Higher Education on the Texas Blackland Prairie: Trinity University's Civil War Era

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• Higher Education on the Texas Blackland Prairie: Trinity University’s Civil War Era
• Sarah Beth Kaufman (bio)

Across the United States, institutions of higher learning are grappling with legacies rooted in slavery. Catalyzed by the historic mandate of Brown University president Ruth J. Simmons, the first Black woman to lead an Ivy League school, colleges and universities have documented the role of enslaved labor, celebrated the accomplishments of formerly enslaved members of their communities, and taken steps toward reconciliation.¹ This essay extends such work, centering the slave economy’s influence on universities founded during southern Reconstruction. Scholars argue that Civil War–era racial capital deserves more attention.² The story of Trinity University’s founding illuminates one aspect of this era: how higher education funneled wealth gained from enslavement before the Civil War to Protestant Anglo children after slavery’s abolition. Drawing on materials such as letters from the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (the Freedmen’s Bureau) and university archival records, this essay provides a model for other southern colleges and universities founded during the Civil War era to clarify how they, too, benefited from the slave economy. [End Page 503]

Today, Trinity University is a small private school in San Antonio, Texas. With an enrollment of over 2,500 undergraduate students, it ranks among the top fifty liberal arts schools in the United States, and it has an endowment to match.³ Like other predominantly white institutions, Trinity has historically served students racialized as white (herein referred to as “white” or “Anglo”), to the detriment of minoritized racial groups, particularly those racialized as Black.⁴ Trinity was opened in 1869 by Cumberland Presbyterians as one of the many evangelical colleges propagated throughout the South during the later nineteenth century. The school is now secular, with a covenantal relationship with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). It resided for the first half of the twentieth century in Waxahachie, Texas, near Dallas, before moving to its current home in San Antonio. But Trinity University was begun in a remote settlement in east central Texas called the Tehuacana Hills, in Limestone County. It was not founded by a single person or family but by a group of Anglo church and community leaders who were wealthy enough to donate land and money, sit on the board of trustees, and travel to solicit contributions for the school. Most of these were farmer- businessmen-ministers who migrated from prominent families in the lower southern states, who enslaved people, and who fought for the Confederacy. Despite losing significant wealth as a result of the Civil War, Trinity’s founders established one of only twenty private colleges in Texas to survive into the late twentieth century, out of the almost one hundred that had been founded in the 1800s.⁵ [End Page 504]

This essay describes how Trinity’s founders were able to accomplish their institution’s unlikely survival and enrich their own positions by creating a valuable new educational commodity. The story of their success—previously chronicled as a triumph of pious men—is also embedded in the failure of southern Reconstruction to create meaningful opportunities for those freed from enslavement.⁶ In a process sociologists call “opportunity hoarding,” the founders consolidated scarce resources for use by their own semiclosed networks.⁷ They founded an all-white, private university with wealth gained from enslavement while simultaneously undermining attempts to establish an educational system for Black children, an illustration of the inextricable entwinement of racialization and capital accumulation—or racial capitalism—developing in the early modern United States.⁸ Trinity University remained closed to Black students until after Brown v. Board of Education (1954).⁹ But its first generation of all-white graduates were positioned to profit from the emerging “military-cotton complex” that swept nineteenth-century Texas, helping sustain the severe economic and racial hierarchies of the region into the twentieth century.¹⁰ As such, Trinity’s history connects the field of universities studying slavery into the era of Reconstruction and beyond.

The historiography of nineteenth-century higher education is commonly broken into two periods on either side of the Civil War.¹¹ [End Page 505] Early-nineteenth-century...