Ebony and Ivy by Craig Steven Wilder Read Free Book Online Page B

that sheet being paid for by a notice for the sale of black children is appropriate, for the participation of the founders in slave trading was one of their more distinguishing characteristics. 49
    Throughout the Mid-Atlantic and New England, higher education had its greatest period of expansion as the African slave trade peaked. In September 1742 the merchants of Philadelphia set exchange rates in response to a shortage of hard currency. Those endorsing that published agreement included most of the men who later served as the governors of the College of Philadelphia. Quaker Philadelphia was a hub in the transatlantic commercial network. The founders of the new school included the Quakers James Logan and Lloyd Zachary. By the mid-eighteenth century there were more than eighty Quaker slave traders in London. David and John Barclay, who freed their Jamaican slaves shortly after inheriting a plantation, donated to the Philadelphia college and served as its London agents. Philadelphia traders carried provisions and enslaved people to Barbados and the rest of the British Caribbean. Several of the trustees were West Indies merchants, and the board actively sought donors and students from thoseislands. Provost William Smith had come to mainland North America with Josiah Martin, a royal councilor and planter from Antigua, whose slaves had participated in the rebellion of 1736. Martin was a founding trustee of King’s, and he enrolled two of his sons at Philadelphia. 50
    The board included a number of men who traded in indentured British and German servants and enslaved Africans. The bifurcation of the Pennsylvania economy between agriculture and a rising system of manufactories brought calls for laborers with different skills and backgrounds. Meeting these demands had lasting political and social consequences. It sparked cyclical struggles between the Quaker minority and a growing population of European immigrants, who demanded political representation and sought the freedom to war against Indians for control over lands at the western border of the colony. Those who arrived as indentured servants often carried an even greater sense of entitlement upon their emancipation. 51
    Commerce strained the Quaker ethic. In 1684 a British firm had brought 150 enslaved Africans to Philadelphia. “It were better they were blacks,” William Penn, the founding proprietor, decided the following year while addressing the colony’s labor needs, “for then a man has them while they live.” In the eighteenth century the number of Pennsylvania merchants in the Africa trade jumped significantly. William Allen and Joseph Turner, both founding trustees of the College of Philadelphia, formed a partnership that brought slaves from the British Caribbean and servants from Europe. David Barclay represented Allen and Turner in London. The two investors advertised for runaways, including people fleeing their New Jersey iron foundry; used their firm to facilitate slave catching; and sold people from their offices. Aging Philadelphia merchants often drifted into manufacturing to limit their exposure in the riskier Atlantic trade. Prominent families such as the Allens, Turners, and Whartons shaped the iron industry, which used enslaved black and indentured white labor. Allen and Turner invested more than £20,000 in a single foundry. One of Pennsylvania’s wealthiest men, William Allen, sent three sons to the college, two of whom also became trustees. 52

    Samuel Johnson teaching his first class at King’s College,
in a nineteenth-century illustration

SOURCE: New York Public Library
    Philadelphia mayor Charles Willing, a charter trustee of the academy, owned three ships and organized at least six slaving expeditions. A 1747 advertisement he took out announced that “several likely Negro Men and Boys” were to be sold from “the Brigantine
George
from Guinea.” He was also offering rum and sugar from Barbados and a