Institutional Slavery

In 1718, the Virginia General Assembly granted £1,000 to the College of William and Mary to provide scholarships to students. The College used the money to purchase land on Nottoway River and seventeen slaves, whose labor would fund the education of free white men through the colonial period. As Jennifer Oast shows in Institutional Slavery, William and Mary was hardly alone in using slave labor to subsidize its activities. Virginia’s civil society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rested on slave foundations. By “institutional slavery,” Oast calls attention to the schools, churches, and other corporations that made use of slave labor. While there is quite a bit of excellent scholarship on industrial slavery in the United States, Oast’s book marks a substantial contribution to the small but rapidly growing historiography on slaveholding by schools and churches. The landmark in this field, Craig Steven Wilder’s acclaimed Ebony & Ivy, focused largely on northern colleges; not surprisingly, institutions in the southern colonies and states were complicit, too.

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