Authors: Craig Steven Wilder

Ebony and Ivy (17 page)

Scottish migrations informed Witherspoon's vision; ultimately, the Scottish influx and the Presbyterian ascendance helped the Princeton college supplant Harvard as the most influential institution in the South. Witherspoon turned his students into an army of preachers and educators who pursued the Scottish and Scots-Irish pioneers. These graduates bound the Presbyterian communion across regions and became Witherspoon's ambassadors. Affirming a commitment to education that defined the Scottish Enlightenment, the Presbyterians imposed themselves upon the intellectual and political cultures of the colonies. Presbyterians, for example, were overrepresented among tutors in the South. Well-to-do planters and merchants routinely turned to college presidents to find “suitable” scholars, and President Witherspoon used these requests as opportunities to solidify ties to the southern elite.
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In 1773 Colonel Henry Leeâthe grandfather of General Robert E. Leeâasked his son to help locate a tutor for the children of their family friend Robert Carter, of the Nomini Hall plantation. Henry junior recommended Philip Vickers Fithian, a Connecticut native who had just graduated from New Jersey. “Dr. Witherspoon is very fond of getting a person to send to him,” a friend wrote. The
young man met with the president on the morning of August 9 to hear about the job: teaching English to Colonel Carter's five daughters, and English, Latin, and Greek to two of his sons and a nephew. It was a generous offer: Â£35 sterling per year, room, board, and the use of a handsomely equipped library, a horse, and a slave. With Witherspoon's blessing, Fithian accepted and prepared to leave for Westmoreland County, Virginia, in the fall.
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Young Fithian recoiled from the cruelty inflicted on enslaved people and the bravado of southern male culture. In one particularly poignant moment, he returned to his room to record the gruesome boasts of a dinner guest:

For Sulleness, Obstinancy, or Idleness, says he, Take a Negro, strip him, tie him fast to a post; take then a sharp Curry-Comb, & curry him severely til he is well scrap'd; & call a Boy with some dry Hay, and make the Boy rub him down for several Minutes, then salt him, & unlose him. He will attend to his Business, (said the inhuman Infidel) afterwards!âBut savage Cruelty does not exceed His next diabolical InventionâTo get a Secret from a Negro, says he, take the following MethodâLay upon your Floor a large thick plank, having a peg about eighteen Inches long, of hard wood, & very Sharp, on the upper end, fixed fast in the plankâthen strip the Negro, tie the Cord to a staple in the Ceiling, so that his foot may just rest on the sharpened Peg, then turn him briskly round, and you would laugh (said our informer) at the Dexterity of the Negro, while he was relieving his Feet on the sharpen'd Peg!

Fithian lasted only a year. John Peck, another of Witherspoon's students, replaced him. Born in Deerfield, New Jersey, Peck had little trouble adjusting to plantation society. He easily adapted to living off black people's labor and fully embraced southern civilization, eventually marrying Anne Tasker Carter and settling in Richmond County, Virginia, with a gift of land and slaves from the colonel.
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New Jersey alumni were key architects of the academic
revolution in the South. They organized Transylvania College (1783) in Lexington, Kentucky, the first college west of the Alleghenies. Governor Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia legislature provided the charter, a small band of proprietors negotiated with the Cherokee to secure the territory, and the Reverends John Todd and Caleb Baker Wallace, both graduates of New Jersey, joined the board. Princeton men were the most conspicuous delegation promoting the University of Georgia (1785). New Jersey graduates also established the University of Tennessee (1794). Before the Revolution Presbyterians had supported the ill-fated Queen's College in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 1771 Governor William Tryon and the legislature chartered the collegeâfunded by a levy on liquor in Mecklenburg Countyâbut their act was rejected in London. Princeton men were the decisive lobby behind the chartering of the University of North Carolina, and one of them, David Witherspoon, was serving in the North Carolina legislature during the debates about the university. In 1794 New Jersey graduates chartered Greeneville College (Tusculum) in Tennessee.
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Products of a northern academy funded by Atlantic slave traders, New Jersey alumni were ready for the task of planting colleges among slaveholders. Bondage subsidized these labors. Born in Ireland and raised in Pennsylvania, John Todd entered the second class at New Jersey. After graduation, the presbytery assigned him to an underserved district outside Richmond, Virginia. The “frontier minister” helped found Hampden-Sydney College (1783) and Transylvania. Todd also acquired more than fourteen enslaved black people and twenty thousand acres of land. Alexander Martin, class of 1756, served as the first president of the board of trustees for the University of North Carolina. A native of New Jersey, Martin had taken a well-worn professional path. He had a long business and public career, served three terms as the governor of North Carolina, and owned a plantation with nearly fifty slaves. Samuel Spencer, a member of the 1759 New Jersey class, was also on the board of the new University of North Carolina. Born in Connecticut, he went south after college and amassed a personal estate that included five thousand acres of land and about twenty slaves.
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Reproducing New Jersey's educational and theological style by
recruiting its graduates as trustees, faculty, and tutors, the new Presbyterian colleges maintained close executive and organizational subservience to Princeton. Samuel Stanhope Smith, born and raised in Chester County, Pennsylvania, gained his administrative and teaching experience at Hampden-Sydney. President Witherspoon sent his son David to assist. In 1775 Rev. Smith married Ann Witherspoon, daughter of the president, and later earned a professorship at the College of New Jersey. In 1795 Smith succeeded his father-in-law as president. Similarly, in 1812 the trustees of Princeton Theological Seminary elected the Reverend Archibald Alexander, a past president of Hampden-Sydney, as their first president. Rev. Alexander was educated at Liberty Hall Academy (Washington and Lee), and he began his career as a plantation tutor.
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A moral comfort with bondage and a willingness to use the slave economy to spread the denomination facilitated the southern and westward march of New Jersey's alumni. In 1782 Witherspoon's students founded Liberty Hall in Lexington, Virginia, as the first southern franchise of the Princeton college. The board comprised New Jersey alumni, including Caleb Baker Wallace, the primary fund-raiser. The trustees bought and sold black people as part of their endowment, and leased their surplus black workers to raise additional cash. A surviving advertisement records this relationship. Liberty Hall's trustees posted bills announcing that they were hiring out “twenty likely Negroes belonging to Washington College: consisting of Men, Women, Boys and Girls, many of them very valuable,” for the following year from the front of the courthouse in Lexington.
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President Witherspoon made the College of New Jersey the intellectual headquarters of the Scottish and Scots-Irish communities in America, turning a young northern school into a southern and West Indian intellectual and cultural force. The contest was not won, but the competition was changed forever. Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Philadelphia, King's, Queen's, Rhode Island, and Dartmouth launched new campaigns for the loyalty of wealthy planters and traders.

Given their access to these colleges, white colonists in the West Indies and the South had little need for local schools. The wealthy planters of South Carolina sent their sons north, which allowed them to delay establishing advanced academies until the nineteenth century. In 1774 Edward Long accused Jamaica's planters and officials of failing to fund academies, thereby causing the racial declension of white people. Elite white women were sent abroad for education and, therefore, had some culture, Long continued, but the majority of the white women spoke “drawling, dissonant gibberish” and acquired the “aukward carriage and vulgar manners” of enslaved black women. Despite its wealth, by the late eighteenth century Barbados had but a few dozen teachers on the whole island. The historian Eric Williams found that the entire educational infrastructure of the British Caribbean colonies comprised little more than Codrington College and a single secondary school in Jamaica.
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Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam
by John Greenwood. Chancellor Stephen Hopkins, College of Rhode Island (Brown), is sleeping at the table next to his brother, the slave ship's captain Esek Hopkins
.
SOURCE: Saint Louis Art Museum

It was the stark and rigid stratification of colonial society that John Witherspoon exploited to stabilize the College of New Jersey. It was the security that human slavery provided free men, the wealth that slave traders and slaveholders could generate, and the social networks of plantation economies that brought Witherspoon to the American academy and that carried the American academy into modernity.

In a quarter century at the helm of the College of New Jersey, Rev. Witherspoon instructed hundreds of young men who became leaders of Revolutionary America. His protÃ©gÃ©s included President James Madison, twenty United States senators, three justices of the Supreme Court, thirteen governors, twenty-three congressmen, and scores of ministers, college presidents and professors, and military officers. One scholar summed up his influence: “Dr. Witherspoon not only led his students, but all the Scotch and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of the country, bodily into the Revolutionary movement.”
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In 1776 the Reverend John Witherspoon signed the Declaration of Independence, marshaling the dissenting tradition of his own Presbyterian faith in support of the cause of rebellion and calling upon his antityrannical and anti-English roots in defense of American freedom. He and his contemporaries had established their own intellectual freedom upon human bondage. They had also bound the nation's intellectual culture to the future of American slavery and the slave trade.