Abstract
Princeton Theological Seminary was founded in 1812 at a time when slavery was still very much part of daily life in New Jersey and the nation. The birth and early development of the seminary occurred in a context in which slavery impacted every aspect of the country’s social, economic, political, and theological life.
Our nation has long resisted examining the degree to which it was built on a slave economy and, consequently, the enduring legacy of racism that systemically marginalizes African Americans from the national narratives of freedom and opportunity. Yet acknowledging this history and understanding its legacy is vital to the spiritual and social healing of our communities. Educational institutions have a special obligation to promote contextual understanding of this complex history and its ongoing implications for our life today. Many colleges and universities have now undertaken studies of their own relationship to slavery and contributed to the national conversation about the legacy of slavery in our nation.
Princeton Seminary, as an institution of higher education committed to educating servants of the church, has the additional responsibility to contribute to this conversation a theological vocabulary for interpreting our past and our present. In the Christian tradition, we use the language of confession to acknowledge as sin the wrongs committed against one another and God. Confession requires telling the truth. But confession must be accompanied by repentance, a commitment to a changed way of life that is in accord with God’s desire for reconciliation.
The context for Princeton Seminary’s historical audit was a convergence of all of these factors: a need for truth-telling in our community called for by our students and faculty, a growing urgency to the national conversation about race, a theological imperative for repentance, and most of all a perception that we needed to come to terms with our historical legacy in order to develop a vision of a more equitable and inclusive way of life together.
Princeton Seminary and Slavery: A Report of the Historical Audit Committee
In the spring of 2016 I appointed a research committee of faculty and administrators to conduct a historical audit of the seminary’s relationship to slavery in nineteenth-century America. The committee was charged with revealing the truth about the ways in which our community of faith and learning, in spite of all of its historical contributions to theological scholarship, was complacent in the racism that continues to plague our society.
Our concern was not just with what our founders said and did, but with the way in which their beliefs and actions created a legacy for what we may continue to say and do today. This history continues to shape and form us as part of our family story, and the only way that we can begin to repair the effects of this history is to begin with the truth. In other words, the audit represents an act of communal confession. It was a means of owning this painful part of our seminary’s history as our story, for all of us, which continues to unfold today.
Beginning in 2016 the committee met regularly through the conclusion of the academic year of 2018, and in the course of their research they carefully studied the writings of the seminary’s founders about slavery, the financing and construction of the campus, the convictions and ministries of our alumni, and the role of the seminary’s leadership in the organization of the American Colonization Society, which sought to send freed African Americans to Africa.
After two years of rigorous research, their report, Princeton Seminary and Slavery: A Report of the Historical Audit Committee, revealed a story of complexity, contradiction, and, it claims, a failure of theological imagination. The school did not own slaves, was not built by slave labor, and the dormitories did not maintain slave quarters. However, the school was funded in its early years by donors benefiting from a national economy that was driven by slave labor. Many of the school’s founding leaders opposed slavery, while having had slaves, and advocated for a gradualism out of slavery that in fact perpetuated it. But many of their students demonstrated greater theological imagination and moral clarity than their teachers.
The seminary’s first professors, Archibald Alexander, Samuel Miller, and Charles Hodge, all used slave labor at some point in their lives, even as they wrote eloquently about their disdain for the institution of slavery. Ashbel Green, the first president of the seminary’s Board of Directors, freed the slave of his wife named Betsy Stockton, encouraged her religious education, and supported her vocation as a missionary. He also chaired a committee of the Presbyterian General Assembly that in 1818 declared slavery was “a gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature.” Yet even as these founders spoke powerfully against slavery, they were also wary of radical abolitionism, believing that it would tear the country apart. As a middle course, they advocated for gradualism, believing the country would eventually outgrow this “gross violation” of human rights. In this sense, they demonstrated a profound failure of vision because they could not imagine an integrated society in which whites and blacks lived together in equality.
As the slavery audit report depicts, many of the seminary’s early faculty provided theological legitimation for the American Colonization Society, which was founded by Robert Finley who was a member of the seminary’s Board of Directors. The ACS raised funds to transport free blacks to Liberia, with the conviction that this colonization scheme would provide a means to gradually fix the problems resulting from bringing slaves to America. In the view of the faculty, the problem was that while blacks and whites were created equally in the eyes of God, the nation would be torn apart by an abolition of slavery. And they believed that when the slaves were eventually freed, it would be impossible for them to live with whites. In the words of Professor Alexander, “Either the whites must remove and give up the country to the coloured [sic] people, or the coloured people must be removed; otherwise the latter must remain in subjection to the former.” So the only way forward they could imagine was to gradually free the slaves and then get them out of the country. It is important to note that our founders were not outliers in their sympathies with the mission of the ACS. It had significant support in the Presbyterian Church, those who considered them progressive on the slavery issue, and in the United States Congress.
The highly unrealistic mission of the ACS resulted in sending only about 13,000 people to Liberia—a country they had never seen. But the significance of our founders’ involvement with the movement is that it illustrates how they participated in larger mainstream northern Protestant convictions that may have opposed slavery in concept, but looked for ways to preserve the white normative structure of society.
Even as there are stories of moral failure amidst the seminary’s history, there are also stories of moral courage. The historical audit includes profiles of students and alumni who were abolitionists and prominent leaders in the cause of justice. For example, three years after his graduation in 1834, Elijah Parish Lovejoy was one of the first martyrs of the abolitionist movement when he defended the freedom of the press against an angry mob that violently protested his newspaper’s articles about the mistreatment of slaves and advocacy for abolition. Theodore Sedgewick Wright, class of 1828, was the first African American graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and served as a pastor in New York City. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery society, and he and his congregation were active in the Underground Railroad. Francis James Grimke, who was born into slavery and escaped as a young man after running away several times, graduated in the class of 1878 and became the pastor of the 15th Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, and eventually one of the founders of the NAACP. Other alumni served as missionaries in the South with a devotion to the illegal pursuit of educating slaves. Still others took courageous stands in the pulpits of their southern and border-state congregations. So there was something in the theology they learned at the seminary that called them to greater visions than our founders possessed.
The Process of Confession and Repentance
The significance of Princeton Seminary’s historical audit report is not simply the history it chronicles but, more importantly, the opportunity it presents for ongoing education, conversation, and confession within our community. The conclusion of the committee’s work in writing the report was just the beginning of a very important process of community engagement in this conversation.
The audit report was presented to the Board of Trustees at its May 2018 meeting, and the Board began a thorough discussion of the report and its implications. The report was presented at the Fall Faculty Conference in the beginning of September and then shared with the entire seminary community in October. A year-long series of educational events commenced on October 17, 2018, when the seminary community, including trustees, students, faculty, and staff, gathered for a panel conversation with the committee that authored the report and a lecture by eminent theologian Willie Jennings of Yale Divinity School. Videos of the events are available on the seminary’s website.
Throughout this process, the seminary’s Board of Trustees has been deeply engaged in studying our history. Since the Board received the committee’s report at its May 2018 meeting, it has devoted time to discussion of the audit at every subsequent meeting. All of the trustees read and discussed together Edward Baptist’s book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. And they have been committed to fostering a process that will lead to substantive acts of repentance in response to the audit.
In October 2018, the Board of Trustees commissioned the Historical Audit on Slavery Recommendations Task Force, a group of trustees, faculty, administrators, students, and alumni, whose responsibility was to oversee a campus-wide discussion of the audit and solicit suggestions from the seminary community about how to respond to the audit faithfully. Over the course of the academic year, there were over 25 events related to the task force’s work, including meetings, lectures, organized lunch conversations, liturgical commemoration, and an academic conference.
Many members of the seminary community, including students, faculty, and alumni, contributed suggestions to the task force. The Association of Black Seminarians presented a collective response to the audit and fostered conversation through town hall meetings and prayer gatherings. The task force considered all of these suggestions carefully and prepared a set of recommendations to present to the Board of Trustees. The recommendations are intended as acts of contrition and repair, which seek both to redress historic wrongs and to help the seminary be more faithful to our mission as a school of the church, both now and in the years to come.
The Board received the report of the task force at its May 2019 meeting and devoted several hours of the meeting to a thorough discussion of the recommendations, including conversation with the members of the task force and representatives of the Association of Black Seminarians. At that time, the Trustees asked the task force to provide additional specificity, prioritization, and financial analysis to ensure the seminary’s ability to move forward in a timely and effective way to publicly repent for the sins of its past and commit to creating a more just, equitable, and inclusive future. At the time of this writing, members of the task force continue to work on the recommendations and are developing a multi-year action plan for the Board’s review at its October meeting.
From the beginning, the Board of Trustees has been committed to a thorough and deliberative process that will result in meaningful response, and the engagement of the seminary community has been important to this ongoing process.
Legacy and Mission: Theological Education and the History of Slavery
As a community of faith and scholarship, we approach the questions raised by the audit with both theological conviction and rigorous scholarly inquiry. This was the framework for the conference hosted at Princeton Seminary in April 2019, Legacy and Mission: Theological Education and the History of Slavery. The conference was part of the task force’s activity, and it was organized by Professors Keri Day and Gordon Mikoski, who are both members of the task force on developing recommendations to respond to the report.
The goal of the conference was to probe several open questions raised by the study of slavery and institutional history within higher education and to examine Princeton Seminary’s unique context within the conversation as a theological school of the church. The conference was organized around three governing questions:
How do academic institutions evaluate their history?
We invited scholars from several prominent institutions that have recently released their own audit reports, including Jody Allen, director of the Lemon Project at William & Mary, Adam Rothman, director of the Georgetown Slavery Archive at Georgetown University, and Martha Sandweiss, director of the Princeton & Slavery project at Princeton University. Each of these schools faced different circumstances in the origins, development, and outcomes of their respective studies.
How do academic institutions contribute to conversations in contemporary society?
The mission of higher education is to advance learning not only within the academy but also in society at large. How can the scholarship generated by such studies contribute to conversations in our culture about race and the legacy of slavery? Darnell Moore, an alumnus of Princeton Seminary and a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement, reflects with candor about his experience as a student at the seminary and issues a powerful call for the practice of costly grace and accountability for the work of justice and liberation.
What are the implications of this history for the mission and curriculum of theological schools?
Princeton Seminary impacts the world through the lives and ministries of its students, and they must be equipped to lead capably in a church and society that is often fragmented. In light of our history, how might the current curriculum and educational experience shape the theological imagination of students to prepare them for leadership in the contemporary world? Luke Powery, who currently serves as dean of Duke University Chapel and associate professor of homiletics at Duke Divinity School, previously served on the faculty at Princeton Seminary and is an alumnus of our school. He spoke with prophetic vision and deep knowledge of the seminary community as he led us in a moving conversation about reimagining theological education through the lens of black human wounds.
It is our deep commitment that the historical audit will have a lasting impact on the life of our community. The purpose of the historical audit was to make confession and to begin the work of repentance. As a Christian community, we hold a responsibility to one another and to God to make changes in our own home to come a bit closer to the beloved community Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned. This will require ongoing conversation and continued acts of confession and repentance. It will necessitate confronting the pervasive legacy of this history in our society and in our own community. Confession and repentance in light of our history requires a restlessness with the way things are and an enduring commitment to the efforts to make lasting change. This is the task that is now before Princeton Theological Seminary.
As we carry out this hard work of doing justice, we place our trust in the grace of the God who began the mission among us, and will guide us as we seek to embody ever more fully the diverse body of Christ in the world.