Erika Lindemann
The lives of
University students were made comfortable by a group of
people whom students encountered daily but rarely wrote about—the
servants. Most servants were slaves. They hauled water to students' rooms every
day and on cold mornings built fires in each fireplace before dawn. They cooked
for students and did their laundry. They accompanied students to school and
drove carriages back home. They maintained the boarding houses and the homes of
faculty members. They cleaned campus buildings, which they also had helped to
build. They built the rock walls enclosing the grounds. Antebellum students
rarely wrote about the slaves with whom they came in daily contact; when they
did, they expressed either genuine affection for them or a coldness offensive
to modern readers.
Some faculty members owned slaves, and a majority of students came
from slave-holding families. The
University also employed slaves, hiring their time from
their masters so that they could work on the campus. The awful reality of
slavery is perhaps most apparent in reading newspapers of the period, which
routinely advertised slaves for sale or offered rewards for their return.
1 Census
records reveal that the slave population for
Orange
County, NC, site of the
University, peaked in 1830, when slaves numbered 7,339 and
whites, 15,918 (
Lefler and Wager
96).
Orange
County also had the largest slave population of any county in the
North
Carolina Piedmont, though the slaves were widely dispersed on only a few
large plantations.
Most of the slaves in
Chapel
Hill were household servants or campus laborers. Some were well known in
the village.
Benny Booth had waited on
James Knox
Polk
when he was a student. He was still working at the
University thirty years later when
President
Polk
revisited the campus in 1847. Nicknamed "Brick Top,"
Booth made extra money by allowing students to crack
boards over his head (
Henderson 95;
Russell,
These Old Stone
Walls 78). "
Davidge [1791-1872], popularly called 'Dr. November,' was
the carriage driver for
Dr.
Joseph Caldwell
of
Chapel
Hill for many years. He boasted that he had blacked boots for senators,
made beds for governors, and even waited on
President
James K. Polk
" (
Lefler and Wager
98).
Dave
Barham
, who hired his time from his master to work for
Elisha
Mitchell
, was a dignified man, "often called upon to attend
visiting celebrities" (
Russell,
These Old Stone
Walls 78). A runaway slave named
James,
however, "who for the last four years attended
Chapel
Hill in the capacity of college servant" (quoted in
Lefler and Wager
103) clearly did not regard working for
the
University a privilege. Perhaps the best known slave of the
antebellum period was
George
Moses Horton
, who paid his master to be allowed to work on campus.
Having taught himself to read and write,
Horton
composed poems to sell to students and occasionally
to publish in local newspapers.
Prior to 1830 many
Chapel
Hillians had belonged to the
American Colonization Society, a national organization
founded in 1816 to relocate slaves to
Liberia. Some
also were members of the
North Carolina Manumission Society, founded by
Quakers in
the same year to urge whites to free their slaves. By the late 1820s
abolitionist fervor and
Denmark
Vesey's organized rebellion in
Charleston in 1822 had made
North
Carolinians increasingly nervous about the possibility of slave
insurrections in the state. In 1830
North
Carolina legislators enacted a law forbidding "all persons from
teaching slaves to read and write, the use of figures excepted" (
Franklin
68). Few people were ever brought to trial for violating this law, and many
southerners persisted in believing that slaves should be taught to read the
Bible and other
religious materials (
Cornelius 36). But such laws and the so-called "
Free Negro
Code," which curtailed the privileges of
African-Americans who had won their freedom, had important
symbolic value. They offered the appearance of protection to whites who felt
increasingly threatened by their slaves. In 1831 the
Nat Turner rebellion in neighboring
Virginia raised
such concerns among whites for their own safety that the
University organized a student militia.
North
Carolina's 1835 constitutional convention curtailed the freedoms
formerly enjoyed by free blacks. The convention resulted primarily from
dissatisfaction with the way legislative representatives were chosen. Extensive
constitutional amendments fixed the membership of the state's senate and house
and determined representation based on numbers of voters, instead of on
property values. For the first time in
North
Carolina's history, the people, not the legislature, would elect the
governor, who would serve a two-year term. Religious qualifications for holding
public office were broadened so that
Catholics as well as
Protestants could stand for election. But apart from
these worthy improvements, the 1835 amendments also abolished the right of free
blacks to vote, thereby disenfranchising over 20,000 people.
2
For most students at the
University, the "slavery question" was not yet the
divisive issue it would become a decade or two later.
William
Gaston's
anti-slavery speech at the 1832 Commencement was favorably
received. When the
Dialectic
Society debated the topic "Ought slavery to be abolished?" on
October 22, 1834, the question was decided in the affirmative. Students who
wrote about politics in the 1830s were less concerned with slavery than with
defining the relationship of the states to the Federal government. They argued,
for example, that
Texas should not
be annexed to the
Union because the
action would unbalance the number of slave and free states. They disagreed with
South
Carolinians who nullified the 1832 Federal tariff, rejecting
John C.
Calhoun's position that states had a right to nullify Federal laws that
were not in the state's best interests. Recognizing in the nullification
controversy a principle supporting a state's "right" to secede from
the
Union, most
North
Carolina students opposed secession. Questions about slavery were
sometimes expressed in this secessionist context, as when
Dialectic
Society members debated the question "Should the slave-holding
states secede from the non-slaveholding?" No, the
Dis
decided on March 11, 1837. Students of the 1830s who favored abolition and the
preservation of the
Union did not
seem to recognize slavery as a moral issue. When considering such questions as
"Would the education of slaves have a tendency to promote domestic
comfort?" or "Is slavery an evil morally or politically?"
Dialectic
Society members answered no.
3
Endnotes:
1. In the June 23, 1837, issue of the
Hillsborough Recorder,
for example,
James
Phillips
advertised for sale a negro woman and four children. The
Hillsborough Recorder
of June 25, 1831, offered a
$10 reward for the return of a runaway slave named
Bob.
2. See
John
Hope Franklin,
The
Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860
(Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1943). On the constitutional convention of 1835, see
Powell,
North Carolina
through Four Centuries 267-81.
3.
Dialectic
Society minutes record that the question "Ought the Tariff be
repealed?" was decided in the negative on January 25, 1832 (
Vol. 7, UA).
"Would a division of the
Union be
beneficial?" was decided in the negative on November 1, 1834; "Should
Texas be annexed
to the
Union?"
was decided in the negative on June 21, 1837; "Would the education of
slaves have a tendency to promote domestic comfort?" was decided in the
negative on February 15, 1837; and "Is slavery an evil morally or
politically?" was decided in the negative on February 23, 1838 (
Vol. 8,
UA). Some individual students, of course, would have disagreed with the
outcomes of these debates and also would have dissented from views discussed
here as characteristic of a majority of students.