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The
Slavery Legacy
With
a debate raging over reparations and a look at the darker side of
some old heroes, Americans are again trying to come to terms with
slavery. Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center looks at the subject across
time and cultures.
February
2002
by Mark Alden Branch '86
Nearly
a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, the subject of slavery is back on the national agenda. A movement
for government reparations to the descendants of slaves is being
hotly debated on campus and in the media, and institutions and families
are looking back uneasily at the presence of slavery in their own
histories.
Yale's
own confrontation with the past came last summer, when a group of
graduate students published
a report pointing out that nine
of the University's residential colleges are named for men who owned
slaves or supported slavery. The news came as a shock to many who
thought of slaveholders as Southern plantation masters—not New
England clergymen—and the University was forced to take another
look at its designated heroes. A New Haven organization called on
Yale to rename the colleges in question, and the social-service
organization Dwight
Hall seriously considered changing its name as a result of the
report's allegations that its namesake, Timothy Dwight, not only
owned a slave but had been a supporter of slavery while president
of the University.
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America has a long way to go in understanding slavery's
role in its making.
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Clearly,
America has a long way to go in understanding slavery's role in
its making. It is a subject that Yale has been working on for years:
Historians such as C. Vann Woodward and John Blassingame did groundbreaking
work on slavery and its lasting impact. And since 1998, Yale's Gilder
Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
has been pursuing such an understanding through a full calendar
of lectures, conferences, and workshops. Not only is the Center
working to advance the state of knowledge about slavery as an American
institution, it is also raising awareness of slavery's role in world
history and its international dimensions.
The Center's
work is inspired by that of its founding director, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus
David Brion Davis. A leading authority on the history of slavery,
Davis made his name as a scholar by writing the first comparative
study of the institution. The book, The Problem
of Slavery in Western Culture, won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize
for nonfiction. Davis is working to see that the Center views slavery
not just as an American subject, but as a complex piece of human
history.
Davis
traces the Center's own history to a lecture he gave in 1994 at
the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York on the origins of New World
slavery. In the audience were two of the Morgan Library's major
benefactors—Richard Gilder '54 and Lewis Lehrman '60. Gilder
and Lehrman together have amassed a collection of documents from
American history worth hundreds of millions of dollars and placed
it on loan to the Library. (Gilder and his family are also the primary
donors behind Yale's new Gilder
Boathouse, and he helped his class raise a $70-million gift
that was given to the University in 2000.) Over dinner that night,
Gilder and Lehrman approached Davis about the idea of teaching a
summer course on slavery for New York City teachers. Davis promptly
devised a course and has taught it every summer since. And within
a year, the two collectors had founded the Gilder
Lehrman Institute of American History, which now offers courses
and materials for teachers on a number of historical topics. "We
want to broaden and deepen the understanding of American history,
chiefly by reaching students through teachers," said Gilder when
the Institute was founded.
Davis
says the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale was a "direct outgrowth"
of the Institute. Founded in November 1998 and funded by Gilder
and Lehrman and by the University through the Yale Center for International
and Area Studies (YCIAS),
the Center is one of two institutions of its kind in the world devoted
to the study of slavery. (The other, also founded in 1998, is at
the University
of Nottingham in England.) The Center operates out of a small
suite of offices in Luce Hall, YCIAS's headquarters on Hillhouse
Avenue. Much of the Center's activity is overseen by associate director
Robert P. Forbes, a former student of Davis's whose own research
focuses on politics and slavery in early 19th-century America.
Within
the academic community, the Center's most visible initiative is
its annual conference, at which scholars from around the world deliver
papers. The Center also offers fellowships each year that invite established scholars to the campus for a semester to pursue research
projects. "We put them to work," says Forbes, "particularly in outreach
workshops with school teachers."
Such
outreach to the community is the other half of the Center's mission.
Despite the new attention being paid to slavery, there is still
a gap in understanding between scholars and the general public.
To further its efforts to get the word out, the Center is hoping
to fund a full-time staff member for outreach programs in the future.
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It
was not that long ago that slavery was deemed unimportant even by historians.
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But it
was not that long ago that slavery was deemed unimportant even by
historians. Davis, who did his graduate work in history at Harvard
in the early 1950s, says that historians there "virtually ignored
the subject." The reason, he explains, was that while the Union
had won the Civil War, the country gradually came to accept—or
at least not to challenge—the Southern version of history in
the years after Reconstruction. "The terrible price of reconciliation
and reunion was marginalizing slavery and race," he says.
Davis
says that historians consistently understated the centrality of
slavery to the rise of America and the New World, describing the
institution as a marginal branch of Southern history and painting
postwar Reconstruction—when blacks earned civil rights and participated
in government—as a failed policy of radical zealots. Primary
sources were ignored: Frederick
Douglass's autobiography, which today is a staple of high school
and college reading lists, was out of print from the end of the
Civil War until the 1960s.
Davis
recalls that the standard work even at Harvard in his time was Ulrich
B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery (1918). Phillips, who
was a professor of history at Yale in the 1930s, represented the
dominant view when he maintained that Africans were an inferior
race and that slavery was an effective means of civilizing them.
That view
was challenged by Kenneth Stampp's book The
Peculiar Institution (1956), which portrayed slavery as
harsh and brutal and worked from a premise of racial equality. The
following decades saw an explosion of interest in Southern history
in general and slavery in particular.
In the
spring of 1955, as Davis was finishing his PhD, Kenneth Stampp arrived
at Harvard as a visiting professor, and the two struck up a friendship.
Stampp's work made Davis realize how little he knew about slavery,
and after finishing a dissertation that examined how different societies
had viewed homicide throughout history, Davis decided to apply such
a comparative approach to the study of slavery.
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Chattel
slavery is as old as civilization itself; the first records
date to ancient Mesopotamia.
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What he
learned was that chattel slavery is as old as civilization itself;
the first records date to ancient Mesopotamia. Davis recounted slavery's emergence in pre-Islamic Arabia, in medieval Scandinavia, and in
the Italian city-states of the 14th and 15th centuries.
The slave
trade that would transform the New World began when the Portuguese
started using West African slave labor to grow sugar on the Atlantic
islands of Madeira and San Tome. In the 1570s, the Portuguese brought
slaves to Brazil when they established sugar plantations there,
and soon the transatlantic slave trade was thriving. Most scholars
now agree that some 11 million Africans were taken from their homes
to become slaves in the New World.
Today,
the importance of slavery to the antebellum economy of the South
—especially after Yale graduate Eli
Whitney's cotton gin helped popularize that crop across the
South—is well known. But the popular image of the South as pro-slavery
and the North as anti-slavery has obscured the degree to which the
whole country had at various times depended on and exploited slave
labor. It is for this reason that last summer's "Yale, Slavery,
and Abolition" report caused such a stir. The report (available
online at http://www.yaleslavery.org)
details the slaveowning and pro-slavery past of a number of Yale
benefactors. The authors, graduate students Antony Dugdale, J.J.
Fueser, and J. Celso de Castro Alves, said they were responding
to a University-produced Tercentennial brochure which touted Yale's
ties to the abolitionist movement but neglected to mention its pro-slavery
relationships.
Many
of the report's facts were surprising. While John C. Calhoun's ardent
defense of slavery is well known (and troubling to many associated
with Calhoun College), few knew that Congregational ministers Ezra
Stiles, Jonathan Edwards, Timothy Dwight, and John Davenport had
owned slaves. Or that Bishop George Berkeley had given the University
a plantation in Rhode Island that likely produced income for the
University on the backs of slave labor. Or that Samuel F.B. Morse,
while not a slave owner himself, had written pro-slavery tracts
as late as the 1860s.
On the
other side of the coin, the report discussed Yale's ties to the
abolitionist movement and suggested that the University had been
less than generous in remembering James Hillhouse, the U.S. senator
and treasurer of Yale who was a vocal opponent of slavery in Congress
as early as 1799. Just after the report was made public, Yale announced
a series of events in September to honor Hillhouse, though officials
said the plans predated the report. (Ironically, there is evidence
to suggest that Hillhouse himself may have owned a slave.)
The report
caused a media sensation during the lazy pre-September 11 summer.
Newspapers around the world picked up the news, and opinions were
offered freely. The Hartford Courant criticized Yale for
its "insensitivity and lack of balance in choosing who or what to
honor over the years," and Brent Staples wrote on the New York Times's editorial page that the report "paints a damning portrait
of Yale's academic leadership during the term of its pro-slavery
president Timothy Dwight." But Washington Times columnist
Diana West dismissed the report as "just one more jiggle in the
Great Reparations Shakedown," and the New Haven Register said
the document proved that "a little knowledge combined with a narrow
perspective can be a truly dangerous thing."
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"Yale produced both abolitionists
and Calhoun."
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The reaction
on campus was no less divided. The Yale administration offered a
muted response, welcoming the report's contribution to the University's
knowledge of its history and maintaining that "few, if any, institutions
or individuals from the period before Emancipation remained untainted
by slavery." Meanwhile, a group headed by local African American
clergymen issued a set of reparations demands to the University:
That Yale rename the colleges named for slaveholders, that the Yale
Homebuyer Program be extended to all New Haven citizens (not just
Yale employees), that the University invest further in economic
development in the city, and that the title "master" be discontinued
in the residential colleges.
By year's end, though, the only tangible result of the debate was a plaque
inside the entrance to Dwight
Hall, the University's social service organization. Dwight Hall's
student-run cabinet considered a name change because of the report's
allegations about its namesake, but in the end decided that such
a change would "undermine a long and outstanding legacy of good
work" that students have done under the Dwight Hall name. Instead,
the group installed the plaque, which reads: "Dwight Hall at Yale
renounces the pro-slavery thought and actions of Timothy Dwight,
while reaffirming our predecessors' work on behalf of justice and equality."
At the
Gilder Lehrman
Center, Davis and Forbes, who have made it their mission to
raise awareness about the pervasiveness of slavery in America, greeted
the report with mixed emotions. While Davis says he welcomed its
attempt to "look at the dark side" of Yale's past, he is critical
of the work's scholarship. "It is certainly flawed in various ways,"
he says. "It comes out as an unmitigated indictment of Yale, and
tends to put Timothy Dwight on the same level as John C. Calhoun.
There is no context, no sense of an informed perspective. It was
a shame that this paper was done not only by amateurs, but without
any consultation with people who know something about Yale's past
and about slavery."
Indeed,
none of the report's authors were graduate students in history.
And as the report's acknowledgements page indicates, all three of
the authors are past or present leaders of the Graduate Employees
and Students Organization (GESO),
the group seeking to organize a union of graduate teaching assistants,
and the report was prepared with assistance from union volunteers,
leading some to question the authors' objectivity. The Yale
Daily News wrote in December that the report "represents
the co-opting of the darkest chapters of American history for present-day
political gain."
Antony
Dugdale, one of the report's authors, says that "we worked extra
hard to make sure the paper included the good and the bad. We did
not have a political aim. If looking at both sides is viewed as
partisan, I don't know what scholarship really is." He also says
that the report was in fact reviewed by a number of scholars of
slavery and American history.
Perhaps
the greatest lesson of the "Yale, Slavery, and Abolition" report
is about the pervasive influence of slavery not just at Yale, but
throughout New England and the entire country in the antebellum
years. "It seems to me that Yale was quite representative of its
time and of the North," says Davis. "Yale produced both abolitionists
and Calhoun."
The issues
highlighted by the report are not likely to go away soon, and the
Gilder Lehrman Center has its own plans to address them. In September,
the Center and the Law School will cosponsor a conference titled
"Yale, New Haven and Slavery." Historians, philosophers, and legal experts will discuss the University's past and the issue of reparations.
Robert
Forbes hopes the work being done at the Center will help reconcile
the extreme interpretations of history that emerge in the debate
over slavery. "Many people have had a hard time accepting the centrality
of slavery because they have an unrealistically celebratory view
of American history," he says. "The response is often a view of
American history as simply a story of enslavement and oppression.
In fact, neither of these are true and both are true. It's the intersection
of America as utopia and America as dystopia that has generated
what's interesting about the American experience."  |
