The Penn & Slavery Project has posted its findings on the University of Pennsylvania’s connections to slavery on a website. According to the report:
“Although there is no evidence that the University of Pennsylvania owned enslaved people, tax records show that many of Penn’s founders, early trustees, and faculty owned enslaved people and profited from their labor.”
The report contradicts a 2006 denial of the school’s involvement in slavery by the university’s archivist Mark Frazier Lloyd who said; “Our 18th century trustees are not known to have profited from the slave trade…This is an important issue that fortunately Penn is on the right side of.”
University of Pennsylvania historian Kathleen Brown organized the project in 2017 and five students at the school undertook the research that led to this year’s report. More students joined the team over the last five years. The students found that in spite of the modern administration’s claims that because of the university’s origins as a Quaker school it had no connections to slavery, in fact, there were dozens of connections.
The Project’s website discusses the sources used to identify slave owners connected to the University:
Student researchers of the Penn & Slavery Project uncovered evidence of slave ownership by Penn’s eighteenth-century trustees and faculty using three main methods: tax records, wills, and 18th century newspapers.
While the school did not own slaves, the Project explains why it is so important to look at the ownership of Black people by the Trustees:
Penn’s 18th Century trustees were critical to the operation of the university. They worked closely with the administration to collect funds for the university, select faculty, and bring stability to the institution. Many of the trustees were also enslavers. The information about slave owning trustees listed here was collected by undergraduates using Pennsylvania Tax & Exoneration Records, trustee wills, and other primary sources. The financial and administrative support provided by these men was one of many ways the University of Pennsylvania benefitted from the institution of slavery.
The university also sought donations from slave owners besides the trustees. According to the report:
Today, the University of Pennsylvania is one of the wealthiest universities in the United States. However, this was not always the case. In its early days, Penn needed to raise money to remain financially viable. The school’s early administrators solicited donations from some of the most prominent enslavers in the Atlantic world.
In 1771 and 1772, facing financial shortfalls, the school sent delegations to South Carolina and Jamaica to seek donations with a focus on wealthy slave owners. The report says:
The trustees sent two faculty members, Provost William Smith, and early Dean of the Medical School, John Morgan on separate fundraising trips. Smith traveled to South Carolina and Morgan traveled to Jamaica. On these trips, both men sought out donations from wealthy families, with special attention to slave-owners. Smith and Morgan’s efforts ensured that the university would stay open because of the wealth earned from slave labor.
The report pays particular attention to the Medical School’s involvement in “plantation medicine” in theory and practice. ‘According to the report:
Like many nineteenth-century medical schools throughout the United States, Penn’s Medical School taught a version of comparative anatomy that emphasized the innate differences between white and African-descended bodies and unique racial vulnerabilities to disease and pain. Most of these alleged differences stemmed from the researcher’s pre-existing beliefs in the fitness of African-descended people to perform strenuous plantation labor in hot climates rather than from what we would now consider scientific inquiry. Penn was distinct from many other medical schools, however, in the national influence of the faculty and alumni who were theorizing and teaching scientific racism. Famous Penn Medical faculty and alumni included Charles Caldwell, Josiah Nott, Samuel George Morton, and John Peter Mettauer. Many Penn Medical School alumni went on to found new medical schools in southern states, publish studies about the peculiar health concerns of enslaved people (known as plantation medicine), and to teach their own courses on race medicine at southern medical schools.
The report says that faculty and graduates of the medical school became leaders in the American School of Scientific Racism, having an impact far beyond Philadelphia. According to the report:
The publications of its graduates, considered collectively, represent the most influential and widely-circulated works of ethnographic scientific racism during the antebellum period. Medical degrees from Penn rendered the “science” of these physicians credible, and their medical education made their practices possible. Their works were circulated widely throughout the South, and their views ultimately became fodder for pro-slavery arguments and the perpetuation of racist medicine after emancipation.
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