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Timothy Dwight on Slavery
Timothy Dwight on slavery
“O happy state! the state, by HEAVEN design’d . . .
Where none are slaves, or lords; but all are men . . . .”1
Timothy Dwight on the United States, and freedom:
“The white population of this country is universally free. This I trust, will ere long be true of the black population. In 1810, near two hundred thousand of these people had been emancipated, or been born in a state of freedom. The number is annually increasing. The disposition to emancipate slaves, and the conviction that they ought to be emancipated, are gaining ground; and there is no reason to doubt that they will spread wherever slaves are holden. In every other respect our freedom is as entire as that of any country, ancient or modern.”2
Timothy Dwight and Southern slavery:
To Benjamin Silliman when he considered taking charge of an academy at Sunbury, Georgia:
“I advise you not to go to Georgia. I would not voluntarily, unless under the influence of some commanding moral duty, go to live in a country where slavery is established....”3
“President Dwight, on one occasion, in illustrating [African Americans’] good qualities, spoke of a negro woman, in his family, who was often consulted as to the management of his family concerns. Amused by this eulogy, some of my classmates laughed outright; when the Doctor broke out upon them: ‘If I thought, young gentlemen, that you would have as much good judgment and good sense as my servant woman has, I should have a higher opinion of you than I now have.’ There was no more laughing.”
(William C. Fowler, Yale Class of 1816)4
“Supreme memorial of the world’s dread fall;
O slavery! laurel of the Infernal mind,
Proud Satan’s triumph over lost mankind!”5
Back to Timothy Dwight article
1. Timothy Dwight, Greenfield Hill: A Poem in Seven Parts, (New-York, Childs and Swaine, 1794) part VII, ll. 127, 136.
2. Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, (Cambridge, Mass., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), v. IV, p. 367.
3. George Park Fisher, Life of Benjamin Silliman, (New York, Charles Scribner and Company, 1866), I, p. 92.
4. William C. Fowler, The Historical Status of the Negro in Connecticut, (New Haven, Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor, 1875), pp. 131-132.
5. Timothy Dwight, Greenfield Hill: A Poem in Seven Parts, (New-York, Childs and Swaine, 1794) part II, ll. 258-260.
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