Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War

The New Haven Negro College and the Dynamics of Race in New England, 1776–1870

172  The New Haven Negro College and the Dynamics of Race in New England, 1776–1870 8 In 1831, a group of black and white abolitionists embarked on a pathbreaking experiment: they would establish an academic institution devoted to educating young African Americans, and, most unprecedented, it would be funded by philanthropists of both races. Modeling their scheme on the manual labor schools already popular in Germany and England, the planners adopted a curriculum designed to help students “cultivate habits of personal industry and obtain a useful mechanical or agricultural occupation, while pursuing classical studies.” Organizers expected to attract talented candidates from all parts of the North, and they focused as well on the British West Indies, whose “respectable” free colored families might be persuaded to choose the school for their sons. For their innovative institution, the founders chose a prime location in the city of New Haven, twenty acres close by Yale College, whose presumably benevolent faculty would offer instruction at nominal cost. Supporters as well as detractors soon began referring to the proposed institution as the “Negro College.”1 The plan for the college was unveiled in Philadelphia on June 11, Originally published as “The New Haven Negro College and the Meanings of Race in New England, 1776–1870,” New England Quarterly 76 (September 2003): 323–55. Reprinted with permission. 1. For a general history of the origins of the Negro College project, see Howard Holman Bell, ed., Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions (1831; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1969), 6; Bell, Survey of the Negro Convention Movement, 1830–1861 (New York: Arno Press, 1969); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1969), 87–91; and James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1991), 57–74. Several letters Garrison and Simeon Jocelyn exchanged on the Negro College project are in the collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford.
173  The New Haven Negro College and the Dynamics of Race 1831, at the First Annual Convention of the Free People of Color by three freshly minted white abolitionists: Arthur Tappan, an affluent New York merchant; William Lloyd Garrison, militant editor of a new, Boston-based abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator; and Simeon Jocelyn, a minister who served the African American parishioners of New Haven ’s Dixwell Congregational Church. The convention representatives who rose to applaud the idea included the wealthy Philadelphia entrepreneur James Forten; Bishop Richard Allen, the free states’ most prominent African American cleric; and Samuel E. Cornish, editor of the nation’s first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal. Forten, Allen, and Cornish, the North’s most visible activists of color, had led their communities with distinction for decades. The energized delegates adjourned to drum up subscriptions for the Negro College. Never before in the nation’s history had racial activists worked together so closely and enthusiastically on a project of such ambitious scope and in an alliance that brought together young and old, black and white. Arthur Tappan pledged an initial gift of one thousand dollars, and, joined by his equally wealthy brother Lewis, promised to match additional gifts up to a total of twenty thousand dollars. To facilitate his firsthand involvement, Tappan bought a house in New Haven just after the convention adjourned. Simeon Jocelyn, a proud booster for his city, confidently asserted that “the literary and scientific character of New-Haven renders it a very desirable place for the location of the College.”2 Jocelyn’s optimism, however, proved woefully misplaced. In late August 1831, only a week after he praised the municipality, news of Nat Turner’s bloody slave insurrection in Virginia hit the North, just as New Havenites were convening their town meeting to consider the Negro College. In recent years, white New Havenites had grown increasingly distrustful of “vagabond Negroes.” As ever greater numbers of African Americans entered the city, residents accused them of undermining moral order and undercutting the white labor market. In the midst of these national and local racial crises, townsmen voted 700 to 4 to 2. Simeon Jocelyn, quoted in Robert Austin Warner, New Haven Negroes: A Social History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), 54.
174  CONSEQUENCES condemn the college proposal and, moreover, to resist it “by every legal means.” Some quickly foreswore legalities and formed themselves into...