Revealing slavery’s legacy at a public university in the South (Part 1)

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This 1820 watercolor shows an early view of the campus.  Image:  South Caroliniana Library

This 1820 watercolor shows an early view of the campus. Photo credit: South Caroliniana Library of the University of South Carolina

Written on the landscape of the University of South Carolina is an untold yet well-documented story of slavery. Enslaved people constructed the buildings of the university’s antebellum predecessor, South Carolina College, attended to the wants of white students and faculty, and performed countless tasks essential to running the college. This story is not unique in the history of American colleges and universities. Even in places where slavery was not widespread, the profits from slavery helped fund institutions of higher learning. Scholars have been slow to examine American universities’ historical association with slavery, and universities have been even slower to acknowledge it. The current momentum, however, favors expanding the discussion of these complicated topics. 

This three-part series reflects on the motivations, strategies, and outcomes of a website, “Slavery at South Carolina College, 1801-1865,” produced by graduate students in the spring of 2011. We offer the University of South Carolina as one case study among various ongoing efforts to confront the troubled legacy of slavery and American history. This story is essential to understanding the history of universities which educated many American political and intellectual leaders. It also highlights how slavery permeated America’s institutions, businesses, and everyday life. Most importantly, it is an opportunity for universities to frankly expose the gap between practices and ideals in American history.

Our team built on the work of other historians of slavery. [1] We applied the collective wisdom of these historians to the case of South Carolina College and experimented with a digital platform to take that story public, revealing the central role of slavery in the history of the institution and thus increasing public awareness of the pervasiveness of slavery in local and national history. Likewise, we surveyed pioneering initiatives at other universities to familiarize ourselves with the possible conversations and products of such an undertaking. Brown University, for example, formed a committee that investigated the university’s deep connections to the slave trade. They made their findings public, created curricula for teachers, proposed public programs, and called for memorials.

Other universities acknowledged their historical ties to slavery in different ways. In 2004, the faculty of the University of Alabama erected a marker near the gravesite of two slaves once owned by the university and issued an apology, while the University of Virginia issued a statement of regret in 2007. Apologies and regrets from universities have faced criticism from two sides, those who felt such sentiments were meaningless without further discussion and those who felt universities were needlessly opening old wounds better left forgotten.

Initiatives led by other schools generated tours, websites, and other programs with varying success. Staff in the archives at the University of North Carolina created a website and walking tour that interpreted the places of slavery on their campus. (This site is no longer available at UNC but can be found on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.) Like Brown University, Emory University and the College of William and Mary created outreach and educational programs for students and the community. They also used their histories as talking points for discussions about race. Some of these projects were initiated by people within university administrations, others by interested faculty members, and some were generated by students. Such programs were springboards for examinations of injustices these universities continued to perpetrate against African Americans following the end of slavery.

Our team at USC knew that the best projects on college slavery went beyond academic papers and instead engaged members of surrounding communities. After considering factors including institutional support, potential community engagement and/or backlash, and the constraints on our time as researching graduate students, we ultimately decided on a website as the appropriate medium for our project. A website could potentially reach the most people and did not require significant material support from the university, beyond the encouragement and support of the instructor and university librarians. We explored potential initial host sites and chose Weebly, which provided a good balance of user-friendliness and customization, especially for a group of historians who had never designed a website. The website is now hosted on a permanent university library server.

College financial records, like this 1844 receipt for contracted labor, shed light on the lives and work of enslaved people at South Carolina College.  Image:  South Caroliniana Library

College financial records, like this 1844 receipt for contracted labor, shed light on the lives and work of enslaved people at South Carolina College. Photo credit: South Caroliniana Library

A topic as important as the untold story of slavery at South Carolina College necessitated grounding in original, compelling research. A senior seminar in fall 2010 led by Robert Weyeneth generated some preliminary research that uncovered important information about slavery at the college. In Weyeneth’s graduate seminar on Historic Site Interpretation, we decided to take this research further by digging deeply into college records. Archivists were supportive of the project but initially unsure about the quantity and quality of material on slavery available in the university collections. The breakthrough came when we discovered the wealth of information in the records of the College Treasurer’s Office, which provided an unexpectedly rich source for the financial transactions–including purchasing or hiring enslaved workers–surrounding slavery and the early college.

Our class worked to keep the focus on enslaved people, not the slaveholders. We also felt it was important to represent the slaveholding power structure that determined much of a slave’s life. These concerns shaped what we included on the website and how we organized our information. Our class had some spirited discussions about whether to include the “Students and Slavery” and “Names on the Landscapes” sections. Were they necessary to telling the story or did they merely privilege white perspectives while overshadowing black ones? We justified these sections by focusing on interactions between the enslaved population and the students and faculty. The “Students and Slavery” section is also important as a way to reach one of our more important target audiences: current University of South Carolina students. Reexamining students and instructors within the context of slavery also gave us the opportunity to touch on their opinions concerning slavery.

The main sections of the website focus on the lives of the campus slaves themselves. This proved difficult because as with most “subaltern” histories, little documentation has survived concerning the slaves in comparison to the larger availability of information about their owners. However, we sifted through resources ranging from financial records to meeting minutes of the trustees of the college to find as many references to individual slaves as possible. Our findings comprise the “Campus Slaves and Slavery” and “Remembering the Slaves” sections of the website.

Part 2 follows.

~ Evan Kutzler is a PhD candidate in history and an alumnus of the Public History Program at the University of South Carolina. He writes on nineteenth-century America, public history, and, especially, the history of the senses.

~ JoAnn Zeise is an alumna of the Public History Program at the University of South Carolina. She received her MA in the summer of 2012. She is currently the Curator of History at the South Carolina State Museum. Her research interests include the cultural history and material culture of South Carolina.

~ Sarah Conlon is an alumna of the Public History program at the University of South Carolina. Her research interests are gender and healthcare in the US South. She received her MA in the summer 2012. She is currently the Collections Manager at the Battleship TEXAS State Historic Site in La Porte, Texas.

~ Jamie Diane Wilson is a PhD candidate in US History and Instructor in US History to 1865 at the University of South Carolina. Her research interests include Antebellum Southern intellectual history and public history.

[1] For some of the key scholarship underpinning our work, see Ira Berlin, “American Slavery in History and Memory and the Search for Social Justice,” Journal of American History 90, no. 4 (March 2004), 1251-1268; James Oliver Horton, “Slavery in American History: An Uncomfortable National Dialogue,” in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of Memory, ed., James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, (New York: The New Press, 2006), 37; Robert R. Weyeneth, “The Power of Apology and the Process of Historical Reconciliation,” The Public Historian 23, 3 (Summer, 2001), 9-38; and the roundtable discussion, “History, Memory, and Retrospective Justice,” The Public Historian 29, 2 (Spring 2007), 13-34.

 

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