Ebony and Ivy by Craig Steven Wilder Read Free Book Online

Scottish Anglican educated at King’s College in Aberdeen, saw his proposal for a New York academy wither during this conflict. Benjamin Franklin recruited Smith to help raise the status of his Philadelphia academy. “I am sorry it meets so great opposition,” Elizabeth DeLancey, daughter of Cadwallader Colden, later wrote of the factionalism that continued to jeopardize her husband Peter DeLancey’s hopes for a college. 41
    William Livingston’s three-year war against the college diminished the Anglican victory, took a heavy toll on advocates such as Governor James DeLancey, and tarnished the public image of the school before it ever received a student. However, he had been less successful at drawing his merchant brothers to the cause. Philip, John, and Peter Livingston became trustees, sponsors, or benefactors. 42
    The division within Livingston Manor is suggestive of a greater social and economic transformation in New York. There was a tension between the sectarian origins of the colonies and the development of an Atlantic commerce, particularly the slave trade, dependent upon intercolonial economic and social relationships. Merchants were, in fact, a visible presence and important faction in the governance of the new school.
    In the charter of King’s College, George II appointed his clerics and public administrators as ex officio trustees: the archbishop of Canterbury, the governor, secretary, and treasurer of New York, the justices of the supreme court, the mayor, and the senior Episcopal, Dutch Reformed, Lutheran, French Protestant, andPresbyterian ministers. The public trustees included slaveholders and slave traders such as Mayor David Holland and Abraham De-Peyster. Perhaps to calm the public, Governor DeLancey, recruited the rest of the board from the city’s commercial leaders: Frederick Philipse, John and Henry Cruger, Paul Richard, Joseph Robinson, John Lawrence, John Watts, Leonard Lispenard, Joseph Reade, Nathaniel Marston, Oliver DeLancey, Henry Beekman, Joseph Haynes, John Livingston, Philip Verplanck, Philip Livingston, and David Clarkson. In the following decades the trustees continued to come from this stratum, including Ludlows, Duanes, Provoosts, and Morrises. William Alexander, a Livingston in-law, and Beverly Robinson, the husband of the merchant princess Susannah Philipse, joined the board along with Charles Ward Apthorpe, whose Elmwood estate in upper Manhattan drew comparisons to the grandeur of ancient Rome. 43

    Philip Livingston, a founding benefactor of King’s College
(Columbia) and Queen’s (Rutgers)

SOURCE: Brooklyn Historical Society
    King’s was a merchants’ college. In its first two decades it enrolled nearly ninety sons of the commercial class, more children of Atlantic traders than any other college in British North America. Although a fire destroyed many of the treasurer’s reports for colonial New York, the slaving activities of the trustees show through eventhis damaged and incomplete record. In the month before the execution of the charter, several governors or patrons traded slaves. In September 1754 the sloop
Polly
docked in Manhattan holding seven enslaved Africans with its other cargo. Two people died during the
Polly
’s return. This was just a few weeks before Nathaniel Marston, a partial owner of the venture, became a trustee. That same month Philip Livingston’s sloop returned from the African coast, and the following month John Livingston’s ship completed a voyage to Jamaica. In the years before he became a trustee, David Clarkson had partnered in several slaving voyages. Matthew Clarkson, a future trustee, was active in the trade long after the opening of King’s. The number of trustees trading in slaves increased through the 1750s. 44
    In May 1755 Governor DeLancey brought the charter—which Attorney General William Kempe, a trustee, had prepared—to Edward Willett’s house to swear in the new