{"id":382,"date":"2020-02-26T15:37:18","date_gmt":"2020-02-26T15:37:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/digital-computational-studies\/?p=382"},"modified":"2023-06-21T12:19:34","modified_gmt":"2023-06-21T16:19:34","slug":"bates-faculty-and-students-seek-to-go-beyond-founded-by-abolitionists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/digital-computational-studies\/2020\/02\/26\/bates-faculty-and-students-seek-to-go-beyond-founded-by-abolitionists\/","title":{"rendered":"Bates faculty and students seek to go beyond \u2018founded by abolitionists\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Jay Burns<\/a> \u2014 Published on February 26, 2020<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

In April 1854, a three-masted schooner, the Kate Brigham, <\/em>set sail from New Orleans<\/a> loaded with 150 bales of cotton grown by slaves on Southern plantations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cotton shipment was one of many destined for Lewiston, Maine, a small but growing mill town where entrepreneur Benjamin Bates of Boston and his fellow investors had built their first textile mill two years earlier. In its first year, the mill had netted $33,000 in profit \u2014 putting Benjamin Bates on track to become a wealthy man in the years before the Civil War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bates readers know what comes next. Benjamin Bates and his business associates, eager to create civic institutions in Lewiston, made financial gifts to a new school founded in 1855 by Oren Cheney, a Freewill Baptist leader and fervent abolitionist. A decade later, Cheney named the school, by then a college, after Bates, its principal benefactor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Eager
Eager to build civic institutions in the growing town of Lewiston, textile mill owner Benjamin Bates and his associates \u2014 wealthy thanks to slave-grown cotton \u2014 made financial gifts to the school that would become Bates College.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And from that foundation grew a college that today is rightly and widely known for its inclusive character.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That founding story is familiar, but it\u2019s not the whole story, say Bates faculty and students who are now doing academic research to better understand what it means that a Northern college like Bates was intertwined at its founding with an American economy fueled by slave labor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEveryone says, \u2018Bates was founded by abolitionists,\u2019\u201d says Perla Figuereo \u201921 of the Bronx, N.Y., who was part of a digital humanities course last fall that has begun a long-term, data-driven exploration of Bates\u2019 early financial history. \u201cBut no one adds, \u2018and funded by slave cotton.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The founded-by-abolitionists narrative is \u201cnot necessarily false, but rather incomplete,\u201d senior history major Ursula Rall of Kent, Ohio, told her audience during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day presentation with fellow senior Emma Soler of Bethesda, Md. \u201cIt\u2019s important to acknowledge the other part of the founding.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be sure, up to the time of the Civil War, there\u2019s hardly an American institution that wasn\u2019t<\/em> supported by the American slave economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"In
In this 1860 photograph, African Americans, likely slaves, pick cotton near Montgomery, Ala. (Lakin, J.H., photographer. 186: https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/item\/2012648057)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSlavery was integral to our nation\u2019s founding, our economy in the North and South, our universities, and our wealth,\u201d says journalist and Bates history major Kristen Doerer \u201914, who has reported for the Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em> on how colleges have reckoned with their historical connections to the U.S. slave economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe can\u2019t kid ourselves and think that because Bates is in the North and was founded by abolitionists that it was immune from slavery,\u201d she adds. \u201cIf we view wealth from cotton and slavery as dirty money, we should know that the dirt is everywhere \u2014 even under abolitionists\u2019 fingernails.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To that point, one day after Rall and Soler\u2019s MLK Day presentation at Bates, Maine Public Broadcasting devoted a segment of its Maine Calling<\/em> program to examining the connections between the slave economy and Maine\u2019s vaunted maritime industry,<\/a> specifically how various Maine ship captains transported slaves from Africa to North America in the 1800s, even after it was made illegal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a barely known fact, says Kate McMahon, a scholar and Maine native who has done extensive research on Maine\u2019s connection to the slave trade, because Maine has \u201cvalorized\u201d its maritime tradition over the years while \u201cmaking the suffering of other people invisible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\u201cSlavery
\u201cSlavery was integral to our nation\u2019s founding, our economy in the North and South, our universities, and our wealth,\u201d says journalist and Bates history major Kristen Doerer \u201914, seen during a campus visit in 2019 when she offered a public talk and met with history students. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

If we fail to fully appreciate this local history \u2014 such as, she says, the existence of \u201cbuildings in Portland that were built from funds from selling enslaved people\u201d \u2014 then how do \u201cwe even begin to understand that we actually live with the legacies of slavery every single day here and now?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a larger journalistic scale, there\u2019s also the ongoing New York Times<\/em>\u2019 1619 Project, named for the year African slaves first arrived in Virginia. That project seeks to place \u201cthe consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The digital humanities course that Perla Figuereo took last fall is taught by Anelise Hanson Shrout, an assistant professor of digital and computational studies. Like her students, Shrout feels the imperative to flesh out the college\u2019s founding story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFor me, as a historian and as a human who lives in Lewiston and works at Bates, the story is more complicated than \u2018Bates has always stood for abolition,\u2019\u201d Shrout says. \u201cWe have the same foundational American sin baked into our history that much of the U.S. does.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Perla
Perla Figuereo \u201921 (center) presents a digital project developed with, to her left, classmate Alya Yousuf \u201921 as part of their fall 2019 coursework in \u201cData Cultures,\u201d taught by Assistant Professor of Digital and Computational Studies Anelise Hanson Shrout. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Last fall, Shrout\u2019s students began painstaking work to review and pull numbers from the college\u2019s early business ledgers, held by the college\u2019s Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library. Those ledgers record the donations, large and small, that Cheney took in, including gifts from Benjamin Bates, who gave approximately $175,000 to the college, equivalent to a few million dollars today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They also began a review of the many bundles of Bates Mill cotton invoices now held by Lewiston Public Library. It is slow work, says Shrout, who anticipates devoting future editions of her course to the project. \u201cWe\u2019ve only scratched the surface.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, the individual cotton invoices are fascinating. Besides the amount and cost of the cotton shipments, they include dates, ship names, shipping routes, and wholesalers, painting a picture of how antebellum cotton made its way north.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Besides the aforementioned Kate Brigham,<\/em> another ship that transported cotton to the Bates Mill was the Paul Boggs<\/em>, which ran aground on Cape Cod\u2019s infamous Chatham bar two years later. And still another, the Asa Fish<\/em><\/a>, built in Mystic, Conn., in 1849, also transported African slaves to Cuba<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shrout says the process of creating meaning from handwritten cotton invoices promises to teach a powerful liberal arts lesson. \u201cOne of the questions we\u2019re asking is, \u2018What does it mean to produce a dataset that represents labor that was violently stolen from people?\u2019 How do we do that ethically and thoughtfully?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Dated
Dated June 30, 1854, this invoice for 150 bales of cotton (63,795 pounds), for delivery to the Bates Manufacturing Co. and its treasurer, Benjamin Bates, indicates that the cotton was shipped from New Orleans on the schooner Kate Brigham. (Photograph by Anelise Hanson Shrout)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In today\u2019s world, \u201cdata is thrown around as if it is objective,\u201d Shrout continues. \u201cWe feed tremendous amounts of data into algorithms that decide what a self-driving car sees as human or how people are policed. But data is always an artifact of some kind of human decision, so at a meta level in this class, I want students to take that away.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The basic facts of the college\u2019s founding, both Benjamin Bates\u2019 cotton connection and Oren Cheney\u2019s abolitionist views, have been well-documented over the years, even as the latter narrative has, until now, received more attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 1970s, Jim Leamon \u201955, then a young history professor and now an emeritus member of the faculty, enlisted students to help him research Lewiston\u2019s economic history, including Benjamin Bates\u2019 contributions to the city\u2019s early growth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Commissioned by the city\u2019s Historic Commission, Leamon\u2019s monograph explained why Benjamin Bates\u2019 mills prospered during the Civil War<\/a> as other New England mills suffered: because Benjamin Bates gambled on a long war and \u201cbought up huge stocks of cotton at 12 cents a pound when the struggle began,\u201d writes Leamon. \u201cBy 1864 cotton was worth 70 cents, and a year later it was over a dollar a pound.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
The Asa Fish was among the many ships that delivered slave-grown cotton to Benjamin Bates\u2019 mills in Lewiston before the Civil War. Flying under the American flag, the bark also transported slaves from the west coast of Africa to Cuba.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to the stockpiled cotton and government war contracts, Lewiston mill profits were \u201cremarkable\u201d during the war, Leamon concludes. In sharp contrast, other New England mills sold their stockpiled cotton early in the war for a quick profit, then had to pay exorbitant prices as the supply of Southern cotton dried up. In Lowell, Mass., for example, the era is dubbed \u201cLowell\u2019s blunder.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is important to note, too, that Benjamin Bates was among a group of businessmen who lent their support to the new school, including Francis Skinner, a Boston-based middleman who sold Southern cotton to Benjamin Bates\u2019 mills and who became a college trustee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe hate it \u2014 we abhor it, we loathe it \u2014 we detest and despise it as a giant sin against God, and an awful crime upon man.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Oren Cheney\u2019s devotion both to abolitionism and to creating a radically inclusive college have also been well-documented over the years, including by Tim Larson \u201905 in his landmark senior honors thesis in history<\/a>, \u201cFaith By Their Works.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Noting that Cheney had operated a branch of the Underground Railroad in Maine prior to founding a new college, Larson quotes Cheney\u2019s own words on the topic of slavery: \u201cWe hate it \u2014 we abhor it, we loathe it \u2014 we detest and despise it as a giant sin against God, and an awful crime upon man.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Larson also notes that, in founding an inclusive college, Cheney was combatting powerful social norms that \u201cadvocated for discrimination against women, African Americans, and the poor.\u201d Despite those and other pressures, the college \u201cheld its ground\u201d and maintained its inclusive practices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(In fact, Bates College wasn\u2019t Cheney\u2019s only handiwork. Well-connected politically thanks to his service in the Maine Legislature, Cheney used his influence to help found another mission-driven school, Storer College, in Harpers Ferry, W. Va., in 1865, which was dedicated to educating freed slaves.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, Larson noted, there was the vexing question, a \u201ccontradiction\u201d as he called it, of why an \u201cardent abolitionist\u201d like Cheney would take money from industrialists like Benjamin Bates, who might be \u201cas much to blame as Southern slave owners\u201d for \u201callowing slavery to thrive.\u201d Larson answers the question this way: \u201cPerhaps this contradiction speaks more to the omnipresence of the slave system in American economy than to Cheney\u2019s own shortcomings.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Founder
Founder of Bates College Oren Cheney, seen in 1873, was a bona fide abolitionist. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Fifteen years later, appreciating the urgency with which Bates students and faculty have taken up \u201cthe contradiction\u201d requires some historical context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2003, Brown University started to investigate its direct historical connection to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. A few years later, scholars and students at Harvard began a similar exploration. And in 2013, historian Craig Steven Wilder published Ebony and Ivy, <\/em>which broadly explained how all of U.S. higher education in the 18th and 19th centuries, not just a few schools, capitalized in some way on America\u2019s slave economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Wilder\u2019s book, explains Joseph Hall, an associate professor of history at Bates, \u201cU.S. colleges no longer had to choose\u201d whether to admit to benefiting from slavery. \u201cWilder demonstrated that everyone was involved, whether you liked it or not.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition, a new generation of scholars, including Wilder, from groups previously underrepresented in academe, including women and African Americans, are now asking new questions about American history, often through the lenses of colonialism (the subjugation of one people by and for the benefit of other people), white supremacy, and racism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPeople are asking different kinds of questions,\u201d says Hall. \u201cAnd different people are involved in asking those questions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the early 2000s at Bates, questions about the college\u2019s historical connection to the American slave economy were cropping up in and around Bates classrooms, prompted by faculty in the history department and the Africana program, including professors Sue Houchins and now-retired Margaret Creighton. (Discussions in her classroom, in part, led to Larson\u2019s Bates-focused thesis.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In recent years, faculty and students began to move the topic front and center in their academic work, spurred in part by national events, including publication of Ebony and Ivy<\/em>, racial violence in Ferguson, and the subsequent emergence of Black Lives Matter. At the same time, Bates was using its convening power to showcase a string of prominent speakers on race and equity in America, including Wilder himself, who spoke at Bates in January 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"An
An audience fills a Dana Chemistry Hall classroom on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to hear Emma Soler \u201920 and Ursula Rall \u201920 lead a discussion about the college\u2019s dual founding narratives: founded by abolitionists and funded initially by Benjamin Bates, a textile manufacturer who derived wealth from slave-grown cotton. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

That September, members of the Bates faculty raised the issue during a discussion in a packed Pettengill Hall classroom, held to help students understand issues of white supremacy and Confederate monuments<\/a> in the wake of violence<\/a> in Charlottesville, Va.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Noting how Benjamin Bates profited from slave-grown cotton, Assistant Professor of History Andrew Baker pointed out that while it\u2019s meaningful to remove Confederate monuments in the South, we need to look at history closer to home. Racial problems don\u2019t somehow \u201cbelong to a different time,\u201d Baker said. \u201cIt\u2019s always been a part of America itself, and so that touches all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the classroom to the public lectern, Joe Hall has lent his academic voice to the topic in recent years. He recalls how, more than a decade ago and after Larson did his thesis, he began to mention the college\u2019s connection to slave-grown cotton as a \u201cthrowaway line\u201d in one of his classes, such as \u201cAfrican Slavery in the Americas.\u201d He says, \u201cI remember a student telling me, \u2018I never thought about that before.\u2019 It\u2019s been kind of an itch\u201d ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"From
From the classroom and the lectern, Associate Professor of History Joe Hall in recent years has invited the Bates community to consider the meaning of its founding connection to the American slave economy. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In spring 2018, Hall introduced the topic in a \u201cmaster class\u201d that he led during a campus Admitted Students Reception, when Bates rolls out the garnet carpet for new admits. After briefing the students on the basic facts, he asked, \u201cWhat\u2019s missing from the story about Oren Cheney and Benjamin Bates?\u201d One of the students replied, \u201cThere\u2019s no African American history here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hall says, \u201cThat was great, because he was absolutely right.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that September, Hall, speaking to the incoming Class of 2022 during Opening Convocation, used his address, \u201cQuestions for Bates,\u201d to explore at some length the apparent contradictions of Bates\u2019 founding<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the past two semesters, Hall has devoted one of the department\u2019s signature courses, \u201cHistorical Methods,\u201d an upper-level seminar that prepares majors for thesis work, to the question of Bates\u2019 founding. During the course, he has guided students into the college\u2019s Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library and downtown to Lewiston Public Library.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"In
In February 2019, students in Associate Professor of History Joe Hall\u2019s historical methods class pore over historical documents related to Bates\u2019 founding in Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library. From left, Eric Opoku, Benni McComish, Zach Jonas, Andrew Faciano, and Ke\u2019ala Brosseau. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From Hall\u2019s perspective as a teacher and scholar, probing questions about Bates\u2019 founding are what a liberal arts education is all about: appreciating complexity, knowing that there\u2019s more than meets the eye, and being on the lookout for unintended consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe good in the world, even the good found in a place like Bates College, does not come without a cost,\u201d he says. \u201cIn the case of Bates\u2019 founding, it was a tremendous cost in human lives.\u201d And it\u2019s powerful, he adds, that his students are learning these lessons in a Bates framework. \u201cThere\u2019s immediacy. They can see the relevance of it because they care about Bates.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ke\u2019ala Brosseau \u201920 of South Burlington, Vt., was in Hall\u2019s methods course last year. With several classmates, she made a presentation at the annual Mount David Summit that looked at how Bates, as an institution, has foregrounded its abolitionist founding narrative over the years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When an institution emphasizes one narrative, it\u2019s like putting on blinders. \u201cYou don\u2019t recognize the imbalances of power,\u201d she says, that have muted other voices over time, including, in the case of Bates\u2019 founding, humans imprisoned by slavery. Furthermore, she adds, \u201cIt\u2019s hard to recognize inequality today when we don\u2019t confront things that have happened in our past.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\u201cIt\u2019s
\u201cIt\u2019s hard to recognize inequality today when we don\u2019t confront things that have happened in our past,\u201d says history major Ke\u2019ala Brosseau \u201920 of South Burlington, Vt. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To be sure, it will take time and effort to discover, let alone amplify, the voices of people who grew the cotton that created the wealth leading to the college\u2019s founding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For her senior honors thesis, Emma Soler initially hoped to \u201cput a human face\u201d on the cotton trade by tracing cotton that Benjamin Bates used in Lewiston back to specific Southern plantations, and perhaps to specific individuals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the limited time of a senior thesis project, that goal proved unattainable. Indeed, Hall imagines that the search for cotton clues might someday extend to century-old dissertations on the cotton trade housed in Southern universities. \u201cIt will take some bibliographic digging,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Soler has pivoted to a broader analysis, looking at Bates\u2019 founding in the context of the U.S. slave economy as well as campus discourse around the issue, contemporary campus culture, and reparations movements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Emma
Emma Soler \u201920 is using her honors history thesis to explore how college\u2019s founding narratives affect the college today. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

She\u2019s asking questions such as, \u201cHow do we talk about this history on campus? What is the consensus about talking about this history in a different way? Do people think it\u2019s impacting their experience here?\u201d And, if so, \u201cpositively or negatively?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From her perspective as an interested alumna, Kristen Doerer sees value in Bates faculty and students continuing their exploration of the college\u2019s founding connection to the American slave economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt says that this institution isn\u2019t afraid to take on hard topics and study, examine, and discuss them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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