The Revolution had strained and fractured the new country’s educational infrastructure. British and American forces had used college campuses for headquarters, barracks, and hospitals. The governors of Harvard in Cambridge, Yale in New Haven, King’s College (now Columbia University) in New York City, the College of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania), and the College of Rhode Island (now Brown University) in Providence had had to close their schools or relocate to interior towns as British forces attacked vulnerable port cities. The officers of Rutgers and Princeton dispersed their students and faculties as the fighting approached their gates. British troops targeted the College of William and Mary in Virginia and burned a portion of the campus while French soldiers camped there. Because of its remote location, Dartmouth College in New Hampshire was spared physical damage but emerged from the Revolution in fiscal crisis.
But a renaissance was near. The revival of the slave trade in New England and the mid-Atlantic and the expansion of plantation slavery in the South allowed white Americans to rescue the old colonial colleges from the wreckage of war and raise eighteen new colleges before the turn of the century. In less than two decades, the slave economy underwrote an academic revolution that tripled the number of colleges and transformed the nation’s intellectual geography.
The expansion of higher education tracked the southward and westward movements of plantation slavery. The Presbyterians founded seven new schools, five of them in the South. The Episcopalians built three Southern colleges. North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee established public universities. Governor Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia legislature chartered Transylvania College in Kentucky, the first college west of the Alleghenies.
Early American colleges preyed upon the bodies, labor, and lives of enslaved Black people. In 1789 Bishop John Carroll and the Roman Catholic clergy founded Georgetown College (now Georgetown University) in what would soon become the new federal district. Carroll’s small community of Catholic priests began planning a church with national reach, administered from Georgetown and funded by slavery.
Catholic clerics and families, emboldened by the promise of religious freedom, had ventured into Kentucky after the Revolution, where they established a base for the church’s southern and western expansion. A few years later Father Patrick Smyth, a visitor from Ireland, published a scathing account of his tenure in the United States that revealed the brutal realities of “institutional slavery.” The Maryland slave plantations were sources and sites of clerical immorality and improvidence, he warned. The Irish priest detailed multiple abuses. A contemporary offered some additional insight into Father Smyth’s urgent protests. During his tour of Maryland, the French republican Brissot de Warville exposed the public secret of systemic rape on the church’s plantations. The priests were “keeping harems of Negro women, from whom was born a mixed race,” Warville charged, while pleading for the abolition of slavery and the cultivation of some “more moral and profitable crop” than tobacco.
In the decades after the Revolution, human slavery allowed the United States to establish a system of public and private colleges and universities, and the inhumanities of that relationship would echo through the history of American higher education.
1804–1809
COTTON
Kiese Laymon
I blame cotton.
Grandmama is massaging the tummies of teacakes in her kitchen. The smell, and only the smell, will make it to tomorrow. I’m watching Walter Payton run to and from yesterday on CBS.
Everyone on Grandmama’s TV, in Grandmama’s kitchen, is wearing cotton.
I hear a Black man stomp his butter brown boots onto her porch.
I am eight years old, wearing a cotton V-neck, and I feel good.
There are four bangs outside Grandmama’s screen door. No one who knocks on Grandmama’s screen in the summer knocks more than three times. Most folks don’t knock at all. They simply press their faces as close to the screen as possible and say, “Hey, Ms. Cat. Y’all good?”
On this summer day, Grandmama is asking who in the world is up in there banging on her door like the police.
No one in the world is banging on Grandmama’s door like the police.
Outside the screen door stands an old Black man with frown lines even deeper than Grandmama’s. The depth of those frown lines, the heavy hang of both lips, the creases beneath his graying eyes, give this old Black man’s familiar face a symmetry I find sexy. In addition to his butter brown boots, his lean ashen body is held up in these sky-blue overalls. Tucked under his right armpit is a huge wrinkled paper sack. And as with most of the old Black men of Forest, Mississippi, I can see the imprint of what I assume is a small .22 in his front bib pocket.
Over a supper of collard greens, black-eyed peas, and squirrel dumplings that I just refuse to eat because the squirrel in the dumpling looks just like the squirrels on her pecan trees, Grandmama tells me not to dare call this man my great-granddaddy. “Call him Albert Payton,” Grandmama says right in front of his face. “That’s who he always been to me. Albert. Payton.”
I usually sleep in Grandmama’s bed, but that night she asks me to sleep in one of the two beds in what she calls her back bedroom.
“Why I gotta sleep in the same room with that man?” I whisper to her. “I don’t even know that joker. And he smell funny.”
“Because I said so.” Grandmama laughs. “He liable to steal everything that ain’t nailed down if he don’t…” She trails off.
“If he don’t what?”
“If he don’t have as many good folks watching him as he can find, if you know what I mean.” Whenever Grandmama says “if you know what I mean,” I always feel grown. And like most grown folks, I never ask her to clarify what she actually means. I just smirk and nod up and down super slowly.
That night, while Grandmama sleeps in the bedroom next to ours, I watch Albert Payton, lying on his back, go in the bib pocket of his overalls, and take out his gun and a bulb of cotton. I watch him place this gun and bulb of cotton on the ironing board next to his bed.
I’d never felt on cotton. I’d felt cotton on my body. I’d seen cotton a few times driving from Jackson to the Delta. But I’d never felt on cotton.
So while my grandmama’s father sleeps, I get up and I grab the bulb of cotton. I gently feel the seeds. The nearly crumbling brown flower holding the actual cloud is twisted in more ways than one. I smell it. I can’t smell anything. I smell it again. I smell Grandmama. But it’s her house.
Over the next few days, I learn that my great-grandfather, who was a shitty father to every child he fathered, was a wizard at picking cotton. He doesn’t talk, so when I ask questions, Grandmama answers them.
Why are your hands so rough?