White Nation, Black Deportation, Deaf Education: The Agenda of the Founders of Sign Language Education in the United States
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| Title: | White Nation, Black Deportation, Deaf Education: The Agenda of the Founders of Sign Language Education in the United States |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | Sayers, Edna Edith |
| Source: | American Annals of the Deaf. 2020 165(2):136-156. |
| Availability: | Gallaudet University Press. 800 Florida Avenue NE, Denison House, Washington, DC 20002-3695. Tel: 202-651-5488; Fax: 202-651-5489; Web site: http://gupress.gallaudet.edu/annals/ |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 21 |
| Publication Date: | 2020 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Reports - Evaluative |
| Education Level: | Higher Education Postsecondary Education |
| Descriptors: | Deafness, Special Education, Educational History, American Sign Language, Racial Bias, Special Schools, United States History, African American History, Slavery, Land Grant Universities, African American Education, Advocacy |
| Geographic Terms: | Connecticut, Alabama |
| ISSN: | 0002-726X |
| Abstract: | Deaf education and American Sign Language emerged in Connecticut during the early 1800s as part of a reactionary social and political agenda that included church control of government and public schools, antifeminism, anti-Catholicism, and, the topic of the present article, White nationalism. Topics discussed include the racist views of early advocates of deaf education, including Mason Fitch Cogswell and Amos Kendall; evidence that Alabama land granted to the American School for the Deaf by Congress involved ASD in the selling of slaves; and T. H. Gallaudet's exploitation of his reputation as a teacher of the deaf to fund-raise for the deportation of African Americans to Liberia. Popular legends that Edmund Booth and Lewis Weld were abolitionists and that Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc helped the "Amistad" captives are debunked. The three mixed-race boys enrolled in ASD during the 1820s and 1830s are discussed in this context. |
| Abstractor: | As Provided |
| Entry Date: | 2021 |
| Access URL: | https://gupress.gallaudet.edu/annals/archives.htm |
| Accession Number: | EJ1282782 |
| Database: | ERIC |
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| FullText | Links: – Type: pdflink Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwGRITS3uIFnCW4pGDDj7B7CAAAA4zCB4AYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHSMIHPAgEAMIHJBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDPldcSPetiYlLR31MgIBEICBm63TWOYlJsuGnD4biVdFd9LML0HtHHhMdhwkGqWKdcLGXmcxbFmdRRAIlqrVq33xwSxGeh4RMPtcj_qSKqmi5ShZZFtEu3zjfNMfVrTXJdGO082QxXdehnlPGkLX43vNvBSQ0mKZ1cOXMshkdM1HfngEod9wN_udEpVol7AZzkbbdrqcYaf7--XuG6DGDiYmuVPiu-ozPOa22sdI Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN0145534847;aod01jun.20;2020Sep09.03:54;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0145534847-1">White Nation, Black Deportation, Deaf Education: The Agenda of the Founders of Sign Language Education in the United States </title> <p>Deaf education and American Sign Language emerged in Connecticut during the early 1800s as part of a reactionary social and political agenda that included church control of government and public schools, antifeminism, anti-Catholicism, and, the topic of the present article, White nationalism. Topics discussed include the racist views of early advocates of deaf education, including Mason Fitch Cogswell and Amos Kendall; evidence that Alabama land granted to the American School for the Deaf by Congress involved ASD in the selling of slaves; and T. H. Gallaudet's exploitation of his reputation as a teacher of the deaf to fund-raise for the deportation of African Americans to Liberia. Popular legends that Edmund Booth and Lewis Weld were abolitionists and that Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc helped the Amistad captives are debunked. The three mixed-race boys enrolled in ASD during the 1820s and 1830s are discussed in this context.</p> <p>Keywords: Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet; American School for the Deaf; Mason Fitch Cogswell; American Colonization Society; Moorish Prince; abolition; Amistadaffair; American Sunday School Union; Edward Miner Gallaudet; Amos Kendall</p> <p>Today, roughly a half million people in the United States and Canada are proficient, regular users of American Sign Language (ASL). ASL interpreters are routinely provided for deaf children in public schools, and ASL and the Deaf people who use the language are widely regarded as part of the American tapestry, one thread in a rich fabric of colors, gender identities, abilities, ethnicities, and languages whose representatives are each to be accorded the dignity due every human being. As we shall see, however, sign language did not always keep such good liberal company.</p> <p>ASL was forged in the 1820s in Hartford, CT, where deaf children were being gathered in America's first residential school for the deaf, the American Asylum, today the American School for the Deaf (ASD). The school's founders—Mason Fitch Cogswell, a physician and the father of the school's first pupil, Alice, along with his neighbor and agent Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, who was informed by the practical experience of the school's senior instructor, the Deaf Frenchman Laurent Clerc—were rock-ribbed advocates of "the beautiful language of signs." In fact, Gallaudet regarded the language of signs as divinely originated, predating the biblical Confusion of Tongues at Babel. But at the time of the founding and during the school's first decades, he and nearly all of his colleagues at the Asylum were also advocating some of the most reactionary causes then under public debate: church control of state government and of public schools, sharp restriction of the franchise, the primacy of property rights, unregulated capitalism, rigid social stratification, acceptance of high rates of income inequality, hard-and-fast rules for female silence and modesty, the limitation of immigration to Protestants only, and, the topic of the present study, the unquestioned acceptance of White supremacy as an integral element of God's plan. These men were reformers, it is true, but reformers deeply committed to a retrograde millennialist movement intent on squelching the values of both the Enlightenment and, surprisingly for us, the American Revolution, in the interest of returning the American states to the ideological and racial purity in which they were supposed to have existed as colonies.</p> <p>If the millennialist convictions of the manualists, as those advocating instruction via sign language were called, seem counterintuitive, so too do the secular and democratic convictions of their opponents, the oralists, who advocated instruction in the national spoken language. Two prominent antebellum oralists, the progressive education reformers Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe, were also prominent advocates of abolition and secular public schools. Known today for their liberal bona fides, Mann and Howe had been deceived by demonstrations in Prussian oralist schools of deaf children with apparently flawless enunciation and lipreading skills. That these children appeared to be fully rehabilitated to the hearing norm fit Mann and Howe's agenda for a program of public schooling that would create the informed citizenry requisite to a working democracy. In their view, the manual education delivered by the American Asylum was creating a subgroup of Americans who could not take part in public life or even access the information needed by citizens of a democracy. By the time Alexander Graham Bell entered the fray later in the century, with his ominous warning that an education in sign language was creating a "deaf variety of the human race" ([<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref1">13</reflink>]), public opinion was ripe to support oral education for the deaf—despite the lack of any objective data showing that even a slim majority of deaf children genuinely benefited from it. Sign language, increasingly prohibited in public and private schools, went underground.</p> <p>How did manualism emerge from the illiberal worldview of the American Asylum's Hartford founders, while oralism arose just decades later in nearby Boston as the natural choice for those advocating basic democratic principles? A groundbreaking 1998 study by Douglas C. Baynton locates the linchpin of this ideological arrangement in the religious conservatism of New England's Second Great Awakening and its accompanying millennialism, which had especially strong reverberations at Yale and, more widely, in conservative Connecticut. Essentially, Baynton shows, just as foreign missions brought the Gospel of Jesus Christ to pagans, sign language would bring the Good News to the deaf—both missions and sign language, therefore, assisted New England to usher in the Millennium, the prophesized thousand years of peace and prosperity that would precede the Second Coming of Christ. But millennialism also informed the belief that American slavery was part of God's plan to spread the Gospel among Africans. In fact, millennialists shared many features with present-day White supremacists: Both groups were, in the words of [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref2">12</reflink>] recent study of White nationalism, "apocalyptic, anti-internationalist, antisemitic," and they "idealized [traditional] familial and gender orders," "linking religious belief with white power ideology" (pp. 7, 8).</p> <p>ASL's origins in the reactionary social policies of the Second Great Awakening's millennialists are largely forgotten today, not only by advocates of ASL but even by historians of the Deaf community and of American deaf education. It is hoped that the present survey of the reactionary social and political views and activities of the founders of sign language education in the United States will prompt further research and, perhaps, soul-searching.</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-2">Mason Fitch Cogswell's Racist Views</hd> <p>Our story starts in the 1790s with Hartford's "beloved physician," Dr. Mason Fitch Cogswell. In the years before his marriage in 1800, Cogswell was a member of the so-called Hartford Wits, an informal group of deeply reactionary Yale men who delighted in using their cleverness and erudition to mock and denigrate anyone espousing democratic principles. For example, an anonymously published poem ([<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref3">22</reflink>]) that we know to have been written in 1793 by Cogswell and two collaborators ([<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref4">4</reflink>]) takes as its first target the presidential electors of Virginia, whom the Wits deride as descendants of "Pokahontas, a celebrated Squaw" (p. 63). The poem avers that Virginians are unable to make wise electoral choices because they are of mixed blood—and that's just the opening lines. The rhymesters go on to excoriate John Hancock, mayor of Boston, for having hosted an Equality Ball to which both White Bostonians and local free Blacks were invited. The connection between Hancock's Equality Ball and Pocahontas's marriage to John Rolfe appears tenuous to our eyes, but it was clear to Cogswell's readership: Both illustrate the horrors of so-called racial amalgamation, the term used at the time for any type of contact between races.</p> <p>To make sure readers got the point, Cogswell and his coauthors provided another poem in a footnote, which includes the following lines:</p> <p>Behold [Hancock] to his splendid hall The noble sons of Afric call: While as the sable bands advance, With frolic mien, and sportive dance, Refreshing clouds of rich perfume Are wafted o'er the spacious room, .....</p> <p>While Cuffey near him takes his stand, Hale-fellow met, and grasps his hand—With pleasure glistening in his eyes, "Ah! Massa Gubbernur!" he cries, "Me grad to see you, for de peeple say "You lub de Neegur better dan de play."</p> <p>(p. 66)</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-3">Gallaudet's Introduction to Deaf Education and Black Deportation at Andover Theological Semin...</hd> <p>Cogswell's affable bigotry was common among the Calvinist descendants of the Puritan settlers of ultraconservative Connecticut, but T. H. Gallaudet, albeit from a staunch Presbyterian family, had grown up in Philadelphia, near the docks, where his father was a commission merchant and where the population was diverse. Nevertheless, by the time he had completed his studies at Yale and begun his postgraduate divinity studies at the newly established Andover Theological Seminary, in 1812, any experiences with diversity had been wiped out by his developing millennial views. At Andover, the New England reform movement inspired by the Second Great Awakening was in full swing, and the school was a hotbed of new ideas—all of which aimed, however, to entrench the old values that conservatives regarded as divinely ordained. Foreign missions attracted the largest share of student attention, but temperance schemes and a new-fangled concept, deaf education, were popular as well. Gallaudet remained cautious, resistant to new ideas and apparently averse to participation in any cause at all. His two roommates, Nathan Lord and Ebenezer Kellogg, had more inquiring minds, however, and occasionally brought Gallaudet along on their extracurricular activities. On one occasion, Kellogg took Gallaudet to visit a "deaf and dumb girl" in his hometown, and subsequently kept him updated on her "very considerable progress" ([<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref5">27</reflink>]). Lord, meanwhile, made efforts to keep Gallaudet in touch with a mutual friend, George Hall, who was "intent on acquiring information in regard to the instruction of the deaf and dumb" ([<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref6">49</reflink>]).</p> <p>Lord also must have been the one to introduce Gallaudet to the notion of deporting African Americans to White-run commercial colonies in West Africa, a cause to which Gallaudet would devote much of his time and effort in later years. The plan, which would take on institutional status with the founding of the American Colonization Society, seems to have emerged as a widespread misunderstanding of the efforts of a businessman of color, Paul Cuffee (or Cuffe). Captain Cuffee was a Boston shipman of Wampanoag and Ashanti ancestry who took the supply-side view of ending slavery, surmising that cutting off the supply of kidnapped Africans would kill off the practice of enslavement in the United States. To replace human trafficking in West African economies, Cuffee proposed to export Yankee agriculture, trade, and whaling by sending small numbers of African American families to West Africa as "temporary emigrants" to bring American know-how to the natives. Although it was often supposed that Captain Cuffee would settle there himself, he never had any plans to do so, explaining in 1814 that his wife, Alice, a Wampanoag like his mother, was quite unwilling to go ([<reflink idref="bib72" id="ref7">72</reflink>]). But many White men who, like Nathan Lord, heard about Cuffee's plans fixated on a misapprehension that he was offering to remove their Black neighbors across the Atlantic. Lord made his views on American-held slaves clear to Cuffee: He wanted to see "measures ... taken for their relief, their moral and religious improvement"—not their freedom ([<reflink idref="bib72" id="ref8">72</reflink>]). This melioration of the unpleasant details of slavery, to wit, spiritual assistance without legal emancipation, was essentially the same solution sought for the deaf by Gallaudet: salvation without enfranchisement. Sign language was perfectly, nay, divinely, formed for just this purpose.</p> <p>As for Gallaudet's other roommate, Ebenezer Kellogg, a journal he kept on a trip through the South in 1817 ([<reflink idref="bib51" id="ref9">51</reflink>]) is as chock-full of White supremacy memes as Cogswell's rhymes. In Charleston, Kellogg wrote, "the whites toil, and bustle," while the enslaved are "lounging about at almost any hour of the day" and "the younger women" among the enslaved house servants "fill the house with their children." "They must, many of them be whipped if they are to be servants," he averred. That enslaved persons attended church was evidence, Kellogg thought, that having been brought to the United States in chains was the "highest blessing" to them, because it released them from the "slavery of sin" (pp. 10, 11).</p> <p>Ebenezer Kellogg would go on to enjoy a quiet career as a professor at Williams College, while Nathan Lord would serve as president of Dartmouth College for three decades—until he was removed from his office by the college's exasperated trustees for his adamant support of slavery ([<reflink idref="bib54" id="ref10">54</reflink>]). As for Gallaudet, it was not until he was almost 30 years old that he evinced interest in anything but playing battledore, a racket game that was the subject of his only extant writing during his time at Andover. Two years after completing his studies, and as an unemployed layabout in his parents' home, he finally acceded to Dr. Cogswell's urging and agreed to undertake an exploratory trip to Europe to study deaf education. There, he spent the first months listless and petulant, until the fall of 1815, when he got the chance to study the latest (albeit atavistic) theories of language and the mind in Edinburgh, and something awakened in him. He betook himself to Paris, met the dapper Deaf Frenchman Laurent Clerc, and the rest is history. When the American Asylum opened its doors to pupils in 1817, Gallaudet, with Clerc's classroom assistance, ran it as an evangelical mission to the White Protestant deaf until his early retirement in 1830. As principal, he passionately defended the God-given language of signs as essential to the school's mission, while shrewdly linking the school's purpose and finances to the wider interests of the New England governing class and its economic base—trade in the products of slave labor.</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-4">Deaf Education and Racism in Hartford</hd> <p>The antislavery North, as historians have been pointing out for decades now, was "largely a myth" ([<reflink idref="bib60" id="ref11">60</reflink>]): The West Indies trade made the fortunes of every one of Hartford's leading citizens, and if Connecticut ships were no longer transporting slaves after 1808—itself a doubtful proposition—they were still carrying New England cod and corn to feed the enslaved workers on Caribbean sugar plantations and returning with the slave-grown sugar (usually as barrels of molasses) that fed the state's rum distilleries ([<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref12">24</reflink>]). Hartford businessmen were also making the products to operate slave-labor plantations, a business opportunity that gained new life when Southern cotton replaced Caribbean sugar as the monoculture goldmine. A Hartford company sold fertilizer specifically formulated for cotton planters; the Collins Axe Works in Hartford County turned out a quarter of a million axes a year that were sold by the crate to clear land for cotton ([<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref13">7</reflink>]); the burgeoning Hartford insurance industry launched its lucrative future by selling life insurance to planters on the lives of their slaves; and the American Asylum built its spacious new campus and established its endowment, as we shall see, by selling the Alabama land on which Hartford-made fertilizer and axes would be use by enslaved Americans who had been sold down the river from their Virginia and Kentucky homes and insured by Hartford capital.</p> <p>Every one of the American Asylum's six original donors, whose donations made them the founding directors of the institution, was deeply involved with slave-labor profiteering. Daniel Wadsworth and his brother-in-law Nathaniel Terry inherited their immense wealth from Jeremiah Wadsworth's investments in the triangular trade of slaves, sugar, and rum, while the fortunes of the other four men were derived from both sugar and cotton, and also from the insurance and banking services that fed off the prosperity of the White planters. Abolition would have "jeopardized everything" ([<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref14">24</reflink>]), and everyone in Hartford knew it.</p> <p>It is no surprise, therefore, that the need to secure the new school's financial health prompted Gallaudet to turn to the slave economy, and his 1818 "brainchild" ([<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref15">25</reflink>]) was thus to seek the big money in "Alabama Fever"—that is, financial speculation in the newly available prime cotton land in what became the states of Alabama and Mississippi. Accordingly, he arranged to request from the U.S. Congress a grant of "a township of land, or a tract of land equal thereto. ... in any of the unlocated lands of the United States to which the Indian title has been extinguished" ([<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref16">52</reflink>]). To realize the cash from this grant, the American Asylum hired an agent, William Ely, to locate and procure patents on the lands and to sell them to planters on commission, issuing private mortgages secured by the collateral of the planter's human property—his slaves.</p> <p>It should have been easy, but when the price of cotton dropped, buyers defaulted on the mortgages issued by the school, and Ely soon had to explain to the directors, in a series of letters archived, along with supporting board meeting minutes and annual reports, at ASD (see Appendix A), that his assistant John Boardman "has been constrained to make collections by legal process, and in some instances has had his Execution levied on Slaves. ... Other debts are in suit, and the Executions, when obtained will be levied on more slaves." He said that none of the slaves had been sold as of the date of this letter, May 14, 1829, and our documentation disappears at this point, but of course the directors, through their agent Ely, must have sold all the slaves the American Asylum had acquired in lieu of payment for the land. The school desperately needed the cash because it had its own bank loan to fund the purchase of an extensive and picturesque campus on a hilltop just outside the city and to erect buildings on it. "To cancel this [debt], however, and to meet the future current expenses of the establishment," Gallaudet reported, "the Directors look forward with encouragement to the avails of the lands, which were granted by liberality of Congress to the Asylum."</p> <p>ASD has yet to investigate, or even admit, its entanglement with slavery, but the correspondence archived at the school makes its complicity inarguable. The American Asylum moved to its lovely new campus in the spring of 1821. When the debt for the new campus was paid off, the school would be left with a $300,000 endowment ([<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref17">27</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref18">42</reflink>]), perhaps about $17 million in today's money. The Asylum would still be involved in lawsuits against delinquent mortgage holders at least as late as 1836.</p> <p>For White Hartford, the enslaved men, women, and children put to field work in large labor camps in the South would have been little more than notional. Most New Englanders, after all, could scarcely imagine such a society. As we have seen in the remarks of Ebenezer Kellogg, it was widely believed that enslaved Africans were people of leisure, tended and fed like children by their hard-working White owners. But what of African American New Englanders, city residents who were only a generation, if even that, out of slavery themselves? As we have seen in the "humorous" verse of Dr. Cogswell, these Americans were little more than figures of fun—at best. That African Americans were, in the words of the White abolitionist [<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref19">44</reflink>], "our brethren for whom Christ died" (p. 19) was a view held by virtually no one in Hartford, least of all those who studied divinity at Andover, like Gallaudet and his roommates. The political and economic conservatism of Connecticut churchmen and the financial interests of the state's wealthy donor class effectively trounced the Gospel message.</p> <p>Meanwhile, the fact that Hartford's small Black community was thriving with its own clubs, insurance co-ops, cemetery, church, and, especially, a school, taught by such accomplished African Americans as Amos Beman, the Rev. and Mrs. James H. C. Pennington, the daguerreotypist Augustus Washington, and the poet Ann Plato, deeply irked middle-class Whites as they observed their Black neighbors taking on the trappings of middle-class respectability ([<reflink idref="bib64" id="ref20">64</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib67" id="ref21">67</reflink>]). White-on-Black street-corner violence was endemic: A visitor to the city in the 1830s claimed that there was no other municipality in the United States "containing the same amount of population, where the blacks meet with more contumely and unkindness that at this place. ... To pelt them with stones and cry out nigger! nigger! as they pass, seems to be the pastime of the place" ([<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref22">1</reflink>]). Throughout Connecticut and beyond during the 1830s, when Gallaudet was living in semiretirement but still advocating for the American Asylum and substitute-teaching there, this kind of casual everyday violence erupted into riots in which mobs of White men, many of them businessmen and professionals, attacked Black homes, businesses, and churches.</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-5">Gallaudet's Work for Colonization and "the Moorish Prince"</hd> <p>And where were "Late Principal" Gallaudet, his handpicked successor, Lewis Weld, and the rest of the American Asylum faculty during all these riots? Like many other respectable people, they were at home in their solidly White neighborhoods ignoring the whole thing and, in many cases, attending to the important business of sending Black Americans to live in privately run colonies in West Africa under the supervision of the White-run American Colonization Society (ACS). The ACS had been founded in 1816, the same year as the founding of the Asylum and the death of Paul Cuffee, whose dream of promoting Yankee commerce, whaling, and agriculture in Africa died with him. Repudiating or, rather, simply ignoring Cuffee's lead, the ACS established itself as a "mixture of fascism and philanthropy" ([<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref23">41</reflink>]), muddling Christian ideals with White middle-class notions of propriety. It gained adherents by constant reference to free Blacks as "useless and pernicious, if not dangerous," "insolent and domineering" ([<reflink idref="bib63" id="ref24">63</reflink>]). Its early organizers were largely slaveholders who regarded free African Americans as threats to the slave-labor economy, "worse than drones to society, and they already swarm our land like locusts" (p. 137). But the ACS soon attracted genuine, albeit naive, antislavery evangelicals and Quakers as well, who believed, quixotically, that deporting free Blacks would encourage slaveholders to manumit their slaves. In Hartford, the local Corresponding Committee included Dr. Cogswell, Asylum director Seth Terry, and Henry L. Ellsworth, who would be helping Gallaudet's secret anti-Catholic society LUPO with a tax problem 20 years later ([<reflink idref="bib61" id="ref25">61</reflink>]). Isaac Orr, whom Gallaudet had hired to the Asylum faculty, became a general agent.</p> <p>In 1827, the Connecticut Colonization Society (CCS) was founded in Hartford by a group that included Seth Terry and Gallaudet, who was still principal of the American Asylum at that date. Gallaudet must have been a real score for the CCS, because he was a formidable fund-raiser with an impressive track record of drawing audiences and getting them to open their wallets, and he could (and did) use his celebrity as an educator of the deaf and an expert in sign language to fill the colonization coffers. Gallaudet served as CCS secretary and wrote the society's annual reports, and at a May 1829 meeting he proposed "that the liberated slaves should be bound to pay for their passage, and even their freedom, if necessary, after their arrival in Africa" ([<reflink idref="bib53" id="ref26">53</reflink>]), apparently intending that the wages the deportees would earn by the work they would be forced to do for the CCS once they were settled in Africa would be garnisheed to reimburse the CCS for the pains it took to remove them from the United States.</p> <p>The following year, Gallaudet, who was becoming increasingly unhappy with his classroom duties at the American Asylum ([<reflink idref="bib61" id="ref27">61</reflink>]), became heavily involved in the ACS at the national level, as well as in the sorry affair of Abd al Rahman Ibrahima ibn Sori. Ibrahima, born in 1762 in Timbo (now in Guinea), was the king's son, and he had studied in Timbuktu before he was ambushed and sold into slavery, eventually ending up on a Mississippi cotton plantation. There he was recognized, incredibly, by an Irish doctor who had known him as a prince in Timbo. Efforts to free Ibrahima—the planter refused to sell, and by this time there was also a wife, nine children, and a commensurate number of grandchildren, all enslaved—drew the attention of the newspapers and of Charles Tappan, a Boston merchant and ACS member who arranged to purchase Ibrahima, commonly known by his slave name, "Prince." Tappan's brother Arthur saw a business opportunity, the ACS saw a fundraising opportunity, and Gallaudet saw a missionary opportunity in which he could leverage his fame as an educator of the deaf—and get some paid time away from the classroom—to send "Prince" to Africa with the Good News of Jesus Christ. Together, they conspired to ship the 66-year-old off to Liberia.</p> <p>There was just one little problem: Ibrahima was a Muslim. In fact, some 20% of the Africans captured and sold into slavery in the United States were Muslims ([<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref28">50</reflink>]), though few White Americans were aware of it. In a May 1828 letter Gallaudet wrote to Ibrahima, he seems to have understood that "the Moorish Prince" was unconverted, for, addressing a man who had been held in slavery by Christians for 40 years, he made the following plea:</p> <p>Perhaps you have met a few persons who are Christians in heart, and who imitate the example of Jesus Christ. What do you think of them? What do you think of that religion which has removed darkness from their minds, and made their hearts love God and love their fellow-men? Look at such men. Are you not glad to have them for your friends?</p> <p>([<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref29">27</reflink>])</p> <p>Five months later, on a fundraising excursion to New York with Ibrahima himself in tow, Principal Gallaudet was still badgering the old prince about his religious convictions and interrogating ACS headquarters about whether the poor man had in fact joined a Baptist church—or not! ([<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref30">29</reflink>]). For the purposes of raising cash for the ACS, however, he used his public probity as founding principal of the deaf school to speak publicly of Ibrahima as a converted man, and, echoing the claim of his old roommate Kellogg that slavery was the "highest blessing" to Africans, he used Ibrahima's alleged conversion to make the proslavery argument that God keeps Africans in slavery until conversion is accomplished:</p> <p>We see in these events, that God's ways are not as our ways, nor His thought as our thoughts. We see why the prisoner was not to return with his Moorish disposition and his Moorish sword; that Providence continued him here, till grace had softened his heart.</p> <p>([<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref31">27</reflink>])</p> <p>A month later, Gallaudet was privately admitting to his doubts about the putative conversion ([<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref32">29</reflink>]), but in the interests of the ACS's plan to embed the prince in their web of commercial agents in Liberia, he managed to suppress them.</p> <p>Ibrahima and his wife eventually sailed to Liberia in 1829, their children and grandchildren left behind in slavery. Arthur Tappan felt sure that Ibrahima would die upon arrival ([<reflink idref="bib65" id="ref33">65</reflink>])—which he did, on July 6, 1829. Nothing daunted, Gallaudet returned to New York a few months later to address an ACS fundraising meeting ([<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref34">31</reflink>]), where, billed as Principal of the American Asylum, he shared the stage with ACS founder Francis Scott Key and a Captain Stockton of the U.S. Navy, which was, in a sense, working for the ACS ([<reflink idref="bib69" id="ref35">69</reflink>]). Plunging headlong into "the delicate and perplexing subject of slavery!" (italics and exclamation point his), Gallaudet declared that antislavery and proslavery sentiments were both merely regional prejudices. The ACS, he averred, removed these regional prejudices, bringing "together Patriots and Christians, from every section of our country, to have their minds enlightened and their best affections kindled." Slavery would probably never be "entirely removed" from the United States, but the existence of the ACS ensured that "rash and imprudent measures"—meaning abolition—would be avoided ([<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref36">31</reflink>]).</p> <p>When Gallaudet finally left the American Asylum in 1830 to devote himself to writing religious books for children, he was offered various salaried positions with the ACS ([<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref37">20</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref38">39</reflink>]). He declined them all, while increasing his work for colonization as a volunteer and preaching around Hartford County to collect donations for the cause ([<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref39">32</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref40">36</reflink>]).</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-6">African American Pupils</hd> <p>During these same years Gallaudet also became heavily involved in expanding and improving education for hearing children from lower-class families—White children, that is. The CCS explained why educating an African American child was worse than a waste of time: "You have added little or nothing to his happiness—you have unfitted him for the society and sympathies of his degraded kindred, and yet you have not procured for him and cannot procure for him any admission into the society and sympathy of white men" (quoted in [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref41">19</reflink>]). Nationally, the ACS was prevented by its constitution from providing or even endorsing any sort of schooling or training of African Americans, the unspoken rationale being that education would only encourage them to remain in the United States. Then, in 1833, Connecticut enacted a law barring any person from operating any school that instructed, harbored, or boarded any colored persons who were not residents of the state. This so-called Black Law was prompted by the public outcry over a scandal that began when Prudence Crandall, a young Quaker running a private girls' school in Canterbury, about 40 miles east of Hartford, admitted an African American pupil. White parents withdrew their daughters, so Crandall closed her school and opened a new one exclusively for girls of color. The state moved quickly to prohibit out-of-state African Americans from entering Connecticut for the purpose of attending school, and made the new law retroactive so that Crandall and her pupils were charged and jailed. Until the law's repeal in 1838, every person in Connecticut involved with educating a Black child from another state was a criminal. And this certainly applied to the directors and teaching staff of the high-profile deaf school in Hartford.</p> <p>It comes as quite a shock, then, to realize that the American Asylum, situated in what was called the worst city in the Union for harassment of Black residents, and run by a set of blatantly racist directors during a time when every church, school, and volunteer society in the city was rigidly segregated, actually had three pupils of mixed race during the 1820s and early 1830s. The first, Charles Hiller, of Nantucket, MA, enrolled during Gallaudet's tenure, in 1825. How was this possible? We need only look at the bottom line. Mason Fitch Cogswell had always believed that the school could be viable only if it were assured a monopoly in the Northeast—for this reason, he had made frantic efforts to sabotage plans to found deaf schools in both New York City and Philadelphia ([<reflink idref="bib61" id="ref42">61</reflink>]) and had sent Thomas Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc off on nearly constant tours around New England to lobby state legislatures. The populous state of Massachusetts was a valuable resource to the Asylum, and it was the Massachusetts legislature that sent Charles Hiller to Hartford and paid his fees. To decline to accept Charles would have been to jeopardize a lucrative pupil pipeline from the Boston statehouse. (Why Massachusetts would have paid for a Black child's education is another question, but the historical record shows that the rare New England boy of color who managed to get into a good private school was almost always the unacknowledged offspring of a prominent White man who had him placed.) Charles studied at the Asylum for 4 years, through 1828. In 1829, Reuben Jones, a Maine resident, was the second pupil of color to be admitted; in 1830, Horace Way of Massachusetts was the third.</p> <p>The one historian ([<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref43">23</reflink>]) who has looked into the American Asylum's pupils of color has simply assumed that they were normally integrated, but there is no evidence for that. These children's presence was easily kept quiet because by the time Charles Hiller was admitted, the school had moved from downtown Hartford (where Black locals were being pelted with stones as they passed along the streets) to its new, exurban campus (paid for, in part, by sales of slaves) that was large and self-sufficient enough that pupils need never have left it even for church, since Gallaudet now preached at the school himself every Sunday. As well, all letters written by pupils were passed through careful censorship by the hearing faculty, and it seems that no hint of the Black boys' presence was leaked. We also know that Alice Cogswell had left the school by this date—it is inconceivable that Dr. Cogswell would have kept her in a classroom with a boy of mixed race.</p> <p>As for the Black Law passed in response to Crandall's school in 1833 and in effect until 1838, Charles Hiller was gone by 1829, Reuben Jones by 1832, and Horace Way by 1833. If the American Asylum was in violation of the Black Law, it could only have been for a matter of months until Horace could be sent home. No other children of color were admitted until the 1840s, years after the law was rescinded.</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-7">Clerc, Booth, and Weld</hd> <p>Was everyone associated with the American Asylum equally bigoted? Probably not. Two or three of the players—Lewis Weld, Edmund Booth, and perhaps Laurent Clerc—may have had some feelings about the injustices perpetrated against African Americans. Such men, however, held their peace, whether from basic indifference or simply to keep their jobs. In Clerc's case, as a Roman Catholic foreigner in Connecticut on the sufferance of his employers, the Board of Directors of the Asylum, it is very likely that he just did not regard himself as having the standing to say anything at all. In no case, however, were these men abolitionists in any meaningful sense of the word. Abolitionists never constituted more than a tiny minority of antislavery sympathizers in the North, and these stalwart few were necessarily women and men who were unafraid to risk attacks on their homes, livelihoods, and very lives by publicly stating their views. No one involved in the early years of manualist deaf education meets that standard.</p> <p>Edmund Booth, for example, a first-generation pupil of Gallaudet's at the American Asylum and later a teacher there as well, was an outspoken Union man during the Civil War—many years after he and his Deaf wife, Mary Ann, had left the Deaf World to live among the hearing in Iowa, where he edited a newspaper. But Booth's displeasure with the secessionist South was not founded on its institutionalization of slavery, or at least not primarily. Rather, it was the South's "treason" that roused his ire. His newspaper's nameplate, which he designed, illustrates his views: He appropriated the nameplate of the abolitionist paper The Liberator, but replaced its ringing declarations "No Compromise With Slavery! No Union With Slaveholders!" with his own more theoretical gripes about secession: "No Compromise Under Menace; No Surrender of Principles; No Concession to Traitors."</p> <p>Earlier, as a postgraduate instructor at the American Asylum, Booth had met the editor of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison, when the latter was briefly in Hartford changing trains. As Garrison told the story, Booth, a "mute," introduced himself and invited Garrison to meet "twelve or fourteen mutes from the slave-holding states"—these were pupils at the Asylum, which at this time was open only to children of White Protestant families ([<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref44">37</reflink>]). Garrison clearly regarded both Booth himself and the deaf pupils hailing from Southern planter families as mere curiosities—hardly as fellow abolitionists. Twenty years later, when abolition was gaining more and more adherents, Booth engaged in an epistolary discussion on the topic of a proposed deaf state in the American West with the racist Deaf-separatist and slave-owner J. J. Flournoy, author of An Essay on the Origins, Habits, &amp;c. of the African Race: Incidental to the Propriety of Having Nothing To Do With Negroes. In the course of their discussion, Flournoy explained that his efforts "to induce the deportation of the slaves to Liberia" was a "sacred duty I owe to God ... to save the republic," and would prevent his moving to the proposed Deaf state ([<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref45">26</reflink>]). Booth, however, made not one mention of slavery in his counterarguments. Well after the Civil War, when having been an abolitionist became a mark of distinction rather than disapprobation, Booth's son Thomas referenced his father's "anti-slavery sentiment" (T. E. Booth, n.d.), but neither Edmund Booth himself in his autobiography ([<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref46">15</reflink>]) nor his daughter Harriet in her "Remembrances" (Le Clere, n.d.) had anything at all to say on the subject, a circumstance unimaginable for genuine abolitionists, whose lives were consumed by a passionate hatred of slavery.</p> <p>As for Lewis Weld, Gallaudet's handpicked successor at the American Asylum, it is sometimes mistakenly assumed that he was a "committed abolitionist" ([<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref47">23</reflink>]) like his brother Theodore Dwight Weld, and that the brothers collaborated to integrate the deaf school. In 1833, an English abolitionist, Edward Strutt Abdy, described seeing a "black boy, or rather a mulatto," at the Asylum, and supposed that the child had been admitted "probably through the influence of the superintendent, who is a very liberal man, and at the suggestion of his brother" ([<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref48">1</reflink>]). But that cannot have been the case. The Asylum was run by its directors; its principal was just another employee, with no authority to make admission decisions, and this particular pupil, Horace Way, had been selected by the state of Massachusetts, which also paid his tuition. In any case, when Theodore Weld visited Hartford in 1837 for an abolition meeting, we have T. H. Gallaudet's word for it that "no citizens of any weight"—and that presumably would have included Asylum principal Lewis Weld—were involved in this meeting, that Hartford officially closed all its meeting rooms to Theodore Weld, and that the antiabolition sentiment in Connecticut would "begin the reaction that within a year or two will check [the abolitionists'] career" ([<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref49">33</reflink>]). If Lewis Weld sympathized with his brother's cause, he took care to conceal his support from his colleagues at the Asylum.</p> <p>Yet even that surmise is doubtful because Theodore's letters to Lewis make no mention at all of the cause that was his life's work: A letter Theodore wrote to Lewis the same year in which Abdy met the "mulatto" Horace Way was not about abolition at all, but about a cholera epidemic and a friend who lost his faith as he lay dying ([<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref50">2</reflink>]). Abolition seems to have been off the table in relations between the brothers. These men—Booth, Weld, and perhaps others—may have been cowed into tacit complicity by the deeply held conservatism of their colleagues, but, as we have seen, there is no question of the racism of those running the school.</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-8">TheAmistad Affair and Sign Language Advocacy</hd> <p>When a few years later the Amistad case was electrifying White New Englanders all along the political and religious spectrums, Gallaudet and the American Asylum directors naturally, remained aloof—in stark contrast to the leadership of a great many other schools, as well as churches and other charitable organizations. A group of Yale professors and students plunged right in as volunteer teachers, beginning with a search for a common language in which to communicate with the prisoners. Among them was George Day, who had previously taught at the New York Institution (now the New York School for the Deaf) and who therefore realized immediately that the techniques of deaf education would work with the Mende-speaking African captives until an interpreter could be found. All he needed was a copy of Gallaudet's elementary textbook, The Child's Picture Defining and Reading Book. Instead of asking Gallaudet directly for a copy, however, he contacted a New York intermediary to convey his request. The book was secured, and Day used it with good success ([<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref51">59</reflink>]). Why Day did not feel comfortable making the request of Gallaudet himself is a good question, but in any case the fact that the book was requested meant that Gallaudet was aware that the methods he had developed for teaching the deaf were being used to help the Amistad captives. Yet he and every other Asylum teacher, current or former, declined or omitted to offer any assistance. There is no evidence to support any claim that Gallaudet (sometimes said to have been accompanied by Clerc) was among those who aided the captives, even when their trial in New Haven was appealed to a circuit court in Hartford and the prisoners were transferred to the city jail, where Gallaudet was then preaching every Sunday.</p> <p>Gallaudet did visit the prisoners in Hartford—but not to assist them. Instead, never dreaming that they were Muslims, and therefore monotheists, and believing them to be, instead, worshipers of primitive nature spirits, he was conducting a scientific experiment to determine whether the human mind has any innate knowledge of God. In an article titled "An Incident" that ran in the New York Commercial Advertiser on September 16, 1839, it was reported that Gallaudet</p> <p>passed some hours every day in the jail. ... His object on Friday was to ascertain whether they had any distinct idea of a Supreme Being, as the judge and rewarder or punisher of human actions. ... By further questioning Mr. Gallaudet satisfied himself that Gooly was their name for God; and then he proceeded to inquire whether they believed that Gooly would punish improper actions. He made signs representing the act of stealing—that of striking, and other wrongful doings; and asked if Gooly would whip, or punish, for such things. This also several of the negroes answered in the affirmative; clearly showing, all the time, by their intelligent looks, and their close attention to his motions, that they not only understood but were much interested in his proceedings.</p> <p>At length, however, Mr. Gallaudet, still rising in his scale of inquiries, conveyed to them the idea of murder by cutting the throat, and asked if Gooley would whip for this also. But the moment the negroes caught his meaning they cast down their eyes and were silent; nor could he induce one of them to resume the conversation, or indeed to hold any further communication with him. It occurred to him immediately that a suspicion had entered their minds of his being an emissary of their Spanish masters, and that he was seeking to entrap them into some confession of what took place on board the Amistad.</p> <p>Fortunately, just at this time the interpreter Ferry came in, and at Mr. Gallaudet's request explained to them that he was their friend, and entertained against them no such hostile design as they suspected; and the good effect of this was quickly made apparent by their coming up in succession to shake hands with Mr. Gallaudet, and then very readily resuming the conversation.</p> <p>Gallaudet most likely wrote this piece himself as a news release, but he never mentioned this particular experiment in subsequent writings, so he probably did not regard it as a success, for, if it proved anything, it was that the Africans did not understand ASL.</p> <p>Gallaudet returned to sign language advocacy in the late 1840s, prompted by Horace Mann's reports on Prussian successes with oral education. The American Asylum responded as well, sending Principal Weld on a European tour to study the question ([<reflink idref="bib71" id="ref52">71</reflink>]). At the time, Gallaudet limited himself to a private letter to Mann ([<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref53">42</reflink>]), but within a few years he wrote an advocacy essay for the maiden number of the American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb titled "On the Natural Language of Signs" ([<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref54">34</reflink>]). It opens with a picture of a deaf toddler inventing a sign language and teaching it to his parents and siblings. We can imagine how shocking this picture would have been to the reading public of the day, and that is perhaps why Gallaudet had it published in a professional journal for teachers of the deaf who knew full well that they had to learn the language from their pupils. It's a lovely picture: "The wind has been kindly tempered to the shorn lamb" (p. 56) was how Gallaudet described the gift of signing. This is followed by a discussion of the sign language in use among the Plains Indians, as described in an 1822 report of a scientific expedition dispatched by Secretary of War John C. Calhoun. Gallaudet studied this report carefully and chose judicious examples from Plains signs that were quite similar to signs used at the Asylum.</p> <p>The essay continued in the next issue of the Annals ([<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref55">35</reflink>]), with Gallaudet criticizing the "frigid, monotonous attitude, and quiescent limbs" (p. 80) of New England's public speakers, and the restraint that everyone in the region imposed on their feelings, "as if we were too fearful, or too cautious, to look, move and act as we think and feel" (p. 81). Attempts to stop deaf children from signing are cruel, he wrote, for that deprives them of intellectual and moral development: "I would as soon think of tying the wings of the young lark that is making its first aspiring essays to fly upward and soar in the ethereal expanse" (p. 88). Much of the remainder of the essay puts into play recycled ideas about the need for language to convey divine revelation, and about the material basis of all language and the suitability of a natural language for addressing the heart, but he ends with some of the truest remarks ever made about sign language and the hearing people who think they want to work in the Deaf community:</p> <p>For the language of natural signs is not to be learned from books. It cannot be delineated in pictures or printed on paper. It must be learned, in a great degree, from the living, looking, acting model. Some of the finest models for such a purpose are found among the originators of this language, the deaf and dumb. The peculiarities of their mind and character, and the genius of that singularly beautiful and impressive language which nature has taught them, should be the constant study of those whose beneficent calling it is to elevate them in the scale of intellectual, social and moral existence; to fit them for usefulness and respectability in this life and for happiness in that which is to come.</p> <p>(p. 93)</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-9">Gallaudet and Racism in the Sunday School Union</hd> <p>Meanwhile, as Gallaudet was penning his words in the Annals on sign language, the Sunday School Union, which had brought out his books of children's Bible stories in the 1830s, was removing one of them from circulation, citing an objection by "our Southern friends" to a "discourteous" passage in the story of Joseph's brothers selling him into slavery. In this context, an explanation for young readers included the remark that masters have authority over their slaves' very lives. The complainants responded with a strawman argument, alleging that in fact "more lives have been taken by slaves than by masters." But instead of defending his text, or even pointing out the logical fallacy on which the complaint was argued, Gallaudet not only agreed to the removal of the book from circulation but went so far as to claim that he did not write the passage in question ([<reflink idref="bib56" id="ref56">56</reflink>]). His retreat left it to the Congregational church in nearby Farmington, CT, to protest the book's withdrawal, on the grounds that its author was by no means an abolitionist but rather "a strong and leading colonizationalist—long, and we believe still, an officer of the colonization society" ([<reflink idref="bib66" id="ref57">66</reflink>]).</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-10">The Second Generation and the Founding of Gallaudet University</hd> <p>Gallaudet did indeed remain throughout his lifetime an active colonizationalist and dependable fund-raiser for colonization. His oldest son, Thomas, followed in his footsteps in both his father's causes: As a teacher at the New York Institution in 1850, he instructed his pupils, in ASL, to admire the "great usefulness" of colonization, and he would regale the deaf children with signed stories of his attendance at colonization meetings, explaining that abolition meetings are often broken up by mobs because abolitionists, unlike the wiser colonizationalists, "make use of a great many unkind and imprudent expressions" ([<reflink idref="bib70" id="ref58">70</reflink>]).</p> <p>Gallaudet's youngest son, Edward Miner, likewise followed his father in both White supremacy and deaf education, albeit on a far larger stage, when, in 1857, he was named head of the then-tiny Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind in Washington, DC. E. M. Gallaudet presided over the school, which he renamed Gallaudet College, for more than 50 years. Today, Gallaudet University ascribes its establishment to Amos Kendall, a philanthropist who donated land for the school and hired the younger Gallaudet, but is silent on how Kendall made his money and what his motivation might have been for establishing a school for deaf children. Kendall, however, is very well known to students of the Jackson era as the postmaster general who, in the 1830s, tried to stop the mailing of abolitionist materials and winked when postmasters around the country burned such newspapers and pamphlets to the cheers of large White mobs. When Kendall returned to private life in 1840, embroiled in lawsuits stemming from his misconduct in the Post Office Department, he bought some cheap land on the outskirts of Washington, the 102 acres he called Kendall Green, then turned his attention to repairing his fortune by litigating patents for the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, proslavery inventor of the telegraph, Samuel F. B. Morse. Earning a 10% commission on each successful claim, Kendall also came to know Sarah Griswold, the deaf woman Morse married in 1848.</p> <p>In the meantime, the Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind had been founded in Washington—by H. Platt Skinner and his deaf wife, Jerusha, née Hills, an alumna of the New York Institution and a former teacher there. Exactly how Kendall wrested the school from the Skinners is perhaps forever lost to history, the convoluted record of lawsuits, criminal charges, legal depositions, and witness testimony being now beyond disentanglement or independent corroboration. Kendall claimed that the Skinners were abusing deaf orphans, which is unlikely considering Mrs. Skinner's background and the couple's later history. What is more likely is that Kendall was horrified to learn that the Skinners' school served both White and African American pupils. Of all the claims made by both the Skinners and Kendall, there is one point on which both parties agreed: An African American pupil who boarded at the school, which was housed in the Skinners' residence, ate at the family table along with her White classmates. As the case proceeded, Kendall won a court order awarding him guardianship of five (White) deaf pupils who were orphans; also during the proceedings, the Skinners' home burned down, driving the family and the deaf and blind pupils they boarded onto the street in their nightclothes. Court testimony suggests that Kendall had the fire set in an attempt to disperse the remainder of the pupils, those whom he did not choose to care for. In any case, Kendall took the five White deaf orphans to Kendall Green, and the Skinners fled to Niagara Falls, NY, where, following Prudence Crandall's example under very similar circumstances, they opened a school there exclusively for African American deaf and blind children.</p> <p>E. M. Gallaudet, installed as superintendent of the Columbia Institution, ever after regarded Kendall as his "second father" ([<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref59">18</reflink>]), and he presided over the collegiate department as a virtually all-White institution. The two "colored" undergraduates who were admitted during his superintendency seem to have been driven out "because of racial harassment" ([<reflink idref="bib68" id="ref60">68</reflink>]), and Gallaudet College remained essentially closed to African Americans until 1950.</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-11">________</hd> <p>Today, as linguists continue to learn about human language from their study of signed languages like ASL, as Deaf Americans and Canadians increasingly choose ASL for everything from poetry to polemics, and as deaf educators ramp up their advocacy of ASL instruction of deaf children, it seems increasingly counterproductive to hide the language's origins behind feel-good fictions asserting T. H. Gallaudet's abolition credentials, or his and Clerc's assistance to the Amistad captives, or the American Asylum's bold defiance of state law to integrate deaf children of color. Least of all, it increasingly seems wrong to elide the origin of the American School for the Deaf's endowment, or to sanitize the founding of Gallaudet University, erasing true integrationists like the Skinners while portraying an unredeemed racist like Kendall as a benevolent philanthropist. Facing the facts of history now is just the first step.</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-12">Appendix A. Archival Sources at the American School for the Deaf (ASD)</hd> <p> <emph>Note</emph>. Because the ASD Archives have not been fully sorted and catalogued, in many cases only the date (if given on a document) and a descriptive title can be provided to identify the document cited.</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-13">ON ASD'S OWNERSHIP OF SLAVES</hd> <p>The evidence is held in the ASD Archives, and consists of the following documents: Minutes of a Directors' Meeting, April 19, 1820; William Ely to Directors, February 26, March 29, and April 20, 1821, and May 14, 1829; John Boardman to [?], [n. d.] For Thomas H. Gallaudet's obfuscating summary, see the Fifth Report to the Directors (1821), pp. 5–6. Gallaudet wrote all of the Directors' annual reports during his tenure as principal of the school, 1817–1830. My June 9, 2016, inquiry to Rennie Polk, assistant director for institutional advancement, was answered with a denial of any "validated evidence." A follow-up inquiry of April 25, 2018, was not answered.</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-14">ON AFRICAN AMERICAN PUPILS AT ASD</hd> <p>Pupil dates, hometowns, and who paid their way are given in an appendix to Barnard (1852). Race was never publicly stated and can be determined today only by examining intake forms archived at ASD. I rely here on Edwards (2012, pp. 65–68, 223–224, n. 45). On the supposition that young Black Americans who were admitted to New England schools were the sons of wealthy White fathers, see, for example, the case of Moses Simon's matriculation at Yale (Kaminer, 2014).</p> <p>On the censoring of pupil letters, which is likely one reason that the presence of African American pupils was not widely known, see the following documents archived at ASD: "Regulations for the Asylum," drafted by the Committee of the Instructors (n.d.); the same, drafted by the Principal, March 1, 1830.</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-15">Appendix B. Further Reading on Selected Topics</hd> <p></p> <hd id="AN0145534847-16">ON IBRAHIMA, "THE MOORISH PRINCE"</hd> <p>See the excellent biography of Ibrahima by Terry Alford (1977). On Charles and Arthur Tappan's involvement, see Wyatt-Brown (1969, pp. 85–87). Arthur Tappan and another brother, Lewis Tappan, would both leave the Anti-Colonization Society just a few years later to join in the abolition effort.</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-17">ON EDMUND BOOTH AND ABOLITION</hd> <p>Most prominent among recent commentators on Booth is Harry Lang (2017, pp. 6–10, 24) and (2004, passim), who declares Booth to have been an abolitionist, based on his newspaper's nameplate and on his pro-Union editorials. Lang does not notice, however, the insidious erasure of slavery from the nameplate, nor that Booth's editorials actually focus on the rights of free White citizens to their opinions with respect to slavery, not primarily on the injustice of enslavement.</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-18">ON DEAF EDUCATION AND THE AMISTAD</hd> <p>For more on George Day, see Bainton (1957, pp. 154–155) and Barber (1840/1993). Assertions that T. H. Gallaudet, and even Laurent Clerc, assisted the Africans can be found in popular accounts like Ragsdale (2003) and children's books like Gold (2007), both of which assert that Gallaudet was brought in by Yale professor Josiah Gibbs before Gibbs found a Mende interpreter. Gold (p. 48) illustrates with a portrait of a different man named Thomas Gallaudet: T.H. Gallaudet's son. Works of Deaf history frequently demonstrate a conviction that Gallaudet and Clerc rallied to the captive Africans. See, for example, "The ASD-<emph>Amistad</emph> Connection" (n.d.) and Silva (2014), both of which reference sign language stories supposedly passed down in the Deaf community for 200 years.</p> <p>The newspaper account of Gallaudet's visit with the <emph>Amistad</emph> captives quoted in the present article ("An Incident," 1839) is the only evidence of his contact with the captives. An article published in Gallaudet's lifetime (Woodruff, 1847, p. 54) affirms the newspaper report and adds nothing new.</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-19">ON GALLAUDET'S KNOWLEDGE OF THE PLAINS INDIANS' SIGN LANGUAGE</hd> <p>In his 1847 <emph>American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb</emph> essay on sign language, Gallaudet quotes extensively from Edwin James, compiler, "Account of an Expedition From Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains," which has been reprinted by University Microfilms, Ann Arbor (1966).</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-20">ON THE SUNDAY SCHOOL UNION DEBACLE</hd> <p>This affair, in which an objection by "our Southern friends" to a "discourteous" passage in the story of Joseph's brothers selling him into slavery caused a book to be withdrawn from circulation, is recounted with extensive documentation in [L. Tappan] (1848).</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-21">ON AMOS KENDALL</hd> <p>Correspondence between President Andrew Jackson and his postmaster, Amos Kendall, concerning abolitionist mail can be consulted in Bassett (1926–1935). See especially vol. 5, pp. 359–361. For discussion, see also Nye (1949, pp. 56–65). For Kendall's life, see Cole (2004). For Kendall's views on the "deaf-mute college," see his Autobiography (1949, pp. 555–559).</p> <hd id="AN0145534847-22">ON H. PLATT AND JERUSHA SKINNER AND THE COLUMBIA INSTITUTION FOR THE INSTRUCTION OF THE DEAF...</hd> <p>The story of how Amos Kendall drove the Skinners out of Washington is told in "Dr. Skinner's School" (1858–1859); the deposition suggesting arson is given in the December 22, 1858, installment. A fanciful story alleging that Kendall rescued the deaf orphans from the Skinners' mistreatment has been repeated in virtually all histories of Gallaudet University and American deaf education since at least 1870. It seems to have originated in that year's Report of the Columbia Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, in a section reporting formal remarks made at a meeting at which President Edward Miner Gallaudet was present (p. 872). (I thank Brian Riley for locating this early iteration.) The story was repeated on to and including my recent <emph>Life and Times of T. H. Gallaudet</emph>. (I thank Kathleen Brockway for calling my attention to the story's uncritical appearance in my book and for suggesting more accurate sources of information about the Skinners and their school.) For more information on the Skinners' Niagara Falls school, see Boston (2005) and Boles and Boston (2010). For more information about the two "colored" students who matriculated briefly in the 19th century, see "Two Black college students" (1990–1991, p. 9) and Peruzzi (2014). (Thanks to Brian Riley for locating these secondary sources.)</p> <ref id="AN0145534847-23"> <title> REFERENCES </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref22" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Abdy, E. S. (1835). Journal of the residence and tour in the United States of North America: From April, 1833, to October, 1834 (3 vols.). London, England: John Murray.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref50" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Abzug, R. H. (1994). Cosmos crumbling: American reform and religious imagination. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> Alford, T. (1977). Prince among slaves: The true story of an African prince sold into slavery in the American South. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib4" idref="ref4" type="bt">4</bibl> <bibtext> Alsop, R. (1793, January 16). [Letter to Mason Fitch Cogswell]. 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She resides in Henrietta, NY.</p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib13" firstref="ref1"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib12" firstref="ref2"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib22" firstref="ref3"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib27" firstref="ref5"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl5" bibid="bib49" firstref="ref6"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl6" bibid="bib72" firstref="ref7"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl7" bibid="bib51" firstref="ref9"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl8" bibid="bib54" firstref="ref10"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl9" bibid="bib60" firstref="ref11"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl10" bibid="bib24" firstref="ref12"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl11" bibid="bib25" firstref="ref15"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl12" bibid="bib52" firstref="ref16"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl13" bibid="bib42" firstref="ref18"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl14" bibid="bib44" firstref="ref19"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl15" bibid="bib64" firstref="ref20"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl16" bibid="bib67" firstref="ref21"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl17" bibid="bib41" firstref="ref23"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl18" bibid="bib63" firstref="ref24"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl19" bibid="bib61" firstref="ref25"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl20" bibid="bib53" firstref="ref26"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl21" bibid="bib50" firstref="ref28"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl22" bibid="bib29" firstref="ref30"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl23" bibid="bib65" firstref="ref33"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl24" bibid="bib31" firstref="ref34"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl25" bibid="bib69" firstref="ref35"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl26" bibid="bib20" firstref="ref37"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl27" bibid="bib39" firstref="ref38"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl28" bibid="bib32" firstref="ref39"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl29" bibid="bib36" firstref="ref40"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl30" bibid="bib19" firstref="ref41"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl31" bibid="bib23" firstref="ref43"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl32" bibid="bib37" firstref="ref44"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl33" bibid="bib26" firstref="ref45"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl34" bibid="bib15" firstref="ref46"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl35" bibid="bib33" firstref="ref49"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl36" bibid="bib59" firstref="ref51"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl37" bibid="bib71" firstref="ref52"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl38" bibid="bib34" firstref="ref54"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl39" bibid="bib35" firstref="ref55"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl40" bibid="bib56" firstref="ref56"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl41" bibid="bib66" firstref="ref57"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl42" bibid="bib70" firstref="ref58"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl43" bibid="bib18" firstref="ref59"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl44" bibid="bib68" firstref="ref60"></nolink> |
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| Items | – Name: Title Label: Title Group: Ti Data: White Nation, Black Deportation, Deaf Education: The Agenda of the Founders of Sign Language Education in the United States – Name: Language Label: Language Group: Lang Data: English – Name: Author Label: Authors Group: Au Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Sayers%2C+Edna+Edith%22">Sayers, Edna Edith</searchLink> – Name: TitleSource Label: Source Group: Src Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22American+Annals+of+the+Deaf%22"><i>American Annals of the Deaf</i></searchLink>. 2020 165(2):136-156. – Name: Avail Label: Availability Group: Avail Data: Gallaudet University Press. 800 Florida Avenue NE, Denison House, Washington, DC 20002-3695. Tel: 202-651-5488; Fax: 202-651-5489; Web site: http://gupress.gallaudet.edu/annals/ – Name: PeerReviewed Label: Peer Reviewed Group: SrcInfo Data: Y – Name: Pages Label: Page Count Group: Src Data: 21 – Name: DatePubCY Label: Publication Date Group: Date Data: 2020 – Name: TypeDocument Label: Document Type Group: TypDoc Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Evaluative – Name: Audience Label: Education Level Group: Audnce Data: <searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Higher+Education%22">Higher Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Postsecondary+Education%22">Postsecondary Education</searchLink> – Name: Subject Label: Descriptors Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Deafness%22">Deafness</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Special+Education%22">Special Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+History%22">Educational History</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22American+Sign+Language%22">American Sign Language</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Racial+Bias%22">Racial Bias</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Special+Schools%22">Special Schools</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22United+States+History%22">United States History</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22African+American+History%22">African American History</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Slavery%22">Slavery</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Land+Grant+Universities%22">Land Grant Universities</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22African+American+Education%22">African American Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Advocacy%22">Advocacy</searchLink> – Name: Subject Label: Geographic Terms Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Connecticut%22">Connecticut</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Alabama%22">Alabama</searchLink> – Name: ISSN Label: ISSN Group: ISSN Data: 0002-726X – Name: Abstract Label: Abstract Group: Ab Data: Deaf education and American Sign Language emerged in Connecticut during the early 1800s as part of a reactionary social and political agenda that included church control of government and public schools, antifeminism, anti-Catholicism, and, the topic of the present article, White nationalism. Topics discussed include the racist views of early advocates of deaf education, including Mason Fitch Cogswell and Amos Kendall; evidence that Alabama land granted to the American School for the Deaf by Congress involved ASD in the selling of slaves; and T. H. Gallaudet's exploitation of his reputation as a teacher of the deaf to fund-raise for the deportation of African Americans to Liberia. Popular legends that Edmund Booth and Lewis Weld were abolitionists and that Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc helped the "Amistad" captives are debunked. The three mixed-race boys enrolled in ASD during the 1820s and 1830s are discussed in this context. – Name: AbstractInfo Label: Abstractor Group: Ab Data: As Provided – Name: DateEntry Label: Entry Date Group: Date Data: 2021 – Name: URL Label: Access URL Group: URL Data: <link linkTarget="URL" linkTerm="https://gupress.gallaudet.edu/annals/archives.htm" linkWindow="_blank">http://gupress.gallaudet.edu/annals/archives.htm</link> – Name: AN Label: Accession Number Group: ID Data: EJ1282782 |
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| RecordInfo | BibRecord: BibEntity: Languages: – Text: English PhysicalDescription: Pagination: PageCount: 21 StartPage: 136 Subjects: – SubjectFull: Deafness Type: general – SubjectFull: Special Education Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational History Type: general – SubjectFull: American Sign Language Type: general – SubjectFull: Racial Bias Type: general – SubjectFull: Special Schools Type: general – SubjectFull: United States History Type: general – SubjectFull: African American History Type: general – SubjectFull: Slavery Type: general – SubjectFull: Land Grant Universities Type: general – SubjectFull: African American Education Type: general – SubjectFull: Advocacy Type: general – SubjectFull: Connecticut Type: general – SubjectFull: Alabama Type: general Titles: – TitleFull: White Nation, Black Deportation, Deaf Education: The Agenda of the Founders of Sign Language Education in the United States Type: main BibRelationships: HasContributorRelationships: – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Sayers, Edna Edith IsPartOfRelationships: – BibEntity: Dates: – D: 01 M: 01 Type: published Y: 2020 Identifiers: – Type: issn-print Value: 0002-726X Numbering: – Type: volume Value: 165 – Type: issue Value: 2 Titles: – TitleFull: American Annals of the Deaf Type: main |
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