Ebony and Ivy (8 page)

On the eve of the American Revolution, Alexander Hamilton entered college in a city transformed by the Africa and West Indies trades. Charitable gifts to fund the educations of poorer boys announced the social influence of the American slave traders, land speculators, planters, and financiers, who replaced British donors as the source of support for colonial churches, schools, libraries, and missions.

By the mid-eighteenth century, merchant wealth was reconfiguring the colonies. Impressive stores rose in the New England and mid-Atlantic ports, handsome townhouses stocked with European and Caribbean luxuries filled the old city streets, and country retreats sprung up in the outskirts of the big towns. During a six-month stay in Manhattan, the Boston artist John Singleton Copley painted thirty-seven portraits for upper-class families, including the Crugers, Livingstons, Verplancks, and Ludlows. The great landlords of colonial New York had transitioned into a more diverse range of investments, including shipping and insurance. These were the families that laid the foundations of the metropolis. They controlled the board of the New York Hospital. The majority of the eighty-three subscribers to the New York Society Library, the first public library in the city, were traders, and sixteen merchants served as trustees of King's College before the Revolution.
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American colleges had their genesis in this Atlantic economy. Colonial merchants were not for the most part scholars, but they
became the patrons of higher education. The wealthiest families had traditionally sent their sons to Britain to finish their studies and make connections. A fourth-generation Livingston, Robert, took his education at Cambridge, a distinction that he converted into a middle name—Robert Cambridge Livingston—to separate himself from his relatives and publicize his credentials. However, as their wealth increased and as their American identities evolved, merchant families became the sponsors and patrons of colonial colleges.
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King's College, known today as Columbia University
SOURCE: Library of Congress

Presbyterians and Reformed Dutch in New Jersey, Anglicans in New York, Anglicans and Presbyterians in Philadelphia, Baptists in Rhode Island, and Congregationalists in New Hampshire all benefited from the rise of the merchants. Between 1746 and 1769, a period of less than a quarter century, the number of colleges in the British mainland colonies tripled to nine. Ministers and merchants in the commercial centers of the Mid-Atlantic and New England organized the College of New Jersey (Princeton, 1746), the College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania, 1749), King's (1754), the College of Rhode Island (Brown, 1764), and Queen's College (Rutgers, 1766). Not primarily intended to further Indian evangelization, these schools relied upon the generosity of the colonial elite. Even Dartmouth College (1769) in New Hampshire fits this pattern. Ostensibly
founded for Indian education, Dartmouth had few Native American students, it soon became a training ground for white missionaries, and its president was experienced at soliciting colonial patrons.
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There was nothing all that remarkable in West Indian slave traders providing a scholarship to a gifted clerk. Far more noteworthy was the ascent of the merchants as the benefactors and guardians of colonial society.

In 1672 the Royal African Company succeeded the Royal Adventurers to Africa, which was chartered in 1618 as the Governor and Company of Adventurers Trading to Gynney and Bynney. The Duke of York—who later ascended the throne as James II—was governor of the company and its largest individual shareholder. A list of prominent investors further raised the endeavor's profile. For example, John Locke owned at least £600 in Royal African stock and had earlier invested in the Royal Adventurers.
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Many of the great fortunes of New York were created while the monopoly was in effect. Frederick Philipse had arrived humbly. He came to New Amsterdam in the 1650s as a carpenter for the Dutch West India Company and labored in that capacity for years. As late as 1660 the company ordered him to renovate the Dutch Church at Midwout (Midwood, Brooklyn). A marriage to the wealthy widow Margaret Hardenbroeck de Vries, who had inherited a number of ships and a family business network, propelled Philipse into the merchant class. An astute and adventurous businesswoman, Margaret Philipse limited her second husband's access to her estate, managed the family businesses, and sailed with her own ships. She was one of a number of women merchants, landowners, and proprietors who came to power during the Dutch era.
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Frederick Philipse's instructions for a 1698 voyage to Madagascar survive. Piloting the barque
Margarit
, Captain Samuel Burgos was to trade for or purchase “two hundred good slaves or as many as the ship can carry.” Philipse laid out the entire scheme: what route to follow; the names of his contacts, how to protect his ship; when
to take on provisions for the crew and slaves, and what to buy; how to secure the slaves on board; directions for trading the supplies of liquor, guns, and money; cautions about piracy and other threats; where to register and clear the cargo; and the best seasonal periods for the return voyage. “Being arrived at that place … you are to trade with the Natives for Elephants Teeth, imploying the Brass Neck Collars, Arm Rings, Beeds, Looking glasses, boxes & such like things out of that cargoe to purchase them with,” Philipse wrote. Barring the captain and crew from slave trading on their own, Philipse reminded Burgos that his share—to be paid upon his return to New York City in money, goods, and Africans—depended upon his success.
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That year Frederick Philipse was charged with piracy and evasion of the Navigation Acts for trading directly with non-English ports. The Madagascar slave trade itself married corruption, piracy, and kidnapping. To evade Royal African's monopoly, merchants had opened a trade from Madagascar. With vessels sailing into the South Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, and into the Indian Ocean, these journeys could take two years to complete. Private traders from Britain and the colonies eroded Royal African's privileges. Merchants in New York joined in, trading illegally to West Africa and Madagascar. New York governor Cadwallader Colden later gossiped, “Several of the now principal families, I have been told, took their first rise to commerce with the Pirates.” Philipse resigned from the governor's council, which enacted and executed laws and formed an appellate court for major cases. In an age of merchant adventurers, this was a modest scandal. All but one of his fellow councilors were accused of crimes. Nicholas Bayard, Thomas Willet, and William Nicholl were financing piracy, while William Pinhorne engaged in real estate fraud. Samuel Burgos had testified against William Nicholl and Governor Benjamin Fletcher, admitting that he had served under a captain who paid them £700 to unload goods pirated in the East Indies. Philipse remained the “wealthiest man” in the colony, he had an active merchant house, and he was the lord of Philipsburg Manor, comprising more than two hundred square miles of land.
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The great New York merchant houses were family networks that
crossed the Atlantic world. Although their rights to hold property and make contracts were curtailed by English law, women traded actively and they were often at the center of these family enterprises. In July 1679 Robert Livingston married the wealthy heiress and widow Alida Schuyler Van Rensselaer. The couple acquired 160,000 acres of land near the village of Hudson and began investing in slaving voyages. Their first venture—the 1690 journey of the
Margriet
—traded slaves, sugar, and tobacco between Madagascar, Barbados, and Virginia. They bought interests in four additional ships, three with Peter Schuyler, Alida's brother. The Livingston children then married and maneuvered their way to greater wealth, consolidating about a million acres of land in two generations. The second generation's Philip Livingston and his wife, Catrina Van Brugh, sent their sons—Peter, John, Philip, and William—to Yale College to prepare them to manage the web of commercial sites and relationships in the Mid-Atlantic, New England, the West Indies, Europe, and Africa that formed Livingston Manor.
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In 1698 Parliament deregulated the slave trade while preserving a semblance of the African Company's privileges. With its merchants clearing fifty ships a year for Africa after the liberalization, Bristol overtook London as a slaving port in just a few decades, with more than two thousand total slaving ventures completed. Leading British banking and insurance houses such as Barclays and Lloyds rose from this commerce, and profits from the Africa trade were funding cultural and charitable institutions. By 1750 Bristol traders constituted a majority in the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, which replaced the African Company.
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The end of the monopoly was no less significant in British North America. In 1698 John Cruger had emigrated from Bristol, England, to New York. A marriage to the heiress Maria Cuyler, of the powerful Albany and New York City family, made him a Hudson Valley landlord and a merchant. The John and Henry Cruger house launched its ships from Cruger's Wharf on the east side of the city and often registered its ships in Bristol. John Cruger held the New York City mayoralty from 1739 to 1744, and his son John was mayor from 1757 to 1766. Henry Cruger's sons administered businesses at key sites in the family's commercial complex. The younger Henry
managed their business affairs in Bristol. John Harris went to Jamaica, Tileman to Curaçao, and Nicholas to St. Croix. Their sister Elizabeth married Peter Van Schaack of the prominent Albany clan.
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Young men from the mainland also went to the West Indies to find wealthy creole wives with whom they could increase their property and enlarge their commercial networks. Philip Livingston, son of the first lord of the manor, dispatched his sons, William and Henry, to Antigua and Jamaica. Peter and Philip Livingston both worked in Jamaica. The younger Philip Livingston met his wife in Jamaica, as did Henry Cruger Sr. His sons Tileman and Nicholas Cruger married women from Curaçao and St. Croix, respectively. Armed with family wealth and often college educations, these young traders headed south to expand their fortunes. Other merchant sons were also in the Caribbean. Gedney Clarke Jr. was in Barbados, William Lloyd operated in Jamaica, DePeyster and Duyckinck houses opened in Curaçao, and David Beekman kept a plantation and merchant house in St. Croix.
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In the late summer of 1730 John Walter of New York and Arnot Schuyler of New Jersey contracted with Captain Jasper Farmar for a slaving mission. They had just finished building
Catherine
, and they registered it within weeks of its maiden voyage. Farmar piloted the ship to the Angola coast, where European and American traders were partnering with the dominant kingships, supplying them with arms and keeping up with their demands for and tastes in foreign goods. Trade shifted these coastal economies from fishing and agriculture to slaving. New York merchants were regular clients who made Angola the most important trading center in West Africa by the latter part of the eighteenth century. Atlantic merchants carried more than two and a half million people from this region, about 40 percent of all the enslaved Africans traded that century. Farmar returned on September 27, 1731, paying dues on one hundred and thirty people at Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and New York
City, but
Catherine
could hold almost twice as many captives as he reported. The captain logged the deaths of thirty African people.
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Even the statistics from well-documented journeys are imperfect. Deaths that occurred before ships departed Africa often went unrecorded, transatlantic mortality rates were high and the causes of death frequently unnoted, and merchants routinely underreported their human cargoes to avoid duties in the Americas. Enslaved people were physically and emotionally compromised by the time they were loaded into ships, having survived violent acquisitions from kidnappings and raids. Long marches to the coast and confinement while local dealers waited for slave ships left captives malnourished and ill.
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Lengthy imprisonments in narrow, cramped, and filthy holds accelerated the spread of diseases during return voyages that lasted several weeks. The poor diet provided the captives delivered few nutrients. A year before
Catherine
's first voyage, a ship's surgeon had complained that mashed beans or peas mixed with salted, rotting fish and fed, sometimes forcibly, to the Africans on his ships further undermined their health. Dehydration was a primary cause of death. A pint of water, a standard daily ration, and water from meals failed to compensate for the loss of water from perspiration, vomiting, and diarrhea. Physical exhaustion and dehydration could bring changes in mental health ranging from depression to delirium. Medical technologies enhanced these threats to life. Common treatments such as bleeding, purging, and administering enemas compounded dehydration, sapped nutrients, and further weakened victims. Those who survived transport found themselves in British plantations where they confronted frequent epidemics and innumerable other risks.
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