Columbia University Report by Eric Foner Detailed Links to Slavery

Columbia University in New York issued a report in 2017 on its connections to slavery. Read about it in the New York Times. The report was written by prominent historian Eric Foner. According to the Times:

“People still associate slavery with the South, but it was also a Northern phenomenon,” Eric Foner, the Columbia historian who wrote the report, said in an interview. “This is a very, very neglected piece of our own institution’s history, and of New York City’s history, that deserves to be better known.”

The NY Times says:

The university, while it does not itself appear to have owned slaves, both benefited from slavery-related fortunes and actively helped increase them…

The report also discusses Columbians who were involved in antislavery activities, if generally of the more moderate sort. A section on Alexander Hamilton, for example, notes that he joined the New York Manumission Society in 1785 and rejected notions of black inferiority but said nothing about slavery at the Constitutional Convention.

In contrast to Columbia’s more recent reputation as a seat of progressive activism, records of student debating societies from the early 1800s show only ”mild hostility to slavery, coupled with opposition to general emancipation,” the report says.

Foner’s report ends at the Civil War, but the professor wants research to continue. As many of you know, the university was the seat of the Dunning School and essentially kept blacks out of the school for decades after the war:

Mr. Foner said he hoped the project would look at the impact, not always positive, of Columbia professors’ scholarship on race as well as why the university was slower than comparable institutions to enroll African-Americans.

“You don’t get the first black undergraduate until 1908,” Mr. Foner said. “I would really like to know more about why.”

Here is a link to the university’s new web site on its history relating to slavery.

Here is a link to the preliminary report prepared by Eric Foner. One thing I like about his work is he gives his students credit for their contributions.

While the university did not own slaves, the report says that slaves were owned by prominent figures at the school and likely worked for them on school grounds:

From the outset, slavery was intertwined with the life of the college. Of the ten men who served as presidents of King’s and Columbia between 1754 and the end of the Civil War, at least half owned slaves at one point in their lives. So did the first four treasurers. Samuel Johnson, an Anglican minister and King’s’ first president, serving from 1754 to 1763, was a well-known theologian and philosopher. In Elementa Philosophica, published in 1752, Johnson described slavery as “a most wretched and abject condition,” but like many other writers of the era he used the word metaphorically, to describe succumbing to “any vicious habit,” such as drink or irreligion. As to actually existing slavery, Johnson criticized the Atlantic slave trade but bought and sold slaves, who worked in his household. In July 1755, soon after the College opened, and already the owner of one slave, Johnson asked Joseph Haynes, a leading New York merchant and one of King’s College’s governors, to help him acquire another. It is unclear whether the transaction took place; that November, Johnson was still hoping to purchase a domestic slave. Since President Johnson lived in the college building, it is likely that his slaves were also present. While president of King’s, Johnson helped his son, William Samuel Johnson, who would later serve as Columbia’s president from 1787 to 1800, to purchase his own “wench,” as female slaves were commonly called. In 1767, four years after leaving office, Johnson sold a slave, Jenny, and took another “wench upon trial.” His family “did not like her,” so Johnson settled on another slave, Robin, who “does with the best good will twice the kitchen work Jenny did.”

The report says that many of the New York area’s grandees owned slaves and many of them were involved in the founding and development of the university:

On the eve of the War of Independence, nearly 3,000 of the city’s population of 19,000 consisted of slaves and some 20,000 slaves lived within fifty miles of Manhattan island, the largest concentration of unfree laborers north of the Mason-Dixon line. Ownership of slaves was widespread. Most worked as domestic laborers, on the docks, in artisan shops, or on small farms in the city’s rural hinterland. At the apex of provincial society stood families like the Van Cortlandts, Schuylers, Philipses, and Livingstons, who made fortunes in trade and owned great estates in the Hudson River valley where both slave and free labor worked in the fields, mills, and in river commerce. This wealthy elite intermarried, featured prominently in municipal and provincial government, and played a major role in the founding and survival of King’s College.

Here is Foner’s discussion of one immigrant professor with whom most scholars of the era are familiar with:

In 1864, King was succeeded as head of the Loyal Publication Society by Francis Lieber, one of Columbia’s most distinguished professors. A Prussian who fled to avoid political persecution and arrived in the United States in 1827, Lieber was a bundle of contradictions. Privately, he despised slavery – it was “abominable in every respect,” he wrote in his diary in 1836. But as a professor at the University of South Carolina from 1835 until 1857, when he became Professor of History and Political Science at Columbia, he not only remained silent about the institution, but bought and sold household slaves. In his diary, he felt compelled to explain “the reasons why we bought them,” including that slaves were treated better by their owners than by those who hired them, and “we believe it will be cheaper for us.” In an article published in a Boston newspaper in 1851, however, Lieber ridiculed the idea of innate white superiority. “Superiority of the white race! Since when? … What was he doing when civilization had made great progress in India, in literature, architecture and the useful arts?’[vi]

Once he arrived at Columbia, Lieber became a public critic of slavery (although his history course on the eve of the conflict seems to have made no mention of the institution). Lieber had sons fighting on both sides in the Civil War. An extreme nationalist, his wartime writings pilloried the South and defended every action of the federal government. It was Lieber who traveled to Washington in 1861 to deliver Lincoln’s honorary degree. He quickly became a legal adviser to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Attorney General Edward Bates. Before the end of 1861 he was insisting that “all negroes coming into our [army] lines are free.” The following year he urged the arming of black troops and informed Bates that the Supreme Court had been mistaken in Dred Scott and free blacks must be considered citizens of the United States. He wrote a new military code, issued in 1863, that became the foundation of the later Geneva conventions. It established humane standards for the treatment of civilians and prisoners of war, prohibited torture, and defended emancipation as a legitimate war measure, but also insisted that the survival of the nation was the paramount value and all other rules must be subordinate to it.[vii]

Along with King, Lieber was the most outspoken prowar Columbian. He exulted over the presentation of colors to the black troops in 1864. “There were drawn up in line over a thousand armed negroes,” he wrote to his long-time acquaintance Charles Sumner, “where but yesterday they were literally hunted down like rats. It was one of the greatest days of our history.” By 1865, in a Loyal Publication Society pamphlet, Lieber proposed a series of constitutional amendments to make irrevocable the end of slavery, the supremacy of the nation over the states, and the punishment of treason.[viii]

Here is Foner on the persistence of racism at the university:

John W. Burgess, the dominant voice on the faculty (and later an architect, along with Professor of History William A. Dunning, of a strongly racist account of the Reconstruction era) steadfastly opposed admitting black students. Thus, Columbia lagged behind its peers. Yale awarded its first degree to a black student in 1857. Several black students attended Harvard in the 1860s; the first to receive a B. A. there was Richard T. Greener, in 1870. Columbia’s first black undergraduate was James Priest, a native not of the United States but of Liberia, who graduated from the recently-established School of Mines in 1877. In that year, the faculty of P and S., now Columbia’s medical school, reaffirmed the prewar policy of not admitting black students. “This does not speak well for the democratic principles of the professors,” commented the College publication Cap and Gown. In 1896 a black student, James Dickson Carr, received a law degree. Not until 1908 did the first black student earn a B. A. from Columbia College. This was Pixley ka Ikasa Seme, of South Africa. He later studied law at Oxford, returned to South Africa, and became a founder of the African National Congress.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Columbia’s professional and graduate schools would train numerous black lawyers, scientists, and educators. A survey of “Negro leaders” in the professions published in 1935 found that Columbia ranked second to the University of Chicago as the place where they received degrees. But in 1939 there was only one black student at P and S. And the number of black undergraduates remained tiny. As late as 1963, the graduating class of over 600 young men (of which I was one) included only three black Americans and one South African. Not until 1966 did Columbia College have more than twenty black students enrolled at one time, and in that year the number of black faculty members on the Morningside campus could be counted on one hand.

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