Endowments

First Professorship
First Scholarship Fund
First Library Fund
First Endowment Drive

Endowments

First Professorship
First Scholarship Fund
First Library Fund
First Endowment Drive

The First Scholarship Fund

Bishop George Berkeley bought 3-5 slaves during his brief stay in the New World between 1728 and 1731, to work on his Rhode Island plantation, Whitehall (14). When Berkeley returned to Europe in 1731, he donated the plantation to Yale.

Yale turned payments from the plantation into its first set of scholarships. At this time, the plantation likely continued being worked by slaves. Charles Handy leased Whitehall farm from Yale, and sent Yale payments that would fund scholarships (17). The Rhode Island census, in 1774, shows that the household of Charles Handy included: "Blacks: 4" (18).

It is likely that these four black people included in Handy's household were slaves. In his study of slavery in the 1774 Rhode Island census, Louis Masur explains:

Data derived from a census conducted by Rhode Island's General Assembly permits us to answer with certainty such questions as who held slaves, how many they owned, and what patterns of slaveholding emerged within the colony ... While we cannot ascertain the precise status of the blacks living in white households, corroborating evidence such as newspaper advertisements indicates that the vast majority of the black residents were held as slaves, apprentices, or in some other dependent relationship ... If anything, the Census of 1774 underrepresented the extent to which blacks lived in some kind of bonded relationship to white families. (19)

The density of slave owning white households in Newport county in 1774 was almost as high as the density of slave owning white households in the American South during the Civil War (20). It would be normal for someone farming a Newport plantation to use slaves to work the land (21).

Words etched into the floor of Berkeley College today explain:

After expenses, the income from the house and farm [Whitehall] was to support two students of the college chosen "without favor or affection" as the best at Latin and Greek after a public examination. The "Berkeley Premiums" as they came to be called, are still awarded in the Yale Classics Department. (22)

George Berkeley had slaves working his plantation until he left in 1731. The profits earned by leasing the Whitehall plantation after 1732 funded Yale's first scholarships. The person leasing the plantation around the time of the 1774 census included four black people as members of his household, and most black people so listed were slaves.

Assuming slaves worked the old Berkeley plantation, then Yale's own land was worked by slaves, and Yale's first scholarship was funded for up to 50 years with money earned from slave labor. It is for the gift of this plantation that his name is honored today with the name of "Berkeley college".

Berkeley's Slaves

After coming to the colonies, Berkeley bought a plantation in Newport, Rhode Island-the famous "Whitehall." On October 4, 1730, Berkeley purchased "a Negro man named Philip aged Fourteen years or thereabout." A few days later he purchased "a negro man named Edward aged twenty years or thereabouts." On June 11, 1731, "Dean Berkeley baptized three of his negroes, 'Philip, Anthony, and Agnes Berkeley' " (16).

Berekley's sermons explained to the colonists why Christianity supported slavery, and hence slaves should become baptized Christians:

It would be of advantage to their [slave masters'] affairs to have slaves who should 'obey in all things their masters according to the flesh, not with eye-service as men-pleasers, but in singleness of heart, as fearing God;' that gospel liberty consists with temporal servitude; and that their slaves would only become better slaves by being Christian. (15)

In the 1930s, Yale named a new residential college after Bishop Berkeley.

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