Yale University and slavery: a reckoning

Founded in 1701, Yale University took its name from a benefactor, Elihu Yale, an East India Company official whose wealth came from many lines of trade, including trade in slaves. Slavery was at that time not yet controversial and so his suitability as a donor was unchallenged. Many of the 18th-century Puritans and theologians who shaped Yale believed the Bible not only tolerated but even prescribed slavery.

But even long after Puritanism waned, acquiescence inslavery lingered. Notes of disquiet over slavery often were limited to private reflections rather than to public declaration. Benjamin Silliman (1779-1864), Yale’s first professor of chemistry, wrote in the midst of the Civil War of “the accumulated guilt of more than two centuries, for which we are now paying the heavy penalty of blood.” To disclose the belated contrition of Benjamin Silliman — scion of a family of slaveholders — commends David Blight’s impartiality as an author. As a reader, however, one would like to know more about attitudes held generally at the time. The book refers to a law of 1792 that forbade out-of-state sale of Connecticut slaves, and by 1848 Connecticut slaves had been emancipated. One would like to assess Silliman’s testimony set against the relief of historical contexts.

This applies also to other of the book’s estimations, such as that of Nathanial William Taylor (1786-1858). Taylor, remembered as the founder of New Haven theology, was a supportor of repatriation of slaves to Africa. But Taylor was also the teacher of Charles Grandison Finney (1792 – 1875), later President of the radically abolitionist Oberlin College. It would have sharpened the focus of the book to colour in the background to relations between Taylor and Finney.

Yale’s 19th-century student body was drawn predominantly from New England. Most students, though conscious of slavery, would have rarely encountered it face to face. The moral and legal justification of slavery began to crumble in the antebellum years, when two issues left unresolved by the country’s constitution came to be entwined, namely the primacy of state versus federal legislatures, and slavery.

War came, and Yale students enlisted on either side of the Civil War. Until this point, the book does not evince a discernible difference between attitudes towards slavery at Yale and those in the country at large. The Civil War abolished slavery by military force, and the Fifteenth Amendment enfranchised former slaves by law. Civil society, on the other hand, lagged behind the army and the law. As late as 1901 a Yale-Princeton intercollegiate debate chose for its topic, “Resolved, that the adoption of the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States has been justified.” One Yale team member opposing the amendment pointed out that “the whole country tacitly acquiesces in the practical nullification of the Fifteenth Amendment.”  

Two flashpoints of Yale’s later history show persisting tensions over America’s memory of slavery. One has been Yale’s Civil War memorial, the other the renaming of one of its residential colleges. In 1867 a memorial was envisaged to honour those who had fought “for the preservation of the Union and the deliverance of the slave”. By 1915, when the memorial came to be unveiled, soldiers of the Union were commemorated alongside soldiers of the Confederacy. For David Blight, this evinced “ideas about education, social order, power, and white supremacy”.

But surely other interpretations are possible. One might, for example, cite Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone. The premise of his plot was that the heroine, Antigone, has two brothers who have fallen in battle, one of them fighting for and the other against the government. Dismayed to hear that the government would allow one but not the other to be buried with honour, Antigone ensures a dignified burial for both brothers and, although disobeying government orders, putsher own life at risk. Sophocles’ example of respect shown by the quick for the dead must have been a message that resonated more in the midst of the carnage of World War I than it does today.

A Yale residential college, Calhoun College, was renamed in 2017 in view of the honorand’s identification with the Confederate cause. John C. Calhoun (1782 – 1850) had had a long political career. He was also an eminent constitutional jurist. His principal legacy as a jurist, the nullification theory, buttressed the right of states to veto federal laws.  Confederates invoked this theory in support of their cause, implicating John C. Calhoun in the outbreak of the Civil War. Hence the renaming in 2017. That John Calhoun had died over a decade before the Civil War broke out was not deemed a material objection. Nor did it matter that in 1956 then-Senator John F. Kennedy had praised John Calhoun as a principled legislative thinker in Profiles of Courage. Today, such praise would probably scupper a political career.

Yale and Slavery exposes aspects of Yale’s history that Yale histories in the past neglected.

It leaves this reader with a sense that Yale was a follower rather than a leader of public opinion as long as slavery existed, but it does not evince a discernible difference between attitudes towards slavery at Yale and those in the country at large. Coming to terms with the memory of slavery is as difficult for Yale as it is for America as a whole, and Yale and Slavery demonstrates a desire to acknowledge and own up to failures of the past. Backed by Yale’s President, this aspiration leads the way to making the humanities great again.          

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