Money acquired through the slave trade has sometimes been whispered about as Brown University’s dirty secret. A new book examines those ties to Brown and Dartmouth.

Joseph Asch of Dartblog reports.

Slaves at Dartmouth

The New York Times has published a laudatory review of a new book, Ebony and Ivy, on the relationship of America’s first institutions of higher learning to the slave trade. Following on work of other scholars in this area, particularly concerning Brown University, former College history professor Craig Wilder, now a professor at MIT, dug into numerous archives to discover disquieting truths common to the nation’s top schools, including Dartmouth:

… Mr. Wilder, scholars say, seems to be the first to look beyond particular campuses to take a broader look at the role of slavery in the growth of America’s earliest universities, which, he argues, were more than just “innocent or passive beneficiaries” of wealth derived from the slave trade.
“Craig shows that what happened at one institution wasn’t simply incidental or idiosyncratic,” said James Wright, a former president of Dartmouth College, which is discussed in the book. “Slavery was deeply embedded in all our institutions, which found ways to explain and rationalize slavery, even after the formation of the American republic.”

“Ebony and Ivy,” published by Bloomsbury, documents connections between slavery and various universities’ founding moments, whether it is the bringing of eight black slaves to campus by Dartmouth’s first president, Eleazar Wheelock, or the announcement by Columbia University (then named King’s College) of the swearing in of its first trustees on a broadside paid for with a single advertisement: for a slave auction near Beekman’s Slip in Lower Manhattan.

The Washington Post’s review of Wilder’s book adds several pertinent comments:

I was saddened to read that “before they became the presidents of the College of New Jersey [Princeton] and Yale, respectively, the Connecticut evangelist Jonathan Edwards and the Rhode Island minister Ezra Stiles both purchased African children through the captains of slave ships in Newport.”…