Craig Steven Wilder. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America\u27s Universities. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013. 423 pp. $30.00

Bell, John Frederick

English

University of Montana

Education's Histories Volume 2 Article 4 2-27-2015 Race, Power, and Education in Early America John Frederick Bell Harvard University, johnfrederickbell@fas.harvard.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/eduhist  Part of the Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons, Educational Methods Commons, Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education Commons, and the United States History Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Bell, John. "Race, Power, and Education in Early America." Education's Histories 2 (February 27, 2015). https://scholarworks.umt.edu/eduhist/vol2/iss1/4 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in Education's Histories by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact scholarworks@mso.umt.edu. Race, Power, and Education in Early AmericaJohn Frederick Bellmethodological grist for thehistory of educationNotesCraig Steven Wilder. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’sUniversities. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013. 423 pp. $30.00The relationship between higher education, race, and slavery has become a burgeoningfield of inquiry. In recent years, historians and archaeologists have unearthed a wealthof information on the complicity of American colleges and universities in chattel slavery,scientific racism, colonization schemes, and the dispossession of Native Americans.Taking their cue from path-breaking historical commissions at Yale and Brown in theearly 2000s, several prominent institutions including Emory, Harvard, the University ofMaryland, the University of Virginia, and the College of William and Mary havesponsored long overdue initiatives aimed at recovering these unsavory chapters fromtheir pasts. Craig Steven Wilder’s Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the TroubledHistory of America’s Universities represents a synthesis of these early findings, alongwith many of the author’s own conclusions. Given its important subject matter, it is aJohn Frederick Bell is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Harvard University. His dissertation, “Opening theCampus: Evangelicalism, Abolitionism, and the Dilemmas of Equality in American Higher Education,” investigatesideas and practices of educational equality in the nineteenth century by examining the interplay of religion, race, andgender in abolitionist colleges, the first to admit students irrespective of race and sex. He can be reached atjohnfrederickbell@fas.harvard.edu.Bell | Race, Power, and Education in Early Americabook historians of education and their students should know well.As the first comprehensive monograph on the linkages between race, slavery, andhigher education, Ebony and Ivy offers scholars valuable lessons for conducting furtherresearch in this subfield.1 Readers will naturally draw different conclusions from this1 For prior studies of individual in-stitutions, see Suggestions for FurtherReading below.extensive book, whose footnotes alone total 115 pages. This review focuses on Wilder’smain theme, the historical relationship between education and power, and considers itsimplications for our understanding of early American colleges.* * *Ebony and Ivy makes two overarching claims (Parts I and II of the book, respectively):early American colleges were active beneficiaries of the slave economy, and theyfurthered these systems of inequality through their exercise of intellectual authorityand their production of knowledge. For Wilder, there was nothing subtle about theassociation of power and education in this era. “The American college trained thepersonnel and cultivated the ideas that accelerated and legitimated the dispossession ofNative Americans and the enslavement of Africans,” he writes. “Modern slaveryrequired the acquiescence of scholars and the cooperation of academic institutions.”22 Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slav-ery, and the Troubled History of Amer-ica’s Universities(New York: BloomsburyPress), 10.Wilder portrays power and higher education’s relationship as symbiotic. Collegesneeded the support of merchants, planters, and empires in order to survive, and theseauthorities depended on the academy to provide “intellectual cover for the social andpolitical subjugation of non-white peoples.”3 Were universities the sine qua non of3 Ibid, 3.white supremacy? No, but Wilder ranks them as “the third pillar of a civilization builton bondage” along with the church and the state.44 Ibid, 11.Wilder does not mince words in his characterizations. Early in Part I, he twice likenscolleges to forts as he assesses their utility as tools of conquest for the French, Spanish,and British empires. At first, the claim feels exaggerated. How can he compare higherEducation’s Histories | www.educationshistories.org 2 February 2015Bell | Race, Power, and Education in Early Americaeducation to an armory or a garrison in its ability to suppress and subdue? Wilder bestillustrates his point by describing occasions when, in fact, colleges operated much likethese other instruments of empire. In 1711, for instance, the governor of Virginiaordered twenty Tuscarora hostages be sent to the College of William and Mary. Thecollege was simultaneously receiving per capita donations from an English trust forIndians’ missionary training, so it may have actually profited from the arrival of thesetwenty prisoners. Devil’s bargains like these typified Indian education in its colonialheyday. Along with William and Mary, institutions like Harvard, Dartmouth, and theCollege of Philadelphia (the University of Pennsylvania) doubly cheated indigenousstudents, first by stripping them of their culture and then by using them as emissariesto ensure tribal obedience. Scholars might disagree with Wilder’s choice to forgo thetrickier questions of hybridity and agency that often accompany discussion of colonialmissions.5 Emphasizing colleges’ strategic value leaves less room for examining cultural5 See, for instance, Emma Anderson, TheBetrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey ofa Colonial Native Convert (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 2007); LinfordFisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Re-ligion and the Shaping of Native Culturesin Early America (New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2012); Margaret ConnellSzasz, Indian Education in the Ameri-can Colonies, 1607-1783 (Albuquerque:University of New Mexico Press, 1988).exchanges between Europeans and indigenous people. As important as theseconsiderations are, Wilder argues that at the end of the day, Indian educationprograms existed to reinforce white interests. Perhaps his strongest evidence comesfrom the simple fact that American colleges discontinued these programs when Nativeresistance waned.Power abundantly reciprocated the support it received from education. Wilder followsthe money to exhaustively detail how the African slave trade financed higher educationin British America. In the mid-eighteenth century, merchant elites replaced religiousorganizations as the primary source of philanthropy for colonial colleges. Institutionscultivated West Indian slave traders as donors; immense Caribbean fortunes endowedscholarships and professorships and bankrolled building campaigns. Officials nurturedthese sorts of relationships by inviting merchants to become trustees and recruitingtheir sons as students. Wilder further reveals the importance of alumni networks inconnecting northern colleges to the wealth of the South and the Caribbean. HarvardEducation’s Histories | www.educationshistories.org 3 February 2015Bell | Race, Power, and Education in Early Americaand the College of New Jersey (Princeton) sent numerous graduates southward astutors and clergy, developing interregional allegiances that would persist through theCivil War. By highlighting these connections, Ebony and Ivy complements other recentscholarship showing the importance of social capital to the development of earlyAmerican education.6 If actions speak louder than words, understanding how schools6 Nancy Beadie, Education and the Cre-ation of Capital in the Early AmericanRepublic (New York: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 2010); Margaret Sumner, Col-legiate Republic: Cultivating an Ideal So-ciety in Early America (Charlottesville:University of Virginia Press, 2014).maintained external support can go a long way toward illuminating their institutionalcharacter.Wilder argues that college life contributed to students’ “moral comfort with bondage.”77 Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery,and the Troubled History of America’sUniversities, 109.In the eighteenth century, faculty, trustees, and presidents frequently owned Africanslaves, who performed any number of chores and errands around American campuses,North and South. Unfree labor built not only the Universities of North Carolina andVirginia but also helped construct portions of Dartmouth and the College of RhodeIsland (Brown). The regular presence of enslaved people acquainted uninitiatedstudents with slavery and its methods. Yet some northern graduates maintainedreservations about the peculiar institution, especially when confronted with its grossermanifestations on visits to the plantation South. “Such moments of moral reckoningwere rare,” Wilder clarifies, but by interspersing a few in his narrative, he hints thatwhites should have known better because some, in fact, did.8 To make this critique8 Ibid., 122.explicit would be to risk anachronism. After all, colonial academics would probably beas repulsed by the values of today’s universities as we are by theirs. Moreover,magnifying white ambivalence would undercut his larger argument that “human slaverywas the precondition for the rise of higher education in the Americas.”9 By9 Ibid., 114.concentrating instead on the overwhelming and appalling evidence of colleges’complicity in bondage, Wilder lets the details do the damning.Part II of Ebony and Ivy examines how the academy helped validate expansionism andwhite supremacy in the mid to late nineteenth century republic through its promotionof scientific racism and colonization. According to Wilder, it wasn’t coincidental thatEducation’s Histories | www.educationshistories.org 4 February 2015Bell | Race, Power, and Education in Early Americathe “genesis of American medical science corresponded to…the ascent of race.”10 In the10 Ibid., 198.early national period, anatomy was as much a hegemonic practice as biological one.Scholars turned to dissection to substantiate their theories of human difference, andmedical schools weren’t above defiling the graves of the under classes (blacks, AmericanIndians, and Irish) for bodies with which to conduct their experiments. This “research”made academics prominent voices in contemporary debates over human origins. Recentworks in Atlantic history have drawn on these exchanges to illustrate the influence oftheology and colonialism on the evolution of race.11 Wilder contributes to this11 Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter Technol-ogy, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Cam-bridge: Harvard University Press, 2003);Rebecca Goetz, The Baptism of EarlyVirginia: How Christianity Created Race(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 2012); Colin Kidd, The Forgingof the Races: Race and Scripture inthe Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2006).discussion by underscoring the role of American universities in reconciling competingscriptural and scientific arguments about human origins.Academics endorsed monogenesis while stressing the influence of geography indetermining the “natural” characteristics of the races. The implications of thisenvironmentalist argument would seem to contradict notions of inherent difference, andWilder shows that for a time, antislavery views gained traction on college campusesacross America. In the wake of Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, however, white powerintervened in the South to redirect education toward its ends. Beholden to theirslaveholding supporters, the southern academy began asserting its unique authority instudies of race “as bondage became peculiar to their region.”12 How northern and12 Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery,and the Troubled History of America’sUniversities, 238.European scientists responded to these claims goes unaddressed, and Wilder misses anopportunity to discuss the vital contributions of Harvard’s infamous polygenist LouisAgassiz to southern science.13 Instead, he focuses on how college officials in the newly13 See Christoph Irmscher, Louis Agassiz:Creator of American Science (New York:Houghton Mifflin, 2013); Louis Menand,The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideasin America (New York: Macmillan, 2002),97-116.free states vigorously opposed the prospect of a multiracial society. After northernemancipation, academics became some of the region’s most vocal advocates ofresettling free blacks in Africa, their “natural” environment.Wilder painstakingly inventories the participation of college presidents, trustees, andfaculty in the American Colonization Society, but his analysis of campus debates overimmediate emancipation abolition is arguably more significant, albeit more subtle. TheEducation’s Histories | www.educationshistories.org 5 February 2015Bell | Race, Power, and Education in Early Americaformation of student abolition societies troubled administrators in the 1830s, but notsimply because these officials were colonizationists. Through the mid-nineteenthcentury, the civic function of higher education was to reaffirm, rather than realign, thesocial order. By opening the American promise to black Americans in even a limitedway, abolitionism threatened the white establishment. Thus, administrators objected tostudents’ views on both political and educational grounds. In the end, colonizationmostly carried the day, but the underlying tension between social conservatism andsocial reform dogged higher education for more than a century after slavery’s abolition.Ebony and Ivy stand outs from previous scholarship in both its range and its daring.Prior studies of race and slavery in American higher education have examinedparticular institutions, though a few have considered regional trends. By widening thescope of inquiry to consider multiple schools, North and South, as well as multipleraces (white, black, and American Indian), Wilder demonstrates the pervasiveness ofwhite supremacy in early college culture. A comparative approach positions him toevaluate the financial, social, and intellectual networks that institutionalized racismwithin the academy. Wilder recognizes that as systems, education, imperialism, racism,and slavery require systemic analysis. Future historians of these subjects should heedhis example. Ebony and Ivy inspires a wealth of avenues for new scholarship, fromhistorical investigations of slavery and higher education in the Old Southwest andborder states to transatlantic histories of scientific racism to studies of slavery’sinfluence on other emergent professional disciplines such as law. Whatever directionthey choose, scholars should be sure to attend to the larger economies and ideologies ofpower that underlay their actors’ motives and mindsets.Slavery and racism were omnipresent in early America. From the colonial period wellinto the twentieth century, white American society staked its fortunes on theexploitation of nonwhite people. If education is the process of cultural transmission, weshould not be at all surprised that the first institutions of higher learning furthered theEducation’s Histories | www.educationshistories.org 6 February 2015Bell | Race, Power, and Education in Early Americaperverse value systems of their era. Yet Ebony and Ivy remains a profoundly unsettlingread. Wilder alerts American academics that our professional world was built on afoundation of bigotry and violence. Historians of education have a critical role to playin recovering and elucidating this troubling past. Ebony and Ivy shows us howchallenging and how necessary that work truly is.Suggestions for Further ReadingA.J. Angulo, “William Barton Rogers and the Southern Sieve: Revisiting Science,Slavery, and Higher Learning in the Old South,” History of Education Quarterly,45:1 (Spring 2005): 18-37.Sven Beckert, Katherine Stevens, et al. Harvard and Slavery: Seeking a Forgotten History(2011) <http://www.harvardandslavery.com/wp-content/up-loads/2011/11/Harvard-Slavery-Book-111110.pdf>.Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, Slavery and Justice(2006) <http://www.brown.edu/Research/Slavery_Justice/documents/Slav-eryAndJustice.pdf>.Terry L. Meyers, “A First Look at the Worst: Slavery and Race Relations at theCollege of William and Mary,” The William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 16: 4(April 2008): 1141-1168.Michael Sugrue, “‘We Desired our Future Rulers to be Educated Men’: South CarolinaCollege, the Defense of Slavery, and the Development of Secessionist Politics,” HigherEducation Annual 14 (1994): 39-71.Stephen Tomlinson and Kevin Windham, “Northern Piety and Southern Honor: AlvaEducation’s Histories | www.educationshistories.org 7 February 2015Bell | Race, Power, and Education in Early AmericaWoods and the Problem of Discipline at the University of Alabama, 1831-1837,”Perspectives in the History of Higher Education 25 (2006): 1-42.Kenneth Wheeler, “Higher Education in the Antebellum Ohio Valley: Slavery,Sectionalism, and the Erosion of Regional Identity,” Ohio Valley History 8: 1(Spring 2008): 1-22.Richard N. Wright, “Ambivalent Bastions of Slavery: The ‘Peculiar Institution’ onCollege Campuses in Antebellum Georgia,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 80: 3(Fall 1996): 467-485.Education’s Histories thanks John Frederick Bell for serving as a book reviewer. Education’sHistories publishes both book reviews and methodological reviews of research and tools. If youare interested in reviewing with us, please email us at educationshistories@gmail.com.Education’s Histories | www.educationshistories.org 8 February 2015Bell | Race, Power, and Education in Early AmericaEducation’s Histories | www.educationshistories.org 9 February 2015

Race, Power, and Education in Early America

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