The following is an excerpt from Richard Yeomans’ article that was published in the latest issue of Acadiensis. To read the full article please click here and subscribe.
RICHARD YEOMANS
IN FEBRUARY 1844 NEW BRUNSWICK’S HOUSE OF ASSEMBLY first read Lemuel Allen Wilmot’s bill for the amendment of the charter of King’s College Fredericton, a collegiate school that had been in operation since 1829 but conceived during the late 18th century. Though debate was short, Wilmot bluntly remarked that since the school was first incorporated in 1800 by provincial articles of incorporation “forty five thousand pounds had been paid for its support – a sum which would have educated every one of its students at Cambridge or Oxford.”[1] Wilmot was convinced that the school was anything but a going concern, and proposed changes including the removal of the colony’s lieutenant governor and members of the provincial Executive Council from being allowed to assume positions on the College Council as either chancellor or president of the institution, respectively.[2] These measures were a direct response to years of woeful mismanagement by the colony’s political elite of the college’s provincial and royal monetary endowments, and the roughly 6,000 acres of land granted in support of the school at the start of the century. Wilmot’s actions and words were also indicative of a long and drawn-out struggle over control over collegiate education in New Brunswick between the appointed and elected houses. Challenges to the school’s land ownership, program of settlement, and the desire of politically elite white settlers to exploit and leverage unceded Wolastoqiyik lands and waters for the maintenance of a collegiate institution in New Brunswick exacerbated this struggle. In an effort to build “the most gentleman like society on earth,” the fraught formation of what was to become the present-day Fredericton campus of the University of New Brunswick became central to the development of the settler state in Britain’s most lucrative timber colony.[3]
Members of New Brunswick’s political elite first proposed using land as foundational capital for a collegiate institution in 1785, while also designing their college to benefit only the children of the most affluent. For the political refugees of the American Revolution, the expense of sending the children of Loyalists away to England to complete their education cost more than most land was worth in New Brunswick in the late 18th century. Moreover, colonial leaders expressed concern that individuals who attended college or university in the newly independent United States might return corrupted by dissenting republican ideals.[4] Ward Chipman, born in Massachusetts and trained at Harvard College before becoming New Brunswick’s first Solicitor General, feared that his own son, in “looking beyond some of these Provinces for his future, . . . will never be contended to starve, as I have done, in this part of the Country.”[5] New Brunswick offered little in the way of upward mobility or educational prospects for children, regardless of their parentage, and colonial administrators sought to “localize the universal culture taught in British Universities” as a means of preserving the social order to which they had become accustomed and which they sought to reproduce in New Brunswick.[6] For more middling refugees, the potential leveling influences of British-style higher education did not supersede their immediate concerns with the lack of rudimentary education, such as reading and writing, mathematics and geometry, which was compounded by the serious backlog in petitions for land grants. The colony had too few surveyors with the necessary math skills to survey land for distribution amongst perspective settlers, and this deficit exacerbated problems with restive settlers such as squatting and conflicts with the Wolastoqiyik, Peskotomuhkatiyik, and Miꞌkmaq.
Loyalist refugees of all ranks were in close agreement about the need for an established system of education in new settlements, albeit for different purposes, and rested their hopes in education as a harbinger of peace, as a disseminator of liberal British values through Christian institutions, and as a generator of future industry.[7] Benjamin Marston, another Harvard-educated refugee and chief surveyor in Nova Scotia, was particularly frank about the need for unanimity between education and religion in one report he sent off to London at the height of his efforts to settle refugees in Shelburne in 1783. Marston observed that such combination required “particular care” by restricting who would be allowed to shape “Colleges & such like Public Seminaries of Education so far as Clergymen were concerned,” and that they “should be committed only to the care of those who were [Church] of England men.”[8] Marston, however, was also quite critical of the lack of any “sufficient portion of men of practical education & abilities” among the refugees expected to occupy and permanently settle in the post-revolutionary northwest Atlantic.[9] Despite there being numerous college-educated refugees in Nova Scotia, in Marston’s view far too few had the practical education necessary for cultivating land for resettlement. Practical education, at least according to Marston’s interpretation while he attempted to survey plots of land along peninsular Nova Scotia, was “useful knowledge” – knowledge thoroughly independent of any kind of theoretical or abstract thought that did not also improve upon the use of a quadrant. In Britain, the link between science and practical education had been well established since the 17th century and proved fertile when put into the service of empire.[10] In Nova Scotia, the link between expanding commerce and practical education was not lost on Marston, who, at the end of 18th century, believed the region needed practitioners and not philosophers. The system of education, once implemented, needed to produce competent settlers and loyal subjects who would quicken the occupation and opening of the land and not question either the actions or authority of the Crown’s representatives in Nova Scotia or, after 1784, in New Brunswick.
After 1784, in the parts of interior Nova Scotia that became the colony of New Brunswick, as hundreds of thousands of acres of land were subdivided as property, members of New Brunswick’s would-be aristocracy accumulated thousands of acres in their attempt to reaffirm status, position, and financial security after their exile from the newly independent United States.[11] Land-wealth alone, however, did not constitute a future for the children of New Brunswick’s most affluent refugees and was no substitute for the kind of political influence reaped from a Harvard or Columbia college degree. As a result, New Brunswick’s political elite laboured to establish a collegiate institution that could reproduce familiar New England and mid-Atlantic gentility north of the Bay of Fundy. In doing so, the earliest foundations of the present-day University of New Brunswick were entwined with the development of a fledgling settler colony. These entanglements shaped not only the development of higher education in the province, but also the politics of the colonial government and ownership of Wolastoqey territory by settlers – a foundation that has further reinforced itself over the generations through continued Wolastoqiyik dispossession and exploitation of unceded lands and waters.
Though an institution of higher education was perceived as central to reinforcing the superiority of elite Anglo settlers in New Brunswick, it was also key to their controlling of knowledge-production about the lands that they sought to occupy as members of an indigent aristocracy. Institutional histories of the University of New Brunswick have preserved this stalwart commitment, while also erasing the questionable actions of the founders of its institutional predecessors, the Fredericton Academy, the College of New Brunswick, and King’s College Fredericton. No history written about the evolution of collegiate education in New Brunswick addresses the centrality of land to the establishment of a university in Fredericton and the role of both land and school in the early development of New Brunswick. Indeed, historians of New Brunswick generally constructed scenarios that deflected scrutiny of the school’s history as a major landowner. James Hannay, a 19th-century historian of New Brunswick, argued that impasses between the province’s Executive Council and House of Assembly about the function of collegiate education arose out of “political spite” rather than legitimate concerns over educational and fiscal responsibility. W.S. MacNutt, in his New Brunswick: A History, 1784-1867, conjectures that during the 1790s the Fredericton Academy was perhaps “patronized by the official and well-to-do classes of Fredericton,” but he offers no evidence and entirely disregards the role that land played in the functions of the school.[12] Other historians have made assumptions about how denominational differences in the colony constricted the early development of the Fredericton Academy, and its successors, the College of New Brunswick and King’s College Fredericton. A.G. Bailey, in 1950, argued that the college’s money troubles in the 1820s led the progressive lieutenant-governor, Howard Douglas, to suggest that non-Anglicans be “permitted to matriculate, attend classes, and receive degrees.”[13] However, the decision to consider non-Anglican faculty and students preceded Douglas’s arrival in the colony by well over a decade. In his history of Mount Allison University, John Reid suggests that after 1800 religion and not land beleaguered the functions of Fredericton’s collegiate school for more than 20 years.[14] Even Katherine MacNaughton’s published MA thesis “The Development of the Theory and Practice of Education in New Brunswick,” which is considered to be the standard for researching higher education in the province, does not offer any analysis of New Brunswick’s only collegiate school during the first 30 years of the 19th century after Loyalist refugees first concocted it. [15]
This body of scholarship has reproduced a flawed metanarrative that the rise of the timber trade in New Brunswick opened the door to a population of “strangers to the old Loyalist ideas of a stratified agricultural society,” who launched an attack “upon the College which they came to regard as a citadel of Tory and Anglican privilege.”[16] Moreover, none of these works take into consideration the significance of the grant of land on which the school was built and supported by, or ask how universities and colleges shaped settler colonial space – for either the colonizer or the colonized. The centrality of settler colonialism to the establishment and functioning of a colligate school in New Brunswick is a phenomenon not unique in Canada or North America. The University of New Brunswick, however, does hold claim to being the first institution to utilize a landed endowment model in the territory that formed Canada. Elsewhere in North America, universities and colleges, as Craig Steven Wilder observers in his 2013 book, Ebony and Ivy, “were not innocent or passive beneficiaries of conquest and colonial slavery.”[17] Indeed, a significant portion of scholarship has rightly criticized the braided histories of higher education and the enslavement of Blacks in the United States.[18] Such conversations are more recent on Canadian university campuses such as McGill and Dalhousie University, but nonetheless critical to our understanding of the historic dependence of the academy on human bondage.[19] Although a significant body of scholarship now historicizes the stolen and enslaved bodies that built many North American colleges, less is known about the stolen or unceded lands upon which they were built, how institutionalized land theft in British North America is a cornerstone of higher education, and how many present-day Canadian universities continue to be implicated in such a destructive system.[20] Universities established by British settlers in North America were designed to transfuse English customs and values into colonial communities and to preserve the privileged position that the Church of England held in shaping education.[21] To accomplish such a task, these institutions accumulated vast swaths of land through grants and used that land to finance classical and liberal education during the 18th and 19th centuries. There were several different “King’s College” institutions established by royal charter: New York (1754), Windsor (1789), and Toronto (1827). All used land for similar purposes, with their institutional successors continuing to benefit from the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. The settler-colonial beginnings of the University of New Brunswick, which was built on unceded land and was granted by provincial and not royal articles of incorporation, has, however, an even more complicated story of Indigenous exploitation and land acquisition – one that requires a broader analysis.
. . .
[1] Quoted in G.E. Fenety, Political Notes and Observations; or, A Glance at the Leading Measures That Have Been Introduced and Discussed in the House of Assembly of New Brunswick, Volume I (Fredericton: S.R. Miller, 1867), 107.
[2] “An Act to amend the Charter of King’s College. Passed 27th March, 1845,” in Acts of the General Assembly of Her Majesty’s Province of New-Brunswick passed in the year 1847 (Fredericton: John Simpson, 1847).
[3] Edward Winslow to Ward Chipman, 7 July 1783, Edward Winslow Papers, MG H2, vol. 2, pt. 2, p. 104, Harriet Irving Library (HIL), digitized for the Atlantic Canada Virtual Archives, http://atlanticportal.hil.unb.ca.proxy.hil.unb.ca/acva.
[4] On the importance of education to the preservation of British governance in British North America, see Bruce Curtis, Ruling by Schooling Québec: Conquest to Liberal Governmentality – A Historical Sociology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); E. Jane Errington, The Lion, The Eagle, and Upper Canada: A Developing Colonial Ideology, 2nd ed. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012); and Cecilia Morgan, Building Better Britains?: Settler Societies in the British World, 1783-1920 (North York, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2017), esp. 125-32;
[5] Ward Chipman to Edward Winslow, 14 December 1805, in Winslow Papers, A.D. 1776-1826, ed. W.O. Raymond (Boston: Gregg Press, 1972), 542.
[6] Tamson Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 21.
[7] Ann Condon, The Envy of the American States: The Loyalist Dream for New Brunswick (Fredericton: New Ireland Press, 1984), 45-58.
[8] Benjamin Marston to Israel Maudit, 8 August 1784, Edward Winslow Papers, MG H2, Benjamin Marston Diaries, “Business Papers.” vol. 21, HIL.
[9] Edward Winslow to Benjamin Marston, 30 May 1783, in Raymond, Winslow Papers, 85.
[10] Margaret Jacobs & Larry Stewart, Practical Matter: Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1686-1851 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 3, 72-80.
[11] Land in New Brunswick was granted based on many factors, not least of which was wealth and properties lost because of loyalty to the British Crown. The most infamous attempt at a land grab happened before New Brunswick’s inception when a group of 55 New York professionals] and clergymen petitioned the British government for 5,000 acres of land each. An excellent synopsis of this attempt, and its fallout, can be found in Ann Gorman Condon, “Hardy, Elias,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 4, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/hardy_elias_4E.html.
[12] MacNutt does not give a source that indicates this was the case; see W.S. MacNutt, New Brunswick: A History, 1784-1867 (Toronto: MacMillan, 1963), 199.
[13] A.G. Bailey, “Early Foundation, 1783-1829,” in University of New Brunswick Memorial Volume: Published on the Occasion of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Granting of the First Charter of Incorporation, February 12th, 1800, ed. A.G. Bailey (Fredericton: University of New Brunswick, 1950), 20.
[14] John Reid, Mount Allison University, Volume I: 1843-1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 14.
[15] Katherine B. MacNaughton, “The Development of the Theory and Practice of Education in New Brunswick, 1784-1900” (MA thesis, University of New Brunswick, 1947).
[16] Bailey, “Early Foundation, 1783-1829,” in Bailey, University of New Brunswick Memorial Volume, 20.
[17] Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 11.
[18] See Leslie Harris, James Campbell, and Alfred Brophy, eds., Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019); Marisa Fuentes & Deborah Gary White, Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016); and Robert Emlen, “Slave Labor at the College Edifice,” Rhode Island History 66, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 35-46. For some examples of reports and ongoing projects examining the influence of slavery on American university campuses, see Brown University, “Slavery and Justice: Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice,” 2006 https://slaveryandjustice.brown.edu and Columbia University, “The Columbia University and Slavery Project,” 2014 https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu.
[19] Charmaine A. Nelson and Student Authors, “Slavery and McGill University: Bicentenary Recommendations,” 2020, https://blackmaplemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/bicentenary-recommendations.pdf; Dalhousie University, “Report on Lord Dalhousie’s History on Slavery and Race,” 2018, https://www.dal.ca/dept/ldp/findings.html.
[20] Caitlin P.A. Harvey, “The Wealth of Knowledge: Land-Grab Universities in a British Imperial and Global Context,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 97-105; Sharon Stien, Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), 18-28. In the American context, see Margaret Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607-1783 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988) and Colin Calloway, The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010).
[21] Tamson Pietsch, Empire of Scholars, 22.
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