The dark secret of Yale University

Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, US has many acclaimed laurels to its credit. This Ivy League university is amongst the three oldest institutions of higher learning in US and one of the only nine colleges chartered before the American revolution. It awarded the first PhD degree on American soil in 1861. It is a reputed to be a liberal educational institution, located in one of the original thirteen colonies that gave the US its national status and its constitution. Yale has continuously been rated as the 3rd ranking university in US for the last 15 years, trailing behind Princeton and Harvard only. Its library is the third largest university library in the US holding 15 million volumes. Its endowment is valued at $27.2 billion, the second largest of U.S. educational institutions. 60 Noble laureates, 5 Fields medallists for excellence in mathematics and 3 Turing awardees for distinction in computer sciences have been associated with it. Its alumni include 5 US presidents, 19 US Supreme Court Justices and 20 billionaires. These achievements are admirably immense by any standard. University's forerunner incipient college, founded in 1701, was housed in private homes and was in danger of closing down due to lack of funds to erect a building. The college approached a wealthy Boston born Welsh 'nabob' by the name of Elihu Yale with a request for a large donation. To entice this rich person, the college wrote that, "What is forming at New Haven might wear the name of Yale College, it would be better than the name of sons and daughters. And your munificence might easily obtain for you such a commemoration and perpetuation of your valuable name, as would indeed be much better than an Egyptian pyramid." Elihu Yale (He will be referred to by his first name in this article to distinguish him from the University bearing his name) found the offer tempting, and donated hundreds of books, a portrait of King George I and 9 bales of goods consisting of Indian cotton. The bales were auctioned for a princely sum of £800 by one source, £560 by another. The money was used to build university's first building and as agreed between the then college administration and the donor, it was named after Yale. Subsequently, the whole university came to be known as Yale. Elihu is reported to have made some further contributions as well though not as much as the college administration had hoped to gain from this fabulously rich employ of BEIC who had been company's first President of Fort St. George; the edifice around which the city of Chennai grew. In its vast art collection, Yale University holds three portraits of Elihu. Two are in storage while the third hangs in the Corporation Room of Woodbridge Hall—the nerve centre of the university. In this portrait, which was placed on the wall in 2007 without much fanfare, a prosperous looking Elihu is shown standing alone. However, in the centuries before that year, the portrait that adorned this spot showed him attended upon by a young boy who is clearly in servitude to the master. Both are wearing expensive flourishing clothes, signifying the wealthy status of the master. The portrait is clearly meant to depict the high social and economic standing of Elihu. However, the portrait also reveals a dark secret. A closer look at the boy reveals that he is wearing a metal collar with a padlock. The boy is not a servant but a slave and despite in no condition of escaping, is being treated like a domesticated wild animal. His skin colour is not jet black that of African slaves but dark brown of natives of Tamil Nadu, where the affluent master an official for 16 years and the President of BEIC factories for another 5 years. The third portrait in the storage shows Elihu Yale with his rich friends and, again, attended by a dark brown slave, collared and padlocked. The administration of the Yale University, sensitive to current thoughts on slavery, quietly replaced the 'slave-waiting-on-master' portrait with the one that hangs now. They were clearly uncomfortable with the reality that their earliest benefactor and the person who gave the university his name was not only a slave trader but also someone who relished exhibiting his human assets of Tamil origin. According to historian Hiram Bingham III, a Ph.D from and later a professor at Yale University, Elihu's grandparents migrated from Wrexham, Wales to Boston in the New World and founded the New haven colony in 1638. Elihu was born in Boston in 1649 and moved to Wales with his parents when he was only three years old. He never returned to America. He was educated at a private school in London. The family escaped the ravages of the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666. In 1671, when he was 22, Elihu was selected for the respectable and well paying position of a 'writer' for the British East India Company -BEIC- and landed in Fort St George, Madras. He would make his fortune here, rising from a mere clerk to junior merchant to senior merchant and then on to the council of members, from whom the Governor was selected. In almost no time, Governor Elihu Yale had pulled himself up from his rough and tumble arrival on that sandy beach and become a proper 17th century “nabob”, as Europeans who had amassed great wealth in India were called. He displayed all the arrogance of the colonial race towards the native population. Apart from indulging in private trade, against the rules of BEIC, Elihu also profited from capturing men, women and children from the areas surrounding Madras and selling them overseas as slaves. Joseph Yannielli, a Ph.D in history from Yale University, has documented this slaving activity in its gory details. He states that as an official for BEIC, Elihu presided over an important node of the Indian Ocean slave trade. Much larger in scope than its Atlantic counterpart, the Indian Ocean trade linked southeast Asia with the Middle East, the Indonesian archipelago, and the African littoral. In the 1680s, a devastating famine struck the Madras coast leading to an upsurge in the local slave trade. As more and more bodies became available on the open market, Elihu Yale and other company officials took advantage of the labour surplus, buying hundreds of slaves and shipping them to the BEIC governed English colony on Saint Helena. Yale participated in a meeting that ordered a minimum of ten slaves sent on every outbound European ship. Fort St. George exported at least 665 individuals in 1681. Elihu was appointed Governor of Madras in 1687. He was the first President of Fort St. George as the post was elevated from that of agent. During this time he enforced the ten-slaves-per-vessel rule. On two separate occasions, he sentenced “black Criminals” accused of burglary to suffer whipping, branding, and foreign enslavement. When the demand began to increase rapidly, the English merchants even began to kidnap young children and deport them to distant parts of the world, very much against their will. Elihu certainly profited both directly and indirectly from this trade in human cargo. In 1688, Aurangzeb occupied Golconda, imprisoned its Qutub Shahi ruler and extended his control over Coromandel coast. The Mughals were already aware that the European trading companies, including the Dutch and British East India Companies, were involved in procuring slaves from Bengal coastal regions. Now they learnt that BEIC was capturing unsuspecting poor persons around Madras and selling them overseas. They insisted on abolition of slavery. Consequently Elihu Yale issued a decree in May 1688 curbing the transport of slaves from Madras arguing, in his wors, that the trade had become more trouble than it was worth. Firstly the availability of slaves from the previous year’s famine had dried up, and the Mughal government had, again in his words, “brought great complaints and troubles ... for the loss of their Children and Servants Sperited and Stoln from them.” With no profit left for the company and a hostile Mughal demanding abolition, Elihu was obliged to comply. In last years of his presidency, charges of corruption were brought against Elihu. He was eventually removed in 1692 but stayed on in Madras trying to clear his name. He finally returned to England in 1699. He had amassed substantial wealth from his trade in cotton goods and slaves. He maintained a luxurious home in London, spent lavishly and continued to exert political and commercial influence as a diamond trader. He bought the Mansion House of Latimer, twenty miles from London, in the lovely valley of the Chess. In addition to his large house in Queen Square he had bought two houses in Southampton Row. He had also bought a small house at the corner of Brunswick Row and several coach houses and stables. He needed them all to store his paintings and objects of art which had crowded his family home. He apparently had an acute desire to "collect," and thanks to his very large fortune he was able to gratify this mania. His large collection consisted of pictures, jewels, gold and silver watches, clocks with several motions, velvets, broad-cloths, silks and muslins, mathematical and surgical instruments, curious fire arms, swords and canes, beautifully incised and inlaid screens from Japan and China, carved chests, fine snuff-boxes, and many curiosities in gold, silver, and agate. After his death, it took more than thirty auction sales to dispose off his effects. He even sent home from Madras some mango pickle for a friend who returned the favour with a fine bottle of ale. Elihu Yale died in London in 1721 and buried in Wrexham, his ancestral town of Wrexham in Wales. A plaque was placed in 1927 near the place of his birth in Scollay Square in Boston, and another in St. Mary church, Chennai to acknowledge the naming of Yale University. His name as the eponymous of the leading US university will live forever, as shall his reputation as a slave trader of Tamil natives. This article appeared in the weekly The Friday Times on 21st Sep 2018 Parvez Mahmood retired as a Group Captain from PAF and is now a software engineer. He lives in Islamabad and writes on historical and social issues. He can be reached at parvezmahmood53@gmail.com