The Early History of Yale University Was Set Among Puritan Slavery

I am just now reading David Blight’s history Yale and Slavery which can be accessed for free online. Here are things I learned from the book:

John Davenport was the principal originator of Yale. He was the founder of the colony of New Haven. Davenport was a religious revolutionary, born in Coventry, England in 1597, he challenged the established religious institutions of the Church of England, supported the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, and approved the execution of the King. When he established the New Haven colony in Connecticut, he offered refuge to those who had condemned King Charles to death. Davenport was dedicated to building a college for the training of Puritan preachers for his colony and he had already begun to collect books for the education of the people under its jurisdiction. While the Puritans did not think that the King should rule them, they did think that whites should rule non-whites in Connecticut. Davenport and many of his collogues owned slaves.

Davenport did not live to see the establishment of his college, but in 1701 the general assembly for the colony authorized the creation of the school. A board of trustees was established consisting of ten members of the Puritan clergy. Of these, at least seven were slaveowners. Although David Blight says that he could find no evidence that Yale College owned slaves, he says that there were slaves likely owned by trustees at the very first meeting to bring the college into being.

Many of the trustees had been educated in Massachusetts at Harvard, where slavery was allowed. However, Samuel Sewall, a noted justice from the colony, had become an outspoken critic of the enslavement of Blacks and Native Americans. Sewall wrote in his anti-slavery book that those who Stealeth a Man and Selleth him . . . he shall surely be put to Death.” Even worse was the enslavement of women; “It is too well known what Temptations Masters are under, to connive at the Fornication of their Slaves.” So while the trustees lived in a world in which wealthy Puritans “owned” Black men, women, and children, they had at least heard criticism from fellow Puritans.

Yale grew when Elihu Yale became its benefactor. Elihu Yale was born in Boston, but he moved to England and was brought up in the aristocracy. He became an important figure in the East India Company and, while Blight cannot tell how many people in India Yale owned, the products that he traded in were made by slave laborers. In 1718, Yale College was built in New Haven and the school became associated with the wealthy colonialist.

After Yale was founded, the college relied for much of its support on donations and taxes placed on shippers trade with the West Indies. As much as 40% of ships leaving New Haven each year were going to slave-intense colonies like Barbados and Jamaica. Sugar was the product they were carrying, along with rum, produced from sugar. Blight writes; Rum became the fuel of economic growth in the New England colonies, used by civil society to build new institutions. In 1721, the Connecticut General Assembly passed “An Act for the better Regulating the Duty of Impost upon Rhum,” which included 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.” In its first century, Yale College was thus a public as well as a private institution. In addition to these public funds, private donations derived from the Caribbean trade underwrote professorships and other expenses. The early rectors, tutors, and students practiced their Latin and Greek morning recitations in comforts provided by trade in sugar, molasses, and rum produced by enslaved people. As in nearly all places of learning, a well-turned Latin phrase could be performed in a quietude purchased from afar.” 

So, while many of its benefactors themselves owned a small number of slaves, their real wealth came from exploiting those slaves on sugar plantations in the West Indies.

Yale’s oldest surviving brick building, Connecticut Hall, was built from 1750 to 1753. Yale not only sought contributions from slaveholders, it also used enslaved construction workers to help build it.

With the outbreak of the Revolution, there were Black voices in Connecticut beginning to denounce slavery. According to Blight;  That same year [1779], two men, Prime and Prince, submitted a petition to the state general assembly on behalf of “the Negroes in the Towns of Stratford and Fairfield . . . Who are held in a State of Slavery.” Demanding their freedom in the name of both Enlightenment doctrine and Christian virtue, they called slavery “this detestable Practice.” The petitioners argued, “Altho our Skins are dif­ferent in Colour, from those who we serve, yet Reason & Revelation join to declare, that we are the Creatures of that God who made of one Blood, and Kindred, all the Nations of the Earth.” Prime and Prince considered their fellow Black people “endowed, with the same Faculties” as their slaveholders and claimed that nothing obliged them to serve White people more “than they us, and the more we Consider of this Matter, the more we are Convinced, of our Right (by the Laws of Nature and by the whole Tenor, of the Christian Religion, so far as we have been taught) to be free.”

In our next installment, we will look at Yale’s involvement with slavery as Abolitionism began its harsh criticism of human bondage.

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