How is slavery an institution

Harvard was the first institution of higher learning in America, founded in Slavery and the slave economy thread through the first years of its history. Slaves made beds and meals for Harvard presidents. The sons of wealthy Southern plantation owners became prominent men on campus. And many of the school's major donors in its first centuries made their fortunes in industries either based on, or connected to, slavery.

The evidence of Harvard's historic links to slavery are there, if you know where to look for them. Jane and Cicely make for unusual clues, according to a Cambridge historian. Few enslaved people were buried with expensive slate headstones.

But Jane and Cicely were honored in death after loyally serving prominent Harvard men. Harvard's ties to slavery were never a secret. Today, however, they're hardly common knowledge on campus and they're generally not reflected in official histories of the university. That started to change in , when Sven Beckert, a professor of American history, taught a seminar with four Harvard undergraduates.

Their mission: dig into the school's archival records to see what traces of slavery they could find. Beckert had been inspired by Simmons' commitment at Brown. They soon discovered that prominent Harvard figures — including the Puritan Minister Cotton Mather and the Declaration of Independence signatory John Hancock — were slave owners. Sugar plantations in the Caribbean devoted most of their land to growing cane. They imported grain, meat, codfish and other supplies from New England. Ship owners in New England hauled back barrels of molasses to make rum.

Then they shipped the rum to Africa to pay for slaves. New England merchants used part of the profits from this triangular trade to finance Harvard and other schools. Over time, cotton from slave plantations in the Caribbean and the American South entered the mix. Cotton fed the great textile mills owned by the Lowell family of Boston, which had extensive ties to Harvard, including a Harvard president and a prominent professor.

Banks in Boston and New York supplied loans to southern plantation owners to buy slaves and seed; northern insurance companies underwrote slave voyages to Africa and the lives of enslaved people. And part of becoming respectable is donating to a place like Harvard," says Kathrine Stevens, assistant professor of history at Oglethorp University in Atlanta.

Stevens was a Harvard graduate student when she helped Beckert teach his seminar. Scientific racism is another of Harvard's legacies. In the 19th and 20th centuries, some Harvard professors proposed scientific theories they said proved the inherent inferiority of black people. Chief among them was Louis Agassiz, the geologist and zoologist often described as one of the "founding fathers" of American science. Agassiz promoted the idea of polygenism — that the different races descended from different species.

Other Harvard scientists propagating scientific theories of white superiority were Nathanial Shaler, dean of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, and anthropology professor Earnest Hooton. That was a history I was totally unaware of as a student. Anti-slavery activists on the Harvard campus were pariahs for much of the antebellum period. Harvard professors who spoke openly against slavery invited fierce criticism from Boston newspapers and risked losing their jobs.

Harvard President Josiah Quincy discouraged, but did not ban, the event. Faust found money for Beckert and his students to write a short book, titled " Harvard and Slavery. Under pressure from students, the Harvard Law School in retired its shield — essentially its logo — because it was based on the family crest of an 18th century slave-holding family of Isaac Royall Jr. Royall's father was a Caribbean plantation owner who built the family fortune trading in sugar, rum and slaves.

At the Harvard slavery conference, keynote speaker Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has written powerfully about the African American experience, argued that the university — indeed all higher education institutions with historic links to slavery — needs to do more than publish histories, change logos and similar acts of recognition. I don't know how you conduct research that shows that your very existence is rooted in a great crime and shrug, say you're sorry and just walk away.

By the time the Jesuit priests of Maryland founded Georgetown College in , they were among the biggest slave owners in the colony. With several tobacco plantations scattered across Maryland, the Catholic order owned at least slaves. It used the income from their labor to create Georgetown, part of an educational mission to spread and maintain Catholicism in the U. Georgetown also directly employed slave labor, says Rothman, citing the school's early ledgers showing rented or hired enslaved people.

By the s, the Jesuits' tobacco plantations failed, and Georgetown was in debt. For some 20 years, the priests debated whether to free their slaves, keep them as part of their religious stewardship or sell them. The Maryland Jesuits decided to sell men, women and children — virtually their entire slave community — to two planters in Louisiana.

The money helped pay off Georgetown's debts. In , the enslaved people were divided and sent by ship to Louisiana. As college students increasingly became part of nationwide protests against a spate of police killings of unarmed black men, they also gave voice to claims of entrenched racism on their campuses. By , DeGioia felt it was time for Georgetown to examine itself. That conversation soon took on a new meaning after a surprising discovery later that fall.

In November , Georgetown students demanded that two buildings on campus named for Jesuit priests who orchestrated the slave sale be renamed. Richard Cellini, a Georgetown graduate, read about the student protests and wondered what had happened to the slaves when they were sold to Louisiana.

Cellini, who is white, says he had never thought much about race issues. But he wrote a note to a member of the working group asking what happened to the slaves who were sold. The person replied that they had all died when they got to Louisiana, speculation never endorsed by the university. To Cellini, this just didn't make sense. Cellini ran a Google search and found Patricia Bayonne-Johnson, who in discovered that she was the descendant of slaves sold by the Jesuit leaders of Georgetown.

Judy Riffel, a genealogist in Baton Rouge who specializes in African American ancestry, had helped her figure this out. Cellini contacted the women and says that within hours he'd uncovered the truth.

He reckoned that thousands of their descendants were alive today. Cellini hired Riffel and a team of genealogists to track down the slaves and their descendants. The GMP has identified and documented the lives of of the original members of the "GU," the nickname Georgetown students gave the group of slaves as they tweeted their protests — GU The GMP has traced and verified 5, direct descendants, living and deceased.

The vast majority of the GU descendants alive today reside in southern Louisiana. Many live just a few miles from the cotton and sugar cane plantations where their ancestors were sent in One of these descendants is Jessica Tilson, a year-old student at Southern University who's raising two girls.

Tilson grew up in Maringouin, Louisiana, a small town west of Baton Rouge. Two bayous cut through Maringouin, and flat farmland stretches in all directions. She brings us to the Immaculate Heart of Mary cemetery, where at least 10 of the Maryland slaves are buried, all of them Tilson's ancestors.

Once Tilson discovered she was a descendant of the GU, she became an expert on who was buried in the cemetery, using an old burial guide from her church. Some bodies are buried on top of others, so discovering exactly who was buried where was tricky. Tilson often comes to the cemetery to clean the old grave markers. She gently scrubs them with a mixture of flour and water. The Immaculate Heart of Mary cemetery is segregated.

A road divides the white and black sections. Tilson says all the people on the black side are cousins. In fact, hundreds of black people still living in Maringouin are cousins.

The enslaved families who came down together from Maryland intermarried. When Tilson was growing up, she and her friends were told they shouldn't date each other because they were related. But no one knew exactly how. Standing in the cemetery, Tilson sounds upbeat as she catalogs the ancestors who were sold. Discovering her family's origins has felt like a gift, from Georgetown. I can't be mad at them because [they] gave me something that a lot of African-Americans don't have. That was the first year the federal census began routinely identifying black people by last name.

Many slave-holding records only list black people by first name, if at all. Cellini explains that was not the case with the Jesuit plantation owners in Maryland.

They kept meticulous records of their human property, including: first and last names, date of birth, parents' names, date of baptism, first communion, confirmation, weddings and funerals. Georgetown University holds a lot of these records. They include the original Articles of Agreement for the sale, which lists all people to be sold by the Jesuits.

They also include the ship manifest of the Katherine Jackson, one of three ships that carried the slaves to Louisiana. These documents have been crucial in identifying the descendants of the Georgetown slaves and mapping the ways they're related to each other. She lives in New Orleans and discovered she and her family are descendants of the Maryland slaves after a front-page story about the Jesuit slave sale ran in the New York Times.

The Descendants Association exists, Harper-Royal says, to reconnect families torn apart by slavery. Harper-Royal says that when descendants first learn how the Maryland Jesuits sold their ancestors, they're hit with a mixture of emotions.

Harper-Royal is on a mission to connect GU descendants with their history, and with each other. In January, she led the association's first genealogy workshop for potential descendants. It was held at a public library in New Orleans and had the feel of a family reunion. About 25 people showed up, bringing trays of chicken wings, deviled eggs, and fruit.

Harper-Royal opened the gathering with an overview of the slave sale and reminded her audience, "These people are our relatives. Soon enough, cousins were meeting cousins for the first time. Harper-Royal has also been working with Georgetown to map a way forward. DeGioia, Georgetown's president, formed the Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation in the fall of , before the student protests, and before Richard Cellini had tracked down any descendants. DeGioia says he would never have presumed the descendants wanted to engage with Georgetown.

In June , DeGioia traveled to Louisiana to meet with descendants. A few months later, he announced the Georgetown working group's recommendations. They included building a campus research center to study slavery and its legacy, and collaborating with the descendant community to create a public memorial to the slaves the Jesuits sold. DeGioia also announced that Georgetown was granting legacy status to all the descendants of the GU, giving descendants the same preference in admissions that the children of alumni get.

We will provide the same care and respect to the descendants," DiGioia said. DeGioia promises that these are just first steps. He has vowed to continue working with the descendant community, but some descendants are skeptical of Georgetown's ability to be a model for change.

She says the university's decision to offer legacy status to the descendants is insufficient and that descendants should have their own status. Enslavement was not by choice. But Thomas plans to continue to work with Georgetown. Few black people, slave or free, were allowed in schools; rural areas offered schooling to almost no one, for poor children of all races and ethnicities were destined for the workforce, not the schoolroom. A small minority of the enslaved did learn to read, write, and figure.

Often their owners, particularly their mistresses as in the cases of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs helped bright slave children learn their letters.

Owners also valued the assistance of slaves who could read or keep accounts. Because slaves could not change employers of their own volition, they could not use the skills they acquired to better their situation by finding improved working conditions or jobs that paid more.

They could not work their way up or purchase a share in their business. Closely supervised, they seldom exercised control over their working conditions. Appeals could go no higher than the master, for masters exercised powers directly on their farms, plantations, and households and indirectly through slave patrols on the roads and other public places.

In the South, local governments nearly always deferred to owners, who exercised police power over the land and people they owned. Child and spouse abuse were constant dangers in Southern families.

We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Our Privacy Policy sets out how Oxford University Press handles your personal information, and your rights to object to your personal information being used for marketing to you or being processed as part of our business activities.

We will only use your personal information to register you for OUPblog articles. Or subscribe to articles in the subject area by email or RSS. Today, Sex slavery has the same dehumanizing effects on the perpetrators, as well as on those under their control. There is also psychological and physical trauma involved. It is sickening to see the extent of the depravity of mankind. It should therefore be no surprise to see the world in such a mess. Wickedness is deeply rooted in the hearts of ordinary human beings, and can be realized in the circumstances of life.

This is such a deep topic, as deep and as depraved as our hearts can ever be. The paper is good, but I do not agree with u that chattel slavery hurt the whites, because wickefness is inbred in the white race ,s blood, the children of the Neanderthal children from the cold caves of Europe.

Shaka Says Bambata Dolo. Very useful article. I have learned something new again about the evil of mankind. Today far rights would continue this hatrred if laws were permitted. How far have we come is the question and lessons learned? White lies, distortion of history, economic dissadvantage were whites are given privileges over others is alive and well. Where is the healing? This is super useful. Thank you! Once again this Shaka Saye Bambata Dolo.

We are intellectual warriors. Keep up the good work. But why do we continue to call upon Jesus, the God of our white oppressor? Buy Now. Physical Trauma By the end of the eighteenth century, branding, amputation, and other extremely brutal forms of punishment became rare as means of controlling slaves.

Psychological Trauma Slaves and, to a certain extent, their owners paid the psychological costs of a society based on violence, obedience, and submission.

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