To Drink from the Well: The Struggle for Racial Equality at the Nation’s Oldest Public University

By Geeta N. Kapur and Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II

Law professor and civil rights activist Geeta N. Kapur provides analysis and commentary on the story of systemic racism in leadership, scholarship, and organizational foundations at the University of North Carolina.

The University of North Carolina is the oldest public university in the US, with the cornerstone for the first dormitory, Old East, laid in 1793. At that ceremony, the enslaved people who would literally build that structure were not acknowledged; they were not even present. In fact, 158 years passed before Black students were admitted to this university in Chapel Hill, and it was another 66 years after that before students forcibly removed the long-criticized Confederate “Silent Sam” monument. Indeed, this university, revered in the state and the nation, has been entwined with white supremacy and institutional racism throughout its history—and the struggle continues today.

To Drink from the Well: The Struggle for Racial Equality at the Nation's Oldest Public University explores the history of UNC by exposing the plain and uncomfortable truth behind the storied brick walkways, “historic” statuary, and picturesque covered well, the icon of the campus.

Law professor and civil rights activist Geeta N. Kapur chronicles the racism within the university and traces its insidious effects on students, faculty, and even the venerable Tarheel sports programs. Kapur tells this story not as a historian, but as a citizen speaking to her fellow citizens. She relies on the historical record to tell her story, and where that record is lacking, she elaborates on that record, augmenting and deconstructing the standard chronology. Kapur explores both the Chapel Hill campus and a parallel movement in nearby Durham, where a growing Black middle class helped to create North Carolina Central University, a historically Black public university.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blair
• Release date: Sep 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781949467536

Book preview

1

NEW HOPE CHAPEL HILL

It was the darkest hour, just before daybreak on a dreary, bitterly cold December morning in 1861 in the small, remote village of New Hope Chapel Hill in North Carolina. A red-orange hue beamed in the distance of the black star-studded sky.

That morning, he wore his usual uniform—black trousers that were too long, a white collared shirt, a black bow tie fastened tightly around his neck, a buttoned black vest, and an unbuttoned, mismatched long black coat that fell just above his knees. An old black wool hat covered most of his thick, kinky hair. The scuffed, worn boots covering his battered feet were his only pair of shoes. He was a tall, slender, dark-skinned, quiet man who stood straight and held his head high.

His silver pocket watch, old and scratched, was tucked neatly into the left pocket of his vest. It never failed him. It was time now.

His steady footsteps echoed in the silence. The howling wind was so cold, it pierced his bones through his thin clothes. He walked past the rosebushes he had planted last year. They were covered with a thin layer of ice and looked dead.

Quietly, he opened the door of the Old South building and climbed to the roof. There, at the top, was the cupola that housed the grand iron bell, barely a year old. His dark, calloused, wrinkled hands reached around in the dark until he found the bell’s cord, grasped it tightly, and then pulled it from side to side. The bell tolled, opening the day at the nation’s first public university, the University of North Carolina.

The sound flooded the halls of the school’s eight buildings and poured down the grassy valleys of the village and up the distant hillsides, gradually mellowing and then disappearing into the dark sky.

Every morning he did this faithfully.¹

s

Wilson Caldwell in the Portrait Collection, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

HE WAS A SLAVE. A slave of the University of North Carolina. His name was Wilson Swain.²

Wilson inherited his lot in life from his parents. His father, November Caldwell, was owned by the university’s first president, Reverend Dr. Joseph Caldwell. November came to Reverend Caldwell by marriage to his second wife, Helen Hogg, daughter of a legendary Hillsborough merchant and realtor, James Hogg, one of the university’s first trustees. Though Reverend Caldwell was a Princeton graduate, a math teacher, and a Presbyterian minister, he quickly adopted the southern tradition of enslaving Black people. Doctor November, as students called him, served as Reverend Caldwell’s coachman and servant, but the Reverend rented him to the university as a slave servant.³

South Building and Old Well. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Image Collection, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In 1845, the board of trustees—who controlled and operated the university for the state legislature—prohibited students from bringing their personal slaves to campus. It was common for the university to rent slaves from the president, from professors, and from nearby plantations to serve the students and faculty. In 1850, Judge William Horn Battle, a university law professor, enslaved sixteen Black people; math professor and Presbyterian minister James Phillips enslaved three; his son, math professor Charles Phillips, four; Greek professor Manuel Fetter, twelve; and geology professor and Presbyterian minister Elisha Mitchell, eighteen. Only one professor, Fordyce Hubbard, had no slaves. Professors and the people of Chapel Hill regularly whipped their slaves. Sometimes the enslaved people revolted by running away. Night patrols and hunting parties that at times included university students hunted down runaways.⁴

Drawing of November Caldwell done after his death, probably using his son Wilson as a model. Portrait Collection, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The slaves shined shoes, made beds, brought water to the dormitories, and swept and washed the floors of the university buildings daily. They also had the dehumanizing task of emptying slop buckets full of urine and feces. Little is known about the boarding houses in town or the slave cabins behind the president’s home where they lived. However, records confirm that in addition to rental fees, the university paid the costs of the enslaved peoples’ housing, food, and clothing. In rare instances, slaves were allowed to keep a meager portion of their earnings. One winter, Doctor November earned two dollars for cutting firewood.⁵

Wilson’s mother, Rosa, was one of thirty-two slaves owned by the second president of the university, lawyer and former governor David Lowry Swain. Though he was president, most people still called him Governor Swain. He bought Rosa from former state governor James Iredell Jr.⁶

Rosa gave birth to Wilson on university property on February 27, 1841. Under the English law of partus sequitur ventrem, meaning that which is brought forth shall follow the womb (in other words, the mother’s status as free or enslaved), Wilson was considered President Swain’s chattel property from the time he was in his mother’s womb. And at his birth, he took his master’s surname, not his father’s.⁷

As a young boy, Wilson was the servant and companion of his master’s only son. When Wilson turned twelve, President Swain ordered him to work with the university gardener, Thomas Paxton, an expert hired from England. Wilson guided a mule and its heavy cart through the campus grounds and the arboretum, making them breathtakingly beautiful with ornamental trees, shrubs, decorative plants, and rosebushes. For the eight years of his hard labor, the university did not pay him a cent.⁸

In 1861, at age twenty, Wilson was promoted to be a waiter of the laboratories, lecture halls, and dormitories—a fancy title to cover up the fact that he remained a slave of the university.⁹ And though President Swain held legal title to Wilson’s body, Wilson worked for the university students and faculty. So in a sense, they owned him too.

After ringing the campus bell in the cold months, Wilson would build fires inside the forty or fifty dormitory rooms of the Old East and Old West buildings. In his left arm, he carried a basket of dry chips and, in his left hand, a bunch of burning lightwood. He opened a dormitory door. Out of the corner of his eye, he would have seen a gun resting against the wall. Every student had at least one. Wilson chose two large logs from the pile he had gathered and threw one to the back of the fireplace and put one in the front. A smaller one went in the middle, and then two or three pieces of the burning lightwood were placed in the center and covered with chips. Two small sticks on top completed the fire. It was fast, and it worked every time. His father must have taught him well.¹⁰

Old Well, circa 1890s. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Image Collection, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In 1861, the university had no running water. Several feet from Old East, directly in front of Old South, in the center of campus, was a well—the university’s only water source—covered by a primitive wooden hut with a peaked roof and no walls.¹¹

On that cold morning in December 1861, Wilson reached up to a chain hanging on a hook in the ceiling. Using both hands, he pulled the ice-cold chain toward him. A bucket attached to the chain lowered, poisoning the well with the sin of slavery. He bent over the ledge. Once the bucket was full of water, he pulled the chain with more force. His fingers felt prickly before they throbbed and then grew numb. The water splashed as it rose. He emptied the water into smaller buckets. He did this over and over again until he had drawn enough water for the forty or fifty dormitory rooms.¹²

Then, carrying a full bucket of water in each hand, he sprang up the three flights of stairs in Old East and Old West, two steps at a time. He woke the students and left buckets of water for them to wash up. In those days, students had mandatory sunrise prayers by candlelight in the university chapel, Gerrard Hall. Prayers in the morning and evening and Sunday worship were rigorously enforced by roll call, caning, and even expulsion.¹³

Wilson went up and down the stairs multiple times, but he must have made fewer trips on this December morning than he had in the past. The Civil War had begun in April, and by May, North Carolina had left the Union and joined the Confederate States of America under the leadership of President Jefferson Davis. In fact, the secession ordinance that removed North Carolina from the Union had been signed by Walter Steele, a prominent university trustee.¹⁴

In Chapel Hill, military excitement spread like wildfire through the campus. Hundreds of students rushed to enlist in the Confederate army. The student body had dwindled from more than three hundred to around a hundred. All students joined one of four military companies established on campus and were taught a course on military tactics through drills. At least one student or alumnus from the university were armed under the banner of every Confederate state.¹⁵ They fought to keep Wilson and four million other Black people enslaved.

Defending slavery at the university was an old tradition dating back to Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831. That revolt in Southampton County, Virginia—just ten or fifteen miles from the North Carolina border—lasted only forty-eight hours, but its impact was felt throughout North Carolina and the rest of the South for months, even years. Turner, a preacher, and six other enslaved people killed more than fifty white people, causing Virginia’s governor to dispatch thousands of troops. Black men, free or enslaved, were tortured to death, burned, maimed, shot, or hung. Turner escaped and hid in a hole he dug under a pile of fence rails in a field where patrols could not find him. Southerners trembled at the nightly rumors of insurrection, fearing that any plantation might harbor another Nat Turner.¹⁶

North Carolina’s governor put Raleigh and Fayetteville under military defense after news circulated that several local enslaved people had been involved in Turner’s rebellion. There was also evidence that a similar rebellion had been planned in Sampson, Duplin, New Hanover, Wayne, and Lenoir Counties. Across the state, enslaved people were arrested, imprisoned, whipped, tortured, and hanged. A North Carolina correspondent reported that at least 120 Negroes had been killed in one day. In Wilmington, four enslaved men were whipped, forced to confess, convicted on their admission, and shot without a trial. Their heads were mounted on poles at the four corners of the town as a dire warning.¹⁷

Panicked and hysterical, the legislature enacted slave codes that made it illegal for any Black person, enslaved or free, to preach or conduct worship services or have a gun, sword, club, or any other weapon. Encouraging slaves or free Negroes to conspire or rebel was classified as a felony punishable by thirty-nine lashes on the bare back and one year of imprisonment for the first offense; a second offense would result in death without the benefit of clergy. Enslaved people who had been emancipated in North Carolina were ordered to leave the state, and free Blacks were prohibited from entering the state. A year before, the legislature had criminalized both teaching enslaved people to read or write anything (except for numbers) and giving them books or pamphlets because legislators believed that reading and writing aroused insurrection and rebellion. The punishment for a white person who committed these offenses was imprisonment and a fine, but for a free person of color or an enslaved person, it was imprisonment, a fine, or thirty-nine lashes. In 1835, the legislature went further, stripping free Black men of their right to vote.¹⁸

The governor urged white leaders in every county to organize volunteer militia companies. In Chapel Hill, sixty-five students, with the faculty’s permission, formed a volunteer company to protect the university and the town and petitioned the governor for more weaponry. At the same time, university president Reverend Caldwell complained to the governor that there was an alarming attitude among Blacks in the area and requested arms. Even before Turner’s rebellion, the town had been on alert. In 1829, copies of the book David Walker’s Appeal, written by a free Black man born in Wilmington, North Carolina, had appeared around Chapel Hill. In it, Walker called on enslaved people throughout the South to join forces and revolt.¹⁹

The governor promptly sent muskets to Chapel Hill. Students were to be ready at all times to defend the campus from slave rebellions and to keep the 464 or so enslaved and 104 free people of color in Chapel Hill in their place.²⁰

Perhaps to pacify the enslaved further, Christianity was used as a tool. On Sunday mornings, university math professor and Presbyterian minister James Phillips, a slaveholder, preached to white people inside the sanctuary of New Hope Presbyterian Church. On Sunday afternoons, at the back of the church in a shed, he preached to the slaves. Although Phillips enjoyed leading the worship services, the enslaved people may not have enjoyed them. Phillips’s reserved services were in stark contrast to their own emotional praise and worship and preaching.²¹

University commencement in June 1832 was rather unusual. The white community remained inflamed with Nat Turner’s bloody insurrection. However, university trustee Judge William Gaston delivered the commencement address condemning slavery. The issue of slavery was the worst evil that afflicts the Southern part of our Confederacy, he said. It could not be neglected much longer. He declared that slavery stifles industry, discourages skill, and poisons morals at the fountain head. Gaston himself was a slave-holder, so he was not arguing that slavery was unjust. His opinion was an economic one—a belief that slavery impeded the growth of the economy. At the time, there was still a lot of public debate about slavery. But soon after, North Carolina became increasingly defensive about slavery and such debate became taboo.²² That certainly was the case at the university.

One day in the fall of 1856, Professor Benjamin Hedrick was poring over equations in the chemistry laboratory when a student came in and asked him who he was voting for in the upcoming presidential election. The soft-spoken, mild-mannered Hedrick answered, Frémont. It meant he was supporting the Free Soil Party, which opposed the extension of slavery into western territories, making Hedrick an enemy of the slaveholding elite. The student did not keep this to himself.²³

When word reached W. W. Holden, the editor of the Standard newspaper in Raleigh, he wrote an inflammatory editorial declaring that Frémont men were Black Republicans (a term that gave rise to violent emotions) and should be found and driven out of the university. Hedrick made the situation worse by sending a long letter to the editor explaining his position. Angry students burned a dummy of Hedrick while the campus bell played the funeral toll. The faculty recommended that the board of trustees fire Hedrick on the grounds that he had violated the established usage of the University which forbids any Professor to become an agitator in the exciting politics of the day. However, eight years earlier, Professor Elisha Mitchell, a Presbyterian minister, had published an article arguing that slavery was authorized by God in the New Testament. Yet, he was not sanctioned.²⁴

Hedrick, an honor graduate of the university, a graduate of Harvard’s math department, and one of the best-trained men on the faculty, was the head of the university’s agricultural chemistry department, a nucleus for the university’s future school of agriculture and technics. However, once he spoke against slavery, none of his credentials mattered. By firing him, the university showed that it would not tolerate any opposition to slavery and was prepared to defend it, even at the cost of one of its most prominent scholars. The legislature reacted by moving Hedrick’s department to Raleigh. (It later became North Carolina State College, known today as North Carolina State University.)²⁵

On that cold December morning, as Wilson climbed the wooden stairs of Old East dormitory that creaked under the weight of his feet, he remembered that his father had walked that same path for thirty years. The memory made his heart heavy. So heavy that tears from a deep well inside him pooled in his eyes. A devout Christian, he prayed, Lord, hear my cry. Let Black boys be here one day. Let our labor not be in vain. He swallowed his tears for he had no time to linger on his deep pain.

Wilson had to tend to the countless needs of his many masters. He polished the students’ shoes, carried their parcels, washed their filthy clothes. He kept their secrets when they got drunk, played cards, rang the campus bell late at night, and put cows in South Building. A few of the boys even slipped him twenty-five cents a month from their allowances—money given to them by their slaveholding fathers who had built their wealth from buying and selling Black human beings.²⁶

While the students playfully but disrespectfully called Wilson Wiltz and he took the liberty of scolding them at times for their misbehavior, the racial order of slavery dictated that he was inferior to them. Because he was Black and considered chattel property, Wilson had no rights the white man was bound to respect. The U.S. Supreme Court had said so in its infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision. And almost thirty years earlier, Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin of the North Carolina Supreme Court—a university trustee and slaveholder—had declared in the 1829 case of State v. Mann that even when a slave was hired, the power of the [hiring] master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect. The University of North Carolina had absolute power over Wilson and all the other enslaved Black people it rented.²⁷

From its birth, white supremacy, racial injustice, and inequality plagued the nation’s first public university.

ON JULY 4, 1776, the Revolutionary War against England was in its second year, and uncertainty plagued the thirteen American colonies when the First Continental Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration proclaimed that all men are created equal, and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were the inalienable or indisputable rights of every man. These rights could only be secured by a democratic government instituted by the people. Announcing the dissolution of the bands tying the colonies to Great Britain, it declared that the thirteen colonies were free and independent. During this time of evolving ideas about American democracy, the nation’s first public university was born.²⁸

That December, a convention of powerful white men assembled in Halifax County (in the northeastern portion of North Carolina) to create a constitution for the newly independent state. Education was one of their deep concerns.²⁹

Farmers in the western part of the state, who did not own slaves and could not afford private education, demanded a public seminary. Wealthy slaveholders in the east no longer wanted to hire private tutors or send their sons to England to be educated. And they believed that sending their sons to northern colleges gave the state’s wealth to the North and did little to engender state pride. Without an education, children could not truly be free, and democracy would die, they reasoned. But education required teachers, and they, like ministers and civil servants, had to be trained in a university at home in North Carolina.³⁰

Public education as a state value made its way into the new constitution: A school, or schools, shall be established by the legislature for the convenient instruction of youth, with such salaries to the masters, paid by the public, as may enable them to instruct at low prices: and all useful learning shall be duly encouraged and promoted in one or more universities.³¹ It is of no coincidence that the beginning of the nation’s first public university fell in the same year as the Declaration of Independence.

The war for independence dragged on for seven more years, until 1783. The first attempt to charter the university in 1784 failed. A representative introduced the Bill for Establishing a University in this State, but the Senate did not approve it, partly because radical western farmers feared that the land-owning gentry would control the university and use it as an engine of political propaganda and as a bulwark of aristocratic privilege.³²

The next attempt came in 1789 when the legislature convened in Fayetteville, on November 2. Revolutionary War brigadier general William Richardson Davie introduced a bill to charter the university. Davie, a lawyer and legislator, had played a key role as the North Carolina delegate to the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787, advocating for the compromise of counting each slave as three-fifths of a person for purposes of allotting the number of congressional representatives for each state. Davie was just as successful at home. The bill passed; a university supported by permanent state funds would be established, and it would be called the University of North Carolina.³³

The radical western farmers’ fears turned out to be right. By the power vested in it through the university’s charter, the state legislature gave forty white men lifelong appointments as the Trustees of the University of North Carolina, to serve as the university’s guardians and fiduciaries. But these men were not representative of the people of North Carolina. Instead, they were governors, senators, judges of state courts and of the United States Supreme Court, and merchants who were wealthy slaveholding landowners.³⁴

In fact, the 1790 federal census listed thirty of the forty trustees as slaveholders. And while most slaveholders of the day had fewer than twenty slaves, several of the trustees were the largest slaveholders in the state. Benjamin Smith enslaved 221 Black people; Willie Jones, 120; Samuel Johnston, 96; Stephen Cabarrus, 73; and Richard Dobbs Spaight, 71. Among these men, Smith, Jones, Johnston, and Spaight had served as governors, and Cabarrus was Speaker of the House, which meant that he controlled the legislature. Only one trustee, physician Hugh Williamson, held no slaves. Even though he claimed he was against slavery, as a North Carolina delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, he voted for the slave trade to continue for twenty more years.³⁵

The trustees aligned politically with the Federalist Party, whose values included the distrust of democracy and the belief that government should be by the rich and the well-born. In the South, that meant slaveholders. The Republican Party, on the other hand, was suspicious of central authority by the privileged few and believed in wide democratic participation by common people.³⁶

And so, from the very first meeting of the board of trustees on December 18, 1789, in Fayetteville, the university was under control of the land-and slaveholding aristocracy and powerful, influential white supremacists.

At that meeting of the trustees, General Davie announced with delight that Benjamin Smith was donating twenty thousand acres of land warrants located in Obion County (in the extreme northwest area of Tennessee) to the university. After the American Revolution, North Carolina had given land warrants—large parcels of land in the far west of the state in what is now Tennessee—to Revolutionary War officers and soldiers in gratitude for their military service. But all of that land belonged to Native Americans. In the 1785 Hopewell Treaty, the United States had given up the land around Obion to the Cherokee Indians.³⁷

Some veterans died without taking possession of their land warrants and without legal heirs or a will. Others did not come forward to claim their land warrants even though their names were published on the roll. Their land warrants escheated (passed to the state) to be disposed of by the legislature. The legislature of 1821 directed the warrants to go to the university—even though Native Americans were the rightful owners under the Hopewell Treaty—and in 1824, the North Carolina secretary of state was ordered to close the roll and give all the remaining warrants to the university. The university denied the Native Americans’ legal right to their land and petitioned the U.S. Congress to legitimize the university’s claim. U.S. Representative Thomas Blount, a university trustee, testified before Congress. He denied that the indigenous people ever occupied the land and said they were not fit to occupy them. To walk across a country, and to shoot in it, was different from occupation, Blount said. The university prevailed.³⁸

In 1835, the university sold the land donated by Benjamin Smith and made $14,000 (the equivalent of more than $350,000 today) and named a library Smith Hall to honor him.³⁹

Each trustee was empowered to receive escheated property for the university, and the trustees appointed a lawyer in each district of the state to search court records regularly and collect escheats. In return, these lawyers received 10 percent commission and expenses.⁴⁰

The university also benefited from the escheat of slaves. The trustees sold enslaved people like property to raise cash. In 1839, a free elderly Black man from New Bern gathered all of his money and bought his enslaved daughter. She later gave birth to a son. Under North Carolina law, the daughter and grandson were the Black man’s property. He could not emancipate them because the legislature had made manumission illegal after Nat Turner’s revolt. The old man died without a will. His daughter, his only heir, could not inherit his property because she was a slave, so she and her son became state property and were turned over to the university. The trustees ordered the woman and child to be sold for cash, claiming that they were of little value since the mother was "one of those diseased and squalid [sic] wenches and that it would be redound to their happiness to have a master." In another instance, the sale of Dorothy Mitchell’s slaves, including several children, brought $2,832.10 ($69,000 today). For comparison, in 1839, the university’s income was $36,681, and a university professor’s salary was $1,250.⁴¹

The university’s attorneys handling escheats were just as aggressive and heartless as the trustees. In 1843, an enslaved boy became the university’s property and later ran away. The university’s attorney got the sheriff of Bladen County to hunt the boy down. Ten days before Christmas, the attorney informed the university treasurer of the boy’s capture and sale: Sale of Negro slave Jim in Bladen County $75. Countless other Black people were also sold by the university over the years. Between 1790 and 1840, escheats of Black people and land brought the university $362,390 ($9.4 million today)—69 percent of its total revenue.⁴²

In 1792, the sites for both the state capital and the university were selected. The charter forbade the location of the new university to be within five miles of a government building or any courts. The trustees wanted the capital and the university to be near the center of the state. In March, the 1,000-acre plantation of Joel Lane—a university trustee and slaveholder of thirty-two Black people—was selected for the capital. The full board appointed eight trustees to visit all eligible sites and decide on a location for the university. One of the appointed trustees, Orange County merchant and expert realtor James Hogg, persuaded his friends to donate 1,386 acres to the university. Eight hundred and forty acres were in a relatively unknown place in Orange County—New Hope Chapel Hill.⁴³

Two highways that were main routes of travel and trade crossed at New Hope Chapel Hill. One road ran north to south, from Petersburg, Virginia, by Oxford, North Carolina, and on to Pittsboro. It passed between what is now Old West and Person Hall. The other road ran east to west from New Bern to Fayetteville, Raleigh, Greensboro, and Salisbury in the west. This road passed just south of the present South Building. At the northeast corner of this intersection stood the only sign of human settlement amid the dense forests of oak and hickory—a small, dilapidated, abandoned chapel of the Anglican Church of England called New Hope Chapel on the Hill. The locality around the small church was called New Hope Chapel Hill or Hill on the New Hope Chapel and later shortened to Chapel Hill. Here, 503 feet above sea level, among the endless hills and thick forests, the home of North Carolina’s university was fixed in December 1792.⁴⁴

In the following summer of 1793—seventeen years after the nation’s founders had declared that all men were created equal—enslaved Black men toiled in the scorching heat, clearing the land to build the first public university in the United States of America. Their grandest dreams of equality and freedom must have poured out in their sweat and evaporated as they swung axes into massive oak and hickory trees to clear a main street for the village—named Franklin Street after Benjamin Franklin.⁴⁵

That summer, the trustees awarded James Patterson a contract to construct the first public university building, Old East. Patterson’s plan called for a building measuring 96′,7″ × 40′,1″, two stories high. Each floor would have eight dormitory rooms, each with a fireplace and closet. Patterson’s plan specified a brick foundation, two and a half feet thick. All brickwork had to be laid in mortar, made from lime and sand.⁴⁶ The trustees contracted with two local brickmakers to produce half a million bricks. Builders of that era were not wealthy enough to purchase slaves for a project of this magnitude; instead, they rented slaves. Patterson rented Black men from two wealthy Chatham County slaveholders.⁴⁷

Brickmaking was no easy task. Enslaved Black men shoveled the hard, red clay into a treading pit and then added water and stomped it into the clay. Next, the clay was packed into wooden molds to be shaped into rectangular loaves. Once the loaves dried, the enslaved men stacked the thousands of bricks in a kiln on university grounds and lit a huge fire, which they tended day and night for a week, feeding the flames with wood they had chopped. After the refined bricks cooled for a week, the Black men unstacked them and hauled them to the Old East construction site. Other enslaved men dragged wagons loaded with limestone to the construction site and burned it in a kiln, watching the coal fire for several days until it yielded lime. Others hauled heavy buckets of water from the local springs to the construction site. Another group of enslaved men collected sand from a nearby homestead where they found 150 arrowheads, trading beads, and a burial ground belonging to the Native Americans who had been driven from the land. The sand was mixed with the water and lime to make mortar to bind the bricks. After spending several months laying the foundation, the enslaved men turned to constructing the brick walls of Old East.⁴⁸

Construction halted at the Old East site for an important occasion on October 12, 1793. It was autumn, and the dogwoods, sweet gums, and maple trees were flaming brilliant reds, oranges, and golds. A long procession of dignitaries wound their way along the slopes toward Old East. At the front was a delegation of Masons in regalia, the trustees who had selected the site for the university, other trustees, Judge Spruce Macay, and other public officers, followed by men of the town.

When the procession reached Old East, the Masons parted left to right, and the trustees who had selected the university site passed through and took their places on the foundation. The Masons moved around the foundation with their usual ceremonies. Then General William Davie, fully clad in Masonic regalia, came forward. Beside Davie was Reverend Dr. Samuel McCorkle, the only university trustee who was a minister. He was dressed in a long, somber black robe and wore white gloves on his hands, in which he held a Bible.

Davie, considered the father of the university for his efforts in convincing the legislature to charter the school, had the highest honor of the day. The American flag, a symbol of democracy, hung behind him. With a sterling silver trowel, Davie ceremonially laid the cornerstone on the foundation’s southeast corner. A brass plate commemorating the monumental occasion was sealed into the cornerstone. Then Reverend McCorkle delivered the first address of the university to the audience of mostly white men.⁴⁹

It is our duty to acknowledge that sacred scriptural truth, except the Lord build the house they labor in vain who build it. Except the Lord watcheth the city the watchman walketh but in vain.…

Knowledge is wealth—it is glory—whether among philosophers, ministers of the State or religion, or among the great mass of people.… Knowledge is liberty and law. When the clouds of ignorance have been dispelled by the radiance of knowledge power trembles, but the authority of the laws remain inviolable; and how this knowledge productive of so many advantages to mankind can be acquired without public places of education I know not.⁵⁰

And so it was that the University of North Carolina was born in iniquity. Not only did the ceremony fail to acknowledge the enslaved African people who had worked day and night to bring Old East into existence, but they were not even allowed to be present at this historic moment.

But something much deeper than a cornerstone ceremony took place that day. Davie held at least thirty-six Black people in bondage on his large plantation in eastern Halifax County. Just a few months earlier, he had bought a man, Joe, and sold a thirteen-or fourteen-year-old girl, Dinah.⁵¹ As Davie used his silver trowel to lay the cornerstone into the mortar made from the intertwined oppression of Native Americans and Black people, the university’s father also laid down the legacy of white supremacy, human bondage, and racial injustice—literally cementing them into the university’s very foundation.

Over the next six decades, an unknown number of enslaved Black men dug and built the Old Well and built the first eight university buildings: Old East, Person Hall, South Building, Gerrard Hall (the college chapel), Old West, Smith Hall, New East, and New West, as well as the president’s home and the stone walls surrounding the campus. Their sweat, blood, tears, and bodies made the university a national treasure and one of the leading public universities.

William R. Davie laying the cornerstone of East Building, October 12, 1793. Yackety Yack, 1935, page 9, in the North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Yet their names, their native languages, their cultural traditions, their dreams, their hopes, their feelings, and their history will forever remain unknown.⁵² On this bedrock of white supremacy, racial injustice, and iniquity stands the University of North Carolina.

DURING THE CIVIL War, President Swain was adamant that the university remain open. The trustees stood behind him and refused to suspend exercises, making the university one of only two colleges in the South that operated throughout the war. In 1862, only twenty-four students graduated, a decline from the ninety-nine who had received degrees the preceding year. Things got worse. In 1863, there were only eight graduates.⁵³

Concerned that the low enrollment would force the university’s closure, President Swain, with the trustees’ blessing, wrote to Confederate president Jefferson Davis begging him to relax the conscription law (enacted in 1862, requiring all men eighteen to thirty-five years old to serve in the war) that forced some students to leave and kept others from enrolling. President Davis granted the exemption but limited it to one year and only to seniors and juniors. The following year, Swain’s request to renew the exemption was denied on the basis that students over age eighteen would "find their highest training in defending their country in the field." As a result, only forty-six students attended in 1864, and only seven graduated. In total, from 1861–1865, 1,062 university students entered the Confederate army, serving at all ranks from lieutenant generals down to privates.⁵⁴

On April 9, 1865, Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Virginia, signaling the end of the Civil War. That same day, North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance (a law graduate of the university) appointed President Swain and former governor William A. Graham (a university trustee) as commissioners of peace to surrender North Carolina to General William T. Sherman, commander of the Union troops, and to negotiate protection of the state capital and the university. Swain delivered the keys of the capital into Sherman’s hands as a formal sign of the state’s surrender. In return, Sherman promised that the University of North Carolina, its buildings, and its property would be guarded.⁵⁵

The Confederate cavalry led by General Joseph Wheeler reached Chapel Hill on Friday, April 14, 1865. Another Confederate general in a gray uniform climbed off his horse as his infantry division continued marching through town. He stood on the sidewalk of Franklin Street and loudly denounced Swain and Graham as traitors and said, They ought to be hanged. He was not alone in his disdain. When Confederate president Jefferson Davis learned of the peace mission in Raleigh, he ordered the immediate arrests of Swain and Graham, though the warrants were never carried out.⁵⁶

General Wheeler set up his headquarters in a house on the north side of Franklin Street opposite the Chapel of the Cross Episcopal Church. Initially, Wheeler intended to defend Chapel Hill from the impending arrival of Union cavalry. He ordered his troops to dig rifle pits on the southern slope of Point Prospect. However, when Wheeler learned of the number of Union soldiers headed toward Chapel Hill, he rounded up his troops, and at 2:00 p.m. on April 16—Easter Sunday, one of the holiest days in the village—a long procession of demoralized men in gray uniforms galloped away.⁵⁷

White people had gathered that afternoon to worship at the Chapel of the Cross when a man rushed inside to report that the Yankees were approaching in full force on the town road. Citizens appointed a committee of representatives of the university—President Swain, law professor Judge William Battle, Professor Manuel Fetter—and representatives of the town (merchants John Carr, Andrew Mickle, and Charles Mallett) to meet the Union soldiers. Meanwhile, the churchgoers rushed home to bury their silver and empty their storerooms and storehouses and wait with quiet resignation for the intruders. At least that is how they saw them. Fear filled the air.⁵⁸

The next morning, just before dawn, Wilson Swain walked past the red rosebushes in full bloom on his way to Old South. He entered the back door and walked up the stairs to the attic to ring the bell to open the university, just as he had done every morning since the Civil War began four years earlier. But this morning was the last time he would do this duty as a slave. He rang it with more force than he ever had before.

Later that morning, around eight o’clock, Wilson joined the committee that included President Swain, Judge Battle, Professor Fetter, and the three Chapel Hill merchants. They walked to the foot of Piney Prospect, not far from the university, to meet the incoming detachment of Union troops.⁵⁹

In the distance, an avalanche of blue approached. A commander on horseback was at the head of four thousand Michigan cavalrymen. The sound of the horses’ hooves and marching boots thundered through the town. The university’s few remaining students came out to look. Under a white flag, President Swain and Wilson surrendered the university and Chapel Hill to Union general Smith B. Atkins. In that moment, Wilson became a free man. One of his first acts of liberation was to take his father’s last name. He became Wilson Caldwell.⁶⁰

President Swain reminded General Atkins of General Sherman’s promise of protection for the university and the town. Atkins said he had received the orders and would follow them. He called out to a colonel to take his regiment into the village and station one soldier at every house that wanted protection. White southerners who were mourning hid indoors and peeked out of their windows as the Union troops rode by. They worried about their future now that slavery had ended. Cornelia Phillips Spencer, the daughter of math professor James Phillips, expressed the sentiments of Chapel Hill’s former slaveholders in her diary: I see before us only humiliation, privation and a life of continued toil. The southern land is ruined. The negroes are free, leaving their homes.… They seem to show no feeling or attachment for their owners—those who have raised and fed and clothed them. But newly freed Black people had a completely different reaction. They ran outside to meet their liberators, cheering and waving Union flags.⁶¹

The thousands of Union troops occupied Chapel Hill for two and a half weeks. The soldiers guarding the university made their quarters and stabled their horses inside university buildings. President Swain wanted history to reflect that Yankees did not interfere with the university, but in reality only three students remained on campus, and classes were canceled during the Federal occupation. Cornelia Spencer described occupation as a wretched fortnight.⁶²

Union General Atkins visited Swain’s home on April 19 and was introduced to his twenty-one-year-old daughter, Eleanor. Atkins was lovestruck at first sight. He ordered the regimental band to serenade her nightly at the president’s home. Soldiers of both armies were incensed. Shocked and outraged townspeople began to gossip that Eleanor and Professor Fetter’s daughters were out riding with Union officers—the highest form of betrayal of the Confederacy. It weakened General Swain’s popularity, but he never realized it.⁶³

Just before Atkins and his troops left Chapel Hill, he ordered thirty-five soldiers to remain and protect the university. And Eleanor announced that they were engaged to marry. Atkins presented his fiancée with a horse and General Sherman sent a driving horse for President Swain. The townspeople condemned Swain for accepting the spoils of the conqueror, which they said were swept from southern stables.⁶⁴

The university was the only southern institution that held commencement in 1865. Though President Swain was away in Washington, advising the new U.S. president, Andrew Johnson, on how to reconstruct the nation, fifteen seniors graduated.⁶⁵

Eleanor Swain and Smith Atkins married in Chapel Hill in August, shocking the feelings of all true Southerners.⁶⁶ Most local whites boycotted the wedding. Some even spit on their invitations, declaring that the girl had thrown herself into the arms of an enemy reeking with the blood of southerners. But the loudest protest came from university students. During the wedding ceremony, they rang the college bell for three hours. And dummies of President Swain and General Atkins hung on trees. Those who attended the wedding at the president’s house saw a large, elaborately decorated wedding cake. People in the Black community of Chapel Hill had baked it and sent it as a gift to the couple. It was their political act of support. Afterward, rumor had it that Eleanor had gone to Illinois loaded with finery and jewels that were stolen from women of the South and given to her by her husband. Throughout the South, the wedding was considered a disgrace to North Carolina.⁶⁷

Roughly three weeks after the wedding, a group of about twenty Black men gathered on the second floor of a building in Chapel Hill to select delegates to the first Convention of Freedmen of North Carolina to be held in October in Raleigh. Somehow university students found out. Around ten o’clock that evening, a group of students threw rocks at the building. They tore down the stairs to the second floor but then used ladders to try break into the second floor, holding sticks in their hands. The Black men fought back. A mob of whites gathered below cried for the building to be set on fire. Black men jumped out of the windows and fled in the dark.⁶⁸

With the war over, North Carolina’s political and economic order was shattered. Questions loomed about how to assimilate the 350,000 freed Black people into the state’s economic, political, and social systems.⁶⁹ The ruling class believed the newly freed men and women’s natural place was at the bottom of the social order, in a condition as close as possible to slavery. Black freedom was a threat to labor and political control. The ruling class moved quickly to enact new laws to restrict Black people.

Early in 1866, shortly after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the North Carolina legislature enacted the Black Codes, a set of racially discriminatory laws designed to control and oppress the newly freed men and women. Though the University of North Carolina as an institution did not play a direct role in the creation of the Black Codes, sons of the university did. Attorney B. F. Moore, a university trustee from 1840 to 1866; William S. Mason, a recipient of an honorary degree from the university in 1857; and R. S. Donnell, a member of the Class of 1839, drafted the Black Codes. The codes denied the newly freedmen from serving on juries or testifying against whites in court. They established the death penalty for Black men convicted of assaulting white women and restricted Black people’s movement and ownership of firearms. Additionally, Black people could not buy land valued over $10 unless it was witnessed by a literate white person. Laws restricting labor included punishment for vagrancy (not working) and violating labor contracts as well as legalizing payment of wages by contributions (instead of money). Similar laws were passed throughout the rest of the former Confederacy.⁷⁰

The South’s Black Codes angered the federal government and northerners who had allied with Black Republicans. In June 1866, Congress responded by passing the Fourteenth Amendment. It gave citizenship rights to formerly enslaved people and mandated that states provide equal protection of their laws to all citizens. It also disqualified any state that denied the right to vote to formerly enslaved men from readmission to the Union and barred from public office anyone who had sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution but had supported the Confederacy. North Carolina and other southern states stubbornly refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment or adopt a new constitution granting voting rights to Blacks—both preconditions for rejoining the United States. Congress punished the South further by placing it under military rule (by sending the army into the states). North Carolina officials remained obstinate.⁷¹

Enrollment at the university did not recover quickly after the war. Very few families could afford tuition, room and board, and other expenses. With very little income and significant debt, the university’s future was uncertain. In 1867, President Swain and the entire faculty submitted their resignations to be effective prior to the fall 1868 term.⁷²

Following a bitterly fought 1868 election, Radical Republicans, made up of unionist whites (called Scalawags), northern whites who had come South for economic gain (called carpetbaggers), and freedmen, won control of North Carolina’s government. More than seventy thousand Black men had voted for the first time. Sixteen Black representatives and three Black senators were elected. Newly elected Republican governor William Holden called a special session of the legislature, which promptly ratified the Fourteenth Amendment on July 2, 1868, and eliminated all property and religious qualifications for voting and granted full voting rights to Black men. North Carolina’s Republican representatives were seated in Congress, and the state was officially readmitted to the Union. Bitter conservatives vowed to regain control of the state’s political and social systems, even if doing so meant resorting to violence.⁷³

Shortly after his inauguration, Governor Holden appointed the first Black state officials. Wilson Caldwell was appointed a justice of the peace for a year, making him Chapel Hill’s first Black official. One of his first duties was to preside over the criminal trial of a former university professor accused of stealing a dog from a Black man. He dismissed the case, finding it better suited for civil court. A previously enslaved Black man sitting in judgment of an ex-professor of the university certainly was a new turn of events and must have enraged many whites.⁷⁴

Governor Holden was determined to take the university out of the hands of the aristocrats who controlled the board of trustees and make it a university of the common people. He sent a contingent of Black soldiers to take possession of the university campus and buildings. They stayed for many months, much to the disgust of the white townspeople. Under the authority of the new state constitution of 1868, he fired all the trustees and appointed a new board of Republicans. The new trustees accepted the resignations of President Swain and the faculty and dismissed them. Reverend Solomon Pool, a graduate of the university and a math professor, became the school’s president—heralding a new day and a social revolution of sorts at the university.⁷⁵

Fisk Parsons Brewer was elected as professor of Greek language and literature. A graduate of Yale University, Brewer had taught at a freedmen’s school in Raleigh