As an academic concerned with the politics of memory, Blight understands that the stories universities tell about their past are vital to their sense of mission. The core function of universities is the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge through research, scholarship and teaching. They also want to endure and grow, so they seek to limit liability and risks to their reputations. When challenged to justify past investment in slavery – or current investments in, say, fossil fuel extraction or arms manufacture – officials weigh the costs and benefits of potential reforms. In the wrong hands, the internal review or study can be little more than a PR exercise, allowing the institution to acknowledge past wrongs while sidestepping accountability. Blight will have none of this: Yale and Slavery is a clear-eyed account of an era when university leaders knew slavery was wrong, but supported it nonetheless.
The first sentence of his report reads like a confession: ‘A multitude of Yale University’s founders, rectors, early presidents, faculty, donors and graduates played roles in sustaining slavery, its ideological underpinnings and its power.’ Deeds, baptismal records, wills and probate inventories list the names of more than two hundred people purchased, possessed and sold by the founders of Yale. New England’s Puritan colonies, Blight writes, emerged from a landscape of ‘destruction, migration and enslavement, both Indigenous and African’. He describes the period from the Pequot War of 1637 to King Philip’s War of 1675-78 as a 17th-century version of a ‘regional total war, a struggle to determine whether the Puritan Israel or various Native homelands would survive at all’. Both conflicts resulted in the capture and sale of Native people. There was nothing new in this. Slavery expanded in tandem with colonisation across the globe; New England was just one outpost.
The founders of Yale, Blight writes, ‘were fully aware that they now lived in an Atlantic world in which the African slave trade was peopling the Americas at a scale not seen before the 18th century, a trade now dominated by British slave traders who seemed the agents of a permanent, lucrative industry in human flesh’. Between 1676 and 1802, ships coming from Africa unloaded ten thousand captives in New England, but many more arrived via trade with the Caribbean, where enslaved people accounted for 90 per cent of the population. In the early 18th century, Black people in Connecticut numbered in the hundreds. By 1774, on the eve of independence, a census counted 6464 Black people in the colony, more than 3 per cent of its now greatly increased population and the largest number in any of the New England colonies.