Maeve Glass Exhibit Materials (Revised Draft) Princeton and Slavery Project January 4, 2017 Princeton’s Benefactor: Moses Taylor Pyne and the Sugar Plantations of the Americas Exhibit Introduction: This exhibit explores the complex relationship between the institution of slave labor that fueled the rise of the American sugar trade and the monetary contributions of one of Princeton’s most prominent benefactors, Moses Taylor Pyne. It invites readers to consider both the networks of trade that linked the Pyne estate to the leading sugar plantations of the Americas and the processes by which these networks have since disappeared from collective memory. Exhibit Sections: 1. Landscapes: A Benefactor’s Gifts 2. Foundations: The Sugar Trade of the Americas 3. Constructions: Moses Taylor Pyne and the Categories of History Possible Exhibit Opening Image: Source: Princeton University Digital Library; Physical Location: Princeton University Library. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library. Box SP01, Item 226. [SECTION ONE] Landscapes: A Benefactor’s Gifts When the heat of the first summer of the twentieth century settled over campus, a forty- five-year-old New York lawyer drafted a check for the ceiling fans that soon began to turn overhead in the new wing of the Chancellor Greene library.1 The payment of thirty- seven dollars that offered relief to the students was by far one of the smallest contributions that Moses Taylor Pyne made to his beloved alma mater.2 Since joining the Board of Trustees sixteen years earlier, the lawyer had begun contributing anonymous donations with such frequency that years later, his first obituary writers dared not even 3 venture an estimate. [FIGURE 1] Caption: An excerpt from Moses Taylor Pyne’s account book, showing a withdrawal on July 17, 1900, from the estate of Moses Taylor for the payment of two electric fans for the library hall adjacent to Chancellor Greene, later known as East Pyne. Source: Account Book No. 300, Box 213, Moses Taylor Papers, New York Public Library. Indeed, by that summer of 1900, Pyne’s support for the new library stacks adjacent to Chancellor Greene had accrued to a sum that would alone be worth nearly fourteen million dollars today.4 During his tenure as trustee, Pyne’s financial contributions subsidized not only the new library, but also the construction of two undergraduate dormitories on Nassau Street, a slew of new faculty and graduate housing, and endowments for initiatives ranging from a history seminar to a professorship.5 [FIGURE 2] Caption: A photograph of the library that Pyne financed using funds from the Moses Taylor estate. Source: Princeton University Digital Library; Physical Location: Princeton University Library. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library. BoxMP39, Item 1154. [FIGURE 3] Caption: A postcard depicting the undergraduate housing on Nassau Street that Pyne financed and that is now the site of a Starbucks and other retail stores. Source: Princeton University Digital Library; Physical Location: Princeton University Library. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library. AC045. Such was the depth of the lawyer’s broad support for Princeton that on the day of his funeral in 1921, the faculty suspended classes, lowered the flags to half-mast, and dedicated a tower on campus to “Princeton’s Most Loyal Son.”6 Today, the Pyne family name graces not only some of the most iconic buildings on campus, but the resumes of 7 some of its most celebrated graduates who have received the annual Pyne Prize. [FIGURE 4] Caption: Examples of the ubiquity of the Pyne name, ranging from the webpage of the Department of Classics, to the honors bestowed upon Sonia Sotomayor, a recipient of the 1976 Pyne Prize. Source: Department of Classics, Princeton University, Campus Directions, https://www.princeton.edu/classics/welcome/directions/; Adam Gillinsky, “Germany, Sotomayor Receive 1976 Pyne Prize,” The Daily Princetonian, Feb. 28, 1976. Despite its prominent place in the geography of campus, the complex roots of Pyne’s financial support to Princeton have remained largely out of view. In history books that mention Pyne’s contributions, his fortune is most often explained with broad references to either his success as a commercial lawyer in New York or his inheritance of a large estate from his grandfather, Moses Taylor, usually described in his capacity as a successful merchant and founding president of a New York bank.8 A return to the leather-bound account book in which Pyne or his clerk inscribed the payments for the library fans that July of 1900, however, reveals the beginnings of a more complicated story—one that scholars have only recently begun to excavate.9 These records reveal that Pyne’s payments for something as ordinary as a fan stemmed directly from an estate whose earliest foundations lay not simply in the banking world of New York, but in the daily work of carrying the produce of the region’s largest sugar plantations to the markets of the world. [SECTION TWO] Foundations: The Sugar Trade of the Americas The work of building the preliminary foundations of the estate from which Pyne eventually withdrew his donations for the new library wing began in the early spring of 1832, in a Manhattan counting-house up the road from the city’s bustling wharves. That March, Pyne’s grandfather, a twenty-year-old named Moses Taylor, drafted a handwritten circular announcing the launch of a new commission firm at 44 South Street.10 The letter was succinct and to the point.11 For a percentage of the profits, Moses Taylor and Company would transport and sell the produce of the continent’s richest soils to the markets of the world. [FIGURE 5] Caption: An 1827 watercolor depiction of South Street, New York City, where Moses Taylor launched his commission business in the spring of 1832. Source: William James Bennett, “View of South Street, from Maiden Lane, New York City,” The Edward W.C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps, and Pictures, Bequest of Edward W.C. Arnold, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Over the next four decades, as Taylor’s son-in-law, Percy Rivington Pyne, took over the firm’s day-to-day management, the fledging business grew to become one of the most successful firms in the global sugar trade.12 By the eve of the Civil War, the firm had secured control of nearly one-fifth of the commercial exchanges between the world’s largest sugar exporter and the United States,13 generating annual profits that would today carry an economic power of $617 million.14 In doing so, they created the foundations for an estate whose roots lay inextricably entangled with the rise of the largest sugar plantations in North America, fueled by the labor of the enslaved. From the outset, the geographic scope of the firm’s shipping business made clear that neither Taylor nor his son-in-law had any aversion to carrying the produce harvested by the enslaved. Like many ship-owners in New York starting out in the commission business in the 1830s, Taylor originally cast a broad net, offering to carry the produce of plantations that ran along the full length of the southern Atlantic coast, from the rice of the Carolinas to the cotton of the Mississippi Delta.15 Taylor’s incoming correspondence in the opening decade of business teemed with letters and reports listing the most current 16 prices of produce from Charleston to Savannah to New Orleans. [FIGURES 6, 7, 8, and additional 9] Caption: Three examples of the many “Price Currents” that Moses Taylor and Company received from southern ports; here, Savannah, Charleston, and New Orleans. Source: Moses Taylor Papers, Box 3, New York Public Library. By the mid-1830s, moreover, the firm had focused its shipping enterprise on a zone of production that would become the last great bastion of slavery in North America:17 a vast dolphin shaped island called Cuba, where newly constructed railroads promised a route into the interior whose soils had yet to succumb to the depletion that had devastated many of the smaller, outer-lying islands and where the newly enacted laws of its neighbors 18 prohibiting slave labor did not apply. [FIGURE 9]. Caption: Map showing the dates of abolition of slavery in North America, beginning with Haiti in 1793 and culminating in 1886 in Cuba, the central hub of Moses Taylor & Co.’s shipping business. Source: Yvan Bertin, “Dates of Abolition of Slavery in the Caribbean,” available online at http://atlas- caraibe.certic.unicaen.fr/en/page-117.html. For centuries, the great slave ships had arrived from the coast of Africa in the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea, each laden with chained men and a handful of women to work the fields on the archipelago of small islands.19 Seemingly blessed with a climate where the winter frosts of the upper Atlantic never glazed the stalks of sugarcane, the English called the region by its produce: the “Sugar Islands.”20 By the eve of the American revolution in 1774, this archipelago had become one of the densest slave societies in the Americas.21 Beginning in the early 1800s, however, the fleet of slave ships that arrived from Africa had begun to sail past these smaller islands.22 Instead, they converged in the ports of Cuba: a place where the slave traders could still find a welcome market for their cargos, and where, for the first time in 1837, iron rails leading out from Havana along the old cart roads into the deep valleys of the interior promised the conquest of some of the most fertile soils in the hemisphere.23 Estimated Disembarkations of Slaves in North America, 1701–1870 British Caribbean French Caribbean 350000 Spanish Caribbean (not Cuba) 300000 Mainland North America Dutch Caribbean & Guineas 250000 Danish West Indies Cuba 200000 150000 100000 50000 0 [FIGURE 10] Caption: Chart showing the rise of the estimated number of disembarkations of slaves brought to Cuba from Africa between the late 1780s and the mid-1840s, a period of decline across the North Americas.