Through a number of lectures, discussions and University initiatives, we are now well aware of an important history of African Americans at early Emory in the antebellum period. We know that Emory’s founders owned slaves, that the College itself rented slaves and that slaves helped build our early campus in Oxford. In short, Emory as an institution and place was inextricably linked to the institution of slavery.

At the time when Emory College first opened its doors, slavery was increasingly coming under attack by abolitionist critics — Southerners began to worry that the very foundation of their society could possibly crumble. Emory’s founders, trustees, professors and presidents took it upon themselves to legitimate slavery in this time of dire need. These efforts make up Emory’s “intellectual investment in slavery” — the people that created such dynamic arguments and the structures that enabled their growth.

Emory’s intellectual investment in slavery and Southern politics is apparent through what professors lectured, wrote and privately thought on race, slavery and secession. Emory impressed upon its students a pro-slavery ideology which evolved with and paralleled pro-slavery thought across the South. Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Emory’s second president who served from 1840-1848, became one of the most prominent defenders of slavery by the mid 1840s after his involvement in the schism of the Methodist Church. He published two important works in 1844 and 1846 on the scriptural legitimacy of involuntary servitude and gave numerous sermons and lectures on the subject. Longstreet’s voice carried far outside the boundaries of Oxford — his works specifically addressed abolitionist groups in Massachusetts and were published in national journals.

 By the 1850s, as the pro-slavery movement had taken on new heights throughout the South, Emory continued to serve as a center for new ideological fodder on this front. Professors such as William J. Sasnett, a moral and political philosopher, lectured their students on the necessity and overall good of slavery as well as the natural inferiority of African Americans. The content of Sasnett’s lectures appeared on the national stage through several publications including a book on the “progress” of the Southern Methodist Church.

 Emory’s students were not simply a passive audience to the pro-slavery rhetoric of their professors. As future Southern leaders, clergyman and plantation owners, they actively debated and wrote on the virtues of slave-holding and southern society. Some were sure that slavery was right while others — albeit a small minority — remained skeptical. Emory’s antebellum students went on to great endeavors following graduation — fighting for the confederacy, rising to political careers during and after Reconstruction and becoming important members of the Methodist Church. Students’ experiences at Emory were fundamental in shaping them to become leaders of southern society. Their notions of slaveholder paternalism and benevolence were no doubt cultivated and nurtured during their time at Emory.

Slavery was, as Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens noted in 1861, the “cornerstone” of the social order in the South. Emory did not simply seek to indoctrinate its students with a world view compatible with pro-slavery ideology, but sought to influence all of southern society. Emory impressed upon its students a pro-slavery ideology which evolved with and paralleled pro-slavery thought across the South. [MORE]