany, New York, in preparation for future missionary endeavors. Graduating from the College of New Jersey in 1765, Edwards Jr. eventually moved to New Haven where he pastored the White Haven Church for most of the rest of his life (1769-95). He developed many associations at Yale and delivered examinations to students, although it appears President Stiles passed him over for a professorship of divinity in 1781.

In 1773, Edwards, Jr. published a series of five articles anonymously in the Connecticut Journal and the New Haven Post-Boy, entitled “Some Observations upon the Slavery of Negroes.” The articles established a New Divinity theological basis for the antislavery cause. They challenged slavery and the slave trade as Christian hypocrisy.

Edwards Jr. countered specific proslavery arguments, rejecting all biblical justifications for slavery. He noted that although God had permitted the ancient Israelites to invade Canaan and enslave the Canaanites, that did not give Europeans and Americans the right to do the same thing to Africans. He also condemned the idea that slavery benefitted Africans by making Christians out of heathens—an idea that would take generations to weaken or die—asserting that religion had nothing to do with why Africans were enslaved. By repudiating the argument that war captives were fair game for enslavement, he took on one of his father’s own weakest justifications for slavery.

These early antislavery writings would have been relatively well known around Yale College in a year of increased resistance to British authority, although the younger Edwards’ parishioners frequently found him too radical and theologically rigid.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

1776

In the year of American political independence, fully one-quarter of wills probated in Connecticut include enslaved property.

1776

Signing of the Declaration of Independence begins. Four of the signatories are Yale graduates—Philip Livingston (New York), Lewis Morris (New York), Oliver Wolcott (Connecticut), and Lyman Hall (Georgia)—all of whom are enslavers.

Dunlap Broadside of the Declaration of Independence, Yale University Library.

1779

Two enslaved men, Prince and Prime, submit a petition to the state General Assembly demanding their freedom in the name of both Enlightenment doctrine and Christian virtue.

1779

The British invade New Haven.

Images, left to right: Sketch of the British Invasion of New Haven from Ezra Stiles Papers, Yale University Library; Ezra Stiles, Yale University Art Gallery; Map of the British Invasion, Yale University Library; New Haven Green, Yale University Library.

Ezra Stiles (1727–1795), B.A. 1746, M.A. 1749, Samuel King, 1771. Yale University Art Gallery.

1784

The state of Connecticut enacts a gradual abolition law, stating that anyone born to enslaved parents after March 1, 1784, would become free on their 25th birthday. An addition in 1797 changes the age to 21 for girls.

Gradual Emancipation in Connecticut The state took an excruciatingly slow path toward liberating the enslaved.

Interlude Gradual Emancipation in Connecticut

The name of James Hillhouse, perhaps the town’s most prominent citizen of the early republic, is inscribed across the city of New Haven, including on the city’s oldest public high school and one of its famous avenues. In 1782, Hillhouse was appointed treasurer of Yale College—a position he held until his death fifty years later.

Hillhouse himself recorded his ownership of two enslaved children: a girl named Hagar, born on March 17, 1786, and a boy named Jupiter, born on June 22, 1789.

An astute money manager and a builder, Hillhouse left an enduring mark on the college and the city. Among other things, he helped design Yale’s famed Old Brick Row, drained and beautified the New Haven Green, and organized Grove Street Cemetery, the first cemetery of its kind in the country. Hillhouse also became a powerful politician, serving in the state legislature (1791-96), U.S. Congress (1791-96), and U.S. Senate (1796-1810). As a U.S. Senator, he introduced amendments that would have restricted slavery, particularly in the new lands added to the United States through the Louisiana Purchase.

Yet in the same years that Hillhouse was building an illustrious career as a public servant, he was enslaving people. According to New Haven vital records, Hillhouse himself recorded in front of the justice of the peace his ownership of two enslaved children: a girl named Hagar, born on March 17, 1786, and a boy named Jupiter, born on June 22, 1789.

The children Hagar and Jupiter grew up in the shadow of Connecticut’s Gradual Abolition Act, which gave them only the nebulous future hope of freedom and autonomy. Passed in 1784, the act stipulated that boys born to enslaved mothers after March 1, 1784, would be free on their twenty-fifth birthday, and girls would be free on their twenty-first birthday. Another act, in 1788, required Connecticut slaveholders to register the birth of enslaved children, which explains why Hillhouse recorded his ownership of young Hagar and Jupiter when he did. The Connecticut law was the most prolonged among Northern states that passed such enactments.

Tragically, Hagar would not live to experience freedom. Hillhouse, a member of the First Congregational Church in New Haven, had the young girl baptized “in private” on July 21, 1794. Hagar died two days later at the age of nine, and like her biblical namesake, one of Abraham’s wives, she died a slave.

The little boy named Jupiter outlived Hagar, but only to endure other trials of slavery, separation, and hardship. In 1795, the boy’s mother, Judith Cocks, wrote to Hillhouse, bereft and confused. Cocks and Jupiter had been taken to Marietta, Ohio, by Hillhouse’s first cousin, Lucy Backus Woodbridge and her husband, Dudley Woodbridge (Yale 1766). (This fact alone suggests a disregard for the law, since it was illegal to transport enslaved people outside the state.) Cocks told Hillhouse that Mrs. Woodbridge and her sons “thump and beat [Jupiter] as if he was a Dog” and begged for clarity about Jupiter’s status.

Living in a “strange country without one friend,” Cocks asked Hillhouse to “be so kind as to write me how Long Jupiter is to remain with them.” Woodbridge had told Cocks that Jupiter “is to live with her untill he is twenty five years of age,” something she “had no idea of.” Cocks further implored Hillhouse not to sell her boy to Mrs. Woodbridge. Even more wrenching, she mentions her daughter Hagar, apparently unaware that the girl had died the year before.

In this rare document, an enslaved mother speaks directly to one of the most powerful men in the country about her fears, and in doing so, articulates the grief, frustration, and sense of powerlessness many enslaved parents felt. Unable to navigate the gradual abolition law with any certainty or genuine hope, Cocks was trying as best she could to protect her children from the violence and cruelty of slavery. In starkest terms, it dramatizes the painfully slow and extended process of abolition in Connecticut, which made children property and subject to the violence and whims of their owners through early adulthood.

Young Jupiter’s fate is unknown, but slavery continued in the Woodbridge household.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

1786

Jupiter Hammon, a man enslaved by the Lloyd family of Long Island—relatives by marriage to James Hillhouse, in whose New Haven home he spent time—writes a poem, “An Essay on Slavery”—a revelatory work of Christian devotion and moral condemnation of slavery. Hammon is today recognized as the first published African American poet.

Image above: A View of Old Brick Row, Including Connecticut Hall, Yale University Library.

Image below: Yale College and the College Chapel, Yale University Library.

‘Tis Thou Alone Can Make Us Free’ Jupiter Hammon, America’s first published Black poet

Chapter 4 ‘Tis Thou Alone Can Make Us Free’

In 1779, when the British invaded New Haven, Sarah Lloyd Hillhouse was twenty-six years old and pregnant with her first child. Her husband James Hillhouse, a Yale graduate and future college treasurer, was off commanding a company of volunteers—including many Yale students—as they attempted to defend the city.

This rare find from the depths of the Yale archives can leave one breathless at the brown paper, the slightly faded ink, and the careful writing.

Sarah described her ordeal to a relative: “You who have gone through a like scene can easily imagine the consternation this town must be in on the occasion,” she wrote. “However we fared much better than we feared as we expected nothing but to see the town reduced to ashes…the rest of the inhabitants were plundered & abused without regard to friend or foe.”

Fortunately for young Hillhouse, she was not alone: an enslaved Black man named Jupiter Hammon was with her at the time of the invasion. “I am happily reassured & have abundant reason to rejoice in the merciful protection of a kind providence—Our old faithful Jupiter happened to be here & was a great comfort to me in my flight.” In the years to come, “faithful Jupiter” would decry slavery in verse and claim his place as America’s first published Black poet.

In 1786, Hammon wrote a poem, “An Essay on Slavery”—a revelatory work of Christian devotion and moral condemnation of slavery. Hammon was a devout Christian and much of the poem reads like an expression of faith, a prayer for deliverance for all the enslaved, and a praise song for Jesus, an all-powerful and liberating God. The manuscript was a working draft, including revisions by Hammon himself.

This rare find from the depths of the Yale archives can leave one breathless at the brown paper, the slightly faded ink, and the careful writing. Here as well is tactile evidence of the paradox of slavery and freedom in the Age of the Revolution.

Hammon was born enslaved in 1711, the property of a wealthy family on Long Island. Yet well into his seventies, he used his considerable literary gifts to envision an end to slavery and the suffering that African and African American people had experienced at the hands of their fellow Christians. Hammon gave keen attention to his rhyme and meter; his handwriting was strong. He repeatedly references both salvation and America through the metaphor of a “distant shore” and the “Christian shore.” He names the Middle Passage with fatefulness and controlled emotion:

Our forefathers came from africa
tost over the raging main
to a Christian shore there for to stay
and not return again.

Exuding Christian humility and supplication in the face of the awesome power of God, Hammon demands that the enslaved and free pray together for “Liberty.” Hammon’s language is King James in style and tone; many a “thee,” “thou,” and “ye” give beauty to the verse. “Tis thou alone can make us free,” the poet declares. In stanzas 11 and 12, Hammon enters briefly the actual voice of God: “Come unto me ye humble souls… bond or free.” After freedom itself, the poem insists on human equality. As he moves the poem with refrain toward crescendo, Hammon returned to the idea of the “shore”:

Come let us join with humble voice
Now on the christian shore
If we will have our only choice
Tis slavery no more…
When shall we hear the joyfull sound
Echo the christian shore
Each humble [voice with songs resound]
That Slavery is no more.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

“Yale College and the College Chapel, in 1786,” campus views (Bowen)

1790

The population of enslaved people in New Haven is declining. The county contains 433 enslaved people, a little more than half the number 16 years earlier. The town of New Haven includes 76 enslaved people, less than a third of the number in 1774.

1790 October 20

Joseph Mountain, a 32-year-old Black man, is convicted of rape and hanged on the New Haven Green. A reported crowd of 10,000 people, more than twice New Haven’s population, gathers to watch the spectacle. Mountain’s notoriety traveled broadly thanks to a purportedly autobiographical account of the crime, Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain, likely ghostwritten by David Daggett (Yale 1783), one of the future founders of the Yale Law School. Daggett claimed to have only taken dictation, but he was the magistrate who recorded the confession and saw that it was published. The popular text widely disseminated ideas of Black criminality, threats to social order, and propensities to sexual violence.

1792

The Connecticut state legislature passes a law forbidding enslavers from selling their human property outside of the state.

The Eli Whitney Gun Factory, verso: Blacksmith Shoeing Horse Artist: William Giles Munson (American, 1801–1878)

1794

Eli Whitney, a recent graduate of Yale, obtains a patent for a new type of cotton gin. The innovation revolutionizes cotton production and fuels slavery’s expansion in the South.

Image above: The Eli Whitney Gun Factory, Yale University Art Gallery.

Image below, left to right: Drawing of a Mechanical Cotton Gin, Yale University Library; Eli Whitney, Yale University Art Gallery.

Eli Whitney and the Cotton Boom With the advent of the cotton gin, production soared — as did the number of people enslaved.

Chapter 5 Eli Whitney and the Cotton Boom

In 1792, a twenty-seven-year-old Eli Whitney arrived at the Mulberry Grove plantation, some ten miles north of the city of Savannah, Georgia, where he seemed untroubled by the large number of enslaved Black men, women, and children on the rice operation. The Yale graduate had first gone to South Carolina in search of a tutor’s position on a plantation but failed to land the job. Through connections, Catherine Greene, widow of the Revolutionary War hero Nathaniel Greene and mistress at Mulberry Grove, invited Whitney to take up residence at the bend in the Savannah River. There he would tutor and begin to study for the law.

Whitney strove to control his invention as it revolutionized cotton production, the explosion of the textile manufacturing business in the North, and indeed slavery’s expansion in the South.

After overhearing conversations among local planters lamenting that they could not grow short staple cotton to any profit because of enormous difficulty in extracting the green seeds, Whitney did what he had always done—he found some tools and wire and experimented. He constructed a small box with two cylinders rotating in opposite directions and wire teeth in the middle. It worked; after demonstrating it to the locals and showing that the seeds in the cotton could be removed mechanically, all around him he saw the potential for “ginning” the crop at ever increasing scale.

Whitney returned to New Haven. With excitement and vigor, he began to make the cotton gins in his own shop and quickly tried to achieve a patent. But he was too late; his idea and model wereduplicated that same year in Georgia and soon other Southern states. He eventually obtained a patent in 1794, but the machine was out of the bag. Through some sixty or more lawsuits over several years, Whitney strove to control his invention as it revolutionized cotton production, the explosion of the textile manufacturing business in the North, and indeed slavery’s expansion in the South.

In 1790, the U.S. produced 1.5 million pounds of cotton but exported far less. In 1800, after Whitney’s invention, the U.S. produced 36.5 million pounds, and then, in 1820, 167.5 million pounds.

The number of African Americans enslaved grew in proportion with the cotton revolution. In 1790, there were approximately 700,000 people enslaved in the new United States; by 1800, 908,000; in 1810, 1.19 million; in 1820, 1.55 million; in 1830, 2.02 million; in 1840, 2.53 million; in 1850, 3.2 million people were enslaved.

On the eve of the Civil War in 1860, when the South produced its largest cotton crop ever and dominated the nation’s exports, almost 4 million people lived and labored in bondage.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

Undated drawing of a mechanical cotton gin. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

1795

Timothy Dwight, an enslaver and a minister who regards antislavery activities as socially disruptive, succeeds Ezra Stiles as president of Yale College.

Timothy Dwight, Yale University Art Gallery.

Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), B.A. 1769, M.A. 1772 by John Trumbull (American, 1756–1843)

drawing from an 1840 book showing enslaved Black people picking cotton

1800

The United States produces 36.5 million pounds of cotton, up from 1.5 million pounds produced a decade before. The number of enslaved people in the United States grows to 908,000, up from roughly 700,000 in 1790—and continues to increase significantly along with the expansion of cotton production.

Image above: Drawing from an 1840 Book Showing Enslaved Black People Picking Cotton, Yale University Art Gallery.

1804

John Caldwell Calhoun of South Carolina graduates from Yale, after which he studies law for one year. He becomes an influential congressman, senator, secretary of war, secretary of state, presidential candidate, and vice president—as well as a zealous protector of the “minority rights” of enslavers and a proponent of slavery as a “positive good.”

Images, left to right: John C. Calhoun Portrait, Daguerreotype of John C. Calhoun, John C. Calhoun Portrait, Stained Glass Window of John C. Calhoun, A. B. Doolittle Engraving of Yale College, Yale University Library.

The Legacy of John C. Calhoun A former Yale historian called him “the most majestic champion of error since Milton’s Satan.”

Chapter 5 The Legacy of John C. Calhoun

Yale College produced no more influential political actor or thinker in the half century after the revolution than John C. Calhoun. He studied law for one year, and after practicing as a lawyer back in the town of his roots, Abbeville, in the South Carolina upcountry, as the cotton boom and slavery surged, he entered politics to stay by 1810. The brilliant and ambitious politician would become congressman, senator, secretary of war, secretary of state, presidential candidate, and vice-president. In his path he would leave a trail of awe, loathing, failure, and collective tragedy.

Calhoun was revered and feared for his genius, but also obsessed with duty and zeal in protection of the “liberty” and the “minority rights” of slaveholders.

Calhoun was revered and feared for his genius, but also obsessed with duty and zeal in protection of the “liberty” and the “minority rights” of slaveholders. He strove most of his career for the failed dream of a unified South. He believed liberty had to be earned and checked by power, and that democratic virtues were no match for the darkness of human nature. The former Yale historian David Potter once called Calhoun “the most majestic champion of error since Milton’s Satan.”

Above all, through his arguments first honed in the nullification crisis of 1828-33, Calhoun became the principal voice of the compact theory of government, an increasingly rigid states’ rights doctrine first rooted in his Jeffersonianism and with time transforming into secessionism. He advanced a theory of the natural inequality of humankind, based in the widespread claim that humans are divided by nature into laborers and property holders. Finally, and most lastingly, he defended slavery as an eternal “positive good,” rooted in part in the historical claim that African peoples had never created a civilized polity and never could do so in the Americas.

In his time, these ideas were anything but fringe constitutionalism or lonely historical theories; tragically, they served as the intellectual fuel of what many Northerners came to call the “Slave Power,” a radical proslavery persuasion satisfied only by vigorous expansion and then by withdrawal from the federal union. With singular force of mind and logic, Calhoun advanced this cluster of constitutional and moral positions to such a powerful extent that some abolitionists by the 1840s and 1850s referred to the South itself as “Calhoundom.” As his biographer Robert Elder writes, “We do not have to honor John C. Calhoun, nor should we. But he has not left us the luxury of forgetting him.”

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

Daguerreotype, John C. Calhoun South Carolina U.S. Senate taken in the Capitol at Washington March 1849

1814

Connecticut’s General Assembly passes legislation formally prohibiting Black men from voting. Despite eloquent petitions from Black New Haveners William Lanson and Bias Stanley, the restrictions are incorporated into the Connecticut constitution of 1818.

1816

The American Colonization Society (ACS) is formed in Washington, D.C. It fosters a scheme to send willing Black Americans to the new colony of Liberia on the west coast of Africa and develops a popular following across the U.S. political spectrum.

1817

Jeremiah Day, a staunch social and religious conservative, becomes president of Yale. He presides during a period when the divinity and law schools are founded.

Jeremiah Day, Yale University Art Gallery.

Jeremiah Day (1773-1867), B.A. 1795, M.A. 1789 by Samuel Finley Breese Morse (American, 1791–1872, B.A. 1810, M.A. 1816, LL.D. 1846)

1820

Black residents of New Haven come together with Simeon Jocelyn, a white man, to form a separate Black congregation, soon known as the African Ecclesiastical Society. In 1829, it receives formal recognition as a Congregational church and is known as the Temple Street Congregational Church, a center of Black education, abolitionism, and community life in New Haven.

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Black Leadership in New Haven

1825

The last sale of enslaved people in New Haven takes place on the New Haven Green. The buyer is an abolitionist, Anthony P. Stoddard, who immediately frees Lois and Lucy Tritton, a mother and daughter.

John Warner Barber, New Haven Green, 1825, Yale University Library.

1825

William Grimes, living in New Haven and running a shop near the Yale campus, authors the first published narrative by an American-born slave: Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, Written by Himself.

1827

Leonard Bacon, an 1820 graduate of Yale, together with prominent Yale graduate and science professor Benjamin Silliman Sr. establish the Connecticut branch of the American Colonization Society.

1831

William Lloyd Garrison, a white Bostonian, begins publishing the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator.

1831 August 7

A group calling itself the Peace and Benevolent Society of Afric-Americans meets in New Haven and unanimously passes a set of resolutions condemning efforts to push Black people to move to Africa. “Resolved, That we know of no other place that we can call our true and appropriate home,” one resolution reads, “excepting these United States, into which our fathers were brought, who enriched the country by their toils, and fought, bled and died in its defence, and left us in its possession—and here we will live and die…”

1831 September 10

An abolitionist alliance, with $10,000 from Black donors and $10,000 from white donors, prepares to build in New Haven the first college for Black men in the United States. In response, New Haven Mayor Dennis Kimberly, a Yale graduate, hosts an “extraordinary meeting” of white property owners “to take into consideration a scheme (said to be in progress) for the establishment, in this City, of ‘a College for the education of Colored Youth.’” At the packed whites-only meeting, 700 people oppose the college and only four vote in favor. The plan is thwarted.

Engraving of Yale College Scene by S. S. Jocelyn, Yale University Library.

Dashed Dreams of a Black College New Haven could have been home to the country’s first Historically Black College or University, but the initiative was crushed by its white residents.

CHAPTER 6 Dashed Dreams of a Black College

Only months after a new state house opened on New Haven’s Upper Green in 1831, the city’s freemen—the white male property owners, many affiliated with Yale—gathered for an extraordinary town hall meeting that would obliterate bold hopes for the nation’s first Black college.

The white male voters of New Haven spoke with in a near-unanimous voice: seven hundred stood opposed to the college and only four in favor.

The idea had been brought to life by a coalition, both local and national, of free Black leaders and white allies. They considered New Haven a prime location in part because it was vibrant and urbane, had ties to the Caribbean, and was a noted center of higher education as home to Yale.

The September 10 meeting was held in the State House, the co-capital building that had opened earlier in the year. A contemporary account describes that intense afternoon: “So great was the interest to hear the discussion,” declared the New Haven Advertiser, “that, notwithstanding the excessive heat and the almost irrespirable atmosphere of the room, the hall was crowded throughout the afternoon.”

At question was whether New Haven would make history as home to the first college dedicated to the education and advancement of the Black race—or whether it would gain notoriety as a city where those dreams died.

The white male voters of New Haven spoke with in a near-unanimous voice: seven hundred stood opposed to the college and only four in favor. Contemporary newspapers reported that five people addressed the meeting. The speakers against it—Isaac Townsend, Ralph Ingersoll, Nathan Smith, and David Daggett—included three Yale alumni. Only the Reverend Simeon Jocelyn spoke in favor.

On the table were resolutions put forward by a committee that Mayor Kimberly had appointed. The committee included ten people, at least six of whom were Yale alumni. Opposition to the proposal stemmed from several quarters, but the committee members began by expressing their disapproval of—even horror at—the abolitionist impulses latent in the scheme to educate Black Americans.

The committee’s resolutions had two parts. The first part read: “The immediate emancipation of slaves in disregard of the civil institutions of the States in which they belong, and as auxiliary thereto the contemporaneous founding of Colleges for educating colored people, is an unwarrantable and dangerous interference with the internal concerns of other States, and ought to be discouraged.”

Thus the entire abolition movement, along with plans to open educational and other opportunities to free Black people, was depicted as an “unwarrantable and dangerous interference” in Southern institutions—that is, slavery. In voting to support this resolution, seven hundred to four, New Haven’s leading citizens went on record. These Northern gentlemen of standing, in opposing the college proposal, stood together in defense of the South’s proslavery regime.

Other objections hit closer to home, particularly concerns about the potential damage to Yale’s reputation. The second part of the resolution stated: “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 of the best interests of the city….we will resist the establishment of the proposed College in this place, by every lawful means.” New Haven’s white freemen, including the elites of “town and gown,” were clear: they believed a Black college would be a threat to Yale and other schools in town.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

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The Black College That Was Quashed

Engraving of Yale College scene circa 1828 - by S. S. Jocelyn (Simeon) likely with his brother Nathaniel Jocelyn

1833 May 24

The Connecticut state legislature passes what becomes known as the “Connecticut Black Law,” preventing Black people from outside of the state from being educated in Connecticut.

Yale College, J. W. Barber's View (depicts Yale at 1835)

1834

James W. C. Pennington becomes the first Black person known to attend classes at Yale. Pennington, who had escaped from slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, was denied formal admission on account of his race, but he was allowed to be a “visitor” at the Yale divinity school. “My voice was not to be heard in the classroom asking or answering a question,” Pennington later wrote. “I could not get a book from the library and my name was never to appear on the catalogue.”

Image above: Yale College, J. W. Barber’s View, Yale University Library.

Image below: The Reverend James W. C. Pennington, National Portrait Gallery.

Yale’s First Black Student James W.C. Pennington couldn’t use the library or speak in class, but he used his Yale education to further Black rights.

CHAPTER 8 Yale’s First Black Student

The Reverend James W.C. Pennington’s experience in Yale classrooms provides a marker in the university’s history, now commemorated with a portrait and a room named for him at the divinity school. But it also represents a historical moment—one that followed from the failure, in 1831, to establish a Black college in New Haven.

“I beg our Anglo-Saxon brethren to accustom themselves to think that we need something more than mere kindness. We ask for justice, truth, and honour as other men do.”

From the fall of 1834 into at least the summer of 1836, Pennington attended theology lectures by professors Nathaniel Taylor and Josiah Willard Gibbs. Both were among the four original faculty of the Yale Theological Department. Pennington later called this period his “visitorship,” since he was never officially admitted. “My voice was not to be heard in the classroom,” Pennington wrote in an 1851 article, “asking or answering a question. I could not get a book from the library and my name was never to appear on the catalogue.”

He boarded in quarters given or rented to him by [white abolitionist] Simeon Jocelyn who, though he had moved away from New Haven after its white residents had refused to allow a Black College a few years earlier, still owned property in the city. Indeed, Jocelyn smoothed Pennington’s transition to Yale and likely helped him get part-time work at the Temple Street Church, of which Jocelyn had been a founder. Pennington, who had escaped slavery as a young man, now helped pastor the African American congregants at that church while studying at Yale.

Pennington earned an international reputation as an abolitionist and the author of two books, including a first attempt to tell the story of Black people’s history, culture, and achievements, A Text Book of the Origin, and History, &c. &c. of the Colored People, published in 1841. But in the preface to his classic autobiography, The Fugitive Blacksmith: Or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington, he told a different, unforgettable story, exploiting the irony of slaveholders and their Northern defenders who repeatedly argued that many bondspeople lived and were “reared in the mildest form of slavery.”

“In the month of September 1848,” wrote Pennington, “there appeared in my study, one morning, in New York City, an aged coloured man of tall and slender form.” He had “anxiety bordering on despair” on his face. The old man also hailed from Maryland, like Pennington. He laid out a batch of letters in front of the minister. The letters demonstrated that the desperate man had two daughters, age fourteen and sixteen, who were about to be sold South. Their enslaver demanded large sums of money from their father to prevent the sale.

On the following Sabbath Pennington “threw the case before my people” (his congregation). They and other churches managed to raise some $2,250 to purchase the two girls’ freedom. Pennington did not miss the opportunity to employ this story for antislavery propaganda against the “chattel principle,” the idea that there can be property in humans. He made it clear that Black people were fed up with the notion of “property vested in their persons.”

By the time he wrote his autobiography in 1849, Pennington declared on behalf of his fellow free Blacks in Connecticut that they were also fed up with a certain kind of moderate, paternalistic racism. He was grateful for his Yale educational opening in the 1830s but wrote nonetheless: “I beg our Anglo-Saxon brethren to accustom themselves to think that we need something more than mere kindness. We ask for justice, truth, and honour as other men do.”

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

Photograph of the Yale event honoring the Reverend Alexander Crummell and the Revered James W.C. Pennington.

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Honoring the Rev. Pennington and the Rev. Crummell

The Reverend James W. C. Pennington, 1848. National Portrait Gallery.

1837

Samuel F. B. Morse, the famous inventor, artist, and one of Yale’s most notorious proslavery advocates of the antebellum and Civil War eras, tests his first telegraph. He spurs a technological revolution but rejects the principles of democracy and abolition. By the early 1850s he defends slavery as “a social condition ordained from the beginning of the world for the wisest purposes, benevolent and disciplinary, by Divine Wisdom.”

Images, left to right: Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, Library of Congress; Samuel F. B. Morse, Yale University Library.

Samuel F.B. Morse: Artist, Inventor, White Supremacist Morse is known for inventing and promoting the telegraph, less so for his staunchly pro-slavery and anti-Catholic views.

CHAPTER 8 Samuel F.B. Morse: Artist, Inventor, White Supremacist

No residential college is named for any of Yale’s antislavery advocates of the antebellum era. But there is one for Samuel F. B. Morse, the famous inventor and artist, and one of Yale’s most notorious proslavery advocates of the antebellum and Civil War eras.

Morse was an aggressive white supremacist in an era when that was often no special distinction; he was doggedly anti-Catholic and anti-abolition.

Born in 1791, Samuel was the son of Yale graduate Jedidiah Morse, the famous geographer and Calvinist preacher. Jedidiah helped spread the conspiracy theory of the Illuminati at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and politically became a Federalist, suspicious of all liberal or radical legacies of the French Revolution. Samuel Morse’s rigid conservatism derives from this influence and background, but he forged his own worldview.

Entering Yale College in 1805 at age fourteen, Morse cultivated his talent as an artist, painting portraits, and imbibed lectures by Benjamin Silliman on electricity and other scientific subjects. After graduating from Yale in 1810, the Anglophile studied painting in London, the first of many sojourns in Europe to forge an artistic career.

Returning to America, Morse created a studio in Boston and later moved back to New Haven where he painted portraits of eminent Yale “worthies” Eli Whitney, Noah Webster, and President Jeremiah Day. Morse struggled for commercial success as a painter, but the young artist always had an eye for business ventures, especially as he entered the competitive world of scientific invention.

Morse made a series of partnerships with some scientists and especially with investors, and by 1837, he managed to string ten miles of wire and test his first telegraph. Soon patent wars and legal battles began over who would take ownership of the amazing new technology.

Morse was hardly the first or the only person to perfect the telegraph, but he surely knew how to take and get credit. He demonstrated the telegraph in a university studio, and then in Congress and to President Martin Van Buren at the White House. By 1840, he obtained his United States patent and was on his way to almost unparalleled fame as an inventor.

Simplifying messages into a system of signals soon known as “Morse code,” the former painter was ready to cash in and transform how people passed information, did business, checked a credit rating, gambled their money, gained news of sporting events, and even fought wars. The “news” itself now spread “on the wires.”

Morse and his associates had changed the world, but the inquisitive man had other keen interests, both political and ideological. His thought was a synthesis of science and religion, of Enlightenment and latter-day Calvinism. He was a technological revolutionary and an ideological counterrevolutionary.

Above all, he seems to have despised the idea of America as a pluralistic nation dedicated to any goal of equality, whether in law or in morality. He did not believe in the natural rights tradition, nor in the nod to equality in the Declaration of Independence. Morse was an aggressive white supremacist in an era when that was often no special distinction; he was doggedly anti-Catholic and anti-abolition. He changed how humans used technology but rejected most social change and the principles of democracy.

Morse judged abolitionists, especially immediatists, as “demons in human shape.” A more “wretched, disgusting, hypocritical crew, have not appeared on the face of the earth,” he wrote his brother in 1847, “since the times of Robespierre.” The more he considered the slavery issue, he wrote by 1857, “the more I feel compelled to declare myself on the Southern side of the question.”

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

Scan of page from Morse, Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States

1837

The Reverend Amos Gerry Beman becomes pastor of the Temple Street Church. Beman, a national leader of antislavery, temperance, suffrage, and other reform efforts, serves the church for two decades. His scrapbooks document a rich period of organizing and activism in New Haven’s Black community.

1839

Southern students make up roughly 10 percent of the Yale student body, and their numbers continue to grow. “Yale was the favorite college of the southern planters,” wrote Julian Sturtevant, an 1826 graduate, in a later memoir. “From the days of John C. Calhoun, almost to the war of the rebellion, the number of southern students was large.”

1839 June 30

Enslaved Africans aboard the slave-trading vessel La Amistad revolt and take over the ship. After a tortuous journey in which several captives die of hunger and disease, the ship is eventually captured by the U.S. Navy and brought to New London, Connecticut. The Africans are put on trial in New Haven, becoming the focus of both local and national attention.

Images, left to right: Death of Capt. Ferrer, the Captain of the Amistad, Yale University Library; Cinque: The Chief of the Amistad Captives, Yale University Art Gallery.

Strangers in a Strange Land The African rebels of the Amistad, imprisoned in New Haven, attracted thousands of onlookers, gawkers, and what might be called slavery “tourists.”

CHAPTER 7 Strangers in a Strange Land

The African survivors of a rebellion aboard La Amistad, a coastal schooner from Cuba, were the talk of New Haven and of the nation in 1839-40. Hailing from the Gallinas coast and Sierra Leone region of West Africa, these people had been captured in Africa, enslaved, and transported across the Atlantic. Then, bought and sold like chattel in Cuba, they had—through an unfathomable combination of daring, courage, and luck—overthrown their captors and seized a kind of tentative, uncertain freedom. Yet in 1839, forty-three of the original captives were imprisoned and put on trial just steps from Yale’s campus.

“Some people say Mendi people crazy dolts,” Kale wrote, “because we no talk American language. Americans no talk Mendi. American people crazy dolts?”

Their ordeal—years of incarceration and complex legal battles—attracted thousands of onlookers, gawkers, and what might be called slavery “tourists” from all over the northeastern United States. The famous white New York abolitionist Lewis Tappan came to New Haven to help organize the defense and publicity for the survivors, and a cast of Yale characters became involved in the unfolding legal and cultural drama. Over the next two years, the African people of the Amistad would leave their mark on the city of New Haven, on Yale, and on the American abolition movement.

Immediately, numerous legal questions arose about just who and what the Amistad Africans were. Were they slaves and murderers, and the property of their Cuban owners, or were they free people exercising their natural rights to liberty and the right of revolution? Were they Spanish property, seized on the high seas by the United States in violation of Pinckney’s Treaty of 1795? Would this ship’s story and the fate of its passengers grow into an international crisis between the United States and Spain that might itself stoke the flames of the slavery issue in American politics? And as abolitionists quickly seized on the Amistad survivors’ legal case, if a Northern state like Connecticut could “free” captive Africans, what might it mean for enslaved African Americans in the South?

Everyone who worked with the Amistad captives in jail and beyond, including Yale professors, graduates, and students, raved about their zeal for education, language, and human connections. They took especially to maps, almanacs, grammar books, and the Bible.

Cinqué, Kinna, and Fuli were often leaders of these study sessions, and the best pupils were the youngest, especially Kale. In their own letters, many of the Africans clearly felt the need not only to describe their conditions but to make appeals to be returned to their home continent, as Cinqué did on behalf of the group.

They also seemed compelled to defend themselves against the various accusations they had endured. “Mendi people,” contended Kinna, “no lie, not steal, no swear, no drink rum, no fight.” And Kale, one of the young boys, complained with a sense of humor. “Some people say Mendi people crazy dolts,” he wrote, “because we no talk American language. Americans no talk Mendi. American people crazy dolts?”  

The abolitionists, the Amistad Committee, and all their allies greatly feared that neither legal logic nor moral arguments would carry the day before this proslavery U.S. Supreme Court, presided over by chief justice Roger Taney, a Maryland slaveholder. The Africans themselves, back in Westville on the edge of New Haven, waited in agony for news as they underwent considerable humiliation and bad treatment in the jail.”

On March 9, Justice Joseph Story of Massachusetts rose in the Court chamber and announced the ruling, a vote of seven to one to deny all the Spaniards’ claims, free the Amistad captives, and asserted their legal, if not their natural, rights. Story, who was antislavery but contemptuous of abolitionists, wrote for the majority that the captives were free-born, were illegally enslaved even under Spanish law, and had struck for freedom by the right of “self-defense.”

Morally, as historian Howard Jones remarks, the Amistad decision was a “Pyrrhic victory,” since it clung to the notion that the slavery question only hinged on positive law, not natural law. The Supreme Court, therefore, made certain that this decision would in no way threaten American slavery where it was lawful. The abolitionists who had spent more than a year and a half fighting for the captives celebrated for the moment; they had won the Africans’ freedom and their liberty to return to Africa if they chose, but they had not won a victory over any legal underpinnings of slavery in their own country.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

Painting of U.S. Fish Commission Schooner “Grampus.”

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The Captives of Amistad

Death of Capt. Ferrer, the Captain of the Amistad, July, 1839, John Warner Barber. Yale University Art Gallery.

Cinque: The Chief of the Amistad Captives, John Sartain, after Nathaniel Jocelyn, circa 1840. Yale University Art Gallery.

1841 March 9

The Africans who survived the Amistad ordeal, backed by abolitionists—including some Yale graduates and students—win their case before the Supreme Court. The Court denies Spanish claims to ownership over the Africans, who are set free. The verdict, however, does not challenge the underpinnings of slavery where it is legal in the United States.

1841 November 26

Thirty-five surviving Amistad rebels, along with five missionaries, board a vessel in New York Harbor to begin a voyage to Sierra Leone. Their eventual homecomings are difficult. Most shed their Western clothes to the chagrin of the missionaries who accompany them. Some find their parents and other family members and experience emotional reunions. Yet they soon find themselves back in an African society ravaged by war and slave-trading.

1846 October 21

Theodore Dwight Woolsey becomes president of Yale, serving in that position until 1871.

Reverend Theodore D. Woolsey, President of Yale College, Yale University Library.

The Reverend Theodore Dwight Woolsey, circa 1858. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University.

1850 September 18

Congress passes the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring that enslaved people be returned to their owners even if they reside in a free state. One of a series of compromises meant to forestall disunion, the legislation is a turning-point for some moderate abolitionists from Yale who become more committed to antislavery causes.

1857

Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed receives an MD from Yale, becoming the first known Black person ever to graduate from the medical school. (Richard Henry Greene graduates from Yale College in the same year.) Creed’s family has deep roots in New Haven.

1858

The fiercely pro-slavery merchant Joseph Sheffield purchases the old Medical Department building on College Street in New Haven, adds two wings, and remodels the entire structure. With a supporting gift of $50,000 for “the maintenance of Professorships of Engineering, Metallurgy, and Chemistry,” Sheffield makes Yale a training center for scientists. Over time, Sheffield’s financial gifts to Yale reach $1.1 million, a figure not matched by any Yale donor until well into the 20th century.

Images, left to right: Sheffield Mansion, Yale University Library; Joseph Earl Sheffield, Yale University Art Gallery; Joseph Earl Sheffield, Yale University Library.

The Anti-Abolitionist Who Bolstered the Sciences at Yale Joseph Earl Sheffield wanted Blacks in the United States to become “so diluted as a people” that their presence would “hardly be noticed or detected.”

CHAPTER 8 The Anti-Abolitionist Who Bolstered the Sciences at Yale

The largest nineteenth-century donor to Yale was the fierce anti-abolitionist Joseph Earl Sheffield. Born in Southport, Connecticut in 1793, Sheffield became a wealthy cotton merchant, eventually headquartered in the port of Mobile, Alabama. He inherited some wealth and business acumen from his father, who was deeply invested in the West Indian trade, particularly sugar production and slavery in Cuba.

“… although an outspoken hater of slavery as such, I was the defender of the slave holders from the foul aspersions of the abolitionists.”

By 1835, Sheffield moved his family back north to New Haven because he did not want his children to grow up in a slave society, even as he owned the people who worked in his house. He continued to spend winters in Mobile managing his lucrative trade interests. With major donations, the merchant established the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale and helped put the college on the world map for science education.

Sheffield purchased the old Medical Department building on College Street in 1858, added two wings, and remodeled the entire structure. With a supporting gift of $50,000 more for “the maintenance of Professorships of Engineering, Metallurgy, and Chemistry,” Sheffield made Yale a university to train scientists. He lived in a handsome house on Hillhouse Avenue, behind the school that by 1861 carried his name.

In the end, Sheffield’s financial gifts to Yale before his death in 1882 reached $1.1 million, a figure not matched by any Yale donor until well into the twentieth century.

Sheffield despised abolitionists. He warmly defended his many friends among Southern planters and believed the enslavement of African Americans was a benevolent practice that could never be terminated suddenly without enormous social and economic upheaval. When the Civil War erupted in 1861 and caused great disruption at Yale, Sheffield was among those Northern merchants who blamed the radicalism of abolitionists for the entire crisis.

When the trans-continental railroads emerged as a Republican party initiative during the war, he hatched an elaborate proposal to use Black labor to build the railroads through the Pacific West. “By the employment of the emancipated slaves,” Sheffield imagined, “they may be gradually withdrawn from our midst and ultimately diffused through the fertile region of the West… now inhabited by the Indian and the Buffalo; so that in the course of time when these regions shall have been peopled by the ever moving Anglo-Saxon, we shall find the negro so mixed and amalgamated, so improved by cultivation, precept and example, so diluted as a people, that their presence will hardly be noticed or detected in the mighty nation which is to inhabit these regions.”

Even though his terrible scheme never materialized, Sheffield demonstrated the extent to which cunning and racist theory could be put to material ends in the nineteenth century.

Sheffield’s political positions in the Civil War era provide a window into the worldviews of many others around Yale, as well as a stark contrast. In his “Personal Reminiscences,” he wrote, “Of course, then although an outspoken hater of slavery as such, I was the defender of the slave holders from the foul aspersions of the abolitionists and often predicted the results which would be precipitated if the people of the North persisted in fanning the flames.”

When Abraham Lincoln was elected and secession exploded in the Deep South, Sheffield was “so certain of the consequences, that I sold, at great sacrifice, my remaining property in Mobile. I had always been an ardent old-line Whig of the Clay and Webster School, but when that party began to run after the abolitionists and other gods, for the sake of votes; when in fact they began to run away from their principles, I could not follow them.”

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

Sheffield bequeathed his mansion on HIllhouse Avenue to Yale (along with substantial monetary gifts). The building was used for scientific purposes.

Joseph Earl Sheffield (1793-1882), M.A. (Hon.) 1871 by Harry Ives Thompson (American, 1840–1906)

1860

On the eve of the Civil War, the number of enslaved people in the United States reaches nearly four million people.

Winslow Homer, The Army of the Potomac-- Our Outlying Picket in the Woods, from Harper's Weekly, June 7, 1862

1861

During the war, virtually no Southerners remain enrolled at Yale. By the end of the war, according to one authoritative account, 511 Yale men have served the Confederacy as soldiers and civil officials, of whom 55 die in the war. Among Yale Confederates, 68 are from Northern states; Connecticut contributes an astonishing 28 Yale men who serve the Confederate cause. There is no definitive account of how many Yale students and alumni serve in the Union Army, but researchers have estimated that total at roughly 700 to 850 men.

Image above: The Army of the Potomac — Our Outlying Picket in the Woods, from Harper’s Weekly, Yale University Art Gallery.

Interior of Fort Sumter: during the bombardment, April 12th 1861

1861 April 12

Confederate troops fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor—the first shots of the Civil War.

Image above: Interior of Fort Sumter: During the Bombardment, April 12, 1861, Library of Congress.

1861 June 10

Theodore Winthrop, Yale class of 1848 and President Woolsey’s nephew, becomes the first Yale death in Civil War combat. His killing in eastern Virginia at the battle of Big Bethel, an early and humiliating Union defeat, is reported by the Yale Literary Magazine 10 months later. He is buried in Grove Street Cemetery.

Theodore Winthrop, Yale University Library.

Heroic Sacrifice Theodore Winthrop was the first of many Yale students and alumni to die fighting in the Civil War.

CHAPTER 9 Heroic Sacrifice

In March 1862, the Yale Literary Magazine reported the first Yale death in combat. Theodore Winthrop, an 1848 graduate, had been killed in eastern Virginia at the Battle of Big Bethel, June 10, 1861, an early and humiliating Union defeat.

“It was worth a life, that march,” wrote Winthrop. “Only one who passed, as we did, through that tempest of cheers, two miles long, can know the terrible enthusiasm of the occasion.”

Born in New Haven, an admired student and a poet, novelist, and travel writer, Winthrop was Yale President Theodore Dwight Woolsey’s nephew. Only a few days after the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter, on April 17, 1861, Winthrop told his uncle Theodore that he had enlisted in the army “for the purpose of lending my aid to the great work of attempting to get rid of slavery in this country.”

As he went to war, Winthrop wrote dispatches for the Atlantic Monthly. In his first, he described in vivid terms the spectacular march through Manhattan of the Seventh Regiment in April. “It was worth a life, that march,” he wrote. “Only one who passed, as we did, through that tempest of cheers, two miles long, can know the terrible enthusiasm of the occasion. I could hardly hear the rattle of our own gun-carriages, and only once or twice the music of our band came to me muffled and quelled by the uproar. Handkerchiefs, of course, came floating down upon us from the windows, like a snow. Pretty little gloves pelted us with love-taps.”

When the regiment reached Washington, DC, they encamped inside the chamber of the House of Representatives in the Capitol. Winthrop exploited the irony of the moment in the Atlantic. “Our presence here was the inevitable sequel of past events,” he said. “We appeared with bayonets and bullets because of the bosh uttered on this floor; because of the bills—with treasonable stump-speeches in their bellies—passed here; because of the cowardice of the poltroons… the arrogance of the bullies, who had here cooperated to blind and corrupt the minds of the people.” These images of nearly a thousand men sleeping on their knapsacks in the House chamber would be unforgettable to his eager readers in those early months of the war, especially after they learned of the journey of his flag-draped coffin to New York City and to the honored burial in New Haven.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

Theodore Winthrop, Yale College class of 1848 and the first Yale graduate killed in the Civil War. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

1863

Official recruiting of Black soldiers to the Union Army and Navy begins. Before war’s end, they number nearly 200,000, including both former slaves from the South and free men of the North.

1863 January 1

President Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, which declares that all enslaved people within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”

Emancipation Proclamation, Yale University Art Gallery.

A Meaningful Death Uriah Parmelee fought to end slavery—and was killed in battle eight days before the Civil War ended.

CHAPTER 9 A Meaningful Death

Yale student Uriah Parmelee enlisted immediately when the war commenced in April 1861. He dropped out in his junior year and joined a New York regiment of cavalry as a private because no Connecticut unit was yet available. His letters, as well as his diary, which he kept in 1864 and 1865, provide glimpses of the war’s brutality and one soldier’s effort to make sense of the suffering.

“I do not intend to shirk now there is really something to fight for—I mean freedom,” Parmelee declared.

Parmelee had attended sermons by the famous antislavery preacher Henry Ward Beecher while a student at Yale, and he carried into the army as strong a commitment to abolitionism as one may find in such a young Union soldier. In early 1862 he declared his passion for the cause. “I am fighting for Liberty, for the slaves & for the white man alike,” he wrote to his mother.

Parmelee believed the constitutional questions would surely be solved by the war, “but the great heart wound, Slavery, will not be reached” without an aggressive emancipation policy enacted by the Union forces. On September 8, 1862, only a week and a half before the pivotal battle of Antietam, the young soldier lamented that this cruel struggle had not yet resulted in “universal Emancipation.”

But in the wake of President Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, and then one hundred days later with the final proclamation, Parmelee changed his tune. By March 1863, anticipating the spring and summer campaigns in Virginia, the Guilford farm boy turned intellectual soldier refused to apply for a furlough to take a break back home. “I do not intend to shirk now there is really something to fight for—I mean freedom,” he declared. “Since the First of January it has become more and more evident to my mind that the war is henceforth to be conducted upon a different basis…. So then I am willing to remain & endure whatever may fall to my share.”

With his patriotic commitment to emancipation and Union refurbished, and believing in a kind of redemption through bloodshed that became a popular Northern attitude, Parmelee nevertheless betrayed his caustic, hardened sense of what soldiering and war had done to his psyche. “We are liable to become mere machines,” he complained in that same spring of 1863, enduring endless camp life. “One can make no plans in the army, indulge no hopes in any particular direction, have no independence, no voice in anything.”

“If it were not for that spark of hope which lives with nothing to feed upon,” he “would soon give up everything,” concluded the lonely son to his frightened mother. Fifty-six percent of the First Connecticut died before the war ended; he was increasingly a scribe to the bereaved back home.

Parmelee made the final entry in his diary on March 30, 1865, saying he “went out alone seeking intellectual clearness.” After two days of pelting rain, and with spring blossoms of red bud and dogwoods now in full bloom all over central Virginia, the last major battle of the war occurred at Five Forks on April 1. About mid-day, the First Connecticut saw Confederates at a short distance in a peach orchard in full bloom. Parmelee, as was his way, stood up and led his men in a charge as cannon opened up from the orchard. He was struck in the chest by an artillery shell and fell dead on the field.

Only eight days later, the end that everyone sought came as Lee surrendered some twenty-two thousand malnourished soldiers to Grant farther west at Appomattox Court House in one of the signal events of American history.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

P.S. Duval's Steam Lithographic Press, Emancipation Proclamation (1865)

1863 November

The Connecticut General Assembly authorizes the organization of an African-American regiment to fight in the Civil War; Governor William A. Buckingham thereupon calls for the recruitment of the Twenty-Ninth Connecticut Volunteers. Black men from some 119 towns and cities around Connecticut ultimately enlist.

Alexander Herritage Newton (left), Quartermaster Sergeant, and Daniel S. Lathrop, Quartermaster Sergeant, both of the Twenty-Ninth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers, Yale University Library.

Black Soldiers Help Turn the Tide Black men from Connecticut volunteered to fight despite facing racism and ridicule.

CHAPTER 9 Black Soldiers Help Turn the Tide

One of the most revolutionary aspects of the Civil War was the enlistment of Black men in the Union army and navy; before the war’s end, nearly two hundred thousand Black men, formerly enslaved in the South as well as free in the North, served in both state and federal regiments.

“What we now want is a country—a free country—a country nowhere saddened by the footprints of a single slave—and nowhere cursed by the presence of a slaveholder,” Frederick Douglass declared.

Official recruiting of Black soldiers began in the spring of 1863. Some Black men from Connecticut sought their chance in the famous Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, recruited in the Bay State by summer of that year. Not until November 1863 did the Connecticut General Assembly authorize the organization of an African American regiment; Governor William A. Buckingham thereupon called for the recruitment of the Twenty-Ninth Connecticut Volunteers.

These enactments were highly partisan in the state: Democratic Party representative William W. Eaton of Hartford called the legislation “the most disgraceful bill ever introduced” at the New Haven State House. Eaton declared he would rather “let loose the wild Camanchees [sic] than the ferocious negro.” Black soldiers would only “spread lust and rapine all over the land.”

Against such racist perceptions, hundreds of men came forward immediately, and by early January 1864, the ranks of the Twenty-Ninth, eventually over 1,200 strong, were filled. The response was so robust that a second regiment, the Thirtieth Connecticut, was formed at the same time.

Soldiers of the Twenty-Ninth Regiment came from several Northern states, but more than half hailed from Connecticut’s cities, towns, and countryside. Crowds came to watch them over the more than three months they trained and practiced; the sounds of marching feet and officers’ shouted commands, the smell of cook fires, and the sight of flags around an African American regiment were scenes that staid Connecticut had never witnessed.

On January 28, 1864, the great orator Frederick Douglass came to town for two extraordinary speaking events—one to the general public, another to the Black regiments. The Palladium advertised his first speech, “The Mission of the War,” as “Fred. Douglass To-night,” at the Music Hall in New Haven on Crown Street, at twenty-five cents per person.

The Music Hall, later known as the New Haven Opera House, was filled beyond its capacity for Douglass’s speech. In this, one of the great orations of Douglass’s life, which he delivered many times, he offered perhaps his clearest description of the war as an apocalyptic, purposeful collision in history, in which “Providence” (God, nature, or fate) entered human affairs and turned that history in a new direction. In stirring terms, Douglass declared a new day possible with a Union victory: “What we now want is a country—a free country—a country nowhere saddened by the footprints of a single slave—and nowhere cursed by the presence of a slaveholder. We want a country… which shall not brand the Declaration of Independence as a lie.”

The following day Douglass rode out to Grapevine Point and delivered a different kind of address to the assembled troops of the Twenty-Ninth and Thirtieth Connecticut. “You are pioneers of the liberty of your race,” Douglass announced. “With the United States cap on your head, the United States eagle on your belt, the United States musket on your shoulder, not all the powers of darkness can prevent you from becoming American citizens.” He left no doubt of the heavy burden on these men. “On you depends the destiny of four millions of the colored race in this country.”

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

Alexander Herritage Newton (left), quartermaster sergeant, and Daniel S. Lathrop, quartermaster sergeant, both of the Twenty-Ninth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers, circa 1865. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Soldiers assembled on the New Haven Green, circa 1865. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

1864 August

The New York Times attacks Yale for its alleged “draft-shirking,” accusing Yale students and their faculty and administration of “plotting evasion and desertion.” At the college, claims the Times, “how to escape the draft” is the issue of the day. “The gutters are dragged for substitutes… Negro slaves who owe to the Republic nothing but curses, are driven to the rescue.”

Image above: Soldiers Assembled on the New Haven Green, Yale University Library.

1865 April 9

Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrenders to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, symbolizing the end of a long and bloody civil war.

1869

Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett is appointed United States Minister Resident to Haiti, becoming the nation’s first Black diplomat. He had studied at Yale and was the first Black graduate of the State Normal School. Two of his sons go on to attend Yale, including Ulysses Simpson Grant Bassett, Class of 1895, named for the president who appointed his father to the diplomatic service.

Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett Jr., Yale University Library.

Photo of Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett Jr.

1871 April

Congress passes the Third Enforcement Act, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which enables the president to suspend habeas corpus in his efforts to combat the KKK and rein in what was beginning to seem like a second civil war.

1871 April 10

Mary A. Goodman signs her last will and testament, leaving her entire estate, except a small annual bequest to her father, to the Yale Theological Department to “be used in aiding young men in preparing for the Gospel ministry, preference being always given to young men of color.” Goodman had worked her entire life in domestic service and as a washerwoman taking in laundry. But when she died in 1872, her real and personal property was worth the substantial sum of about $5,000.

1874

James W. Morris becomes the first Black student to graduate from the Yale Theological Seminary. His contemporary Solomon M. Coles, born enslaved in Virginia, matriculated first but graduated a year later. Coles was the first African American student to complete the entire three-year course of study in theology at Yale.

Solomon M. Coles, Blackpast.org.

Dreams Deferred The hard road for Black students at Yale after the Civil War.

CHAPTER 10 Dreams Deferred

On April 10, 1871, Mary A. Goodman signed her last will and testament, leaving her entire estate, except a small annual bequest to her father, to the Yale Theological Department to “be used in aiding young men in preparing for the Gospel ministry, preference being always given to young men of color.”

“Of African Descent,” it was written on Mary A. Goodman’s tombstone, “she gave the earnings of her life to educate men of her own color in Yale College for the Gospel ministry.”

Goodman, a Black New Haven woman, had worked her entire life in domestic service and as a washerwoman taking in laundry. But when she died in 1872, her real and personal property was worth about $5,000. A church newspaper out of Boston, reporting on the gift, said that Goodman had been a member of the College Street Church and “felt that the time was coming, in the rapid progress of her race and people, when they would require a more highly educated ministry.”

The university had her buried in the Grove Street Cemetery, inscribing the tombstone, “Of African Descent, she gave the earnings of her life to educate men of her own color in Yale College for the Gospel ministry.”

James W. Morris became the first Black student to graduate from the Yale Theological Seminary in 1874. His contemporary Solomon M. Coles, born enslaved in Virginia, matriculated before Morris but graduated the next year; Coles was first African American student to complete the entire three-year course of study in theology.

Other Black students were making inroads in the School of Medicine. Bayard Thomas Smith and George Robinson Henderson both transferred to Yale’s medical school from Lincoln University, a Black institution in Oxford, Pennsylvania, when its medical department closed. They graduated in 1875 and 1876, respectively. Between 1876 and 1903, when Cleveland Ferris graduated, at least eight Black students received medical degrees from Yale. This number, while small, exceeds all the known Black graduates of the Yale School of Medicine for the forty years after Ferris’s graduation.

During Reconstruction, some observers believed that widening educational opportunity at Yale presaged hopeful trends in the country at large. In 1874, the Connecticut Courant reported that the U.S. Senate had passed an amended version of a civil rights bill. They noted that one of the senators, Orris S. Ferry of Connecticut, Yale Class of 1844, opposed the bill “because the wisdom, expediency, and right of such legislation were doubted.” The editors of the Courant were dismayed by Ferry’s opposition, suggesting that much of the opposition to the bill centered on school integration. But, as a counterargument, they pointed to Yale:

“The battle has been fought and won in New England, and the prejudice was effectually killed here when Yale opened its doors to the colored student. If the new bill shall in the end accomplish the same good for the country at large, it will prove the best piece of legislation of any congress since slavery was abolished.”

Their optimism was premature.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

1875

Bayard Thomas Smith graduates from Yale’s medical school. His fellow student George Robinson Henderson, who like Smith transferred to Yale from Lincoln University, a Black institution in Oxford, Pennsylvania, graduates a year later. Smith and Henderson are the first Black graduates of the Yale medical school since Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed graduated in 1857—a hiatus of nearly 20 years.

1876

New Haven native Edward Bouchet, just two years after finishing his bachelor’s degree at Yale, earns his PhD in physics from Yale. He is the first African American to earn a PhD in any subject in the United States and only the sixth person of any background or race to earn a PhD in physics from an American university. His research delves into geometrical optics and refraction in glass.

Edward Alexander Bouchet, Yale University Library.

‘A Good Story from Yale’ Edward Bouchet, the first African American to earn a PhD in the United States, faced severe discrimination throughout his life.

CHAPTER 10 ‘A Good Story from Yale’

A May 1871 headline in the Connecticut Courant promised “A Good Story from Yale.”

The article told of a Democratic politician from New York who was upset his son was forced to sit next to Edward Bouchet, a student in the Yale College Class of 1874. The politician wrote to the professor on his son’s behalf, asking for a new seat, “as it was for many reasons distasteful to sit so near a negro.”

Despite Bouchet’s sterling academic credentials, the professional obstacles he faced throughout his adult life presaged the challenges to come for African Americans.

But according to the article, “The professor wrote back that at present the students were ranged in alphabetical order, and it was not in his power to grant the favor, but ‘next term the desired change will be brought about, for the scholarship then being the criterion, Mr. Bouchet will be in the first division, and your son in the fourth.’”

Edward Bouchet’s arrival as a student at Yale was in many ways the product of decades of growth and organizing within New Haven’s African American community. Born in 1852 on Bradley Street in New Haven, Edward was the youngest of four children. His mother, Susan Cooley Bouchet, was a native of Connecticut; his father, William Francis Bouchet, may have come to New Haven in 1824 as the “body servant” of a student from South Carolina.

Young Edward, a prodigy, first attended school at his church, where children were taught by Vashti Duplex Creed, the city’s first Black schoolteacher. He later went to the Artisan Street Colored School and from there to the New Haven High School from 1866 to 1868. From 1868 to 1870, he attended the prestigious Hopkins School in New Haven. Bouchet was not the first Black student to enroll in that preparatory school, but he flourished there, graduating as valedictorian in 1870.

Bouchet was soon admitted to Yale College, where he excelled in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, graduating sixth in his class of 124 students, and was nominated to Phi Beta Kappa. Bouchet attracted the attention of philanthropist Alfred Cope, who encouraged him to return to Yale to pursue further study.

In 1876, just two years after finishing his bachelor’s degree, Bouchet earned his PhD in physics from Yale. He was the first African American to earn a PhD in any subject in the United States and only the sixth person of any background or race to earn a PhD in physics. His research delved into geometrical optics and refraction in glass. Yet despite his sterling academic credentials, the professional obstacles he faced throughout his adult life presaged the challenges to come for African Americans, even for those, like Bouchet, who had reached the highest tiers of educational achievement.

With a Yale doctorate in hand, Bouchet could not find a job in the universities or laboratories of Jim Crow America. Instead, he did what several of his fellow educated African Americans did in this period: he taught in segregated schools until, at the age of fifty-two, Bouchet sought a teaching position at his alma mater.

His Yale application, dated 1905, delineated his sterling qualifications—six years of Latin, six of Greek, ranked sixth in his Yale class—and described teaching as his “life work.” Bouchet listed Arthur W. Wright, professor of experimental physics at Yale, as his reference. In a confidential questionnaire attesting to Bouchet’s personality, scholarship, and “force of character and ability,” the eminent faculty member recommended Bouchet without reservation.

Yale did not hire Bouchet. Over the next fourteen years he lived a peripatetic life, crisscrossing the country to hold teaching jobs in Missouri, Ohio, and Virginia. He became ill and eventually returned to New Haven, where he died in 1918, in a house on the same street where he had grown up. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Evergreen Cemetery.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

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The Country’s First Black Ph.D.

1880

Edwin Archer Randolph becomes the first Black graduate of Yale Law School. He is also the first African American admitted to practice law in Connecticut, although he never does. Instead, after graduation he moves to Virginia where he goes into private practice, is elected to political office, and founds the Richmond Planet, a Black newspaper.

Edwin Archer Randolph, Yale University Library.

1881

John Wesley Manning, an early Black student whose parents escaped slavery in North Carolina, graduates from Yale College. Like many other academically gifted Black graduates, he spends his post-graduate career working at segregated schools. After moving to Tennessee, he teaches Latin and serves as the principal of a school in Knoxville. Active in church and civic affairs, Manning holds leadership positions in the East Tennessee Association of Teachers in Colored Schools and the Tennessee Conference of Educational Workers and participates in the Southern Sociological Congress in 1915.

John Wesley Manning, Yale University Library.

A Yale Family in Slavery and Freedom Stowed away on a Union ship heading north, John Wesley Manning eventually reunited with his family and became a prominent graduate of Yale.

Interlude A Yale Family in Slavery and Freedom

During the Civil War, a couple named Alfred and Eliza Manning boarded a steamship off the coast of North Carolina with their young son. They found an empty steamer drum, drilled holes in it, and placed their child, John, inside. Like the mother of Moses hiding her baby in a basket of bulrushes, they covered their own boy with clothes and told him to be quiet.

Being able to raise a family, unburdened by the threat of sale or estrangement, was one of the great distinctions between slavery and freedom.

The vessel belonged to the Union navy, part of a northern blockade intended to prevent the Confederacy from transporting—and profiting from—plantation goods. Alfred and Eliza said goodbye to John and asked the Union sailors to take him to safety. The ship was bound for New Haven, Connecticut, and the Mannings, along with other family members, eventually joined the little boy there. Many years later, in 1881, John Wesley Manning graduated from Yale College. When his own wife gave birth to their first child, they christened her “Yale.”

Stories like this one—of separation and unification, daring and sacrifice, death and new life—played out in ways both spectacular and mundane during the Civil War. And in the years following Appomattox, the country had to reckon with the consequences of a conflict that had torn apart both families and a nation. African Americans searched for loved ones who had been sold away, sometimes many years earlier, or others who had escaped of their own volition when the timing was right. Others sought new opportunities away from those who had held them as chattel, sometimes in faraway cities like New Haven.

Being able to raise a family, unburdened by the threat of sale or estrangement, was one of the great distinctions between slavery and freedom, and the Mannings achieved it. In another turn, John Wesley Manning, his brother Henry Edward Manning, and Samuel Johnston, their family’s onetime enslaver, all came to share the same alma mater. In time, the Manning family, along with many other wartime migrants, would leave their mark on both the university and the city of New Haven.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

1883

Henry Edward Manning, brother of John Wesley Manning, receives a three-year certificate from the Yale School of Fine Arts. (The art school did not begin granting degrees until 1891.) Manning may have been the first Black student to receive a certificate from the Yale art school. After graduation, he teaches drawing at a school in Knoxville, Tennessee, and at Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, but he spends most of his career as a sign painter in New Haven. In the 1920 census, he is listed as self-employed, owning his own business and his own house.

Photographs of Classes, Including for Art, Yale University Library.

One of these photos may show Henry Manning in a life drawing class

1884

Thomas Nelson Page published his story “Marse Chan,” one of his most popular works offering a sentimental vision of antebellum Southern life, depicting slavery as benevolent and enslaved people as unwaveringly loyal to their enslavers. Part of a national turn toward reconciliation, in which the advances of Black rights during Reconstruction were viewed as a terrible mistake, Page’s writing received glowing reviews in the Yale Daily News, and he was invited to speak on campus.

1884

A statue of Yale science professor Benjamin Silliman Sr. is unveiled on campus. His “faithful” associate Robert M. Park, a free Black man who contributed to Silliman’s work, is on hand to draw aside the veil. Park’s commitment to movements for Black rights paid some dividends in his lifetime: He lived to see one of his grandchildren, Ulysses S. Grant Bassett, graduate from Yale only months before he died.

Ulysses Simpson Grant Bassett, Yale University Library.

A ‘Faithful Servant’ and Abolitionist Anecdotes and jokes reveal the subtext of a complicated relationship between a venerated professor and his Black assistant.

CHAPTER 5 A ‘Faithful Servant’ and Abolitionist

Yale science professor Benjamin Silliman is honored today for establishing and promoting scientific education both at Yale and in the United States more broadly. More recently, historians have explored Silliman’s status as a slaveholder and his views on the institution of slavery. Few if any, however, have noticed his close relationship with his longtime assistant, a free Black man named Robert M. Park.

Silliman accompanied his Black assistant, Robert M. Park, in a second-class car because he had been “unwilling to disturb the feelings of one who had served me so well, and contributed materially to my success.”

In the census and city directories, Park was described as a “custodian” and “sexton.” Yet Silliman’s own accounts suggest Park’s duties extended far beyond cleaning or janitorial tasks; he participated in and contributed to the professor’s scientific work. In fact, the elder Silliman came to rely on and credit Park with some of his own success.

In 1835, the celebrated professor was invited to give a series of lectures to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge at the Masonic Temple on Tremont Street in Boston. Already well known as a scientist, textbook author, and founder of a leading scientific journal, Silliman was keen to further bolster his reputation and attract funding. The opportunity in Boston was well paying and promised to connect him with even larger audiences. Park accompanied Silliman to Boston, staying for over a month while Silliman delivered his lectures.

Park’s role was not only behind the scenes but out front during the lectures. On March 9, Silliman wrote, “I am well, and all goes well—charmingly indeed,—cordiality and interest and numbers far beyond my expectations. Robert is well and does exceedingly well; he is much admired in his station, and is regarded by the audience as a sub-professor!” Perhaps the audience was able to see what Silliman could not.

The great scientist may have thought it was amusing to consider his “faithful Robert” a “sub-professor.” But he acknowledged Park’s contributions. On their return home to New Haven several weeks later, Silliman decided to sit with his assistant in the second-class car since, he wrote, “objections might be made to the admission of a colored man into the passenger cars of the first class.” Silliman continued, explaining that he accompanied him in part because he had been “unwilling to disturb the feelings of one who had served me so well, and contributed materially to my success.”

Decades later, at the 1884 unveiling of Silliman’s statue on the Yale campus, Andrew Dickson White—a former Silliman student and by then president of Cornell University—told the story of his old professor choosing to sit in the second-class car. To White, an erstwhile abolitionist, the anecdote illustrated Silliman’s humanity and humility. But he also told another story that perhaps better illuminates the place of Robert M. Park—and no doubt others like him—in Yale’s history: Professor Silliman says to a student. ‘How would I test sulphuric [sic] acid?’ The student answers: ‘You would taste it.’ Silliman, indignantly, ‘Taste it, sir; it would burn my tongue out. Tell me, how would I test sulphuric acid?’ Student: ‘You would make Robert taste it.’

The joke “works” because those hearing it would have known Park and would have recognized him as a “faithful” associate who stood by Silliman’s side and did what he was asked to do—whether to further the cause of science or because his job depended upon it. Silliman had been dead twenty years when White recounted those stories, but Park was there, on hand to do a job both dignified and menial: drawing aside the veil covering the statue of his late employer.

Park lived a life that went well beyond his job. In the 1820s, he was one of the four men who, with twenty-one women, founded the Temple Street Congregation in New Haven, a center of Black community and anti-slavery organizing. In 1849, he was a delegate to the Connecticut State Convention of Colored Men, held at the Temple Street Church, “to consider our Political condition, and to devise measures for our elevation and advancement.” Black suffrage and increased educational opportunities “for our children” were on the agenda. Park’s commitment to antislavery and social and political movements for Black rights paid some dividends: he lived to see one of his grandchildren graduate from Yale only months before he died.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

portrait of Ulysses Simpson Grant Bassett, older

1886

Student publications and alumni reminiscences, including Sketches of Yale Life, published this year, often feature racist and derogatory accounts of Black custodians and “campus characters.” These men made their living by cleaning dormitories or selling candy and other goods to Yale students. They had lives beyond their work at Yale of which most students were unaware.

Images, left to right: Candy Vendor Theodore Ferris; Candy Vendors Theodore and Mary Ferris; Candy Vendor Hannibal Silliman; Custodian John Jackson; Yale Custodians Osborn Allston, Isom Allston, John Jackson, and George Livingston; A Group of Yale Custodians, Including Isom Allston and George Livingston; Custodian Osborn Allston, Yale University Library.

Black Employees at Yale Some cleaned dorm rooms, built fires, and shined boots; others sold goods door-to-door to eke out a living.

Interlude Black Employees at Yale

In the decades after the Civil War, it was still far more likely to find African Americans cleaning rooms or selling their wares on campus than it was to see them sitting in those rooms as students. The war changed much about New Haven, but employment opportunities for Black men and women remained limited. Given these constraints, a job at Yale as a custodian or a “sweep,” as they were known, was desirable.

Memoirs by Yale alumni include perhaps the most disparaging and caricatured accounts of the men who held these jobs, full of racist slurs, dialect, and stereotypes.

Sweeps made students’ beds, swept the dormitory rooms weekly, and were responsible for keeping campus buildings clean. For many years, there were both private sweeps, paid by individual students, and “regular sweeps” employed by the university. Lyman Hotchkiss Bagg, a member of the Class of 1869, identified a private sweep as “a negro who, besides making the beds and doing the ordinary chamber work, builds the fires, draws the water, blacks boots, buys the oil, fills and trims the lamps, and runs on miscellaneous errands.”

Memoirs by Yale alumni include perhaps the most disparaging and caricatured accounts of the men who held these jobs, full of racist slurs, dialect, and stereotypes. Pontificating on the advantages of living in the dormitories as opposed to lodging in town, one alumnus wrote that in the dorm he “is his own master. His room is his castle. And if he can’t ‘wallop his own n——,’ he can at least swear at his private sweep.”

In addition to the sweeps, a cast of so-called “campus characters,” nearly all African American, were part of Yale life and lore in these years. “Apple Boy,” “Candy Sam,” “Old Clothes’ Man,” “Fine Day,” and “Free Bill” were among the itinerant salespeople, known also as “nondescript purveyors, vendors, beggars, ragamuffins, and other nuisances,” mentioned in the Yale Banner.

Members of the Class of 1868 remembered them as part of their first initiation into college life: “We made an early acquaintance with Candy Sam, who was always to be found, just before recitation, in his place leaning against the wall of the old Atheneum, and, with his dejected smile, trying to persuade us to part with our fractional currency.” “Candy Sam,” whose real name was Theodore Ferris, was blind, and he was often accompanied by his wife, whom the students called Mrs. Candy Sam. A lengthy profile of Ferris in the Yale Literary Magazine reflected students’ affection for and interest in him, declaring his “life more adventurous than many of us imagined. We hope it may long be preserved, for if the Candy Man were removed, college life would lose much of its sweetness.”

Another confectioner, George Joseph Hannibal, L.W. Silliman (known as “Hannibal”) was distinguished by his speeches, which were as long as his full name. “‘Notwithstanding, even under the most superlative temptation, to interrupt the gentlemen in their studies, I beg to ask whether they are not moved to purchase a package of my old-fashioned, home-made molasses candy,’” quoted Clarence Demming in his 1915 book Yale Yesterdays. Demming said “every graduate of Yale since the later sixties” would be able to recall this speech and remember Hannibal, whom Demming deemed the “alpha” of the “original Campus characters.” Around him others like Candy Sam and Fine Day “twinkled as minor stars.”

Other observers were less generous than Demming and the alumni whose memories were steeped in nostalgia. One anonymous member of the Class of 1868 complained about the “the uninvited and usually unwelcome guests who knock at the college doors,” including Candy Sam. With a less than charitable attitude, this author remembered that freshmen would take up a collection for Ferris at Thanksgiving and that he would receive donations of old clothes from the students. He recalled his “chief rival,” Silliman (aka Hannibal), as a “crafty black man.”

The students knew little about the lives of these men. A native of New Haven, Silliman had served with the Black Twenty-Ninth Connecticut Infantry in the Civil War. When he enlisted on December 8, 1863, at the advanced age of twenty-five, he gave his occupation as “confectioner.” Silliman served for the duration of the war, mustering out on October 4, 1865, and returning to his work making and selling sweets. It is unknown whether many students knew about Silliman’s wartime service or considered his life outside campus, but it was reported in the newspapers when he died in 1907.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

Hannibal Silliman, veteran of the 29th Regiment

1890

The Southern Club is established at Yale, open to “all men whose homes are or were south of the old Mason and Dixon line.” Five years later, the club occupies an entire page of the Yale Banner yearbook, with a long list of members and a racist cartoon featuring a buffoonish Black figure.

The Southern Club Yale courted Southerners after the war, but the revival of Southern feeling on campus may have started among the students.

CHAPTER 11 The Southern Club

Established in 1890, the Yale Southern Club was a student organization open to “all men whose homes are or were south of the old Mason and Dixon line.” At the initial meeting, the founders decided “no party lines [would] be drawn so long as a man comes from the South and is in full sympathy with the Southern people and their best interests.”

The same year that the Yale Daily News “joked” that the Southern Club was planning to “lynch” “a n—— … on the Green,” President Hadley announced plans for a Southern tour.

Although fledgling at first, the Southern Club came into its own only five years later. In 1895, the club occupied an entire page in the Yale Banner, the yearbook, with a long list of members and a cartoon featuring a buffoonish, stereotypical Black figure. And in 1901, the club took up two full pages and featured a new image—a white female figure as well as two cartoons of Black figures.

Trends on campus aligned with the university’s broader plans for courting the South. The same year that the Yale Daily News “joked” that the Southern Club was planning to “lynch” “a n—— … on the Green,” President Hadley began announcing plans for a Southern tour. The Yale Alumni Weekly reported in 1904 that before the Civil War, about 11 percent of students “came from the Slave states,” whereas that figure stood at about 6 percent in the 1903-1904 academic year. However, the organization of alumni groups in Texas, Alabama, New Orleans, and Savannah, and soon Charleston, heralded “a revival of Yale interests at the South.”

The alumni magazine looked favorably on the president’s plans to visit “for the first time” “Yale’s far away children.” The tour of Southern Yale alumni clubs would, it was hoped, bring about a “closer union” and “the forging of fresh links of sympathy and of interest.” It was important, they believed, that Hadley was making “a definite and official expression of the fact that the University, as a national seat of learning, tolerates no sectional divisions.”

Hadley and his wife, Anne, visited alumni clubs in Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, Dallas, and New Orleans. The president spoke of the university’s needs—new dormitories, a new library, and “sufficient money to help the University out of her difficulties”—but he also invoked Yale’s broader ambitions. Bringing the South back to Yale, he suggested, meant recapturing some of the honor and grandeur that Southern students had once brought to the college.

Whether due to the university’s outreach campaign or for other reasons, the composition of Yale’s alumni body began to change. In 1908, the Yale Daily News rejoiced that the number of alumni living in the South Atlantic and the South Central divisions of the country had increased by 20 percent and 21 percent, respectively, over the previous four years.

Yale’s efforts to court Southern students and alumni yielded a public and tangible result in 1915, with the establishment of the John C. Calhoun Memorial Scholarships. Founded and funded by the Southern Club of Yale and the Yale Southern Alumni Association, with blessing and praise from university leaders, the Calhoun scholarships were to be awarded to two Southern students each year. The Yale Daily News reported that the dean of Yale College, the alumni registrar, the Southern Club president, and “two Southern Yale graduates,” yet to be named, would form a committee to raise the requisite $15,000.

“The Southern Club has long felt the need of establishing a memorial of some sort to J. C. Calhoun, and it seems most fitting that the scholarships for general excellence in athletics and scholarship should be dedicated to this eminent Yale graduate and national statesman,” the Southern Club president declared.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

1896 June

The Reverend Joseph Twichell—an 1859 graduate of Yale College, longtime member of the Yale Corporation, and close friend of Mark Twain—speaks at the dedication of a new statue commemorating former Yale President and Union stalwart Theodore Woolsey. Hearing that the senior class aims to plant, as its “class ivy,” a sprig from the grave of Robert E. Lee, Twitchell is horrified. He tells the gathering that Woolsey’s face would, if it could, be “averted from the scene.”

Joseph Twichell, Yale University Library.

Honoring Robert E. Lee At Yale after the Civil War, the prevailing mood was to reconcile with the South.

CHAPTER 11 Honoring Robert E. Lee

“For God, for country, and for Yale.” These were the pillars of the Reverend Joseph Twichell’s life. An 1859 graduate of Yale College and a longtime member of the Yale Corporation, Twichell was the pastor of Asylum Hill Congregational Church, a prominent white parish in Hartford, Connecticut. Beyond the pulpit, he was known widely as Mark Twain’s closest friend, and he traveled in distinguished literary and social circles.

Just before giving his speech, Twichell learned that the senior class had chosen to plant a sprig of ivy from the grave of Robert E. Lee. The very idea of it horrified Twichell.

Yale was a central feature of Twichell’s Gilded Age life. He organized reunions, gave toasts at alumni dinners, and said the benediction at commencement. But above all, the pastor and writer considered the Civil War a defining experience for himself, his generation, and the nation at large. The pages of his journal, kept for over forty years, document his dogged determination to honor those who had served—and died—for the Union cause.

From the 1870s until his death in 1918, Twichell was involved in an array of efforts to memorialize the war: he organized reunions of the Third Army Corps, served on the committee to erect the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch in Hartford, spoke at the laying of the cornerstone of the Excelsior Brigade monument at Gettysburg, advocated for a monument in Georgia to Connecticut soldiers who died in Andersonville prison, and eulogized Ulysses S. Grant from his pulpit.

And so it was fitting that Twichell was invited to speak at the dedication of a new statue of [former Yale President] Theodore Dwight Woolsey during the commencement festivities in June 1896. Later that afternoon, the senior class, in keeping with tradition, would plant its “class ivy.” But just before ascending the platform to give his speech, Twichell learned that the senior class had chosen to plant a sprig of ivy from the grave of Robert E. Lee.

The very idea of it—honoring the “Confederate chief,” as Twichell called him, on the same day as they gathered to remember Union stalwart Woolsey—horrified Twichell. How could such a thing be happening at his beloved Yale? “I disliked the thing so much that I could not forbear an open protest against it,” he later wrote.

Twichell ascended the platform and began delivering his prepared remarks about Woolsey. And for a time, he largely followed his notes. But then he spoke extemporaneously. The Yale Alumni Weekly reported that Twichell paused, turned, and looked “into the face of the statue…showing the intense-est feeling in his voice and manner” and then spoke: “And if I may be pardoned, I must say that if it were possible that face would be averted from the scene, when it shall happen this afternoon…that an ivy from the grave of Robert Lee, a good man, but the historic representative of an infamous cause, shall be planted on this campus to climb the walls of ever loyal Yale.”

“The ivy was planted nevertheless,” Twichell wrote in his journal, “but I had the satisfaction of speaking my mind.” And Twichell learned he was not alone in his feelings. After his remarks, Charles Lane Fitzhugh, a brevet brigadier general in the Union Army and a fellow Yale graduate, “heartily embraced” Twichell. Rumors spread that alumni who graduated during the war years “had expressed the intention of tearing up the ivy tonight,” so the seniors posted a guard to protect it. And in the weeks following, the pastor received many letters supporting his public declaration—and others, “chiefly from the South,” he said, “condemning it.”

Twichell’s rebuke made headlines and elicited support from older alumni, but it did not alter the trajectory of how Yale, or the nation as a whole, would remember the Civil War. Major university celebrations, including the bicentennial in 1901 and the university pageant in 1916, provided special opportunities to embrace the white South and make room for it in the Yale pantheon — especially for that Southerner par excellence, John C. Calhoun. For as the university celebrated, and refashioned, its own history to suit the national mood of reconciliation, it also undertook a deliberate campaign to attract Southern alumni and students back to New Haven.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

1897

The Sheffield Debating Club at Yale decides to address the topic, “Resolved: That lynching is justifiable.” Two debaters take the affirmative position and two the negative. The judges and “the house” decide in favor of the affirmative. The same year, more than 120 Black people are lynched in the United States.

Open for Debate: Lynching In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Yale students debated the rights, political inclusion, and humanity of Black people.

CHAPTER 10 Open for Debate: Lynching

From the 1880s into the early decades of the twentieth century, Yale students engaged with the most pressing issues of the day as they flocked to hear national figures speaking on their campus. A sampling of topics from these years reflects the urgency with which the college, and the nation, wrestled with the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Perhaps most striking is the extent to which the questions of Black rights, political inclusion, and humanity were considered valid topics of debate.

William Pickens and George W. Crawford, two African American students, won the most prestigious awards for oratory in 1903 and 1904. Despite these accolades, Pickens was denied a spot on the university debating team.

The subjects for junior disputes and essays in the 1880s included “Lynch law as now practiced in the United States,” “Are the Southern Negroes Better Off than in the Days of Slavery?” and “The Future of the Negro in America.” The Dwight Literary Society debated the resolution “That lynch law is sometimes justifiable.” The sophomore composition topics in 1890 included the question, “Should the emancipated negro have received unconditional citizenship?”

Colonization and disenfranchisement were floated as solutions to “the Negro Problem.” In 1895, the first meeting of the Freshman Union attracted seventy-five students to consider the following: “Resolved: That the Southern States should take steps to disfranchise the negroes by means of state constitutions.” The Yale Daily News reported that “the affirmative won the debate.” In 1896, the Political Science Club considered the ‘Negro Problem from a Southern Standpoint.’”

In 1897, the Sheffield Debating Club took as its topic, “Resolved: That lynching is justifiable.” Two speakers argued in the affirmative and two in the negative; “The decision of the judges and the house was in favor of the affirmative.” That year, more than 120 Black people were lynched in the United States.

When Yale faced Princeton in 1901, the intercollegiate debate was featured in multiple front-page articles of the Yale Daily News. Princeton submitted the debate question—“Resolved, that the adoption of the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States has been justified”—giving Yale the choice of which side to argue. At the final trials, eighteen students vied for a spot on the Yale team; fourteen of these would-be orators chose to argue against the Fifteenth Amendment.

All six of those who made the team took the position that the Fifteenth Amendment, giving African American men the right to vote, was not justified. In making their case, the Yale debaters repeated racist stereotypes of Black inferiority and laziness. The first speaker noted that the Fifteenth Amendment had “enfranchise[ed] a race of utterly ignorant freedmen.” Students insisted that even Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman had seen the error of their ways. “The Republican party has since repudiated universal suffrage, and the whole country tacitly acquiesces in the practical nullification of the Fifteenth Amendment.” Based on these and other arguments, the News deemed it an “Unusually Interesting Contest.”

And the longevity of such topics is notable. The repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment was still being debated by the Freshman Union in both 1909 and 1911, and John Brown’s legacy was a topic for the Porter Prize as late as 1910, the year after the fiftieth anniversary of the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859.

Given debate’s importance on campus, it is all the more noteworthy that William Pickens and George W. Crawford, two African American students, won the most prestigious awards for oratory in 1903 and 1904. Despite these accolades, Pickens was denied a spot on the university debating team, depriving Yale of one of its best speakers when the team competed against Princeton. One newspaper declared, “Reason Seems Obvious to Many Why Winner of Ten Eyck Prize is Not to Face the Tiger Debaters.”

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

Bicentennial buildings, view from corner of College and Grove streets.

1901

Yale celebrates its bicentennial, using the occasion to welcome white Southerners back to the college. One speaker declares that Yale has “ever been proud” of its Southern alumni of the antebellum era, praising them as “eminent as statesmen, as soldiers, as scholars, and as divines.” Thomas Nelson Page is among a number of Southerners who receive honorary degrees at the bicentennial celebration.

Image above: Bicentennial Buildings, View from Corner of College and Grove Streets, Yale University Library.

Images below, left to right: Yale Alumni Weekly: the Bicentennial; Booker T. Washington, Delegate to the Bicentennial from Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute; Graduates Passing Hendrie Hall, Elm Street, During Yale’s Bicentennial Celebration; Commons Set for Dinner, Yale University Library.

Graduates passing Hendrie Hall, Elm Street, during Yale's bicentennial celebration.

1903

George W. Crawford graduates from Yale Law School, where he is awarded the prestigious Townsend Prize for oratory. He goes on to ascend the highest ranks of Black professional life in New Haven, practicing law in the city for decades and serving four terms as the city’s corporation counsel. Crawford establishes an NAACP branch in New Haven and is a longtime member of the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church (formerly the Temple Street congregation). He serves on the boards of Howard University and, for over 50 years, Talladega College.

George W. Crawford (LL.B., 1903). The Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School. MssA C858 flat.

1903

Thomas Nelson Baker, born enslaved in Virginia in 1860, completes his second Yale degree, becoming the first Black person in the United States to earn a PhD in philosophy.

1904

William Pickens graduates from Yale College. He goes on to teach at Talladega College in Alabama and at Wiley College in Texas and serves as dean of academics at Morgan State College in Baltimore. He helps to build the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, where he works for over two decades.

William Pickens, Yale University Library.

1905

Edward Bouchet graduates from Yale College in 1874 and earns a doctorate in physics from Yale University in 1876. He is the first Black person to earn a PhD in the United States. In 1905, he is turned down for a teaching position at Yale despite his sterling qualifications—six years of Latin, six of Greek, ranked sixth in his Yale class—and a ringing endorsement from Arthur W. Wright, an eminent Yale professor of molecular physics and chemistry. Over the next 14 years, Bouchet lives a peripatetic life, crisscrossing the country to hold teaching jobs in Missouri, Ohio, and Virginia. He becomes ill and eventually returns to New Haven, where he dies in 1918 and is buried in an unmarked grave in Evergreen Cemetery.

Edward Alexander Bouchet, Yale University Library.

1915

A Black student at Brown University, Frederick Douglass “Fritz” Pollard, plays football in the newly built Yale Bowl—the first Black person to do so. A halfback, Pollard must enter the field separately from the rest of his team to avoid hostile crowds. When he gets the ball, Yale fans yell racist epithets at him. Pollard goes on to distinguish himself as the first African-American player to appear in the Rose Bowl, the first African-American quarterback, and the first African-American head coach in the National Football League, among many other barrier-breaking achievements.

Fritz Pollard, Brown University Library.

A Bitter Victory Frederick Douglass “Fritz” Pollard achieved many groundbreaking achievements, but he recalled a football game he won at Yale with bitterness.

CHAPTER 11 A Bitter Victory

Later in the same year that John C. Calhoun was feted and honored with a scholarship in his name, a Black student played football in the newly built Yale Bowl for the first time—but not for the Blue.

Brown’s win against Yale that day was one stop on the team’s—and Pollard’s—journey to the Rose Bowl. But the victory was not sweet for Pollard.

Frederick Douglass “Fritz” Pollard, a halfback for Brown University, had to enter the field separately from the rest of his team to avoid the hostile crowds. William M. Ashby, a student in the divinity school, went to the game with a handful of other Black students. As Ashby recalled later, they had heard of Pollard, who was rumored to be an exceptional player. Yet they, like Pollard, expected to face insults and perhaps injury—even from their fellow Yale students.

Ashby wrote, “We went to the Brown side of the field, wanting to give Pollard as much moral support as possible, but also because we knew that there would be animosity toward us in the Yale stands. We would be baited with the foulest and vilest epithets hurled right into our teeth, and we could do nothing about it.”

Over the course of an outstanding career on and off the field, Pollard would distinguish himself as the first African American player to appear in the Rose Bowl and the first African American quarterback and the first African American head coach in the National Football League, among many other barrier-breaking achievements. On that November day in 1915, however, he was something else to the white Yale fans. When Pollard had the ball, Ashby remembered, “The Yale stands arose, ‘Catch that n——. Kill that n——,’ they screamed.”

Brown’s win against Yale that day was one stop on the team’s—and Pollard’s—journey to the Rose Bowl. But the victory was not sweet for Pollard. “For all the glory he achieved in New Haven, Pollard later expressed bitterness about his playing in the Yale Bowl. He had never felt so ‘n——ized,’ as he put it,” said one historian of the game.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

1915

The John C. Calhoun Memorial Scholarships are established. Founded and funded by the Southern Club of Yale and the Yale Southern Alumni Association—with the blessing and praise of Yale’s leadership—the Calhoun scholarships are to be awarded to two Southern students each year. “The Southern Club has long felt the need of establishing a memorial of some sort to J. C. Calhoun, and it seems most fitting that the scholarships for general excellence in athletics and scholarship should be dedicated to this eminent Yale graduate and national statesman,” the Southern Club president declares.

1915 June 20

In an elaborate ceremony, the Yale Civil War Memorial is dedicated. It honors fallen soldiers from both the North and South and makes no mention of slavery.

The Yale and Slavery Research Project completes its study of Yale’s history here. The research team chose 1915 as the endpoint in part because the dedication of Yale’s Civil War Memorial was the capstone to decades of deliberate forgetting, both at Yale and in the country as a whole, about the reasons for the Civil War. Yale’s collections are available for other faculty members, scholars, and students to conduct further research on the legacies of slavery and racism in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Images below: Yale’s Civil War Memorial, Yale University Office of Public Affairs and Communications.

Yale’s Civil War Memorial Yale’s Civil War memorial, a monument to the reconciliation of North and South, deliberately neglects to mention why the war was fought.

CHAPTER 12 Yale’s Civil War Memorial

A 2021 study of memorials in America counted 5,917 monuments of various kinds that memorialize the Civil War. In that total, only 1 percent include the word “slavery”; Yale’s striking Civil War memorial, carefully and artfully designed, located in a very public setting, and dedicated in 1915, is not among that 1 percent.

The Yale memorial masks the deep meanings of the Civil War as it also almost perfectly reveals the solemn tragedy of the national culture of reunion and reconciliation that came to dominate American society.

For more than a century, the Yale Civil War Memorial has honored the sacrifice of Yale men on both sides in the struggle of 1861-1865 and encouraged the deliberate forgetting of the deepest meanings of that event.

On the floor of the slightly sloped hallway, some verses of the reconciliationist poem, “The Blue and the Gray” were etched into stone as part of the 1915 memorial. By then the poem, by 1849 Yale graduate Francis Miles Finch, was a national classic that had already appeared and still does on monuments and wayside markers at national cemeteries and Civil War battlefield sites.

As the story goes, Finch was deeply moved by an incident he read about in spring 1866, when white Southern women in Columbus, Mississippi, had gone to a Civil War cemetery and adorned with flowers the graves of both Confederate and Union dead buried there. In September 1867 in the Atlantic Monthly, he published his nine-verse poem that soon became a sentimental symbol of national reconciliation of North and South around the elegiac memory of the mutual valor of soldiers on both sides of the conflict.

In 1868 when an “official” beginning to Memorial Day was announced by the Grand Army of the Republic, the growing Union veterans’ organization, Finch’s poem suddenly soared in significance as people who wished to believe in a reunion devoid of cause and conflict, but steeped in the solemnity of soldierly virtue and sacrifice, now had lovely, well-timed verses through which to advance their cause. No one need be blamed for all the bloodshed; everyone who fought with courage and died for devotion to a cause, whichever they believed in, was equal and heroic in death. Finch’s sweet mutuality intones,

No more shall the war-cry sever,
Or the winding rivers be red;
They banish our anger forever,
When they laurel the graves of our dead!
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day; -
Love and tears for the Blue;
Tears and love for the Gray.

That single verse is carved into the floor of the corridor of Memorial Hall near the following inscription:

TO THE MEN OF YALE
WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE CIVIL WAR
THE UNIVERSITY HAS DEDICATED THIS MEMORIAL
THAT THEIR HIGH DEVOTION
MAY LIVE IN ALL HER SONS AND THAT THE BONDS
WHICH NOW UNITE THE LAND MAY ENDURE MCMXV

The inscriptions, which are badly faded and worn by foot traffic, with some of Finch’s words unrecognizable, are today hidden beneath industrial strength removable carpets protecting the floor; the burgundy-colored rugs have a special effect in afternoon sunlight from the doors. Any casual visitor to the Memorial Hall will note the sounds of thuds and clicks of shoes on the uncarpeted sections of the rotunda and the larger spaces commemorating the Yale dead of the twentieth-century world wars and other conflicts. Voices echo in this hallowed space, depending on how crowded it is.

One will also witness an endless array of people hurrying by, faces leaning into cell phones, unaware of anything hallowed around them. Indeed, as scholars working in a range of disciplines, cultures, and time periods have shown, no monument means anything without knowledge of its conception and purpose, of its significance at its unveiling and then over time. The Yale memorial masks the deep meanings of the Civil War as it almost perfectly reveals the solemn tragedy of the national culture of reunion and reconciliation that came to dominate American society after the beginning of the twentieth century.

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

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The Civil War Memorial

Yale’s Ties to Slavery Confronting a Painful History, Building a Stronger Community

Introduction

History

1636

1637 May

1638

1638 April

1638 September

1639

CHAPTER 1 African Captives Arrive in New England

1662

1675

1676 August

Chapter 1 Yale’s Beginnings

1690

1700

1701 October 9

CHAPTER 2 Yale’s Founders and Slavery

1713–1721

1716

1717–1718

CHAPTER 2 How Yale Got Its Name

1718 September 12

1720

CHAPTER 1 The Contradictions of Jonathan Edwards

1721

1730

1739

1745

CHAPTER 3 Follow the Money

1749

1750 April 17

Chapter 3 Building Connecticut Hall

1773

1773

1774

Interlude Names of the Enslaved

1774 October

Chapter 4 Questions of Freedom

1776

Chapter 4 Yale’s Christian Abolitionists

1776

1776

1779

1779

1784

Interlude Gradual Emancipation in Connecticut

1786

Chapter 4 ‘Tis Thou Alone Can Make Us Free’

1790

1790 October 20

1792

1794

Chapter 5 Eli Whitney and the Cotton Boom

1795

1800

1804

Chapter 5 The Legacy of John C. Calhoun

1814

1816

1817

1820

1825

1825

1827

1831

1831 August 7

1831 September 10

CHAPTER 6 Dashed Dreams of a Black College

1833 May 24

1834

CHAPTER 8 Yale’s First Black Student

1837

CHAPTER 8 Samuel F.B. Morse: Artist, Inventor, White Supremacist

1837

1839

1839 June 30

CHAPTER 7 Strangers in a Strange Land

1841 March 9

1841 November 26