The Project

An Overview

Our team of undergraduate researchers has investigated the slaveholding of people connected to the College, including presidents, College founders, Board of Visitors and Governors members, and even students. We have researched the presence of enslaved workers on campus, and the connection between slaveholding and College land rentals sales, and loan agreements.

  But this project also explores freedom at Washington College. Free black people worked at the College. Enslaved people were manumitted by College owners, some of whom were part of an organized abolitionist movement on the Eastern Shore. Other enslaved people freed themselves by running away. And we have followed the stories of some individuals beyond emancipation, examining the lives of Civil War veterans formerly claimed by College owners, as well as efforts to continue a form of enslavement through the illegal apprenticeship of African-American children.

In a 2013 interview, Professor Wilder said of college campuses, “people of color have always been here.” Yet at Washington College their stories, their actual existence, has been erased. We have mined original documents–Board of Visitors and Governors Meeting Minutes, Presidential records, freedom certificates, soldiers’ pension records, census data, wills, letters, newspaper articles, advertisements for fugitive slaves–from repositories ranging from the Maryland and Delaware State Archives, Kent County Courthouse and Historical Society, to our own College archives. This research is enabling us to recreate the stories of the enslaved and free African Americans of Washington College.