Sam Flores (College of Charleston)
When the Roman philosopher Seneca explained the meaning of the phrase “liberal studies” (liberalia studia), he etymologized the Latin adjective liberalis as a term diametrically opposed to the status of enslaved persons, saying these studies are called liberal “because they are worthy of a free man” (quia homine libero digna sunt) (Ep. 88.2). What we today call “classics” also takes root in a form of exclusion and marginalization: the western European Renaissance education of elites. As Lee Pearcy says, “Renaissance classical education [was] humanistic, Christian, [and] designed to educate members of the governing class…” (9, emphasis mine). Institutions founded in colonial America and the early United States borrowed heavily from this western European model, making classics so central to their educational curriculum that, prior to the 19th century, classics was not seen as its own subject matter and discipline (Pearcy 16). Later, during the first half of the 19th century, ‘liberal arts’ was essentially synonymous with the field of classics.
This paper juxtaposes how the central role of the liberal arts in 18th and 19th century US education served as a gatekeeper for access to higher education while simultaneously benefitting from the exploitation and forced labor of the enslaved people it excluded. At many of the oldest and most prestigious colleges and universities in the US, the study of Latin and Greek was not just a major component of American higher education, but it was often a prerequisite for admission. Despite this fact, recent scholarship has demonstrated that the peoples who were marginalized from higher education, especially enslaved, formerly enslaved, and freeborn African Americans, were still able to obtain and master a classical education (e.g. Ronnick 2004; Hairston 2013).
In the last decade, we have also seen a surge in many of these same schools trying to reckon with their own history of enslavement and to recognize formally the contributions that enslaved people made to their development and flourishing of these institutions. In the second half of this paper, I turn my examination specifically to my home institution, which was founded in the 18th century to compete with older and more prestigious universities in providing a classical liberal arts education. The archival records show that it was endowed and founded by enslavers who profited from the forced labor and the buying and selling of enslaved people. After being built and maintained by enslaved people, the institution continued to enslave people until the American Civil War, while continuing to marginalize formerly enslaved and freeborn African Americans in the century that followed with racist admissions policies and resistance to desegregation. Enslavement and liberal arts education are thus tied to the school since its founding.