A Long and Complex Legacy: An Interview with Thai Jones on the Columbia University and Slavery Project

Interviewed by Robb K. Haberman

Today on the blog, editor Robb Haberman speaks with Thai Jones, who co-taught the Columbia University and Slavery Seminar in 2020, about the history of slavery and its continuing legacy at King’s College and Columbia University.

Craig Wilder observes in his Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of American Universities (Bloomsbury Press, 2013), that northern colleges in early America profited in many ways from the practice of slavery. What were some of the key conditions in New York City that define the relationship between slavery and the creation of King's College in 1754 and its subsequent growth in the following two decades? How did the college benefit from the institution of slavery during this period?

Let me begin by saying that the story of King's College/Columbia University and New York City in relation to slavery is one that I think is both diverse and differs greatly with most other educational institutions of this era. For instance, take Georgetown University (founded as Georgetown College in 1789). This institution owned hundreds of enslaved people who were working on grounds owned by the university or by the Jesuits who operated the university.

Slavery at King’s College is quite distinct from the situation at Georgetown. King's College, as far as we can tell, as an institution, did not own individual people itself. However, individual faculty, presidents, trustees, and students as well as alumni, were slave-owners throughout the 18th century and early 19th century. New York City was one of the major centers of enslavement in the American colonies and had a huge population of enslaved people as well as a large community of free African Americans. College affiliates traded goods to the Caribbean, they owned plantations there, and manufactured products that were used in plantations located in the southern colonies and in the Caribbean.

The Livingstons were among New York's most active slave traders during the eighteenth century. https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu/content/3-livingstons

College affiliates also owned plantations and large agricultural establishment in upstate New York, where enslaved people worked on their lands in the Catskills and along the Hudson Valley, as well as in Upper Manhattan. In addition, many college affiliates had enslaved workers serving as domestic and personal servants and as artisans and craftsmen within their homes and workshops in Manhattan. Moreover, trustees who oversaw the shipping of building materials for the original campus had also transported enslaved peoples on the same vessels into Manhattan. Major slave-holding families like the Livingstons, Philipses, and Schuylers had close relations with King’s College. In fact, one student project examined the connections between the Philipse family and enslavement.

We have only found evidence of one actual enslaved person who was on campus, and this was George Washington’s stepson’s personal slave who would come up when Washington’s stepson briefly attended King’s College.

Based on these circumstances, my sense is that the story of slavery at King’s College is extremely diverse even when compared to other universities.

As King’s College was founded as an Anglican institution, what role does the Anglican Church have in shaping the practices involving slavery?

Samuel Johnson, the first president of King's College and a slaveholder. https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu/content/1-kings-college-and-slavery

An important early function of King’s College was the training of ministers. Samuel Johnson, the first president of the college was an Anglican minister, and two of our seminar students this year completed projects on Johnson. Their presentations show that Johnson always had enslaved people in his household, and was extremely callous and cavalier about selling people, including a mother who had just given birth. Yet Johnson simultaneously espoused a Protestant worldview of family, hierarchy, and reciprocal commitments among masters and slaves, faculty and students, monarchs and subjects. The hypocrisy of that contrast seems to have largely escaped him.

It should also be noted that the impact of two major panics affected enslavement in New York during the 18th century — the 1712 and 1741 uprisings. Basically what these two panics did for Anglican leaders was to make them much less receptive to the idea of educating enslaved people and providing them with instruction in religious doctrine. So, if anything, the Anglican clergy in New York were going backwards from what we would see as progress and were more concerned about physical and social control of enslaved people.

How did the events of the American Revolution and founding of the New Nation have an impact on practices involving slavery at King’s College/Columbia University?

King’s College, of course, has a couple of very well known revolutionaries, most notably Alexander Hamilton, who had matriculated at King’s College, but didn't graduate, and John Jay who received both B.A. and M.A. degrees. So the school had a few revolutionaries and a few anti-slavery activists in its ranks. But the vast majority of the King's College establishment was Loyalist. Almost the entire body of governors, as well as the president, fled New York, went to England or ended up in Nova Scotia. King’s College paused classes in 1776 and served as a barracks for English troops throughout the duration of the war. Many of the leaders of King’s College went up to Canada and tried to reestablish a slave economy there. They were joined by thousands of free African Americans who were transported to Nova Scotia by the British. In fact, there’s a King’s College, in Halifax, that was established by Loyalist New Yorkers and which has always considered itself the true successor to New York’s original King’s College.

Let’s not forget that Columbia has moved twice. So the archival record of its early years is quite scant and there are only a handful of boxes related to the entire era of enslavement. It really has been an investigative effort by the seminar students to track down these materials in archives throughout the Northeast.

What about anti-slavery activity at Columbia?

An illustration of two Philolexian Society Pendants. https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu/content/7-columbia-faculty-and-students-and-slavery

There was a small minority of Columbia affiliates that can lay claim to any type of abolition of credibility or the pretense of being active opponents of enslavement. And, a broader point here, is that a lot of institutions have bent over backwards to highlight the occasional abolitionist in their histories in a way I think to minimize the much broader implications of the institution as an upholder of the slave economy and white supremacy. So yes, there were a few notable abolitionists, John Jay II (1817-1894), being I think the most important one in the 19th century. And there were a few institutions, like a debate club, called the Philolexian Society, that did hold a few debates over the years about the morality of enslavement, but you have to really try pretty hard to emphasize Columbians as a force for anti-slavery. My sense is the vast majority of the Columbia footprint on the world at that time was favoring expansion of slavery and profiting from the institution.

Looking beyond the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865, what has been the legacy of slavery at Columbia in the late-19th through the mid-20th century?

To me it's clear that the most significant moment in the history of Columbia and this story of white supremacy is not during the era of enslavement, but actually during Jim Crow when Columbia historians and political scientists created a school of historical thought, known as the revisionist school or the Dunning School. William Dunning was a historian and political scientist at Columbia and the other primary exponent of these ideas, John Burgess, was also a Columbia political scientist. Both of them led the way in rewriting the history of the Civil War in such a way as to not only erase the active participation of African American soldiers in winning the war but also to minimize the evils of enslavement and to create the Lost Cause narrative. This was the time of the film Birth of a Nation, which was a kind of popular cultural expression of this academic school of thought that was really born at Columbia at this time. And Columbia in the 1920s is a really deeply racist place. The yearbooks from that period are filled with blackface cartoons. There was a southern society which was celebrating the Lost Cause narrative. There's a whole legacy of white supremacy and exclusion from fraternities and other social organizations.

Tell us about Columbia University and the Slavery Project. What was the impetus behind starting this program and what are its goals?

Well, let me step back a little bit and say the university and slavery movement or the university studying slavery movement really originated at Brown University in the early 2000s with a faculty-led investigation into the origins of the Brown Brothers firm and Brown University and Rhode Island’s history of enslavement, and then it spread to other Ivy League schools and other colleges. Craig Wilder’s work and the work of Leslie Harris and others had spread this story. It's become, I believe, the most important movement in the field of history right now, or maybe in all of the humanities; it's really a remarkable project. I've been to some related conferences where there are representatives from universities from all over the world. And because of the students at Georgetown and their referendum about reparations, the university and slavery research has actually become one of the most important conversations in the reparations debate. So it's been fascinating to see academic archival research be transfigured into this incredibly potent political force.

The Columbia and Slavery seminar was initiated by historians Karl Jacoby and Eric Foner, with support from President Lee Bollinger in 2015. The goals were relatively open-ended, an inquiry into what archival records would show about the history of Columbia and enslavement. No one had really done much formal research into this question.

So it's now been running for six years. It's an undergraduate seminar that meets in the spring each year, a cohort of advanced undergraduate students. There is a website, the Columbia and Slavery website. It's a public facing history project and it never really did have any explicit political goals, per se. It was begun because other institutions were starting to do this research. Eric Foner felt that it was important and likely going to be quite fruitful to do some research at Columbia. It's now been running for longer than most other institutions. It's really an open-ended research project and it will be going as long as we can find student interest.

Tell us more about the seminar projects, the course curriculum, and the student presentations that take place at the end of the semester.

The course is a seminar, it's a small seminar offered in the spring and has about a dozen students. Each student completes a 25 page research paper. Their papers go on the website. And yes, we do have annual presentations of projects which are open and accessible to the public. This past year, we did it on Zoom.

To me, what really distinguishes the Columbia and Slavery Project from others is that it has been, from its beginning, a teaching and learning project. All of the research has been done by students. So by far and away the most important outcome of this project has been the training and creation of annual cohorts of really skilled and committed historical researchers, many of whom had never done a research project before they came to the course. Many have gone on to pursue graduate studies and have made this research their life's work.

I think this is really what's most important is that we have really been able to train undergraduates in the skills of historical research, giving them the confidence and ability to engage in historiographical arguments with professional historians.

Are there any projects from this past semester that you think are particularly noteworthy and provided unique insight on the legacy of slavery and racism at Columbia?

This year was remarkable as you might imagine. Our course was interrupted at the halfway point by the pandemic. Our students had to go from doing research in archival reading rooms to supplementing that work with digitized archival sources. This situation presented enormous research challenges, as well as the emotional trauma everyone was going through. So we were really amazed and inspired by what the students were able to produce. The papers are available on the website now.

One of my favorites this year was an inquiry into the slave holding of Samuel Johnson, the first president of King’s College. He is obviously a really significant figure in the university history, but no one had really done much of a study about his life, and especially his life in relation to enslavement. So this student went into his archives at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library and found just an enormous amount of information about Johnson and slavery. It had basically been hiding in plain sight all this time.

Other projects that stand out covered the American jurist James Kent, the New York Manumission Society, Francis Lieber, David Hosack, and Sarah Livingston Jay. So it's really an impressive crop of papers this year done under enormous stress and unanticipated difficulties. Student presentations from previous years are also available on the project website. Moreover, many of our students have been involved in campus forums on race and racism. I would see them at these conversations and they were talking to large crowds about questions related to issues that we had discussed in class. The students said they found that the history we had been uncovering to be enormously useful as they were putting contemporary politics into context. They are able to really use the research skills and the revelation of the history to guide their thinking in contemporary moments of crisis.

To what extent has the Slavery Project had an impact on Columbia today in terms of its campus, course curriculums, and business practices?

We are always looking to expand the impact and awareness of our students’ findings. The project has a website and it's relatively well known, but the students always say that they wish it was incorporated into orientation and that there was more of a robust public outreach and community engagement around the project. So there's still work to be done. And every year by far and away the number one priority is to find a way to spread the word about the project and to get Columbia people, as well as community neighbors, to be aware of, involved in, and engaged with  it.

To me, what's been most remarkable has been to see the project itself develop its own internal history, over the course of six years. Student attitudes have changed. Politics have changed radically and student recommendations and approaches to campus racism and societal racism have changed dramatically. They are passionate in their views about how campus dorms, halls, and other spaces are named, they have deep, deep unease about Columbia's relationship to the police, and also a profound desire to find a way to get out of the campus walls and start communicating with community groups and neighboring researchers, and so this is really our priority moving forward — to extend that conversation as far as we can.

Thai Jones is the Herbert H. Lehman Curator for U.S. History at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library and a lecturer in Columbia’s Department of History. He studies radical social movements, New York history, and environmental history in the United States. Heis the author of More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York’s Year of Anarchy (Bloomsbury, 2012).

Robb K. Haberman is an associate editor of The Selected Papers of John Jay and an associate editor for Gotham.