From the authors: This article was written in tandem with a 10-month-long research project being done under the guidance of Professor Iver Bernstein and Professor Carl Craver, with the end goal being that this research would support a new first-year Ampersand course entitled, “Rethinking WashU’s Relation to Enslavement: Past, Present, and Future.” The goal has always been, and continues to be, to shed some light on our university’s complicated and oftentimes violent history with St. Louis and enslaved people. We continue to embark on the ongoing task to fully recognize St. Louis’s Black history and the role our institution has played in neglecting those stories.

By most contemporary accounts, Washington University’s history with slavery begins and ends with its founder, William Greenleaf Eliot, who along with co-founder Wayman Crow established the school in 1853. Virtually all modern histories present Eliot as a strong abolitionist figure. In a 2016 article about Eliot and Archer Alexander, an enslaved Black man whose tenacious efforts at self-emancipation during the Civil War Eliot assisted, WashU’s “The Source” described Eliot as “a Unitarian minister, staunch abolitionist and first president of Washington University [emphasis added].” Twenty years after the passage of the 13th amendment and several years after Alexander’s death, Eliot published an account of Alexander’s life entitled “The Story of Archer Alexander: From Slavery to Freedom, March 30th, 1863.” Eliot proposed that Alexander be enshrined in the Freedmen’s Memorial, a statue depicting Alexander kneeling beside Abraham Lincoln.

The characterization of Eliot as an “abolitionist” was reiterated in the Spring 2021 University press release announcing WashU’s decision to join Universities Studying Slavery (USS), a consortium of 80 institutions examining their connections to slavery. Indeed, WashU’s own library guide brands Eliot as a “moderate abolitionist” who “came out strongly in favor of union and emancipation” when the Civil War broke out. 

But in the interest of honestly examining WashU’s relationship with the institution of slavery, a task that must be undertaken to understand and change the University’s relationship with the city of St. Louis and the marginalized communities most directly impacted by slavery’s pernicious legacy, we must confront an uncomfortable truth: William Greenleaf Eliot was, by no measure, an abolitionist. 

WashU does have reason to celebrate some of Eliot’s contributions to the building of St. Louis. Eliot devoted himself to improving education in the city and was instrumental in establishing the St. Louis Public Schools district, among numerous other educational institutions. He helped found the Western Sanitary Commission during the Civil War to provide much-needed medical care and supplies for sick and wounded soldiers. Eliot worked throughout his lifetime to construct the cultural and educational infrastructure that St. Louisans benefit from today. Despite these laudable efforts, Eliot was no abolitionist. Instead, he vehemently defended forms of gradual emancipation and colonization, both of which were opposed equally vehemently by abolitionists at the time. In fact, Eliot was an anti-abolitionist, by definition and by his own insistence. Untangling why Washington University has insisted on revising historical memory so that Eliot is misbranded as an abolitionist is imperative if we are to understand the University’s role — our role — in shaping St. Louis’s racial past, present and future.  

A young William Greenleaf Eliot. (Courtesy of the Washington University Eliot archives)

Courting Colonization

Five years before founding WashU, Eliot addressed the St. Louis’s Young Men’s Colonization Society as its president, boasting that he had been a friend of the American Colonization Society (ACS) and its efforts for 16 years.^[1]William Greenleaf Eliot, “Address before the Young Men’s Colonization Society of Saint Louis” (January 11, 1848), 3. Colonization societies in the 19th century offered an alternative to immediate emancipation, dedicating themselves to colonizing Africa, specifically Liberia, with free Black Americans. While colonization societies attracted men opposed to the institution of slavery, their anti-slavery position often had more to do with creating a country without Black people than it did with achieving racial equality in the United States.

Echoing the racist rhetoric that permeated colonization societies in the 19th century, Eliot explained to the Young Men’s Colonization Society in 1848 that “to place [Black people] upon an equal footing [to whites], to give them equal political, social, and civil privileges with the whites, is quite an impractical thing in our day, and probably will be impracticable for many generations to come, if not forever. I am by no means sure it is desirable [emphasis added].” He supported the gradual emancipation of slaves “on condition, or with the hope of [their] being removed to a country [Liberia] suitable for [their] physical, moral and social improvement.”^[2]William Greenleaf Eliot, “Address before the Young Men’s Colonization Society of Saint Louis” (January 11, 1848), 3. Undoubtedly, Eliot’s justifications for supporting colonization and the conditional emancipation of slaves stood in sharp opposition to the core beliefs of the antebellum American abolitionist movement, which wedded an active and urgent engagement with the liberation of Black Americans to a strong affirmation of the right of Black people to live in the United States.

W.G.E.: William, the Gradual Emancipationist

Abolitionism, as Manisha Sinha explains in her landmark study of mid-19th-century abolitionist movements, “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,” was a radical movement that advocated strongly both against slavery and for Black citizenship. Abolitionism as conceived at the time was incompatible with colonization precisely because the latter implies that white people knew what was best for Black Americans; this was not only antithetical to abolition, but it explicitly neglected Black people’s birthright citizenship claims, their right to self-determination and their stated desire to fully realize such self-determination in the United States.^[3]Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991)(orig. pub. 1969), chapter 1.  The ACS was explicitly anti-abolitionist. Henry Clay, president of the Society, stated in 1837 that “It has been objected against the Society that… its purpose is to abolish slavery forthwith, and to let loose the untutored and unprepared slaves upon society. Both objections cannot be founded in truth. Neither is.”^[4]“The Twenty-First Annual Report of the American Colonization Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States,” The Annual Reports of the American Colonization Society for … Continue reading Black abolitionists, Sinha writes, were “the standard-bearers in opposing colonization,” and with their anti-colonization position, they “rejected any solution to slavery that did not encompass Black rights.”^[5]Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 160, 245.

Eliot himself would have rejected the abolitionist label; his views on the matter were much more nuanced but squarely opposed to the demands of the abolitionists. In 1853, the year that marked both the founding of WashU and the year that Eliot was elected vice president of the Missouri Colonization Society, Eliot expressed in a letter to the editor of “The Christian Messenger” that he “would not advise the present emancipation of those held in bondage,” arguing for a more gradual approach to emancipation. Sinha argues, in contrast, that abolitionists were immediatists, not gradualists.^[6]Sinha, 247. Indeed, Eliot decried those who supported immediate emancipation, writing in 1835 that he “would make any degree of effort, to induce [immediate emancipationists] to be still. Their zeal is wholly without knowledge; they know nothing of the true difficulties of the case, or they would not speak and act as they do… We would say to these erring philanthropists, ‘for God’s sake, desist; for liberty’s sake, for your country’s sake!’”^[7]Earl K. Holt III, William Greenleaf Eliot: Conservative Radical (Belleville, IL: Village Publishers, 2011), 17.

In 1862, Eliot mocked Northern abolitionists, who he saw as radicals that would thoughtlessly burn the country to enforce their morality: “The war is not felt, and the Abolition Pharisees having set the house on fire and with their hands + chuckle to see how splendidly it burns.”^[8]Correspondence from William Greenleaf Eliot to his wife, Abigail Adams Cranch, on December 20, 1862.

Eliot, not only as a University founder but also as a leading minister in the Unitarian Church and a prominent member of St. Louis society, was much more concerned about keeping the peace for the white moderates and his many social projects than he was about seeking justice for enslaved Black people. To call him an abolitionist is to whitewash Eliot’s true beliefs, running roughshod over views he considered deeply and took pride in.

Archer Alexander, the subject of Eliot’s “The Story of Archer Alexander: From Slavery to Freedom.” (Courtesy of the Washington University Eliot archives)

While there is no doubt that Eliot’s personal and professional writing evinces a clear moral stance against many aspects of the institution of slavery, it is notable that he seems to have avoided the topic from the pulpit. Notes on a sermon against slavery, it seems, were never delivered to his congregation, for example. And when in 1857, the year of the Dred Scott decision, the conference of Unitarian ministers in Alton voted to take an official doctrinal stance against slavery, Eliot felt so strongly that the Church should not take an official stance on the issue that he resigned his position as president of the conference. In the same month as that conference, Eliot wrote, “If the clergyman feels it his absolute duty to discuss questions of constitutional law and judicial authority, and the like, let him do so on the week day at the political meeting, as a citizen; not on the Sabbath as a religious teacher, in the pulpit.”^[9]William Greenleaf Eliot, “Social Reform: A Discourse Delivered in the Church of the Messiah of St. Louis by William G. Eliot” (May 24, 1857).

Profit over Principles

Eliot’s complex relationship with his anti-slavery beliefs can be further examined through his willingness to bankroll his fledgling university with money gifted by multiple enslavers and official supporters of the institution. Seven of Washington University’s 17 founding members were enslavers, including John O’Fallon, a significant land benefactor who enslaved 39 people in 1850.^[10]U.S. Census Bureau, Federal Slave Census of 1850 prepared by Ancestry.com). Also on the charter is John M. Krum, who ruled in a circuit court case that “no one but free white persons should attain to the condition of citizen in these United States [emphasis added]” as justification for barring Charles Lyons, a free Black man, from living in Missouri without a license.^[11]J.M. Krum, Opinion in the Case of Charles Lyons, A Free Negro (Missouri Historical Society, n.d.), 7.

Even Wayman Crow, a personal friend, co-founder of WashU and member of Eliot’s congregation for over 20 years, enslaved many people over decades before manumitting them in the 1850s.^[12]U.S. Census Bureau, Federal Slave Census of 1830 and 1850 (prepared by Ancestry.com). For someone who seemingly detested the institution of slavery, Eliot was clearly willing to associate himself and the institution he founded closely with several men who upheld it. This act alone represents, at the very least, a substantial concession by this builder of civic and educational institutions to the hard realities of attracting investment and allies in a slave state.

Moreover, Eliot’s and the Washington University’s founders’ relationships with what might be called a foundational event of St. Louis’s racial experience — the horrific lynching of Francis McIntosh — is a disturbing but vital topic for future research, as the impact of this event still reverberates to this day. A Black boatman who had been arrested for killing a white deputy sheriff, McIntosh was pulled from jail by a murderous white mob and burned at the stake in April 1836, a sequence of events that according to at least one account all occurred within one hour of his setting foot on the St. Louis levee. O’Fallon, a founding member of the University, acted as the foreman of the grand jury of the McIntosh case and, as one of the region’s most influential men, must have played a substantive role in reaching the decision not to indict any of the individuals culpable for McIntosh’s death, though his personal contributions to the grand jury remain ambiguous.^[13]Missouri Argus (May 27, 1836), 3.

Eliot’s thoughts on McIntosh’s lynching and his contribution to the cultural landscape of St. Louis in the wake of this tragic event are more available to us than those of O’Fallon, having been immortalized in his September 1836 “Letter from St. Louis,” published in the Western Messenger.^[14]William Greenleaf Eliot, “Letter From St. Louis,” The Western Messenger (September, 1836), 98-101.

In the opening paragraph of his work, Eliot attempts to create an image of McIntosh that is wholly unsympathetic, someone who deserved some sort of severe punishment independent of the events on the St. Louis waterfront, writing that McIntosh “was, in the first place, obnoxious on account of his former insolent demeanor, from the fact that he had killed one or two whitemen at the south, and attempted to kill one of our citizens a year ago, and especially from his supposed connexion with abolitionists of Pittsburg [sic].” With the use of the word “especially,” Eliot designated McIntosh’s abolitionist connections as a more grievous sin than even the supposed long history of murderous violence that Eliot constructed.

Eliot built his argument from here, having made McIntosh into something of a moral monster: claiming that the lynching could have happened anywhere, that worse lynchings had happened in other cities and that St. Louis was, ultimately, a respectable city inhabited by moral people, at least no more disreputable than any other city. In a pivotal moment, Eliot chose to protect the reputation of St. Louis as a place of great future progress at the expense of closer and more humanizing attention to Francis McIntosh as a person, as a free citizen of Pennsylvania and as an American. Eliot did not reflect upon what it might mean for his city to be built on Francis McIntosh’s ashes.

Eliot in his later years. (Courtesy of the Washington University Eliot archives)

Who was WashU For?

All of this is to say that questions of Eliot’s and the University’s principles and practices in the founding era must be examined. No doubt, Eliot’s insistence on gradual emancipation seemed to wane as the country divided and descended into civil war, the primary outcome he was seeking to avoid with his gradualism. But Eliot held on to his colonizationist perspective even as contemporaries, such as President Lincoln, moved away from it. Moreover, men like Krum and Crow remained in their University positions decades after the Civil War; their influence was of long standing. Knowing this, we then must ask ourselves: To what extent were the beliefs and practices of Eliot and the men he relied upon a product of a desire for unity and compromise within a polarized city and country? To what extent were they a product of a white supremacist vision of the world, and what did that mean, exactly, in 1853? And were gradual emancipationists such as Eliot truly committed to the liberation of enslaved Black people in the U.S., or were they emancipationists in name only?

Understanding Eliot will help us to better understand our university, its relationship with slavery and the history of St. Louis, for these histories are inextricably linked. If WashU is truly committed to examining those links, the way the University addresses the fraught legacy of the institution’s founders must be a critical starting point for that work. In a February 2019 statement discussing William Eliot’s relationship to Archer Alexander, Chancellor Martin describes Eliot as “a hero who used his privilege to become a catalyst for change. He was a man who continuously fought for the rights of our African American colleagues and friends.” We know that Eliot tried to buy at least three enslaved persons with the intention of freeing them^[15]Year: 1845; St. Louis Emancipation Records, Court Entry: 16;328, St. Louis Integrated Database of Enslavement. and supported the education of Black St. Louisans later in his life.^[16]Primm, James Neal. Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764-1980. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1998. 317. But Eliot was not a continuous supporter of Black rights; after all, he presided over organizations that advocated for colonization and, ultimately, a United States devoid of Black Americans. There is even a “W.G. Eliot” listed in the 1840 census as owning at least two enslaved people, the only record of someone with that name in the city in the 1840 federal census.^[17]Year: 1840; Census Place: St Louis, Saint Louis, Missouri; Roll: 231; Page: 182; Family History Library Film: 0014858 As far as we know, St. Louis City records only indicate one emancipation on the part of Eliot — Amanda Holmes on July 7th, 1845.^[18]Year: 1845; St. Louis Emancipation Records, Court Entry: 16;328, St. Louis Integrated Database of Enslavement.

We understand these evidentiary traces to create a more complicated version of Eliot than previously understood. History demands a more accurate picture of Eliot than the distorted one of him as an abolitionist and defender of Black rights. After all, the University’s motto is Per Veritatem Vis, strength through truth. We will become stronger as an institution, but more importantly as a community, as we uncover the truth about our relationship to slavery in the past and to the city of St. Louis in the present.

Why does it matter that William Greenleaf Eliot was so demonstrably not an abolitionist? Why does it matter that he saw no meaningful future for African Americans in the United States? Why does it matter that he may well have enslaved people? Abolitionism was radical, indeed, but it was full of revolutionary possibility. It not only required the destruction of the institution of slavery but the rebuilding of an entire society that guaranteed a future for Black citizenship and self-determination. Eliot and his fellow associates were in the midst of constructing a city where slavery and white supremacy were often cultural and economic foundations for success; hence it is worth asking whether abolition had any place in St. Louis if these men were to keep their prestige and financial power. This raises perhaps the most profound and urgent question: Who was Washington University supposed to be for? And the answer, so it strongly seems, is for William Greenleaf Eliot and people like him — decidedly not for African Americans. What are the longer-term implications of this foundational fact for Washington University? The research that we and others are now doing will no doubt shed light on this complex and profoundly important question in the coming months and years.

Editor’s note: Typically, Student Life does not use footnotes since sources of information are cited within the text. Given the complex historical nature of this submission, we have chosen to include in-line footnotes to provide readers with additional information about the sources of information in the submission. If you have any questions, email [email protected].

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