It is perhaps intuitive that Yale University—founded in 1701 on land conquered and colonized following the Pequot War of 1637–38 and King Philip’s War of 1675–77, and partially built by enslaved African laborers—would represent a very fruitful historical case study through which to narrate the long history and afterlives of racial slavery in the Americas. Yale, as David W. Blight convincingly shows in Yale and Slavery: A History, has also served as a profoundly conservative pillar of America’s elite intellectual life. In this 2024 book, Blight and his many collaborators with the Yale & Slavery Project have created a remarkably illuminating and multidimensional narrative, which showcases a profound depth and breadth of research. This innovative monograph represents a consistently contemplative effort to somehow “grapple” with the profoundly bitter legacies of slavery and racism as defining features of American history and political life.
Yale and Slavery demonstrates the broad power of a major institutional history to reach out and address a very robust range of events and topics. The book offers compelling windows into the violent conquest of New England, indigenous and Black slavery in the northern colonies, early Black intellectual history, American abolitionism, and key moments in the history of Black resistance to slavery, such as the 1839 Amistad uprising. Indeed, this book might well offer one of the most thorough and detailed overviews of the entire history of the Amistad uprising, including the remarkable public impact that the adjudication of their case in New Haven had and the multiple public appearances made by the Amistad rebels as they raised funds for their eventual successful return to Sierra Leone. Yale and Slavery is in part a transnational and globally oriented Atlantic history, offering important glimpses into the history of the English East India Company as it reconstructs the ways in which the university’s namesake donor Elihu Yale grew rich from trade in Asian textiles and gems while presiding over regular patterns of slave trading in his decades as a top company official in India.
The monograph also offers an intellectual history of patrician political thought in colonial New England and the early United States. From the very beginning, Blight works to repeatedly showcase the slippages and contradictions within the ideas of leading theologians and university leaders whose interests in philosophy, science, and politics were invariably shaped by the country’s economic dependence on slavery and the overwhelming ideological ubiquity of white supremacy. He pays careful attention to the religious doctrines and the philosophical worldviews of the early Puritan conquerors of New England, elucidating in depth the ways in which they reconciled their firm Calvinist moral codes with the widespread slave trading and slaveholding that prevailed in their colonial holdings. While Blight gives appropriate attention to a range of abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, James Pennington, and Alexander Crummell, he appropriately emphasizes the conservative and accommodationist mindsets that prevailed at Yale across centuries. The book highlights, in particular, the self-interested thinking among elite whites who overwhelmingly preferred avoiding trouble with the Southern slaveocracy, blocked the creation of America’s first proposed Black College in 1831, and sent as many American Blacks as they could away to the American Colonization Society resettlement scheme in Liberia. In this way, the book offers a well-grounded and realistic reflection on the intertwined phenomena of reactionary conservatism and moderate conservatism.
Yale and Slavery is much more of a political, intellectual, and even at times a cultural history than an economic one. The book provides few numbers through which to consider the financial role of slavery and colonialism in Yale’s history. But Blight does make clear how important early windfalls from the underlying history of indigenous conquest and indigenous and African slavery were to Yale’s rise to becoming a $40-billion institution. For example, he shows the university relied on colonial Connecticut’s tax revenue from the Caribbean rum trade and that a substantial amount of slave labor was used to construct Connecticut Hall. Many of Yale’s trustees, rectors, founders, presidents, and major donors, in turn, were slaveholders, slave traders, merchants, and participants in the West Indian trade. Enos Alling, who donated £15 to Yale College, conducted trade voyages bringing molasses, rum, and sugar from Anguilla, Turks and Caicos, and the Leeward islands to Connecticut. The slaveowner Captain Theophilus Munson donated 11 pounds to Yale. And Philip Livingston Sr., a member of the richest of these slave-trading family dynasties, donated £28 and 10 shillings. “[W]ithout these merchant families, the college would not have prospered into the leading American institution of higher learning that it became by the time of the American Revolution,” Blight writes. “The West Indian trade, rooted so deeply in slavery, was an indispensable element in Yale College’s birth, growth, and eventual prosperity” (60).
Like many others who have written in this vein, Blight refers roughly 10 times to Yale and its leaders’ and patrons’ “entanglements” with slavery. This recurrent usage of “entanglement” across many studies of this type is perhaps vaguely reminiscent of American founders’ curious posture of sometimes blaming the British empire for imposing upon them the troublesome institution of slavery, which they would ultimately preserve and expand. “Entanglement” suggests that some of history’s most successful slavery investors somehow passively or inadvertently wound up in the historical “predicament” of winning out from colonialism and slavery. To suggest that slaveowners or statesmen were somehow caught in historical spiders’ webs would be to miss the fact that within such an analogy, they were in fact the spiders.
Yale and Slavery provides a model for how other American and European institutions might begin to deeply investigate their historical links to enslavement and Indigenous dispossession. Thanks to this remarkable book, the early founders and trustees of Yale University cannot remain detached from the enslaved and dispossessed Africans and Native Americans whose names Blight documents as part of the university’s history. But it also forcefully poses the question of repair. Built and sustained with this Atlantic colonial wealth, what kind of debt does Yale owe to the victims of the racism that it helped produce and sustain for centuries?
The epilog focuses directly on the ethical and political importance of understanding the past in relation to the present. Yet Yale and Slavery does not go beyond the realm of historical research. Given that Blight says that Yale University’s decision to conduct an inquiry was inspired by the 2015 massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, as well as the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 and the growing Black Lives Matter Movement, one might wonder whether Blight would discuss how Yale University plans to address the legacies of racism and inequality that persist into our contemporary moment. Yet the ending carefully avoids the debates over reparations, which have become quite widespread in recent years. The epilog therefore calls to mind Hilary Beckles’ critique of a pattern he calls “research and run,” a situation in which universities began to look at their historical connection to enslavement—and then decide to stop. For his part, Blight proposes future research at Yale to investigate twentieth-century connections to histories of eugenics, scientific racism, and forced sterilization. But including a frank discussion of how Yale University might address these legacies of slavery would have made this a bolder (if also a more controversial) book. And it would have brought home Blight’s arguments about why this history matters in the present. The absence of these reparative discussions in Yale & Slavery, in some ways, represents an echo of the university’s conservative past.
