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 Driving Slavery from the North
“Yale, Slavery, and Abolition” rightly points out the ubiquity of slavery in colonial New England: slavery was permitted in all thirteen original colonies. Many eighteenth-century Yale professors, graduates and donors owned slaves, and some Yale funds undoubtedly derive at least in part from slave labor.
However, around the time of the Revolutionary War, many Americans began to realize that slavery was indefensible. Quakers had openly opposed slavery for years, but now others, including many Yale men, began to speak out. Even setting aside antislavery men mentioned by the slavery report, there is not space here to adequately review Yale’s part in driving slavery from the North and resisting its movement into the western territories.
In 1773-1774, Ebenezer Baldwin (Yale, 1763) joined with Jonathan Edwards, Jr. (Princeton, 1765) in publishing a series of antislavery articles in The Connecticut Journal and the New-Haven Post-Boy. They declared:
“Has it not a shrewd appearance of inconsistence, to make a loud outcry against the British Parliament for making laws to oblige us to pay certain duties, which amount to but a mere trifle for each individual; when we are deeply engaged in reducing a large body of people to complete and perpetual slavery?”1
Levi Hart (Yale, 1760) pointed out the same inconsistency in a 1774 sermon entitled Liberty Described and Recommended . . . . He urged the Connecticut assembly to prohibit the importation of slaves, as Rhode Island had:
“Can this colony want motives from reason, justice, religion, or public spirit, to follow the example? When, O when shall the happy day come, that Americans shall be consistently engaged in the cause of liberty, and a final end be put to the cruel slavery of our fellow men?”2
New England assemblies began to respond to protests like these. A few weeks after Hart gave his sermon, Connecticut banned slave importation. In 1784, it passed a gradual emancipation law. In 1788, Jonathan Edwards, Jr. and Levi Hart led Connecticut’s Congregational ministers in petitioning the legislature to ban the slave trade, and their petition was successful. Though economic and military motives had a part in eliminating slavery in the North, mounting public outcry was important.3
“The Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom and the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Holden in Bondage” was formed in 1790 because many of Connecticut’s leading citizens were dissatisfied with the state’s limited and slow emancipation measures. The Society was made up largely of Yale men. Yale members included Noah Webster (Yale, 1778), Chauncey Goodrich (Yale, 1776), Zephaniah Swift (Yale, 1778), Levi Hart (Yale, 1760), Uriah Tracy (Yale, 1778), Simeon Baldwin (Yale, 1781), Timothy Dwight (President of Yale, 1795-1817), and many others.4
This association joined other antislavery groups in memorializing Congress for the abolition of the slave trade, and it also tried to bring about the complete abolition of slavery in Connecticut. Even though it failed in the latter purpose, some of the antislavery sermons delivered and published by the Society proved to be highly influential when a general abolition movement was born in the 19th century. Jonathan Edwards, Jr. and Timothy Dwight’s brother Theodore Dwight delivered perhaps the most powerful of these addresses.5
In 1787, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance. Article Six of the Ordinance, which outlawed the transportation of slaves into the Northwest Territory, was probably included at the behest of Manasseh Cutler (Yale, 1765).6 It set an important precedent for restricting the movement of slavery into the western territories.
By 1804, all the states from Pennsylvania north had passed emancipation laws, and in 1807 Congress banned the slave trade, though slavery still grew and prospered in the South.7
1. As quoted in Roger Bruns, ed., Am I Not a Man and a Brother: The Antislavery Crusade of Revolutionary America 1688-1788, (New York, Chelsea House Publishers, 1977), p. 294; see also Kenneth Pieter Minkema, The Edwardses: a Ministerial Family in Eighteenth-Century New England, (Ann Arbor, UMI, 1988), pp. 507-509, 522, n. 109-110. Minkema asserts that the October 8, 1773 piece is by Edwards alone, and that the 1774 articles are by Baldwin. Jonathan Edwards, Jr. was the son of the Jonathan Edwards for whom the residential college is named.
2. As quoted in Bruns, ed., p. 347.
3. Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North, (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 107-108, 123-124, 156-157. See also Mary Stoughton Locke, Anti-Slavery in America from the Introduction of African Slaves to the Prohibition of the Slave Trade (1619-1808), (Boston, Ginn & company, 1901), pp. 40-41; and Minkema, The Edwardses, pp. 508-509.
4. List of society members is in Green’s Register, for the State of Connecticut: with an Almanack, for the Year of Our Lord, 1792, (New-London, T. Green & son, [1791]), pp. 64-67.
5. Leonard Woods Labaree, comp., The Public Records of the State of Connecticut, from May 1793 through October 1796, (Hartford, Connecticut State Library, 1951), pp. xvii-xx; Locke, Anti-Slavery in America, pp. 99, 103-104, 126-127, 141; Minkema, The Edwardses, pp. 509-512; Zilversmit, The First Emancipation, pp. 201-202.
6. Article on Manasseh Cutler, American National Biography Online: www.anb.org/articles/08/08-00341-article.htm
7. Zilversmit, p. 226; Locke, Anti-Slavery in America, pp. 148-156, 158-159. |
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