No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
In the late 1820s, African Americans’ access to primary and religious instruction expanded significantly throughout the urban Northeast, yet barriers to their higher education remained firm. Segregated in public “African” schools, blacks were also barred from most private academies. Collegiate education similarly remained out of reach. In response, an alliance of black and white abolitionists launched a campaign to build a separate “African” college in 1831. Two ministers, one black, Peter Williams from New York, the other white, Simeon Jocelyn from New Haven, led the endeavor. After much consideration, they selected New Haven, Connecticut to house the new institution, believing that in “no place in the Union” is the “situation [of blacks] more comfortable, or the prejudices of a community weaker against them.” On September 5, 1831, Williams and Jocelyn announced their intentions. Their timing could not have been worse.
1 G_______n., “Sonnet,” Liberator, October 8, 1831.Google Scholar
2 “Extracts from a Letter from the Editor,” Liberator, June 18, 1831.Google Scholar
3 “Education—An Appeal to the Benevolent,” Philadelphia Chronicle, September 5, 1831.Google Scholar
4 Boston Evening Transcript, August 22, 1831; “Insurrection in Virginia,” Liberator, September 3, 1831; “Virginia Insurrection,” Connecticut Mirror, September 17, 1831.Google Scholar
5 “Insurrection of the Blacks,” Niles’ Register, September 3, 1831.Google Scholar
6 “Negro Insurrection in Virginia,” Columbian Register, September 3, 1831.Google Scholar
7 Rev. Cleaveland, Elisha L. D. D. An Address Delivered at the Funeral of the Hon. Dennis Kimberly, December 16, 1832 (New Haven: Basssett & Bassett, 1863); Theodore Weld to Lewis Tappan, June 8, 1837, reprinted in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld, and Sarah Grimke, 1822–1844, ed. Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond [1934] (Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1965) 397–398.Google Scholar
8 College for Colored Youth. An Account of the New Haven City Meeting and Resolutions with Recommendations of the College and Strictures upon the Doings of New Haven (New York, 1831); “Education—An Appeal to the Benevolent.”Google Scholar
9 Cornish, Samuel E. “Anomaly in Nature,“ Liberator, October 8, 1831. Simeon Jocelyn to William Lloyd Garrison, 20 September 1831, Anti-Slavery Collection [hereafter ASC], Boston Public Library.Google Scholar
10 On October 22, 1831, white rioters attacked a private black home; that same week, they sacked the residence of Arthur Tappan, a white abolitionist and college supporter. A week later, whites attacked the hotel of free black Julius Decatur, which was also rumored to be a house of “ill repute.” Arthur Tappan to William Lloyd Garrison, 18 October 1831, ASC; “Riots at New Haven!” Liberator, October 22, 1831; Julius Decatur, “Liberian Hotel,” Columbian Register, September 24, 1831; Connecticut Journal, October 25, 1831; “The City Resolutions,” Columbian Register, September 17, 1831.Google Scholar
11 In summer 1835, whites in Norwich attacked Mrs. Giles Buckingham's “Academy for Negroes.” In 1839, whites in Brookfield railed against the admission of a black girl into a white Sabbath school. “Fruits of Abolition,” Daily Herald, September 5, 1835; “Riot at Brookfield,” Colored American, September 7, 1839. On Canterbury and Connecticut's “black laws,” see Phillip S. Foner and Josephine F. Pacheco, Three Who Dared: Prudence Crandall, Margaret Douglass, Myrtilla Miner: Champions of Antebellum Black Education (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984); Marvis Olive Welch, Prudence Crandall: A Biography (Manchester, N. H.: Jason Publishers, 1983); Lawrence J. Friedman, “Racism and Sexism in Antebellum America: The Prudence Crandall Case Reconsidered,” Societas 4 (Summer 1974): 211–27; and Frances M. Edwards, “Connecticut's Black Law,” New England Galaxy 5 (Fall 1963): 34–42.Google Scholar
12 On white education in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Connecticut see, for instance, Nicholas Colucci, “Connecticut Academies for Females, 1800–1865” (Ph. D. diss., University of Connecticut, 1969); Hendrick D. Gideonse, “Common School Reform: Connecticut, 1838–1854” (Ph. D. diss., Harvard University, 1963); William J. Frost, Connecticut Education in the Revolutionary Era (Chester, CT: Pequot Press, 1973); and Orwin B. Griffin, The Evolution of the Connecticut State School System (New York: Columbia University Teachers College, 1928).Google Scholar
13 Gideonse, “Common School Reform,“ 382–3.Google Scholar
14 n 1830, 2.8 percent of white males aged fifteen to twenty in Connecticut attended college. Rhode Island ranked second with 2.0 percent and Massachusetts followed with 1.6 percent. Colin B. Burke, American Collegiate Populations: A Test of the Traditional View (New York: New York University Press, 1982), 62–63.Google Scholar
15 According to the 1840 census, only .03 percent of Connecticut residents were illiterate. New Hampshire ranked second with .06 percent followed by Massachusetts with .1 percent. Lee Soltow and Edward Stevens, The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States: A Socioeconomic Analysis to 1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 159.Google Scholar
16 As quoted in Griffin, Evolution of the Connecticut State School System, 29. On education in New Haven, see Louise G. Wrinn, “The Development of the Public School System in New Haven, 1639–1930: A Problem in Historical Research” (Ph. D. diss., Yale University, 1933).Google Scholar
17 According to Leonard Richards, of the New England states Connecticut was “the most inhospitable” to antislavery. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 40.Google Scholar
18 Pillsbury, Parker “Letter from Parker Pillsbury,“ Liberator, March 26, 1852.Google Scholar
19 Freedom's Journal, March 23, 1827; Rights of All, September 28, 1829; Samuel E. Cornish and John Russwurm to Gerrit Smith, 16 April 1827, Black Abolitionist Papers [hereafter BAP], ed. George E. Carter et al. microfilm collection, 16:0456.Google Scholar
20 McQueeny, Mary Beth “Simeon Jocelyn, New Haven Reformer,“ New Haven Colony Historical Society Journal 19 (September 1970): 63–68; Amos G. Beman, “Thoughts on the History of Temple Street,” Amos Gerry Beman Scrapbooks, vol. 3, Beinecke Library, Yale University; Beman, “Sermon Notes,” ibid; “African Church and Ordination,” African Repository V (1829): 252; Connecticut Journal, August 25, 1829. For more on Temple Street, see Kurt Schmoke, “The Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church, 1829–1896,” New Haven Colony Historical Society Journal 20 (May 1971): 3–11.Google Scholar
21 “School Report,” Connecticut Journal, December 7, 1824; Timothy Dwight, The Charitable Blessed. A Sermon Preached in the First Church in New Haven, August 8, 1811 by Timothy Dwight, D. D. President of Yale College (New Haven: Sidney's Press, 1810).Google Scholar
22 “School Report,” Connecticut Journal, November 22, 1825. Together the two schools served sixty-seven black boys and ninety-seven black girls under age fourteen. Fifth Census of the United States (Washington, D. C.: USGPO, 1830); Timothy Dwight, A Statistical Account of the City of New Haven (New Haven: Waller and Steele, 1811), 71–78.Google Scholar
23 Third Annual Report of the African Improvement Society of New Haven (New Haven: African Improvement Society, 1829), 5–7; “African Improvement Society,” Freedom's Journal, April 20, 1827; Hugh Davis, Leonard Bacon: New England Reformer and Antislavery Moderate (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 56–57.Google Scholar
24 Freedom's Journal, November 9, 1828.Google Scholar
25 On blacks’ exclusion from vocational training see, for example, Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America 1800–1850: The Shadow of the Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Jacqueline Jones, American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); and Shane White, “‘We Dwell in Safety and Pursue Our Honest Callings': Free Blacks in New York City, 1783–1801,” Journal of American History 75 (September 1988): 445–470.Google Scholar
26 College for Colored Youth, 5; Liberator, November 12, 1831.Google Scholar
27 Barnes, Gilbert H. The Antislavery Impulse (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1933), 25.Google Scholar
28 Tappan, Lewis The Life of Arthur Tappan (New York: Arno Press, 1970), 69, 77; Report of the Proceedings at the Formation of the African Education Society Instituted at Washington, December 28, 1829 (Washington, DC: J.C. Dunn, 1830).Google Scholar
29 Williams, Peter “A Sermon Delivered in St. Phillip's Church on Sunday 27th April 1828, Continued,“ Freedom's Journal, June 13, 1828; “School Meeting,” Freedom's Journal, January 11, 1828; “African Free School,” Freedom's Journal, February 1, 1828.Google Scholar
30 Williams, Peter “To the Citizens of New York,“ African Repository 10 (August 1834). On black exclusion from New York colleges see Liberator, April 16, 1831.Google Scholar
31 Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 63. On antebellum New England colleges, see David F. Allmendinger, Jr., Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life in New England (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975).Google Scholar
32 Allmendinger, Jr. Paupers and Scholars, 4 11–12.Google Scholar
33 Jocelyn, Simeon “For the Advertiser,“ Connecticut Journal, October 4, 1831.Google Scholar
34 Jocelyn, Simeon to Lloyd Garrison, William 28 May 1831, ASC.Google Scholar
35 Williams, “To the Citizens of New York.“Google Scholar
36 Garrison, Jocelyn to 28 May 1831, ASC.Google Scholar
37 Jocelyn, Simeon “College for Colored Youth,“ Columbian Register, October 15, 1831.Google Scholar
38 Augustus, “Scipio C. “ Freedom's Journal, August 22, 1828.Google Scholar
39 “College for the People of Color,” Liberator, July 9, 1831; “Education—An Appeal to the Benevolent.”Google Scholar
40 “Report of the Manual Labor Academy of Pennsylvania,” American Journal of Education I (August 1830): 362–70; “Manual Labor High School-Litchfield,” Connecticut Observer, September 26, 1831.Google Scholar
41 “Ruined by Hard Study,” Connecticut Courant, January 18, 1831; L. F. Anderson, “The Manual Labor School Movement,” Educational Review (November 1913): 369–86. On the ties between manual labor and abolition, see Paul Goodman, “The Manual Labor Movement and the Origins of Abolitionism,” Journal of the Early Republic 13 (Autumn 1983): 355–88.Google Scholar
42 Lloyd Garrison, William An Address Delivered before the Free People of Color in Philadelphia, New York, and Other Cities during the Month of June, 1831 (Boston: Stephen Foster, 1831).Google Scholar
43 Ibid.Google Scholar
44 Adeleke, Tunde “Afro-Americans and Moral Suasion: The Debate in the 1830's,“ Journal of Negro History 83 (Spring 1998): 127–142;Google Scholar
45 Freedom's Journal, March 23, 1827.Google Scholar
46 Glickstein, Jonathan A. Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
47 Barber, John Warner Views in New Haven and Its Vicinity (New Haven, 1825); Robert Warner, New Haven Negroes: A Social History (Arno Press and the New York Times: New York, 1969), 11–13.Google Scholar
48 The population increased from 5,157 in 1800 to 10,678 in 1830. Mary H. Mitchell, History of New Haven County, Connecticut, vol. 1 (Chicago: The Pioneer Historical Pub. Co., 1930), 863; Warner, New Haven Negroes, 301.Google Scholar
49 Curry, Free Black in Urban America, 245.Google Scholar
50 “Census of the Town of New Haven,” Connecticut Journal, January 4, 1831. According to the 1830 census, there were 1,481 “aliens” in Connecticut of which 439 lived in New Haven County and 271 in New Haven City. In 1831, only 33 immigrants sailed into New Haven's port. William J. Bromwell, History of Immigration to the United States Exhibiting the Number, Sex, Age, Occupation and Country of Birth of Passengers Arriving in the United States by Sea from Foreign Countries from September 30, 1819 to December 31, 1855 (New York: Redfield, 1856); Charlotte Erickson, “Emigration from the British Isles to the U.S.A. in 1831,” Population Studies 36 (July 1981): 175–191.Google Scholar
51 Osterweis, Rollin G. Three Centuries of New Haven (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 265–272.Google Scholar
52 “African Improvement Society,” Freedom's Journal, April 20, 1827; Davis, Leonard Bacon, 56–57.Google Scholar
53 “Extracts from a Letter from the Editor, Dated Philadelphia, June 10, 1831,” Liberator, June 18, 1831.Google Scholar
54 Minutes and Proceedings of the First Annual Convention of the People of Colour (Philadelphia: Committee of Arrangements, 1831).Google Scholar
55 “Negro College,” Columbian Register, October 8, 1831.Google Scholar
56 Gideonese, Common School Reform, v. The dividend from Connecticut's school fund provided 85 cents per student. “Literary Register: Or Annual view of the State and Progress of Education,” 282.Google Scholar
57 New Haven's Lancasterian school, for example, restricted enrollment to 280. Edward E. Atwater, History of the City of New Haven to the Present Time (New York: W.W. Munsell and Co., 1887), 152; “School Report,” Columbian Register, September 10, 1831; Wm. W. Boardman, “School Report,” Connecticut Journal, September 20, 1831; Alexander Harrison, “Lancasterian School,” Columbian Register, November 12, 1831.Google Scholar
58 Barber, Views in New Haven, 4.Google Scholar
59 Garfield, John M. “New Haven Female Seminary,“ Connecticut Courant, May 4, 1830; “Literary Register: Or Annual view of the State and Progress of Education, and of Literary Institutions, Throughout the World,” American Quarterly Register (May 1831): 299.Google Scholar
60 “New Haven,” Connecticut Journal, October 11, 1831.Google Scholar
61 “From the New Haven Advertiser, Feb. 1.” Baltimore American and Commercial Daily Advertiser, February 7, 1831.Google Scholar
62 On deskilling and industrialization in early nineteenth century manufacturing see, for example, Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). On the socio-economic insecurities plaguing antebellum white workingmen see, for example, Paul Faler, Mechanics and Manufacturers In the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1800–1860 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981); Seth Edward Rockman, “Working for Wages in Early Republic Baltimore: Unskilled Labor and the Blurring of Slavery and Freedom” (Ph. D. diss. University of California, Davis, 1999); Roediger, Wages of Whiteness; and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
63 “Refuge of Oppression,” Liberator, February 15, 1834.Google Scholar
64 Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 144–145.Google Scholar
65 Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 146.Google Scholar
66 Connecticut Herald, October 4, 1831.Google Scholar
67 Countryman, William A. “Transportation,“ in History of Connecticut in Monographic Form, ed. Osborn, Norris G. (New York: The States History Co., 1925); “Foreign Immigration,” Connecticut Observer, October 20, 1834; John Carroll Noonan, “Nativism in Connecticut: 1829–1860” (Ph. D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1938); Osterweis, Three Centuries of New Haven. Google Scholar
68 “New Haven,” Connecticut Journal, March 25, 1831.Google Scholar
69 “Influx of Immigrants,” Connecticut Observer, October 27, 1834.Google Scholar
70 “Colonization,” Connecticut Journal, July 6, 1830.Google Scholar
71 Warner, New Haven Negroes, 301.Google Scholar
72 Noonan, Nativism in Connecticut. Google Scholar
73 Yang, Goucom “From Slavery to Emancipation: The African Americans of Connecticut: 1650s-1820s“ (Ph. D. diss., University of Connecticut, 1999), 114–120.Google Scholar
74 In 1788, the state required masters to register children born in bondage and prohibited masters from transporting slaves entitled to freedom out of state. In 1797, Connecticut lowered its age of emancipation from 25 to 21.Google Scholar
75 Vermont was first in New England to emancipate in 1777. In 1779, Rhode Island passed a gradual emancipation statute similar to Connecticut. Massachusetts eliminated slavery in 1783 after the case of Quok Walker vs. Jennison. New Hampshire did not prohibit slavery until 1857, though the state never had a sizable slave population.Google Scholar
76 Greene, Lorenzo The Negro in Colonial New England: 1620–1776 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1966), 98.Google Scholar
77 After 1800, the number of slaves fell dramatically suggesting the delayed impact of the gradual emancipation process. In 1810, there were 310 slaves. That number decreased to 97 in 1820, to 25 in 1830, to 17 in 1840, and by virtue of the 1848 law, 0 by 1850. Yang, “From Slavery to Emancipation,” 117.Google Scholar
78 Connecticut, for example, enacted a law in 1703 preventing taverns from serving servants or slaves; in 1723, the legislature established a nine o'clock curfew for Native and African Americans. Those in violation could be fined “ten stripes.” Ralph Foster Weld, “Slavery in Connecticut,” in Tercentenary Commission of the State of Connecticut Committee on Historical Publications (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935), 1–31; Yang, “From Slavery to Emancipation.”Google Scholar
79 De Toqueville, Alexis Democracy in America, vol. 1 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 360.Google Scholar
80 Adams, James T. “Disenfranchisement of Negroes in New England,“ American Historical Review 30 (April 1925): 543–547; Charles H. Wesley, “Negro Suffrage in the Period of Constitution Making, 1787–1865,” Journal of Negro History 32 (April 1947): 143–168.Google Scholar
81 Grimes had been warned out of two other Connecticut towns. William Grimes, “Life of William Grimes the Runaway Slave, Brought Down to the Present Time, Written by Himself,” in Five Black Lives: The Autobiographies of Venture Smith, James Mars, William Grimes, the Rev. G. W. Offley, James L. Smith, ed. Arna Bontemps (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 120.Google Scholar
82 Baltimore American and Commercial Daily Advertiser, December 6, 1831.Google Scholar
83 “Servant-Sleigh-Chair, “ Connecticut Courant, February 2, 1830; “Carriage—Also a Chair for Sale,” Connecticut Courant, March 23, 1830.Google Scholar
84 Wilson McPhail, George to Venable, Mary (Carrington) Grisby, 18 August 1834, Carrington Family Papers, 1755–1839, Virginia Historical Society. Original emphasis.Google Scholar
85 Walker, David Walker's Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preface to the Colored Citizens of the World (Boston, 1830). On the social and political movements contemporaneous to the African college, see Louis P. Masur, 1831: Year of Eclipse (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).Google Scholar
86 For newspapers which printed stories of the African college and Turner's rebellion side-by-side see, for example, Columbian Register, September 10, 1831 and Columbian Register, September 13, 1831. The September 13 edition also contained coverage of a black man who “dashed out” the “brains” of his infant son.Google Scholar
87 “Southampton Affair,” Columbian Register, September 13, 1831.Google Scholar