Pursuing lost, local black history

Almost two centuries ago, the Rev. L. Jerome Fowler's great-great-grandfather was a slave in Prince George's County.

Adam Francis Plummer was the personal servant to Charles Benedict Calvert, a Southern aristocrat who founded the Maryland Agricultural College, this university's 19th century precursor.

Plummer could read and write and was even given a plot of land to develop his passion for growing roses. He accompanied Calvert everywhere and was involved in all of his projects, Fowler, a family historian, said.

This just leaves one question - did Plummer help build this university?

Before the Civil War, Calvert handed the university's presidency over to Benjamin Hallowell, an abolitionist who accepted the position on the condition that the university end its practice of slavery. But nowhere in Fowler's archives do his descendants mention actually accompanying Calvert to the campus.

This indefinite history has troubled administrators who have grappled with how to interpret its ties to slavery, while other universities around the country have investigated their pasts. State lawmakers apologized for its role in the institution last year, but afterward, university President Dan Mote said the university lacked the evidence to make any admissions.

The university charged archivist Liz McAllister with investigating the history for one a day week last semester, but with little time and scarce resources, her research produced more questions than answers.

Next year, a two-semester class of 30 undergraduates, led by history professor Ira Berlin, will pick up where she left off.

"It's important that we get to bottom of this and know the true roots of the university and how it developed and if slaves were involved in building it," Fowler said. "We need to know."

Though it's still in the planning process, a draft of the class' syllabus shows it will spend the first semester investigating and understanding the history and role of slavery in the Mid-Atlantic states before splitting off into research groups and specifically examining the university the second semester.

So far, Berlin plans to investigate old censuses from the 1850s, slave schedules, land records, national archives, the state archives and the Maryland Historical society in Baltimore.

"We fully expect to hit dead ends," Berlin said. "Historical research can be extremely ineffectual. It's a lot of work. You can spend a lot of time drilling a hole and find no oil."

Berlin, however, is hopeful.

"Slavery was integrally invested in every possible way in the institution as a central mode of life. It's not so much about the conclusion. It's about the information we find. We don't need to find the smoking gun."

Here is what we know so far about slavery at the university as compiled by McAllister:

• Charles Benedict Calvert, the founder of the Maryland Agricultural College, owned slaves.

• Calvert, however, was a unionist, though he supported the institution of slavery.

• Like Calvert, many of the stockholders and trustees of the Maryland Agricultural College owned slaves, which means many of the men in charge at the university during the 1800s were slaveholders.

• Maryland was a slave state so members of the college's administration were by no means the only ones.

• Because the college was founded in the midst of a slave-holding society, the college could have had a pro-slavery attitude.

• We know through Adam Plummer's Diary that the college may not have been accommodating to abolitionists in its early days, implying the overall mentality of the college was in favor of slavery. He mentions in his diary that a Maryland Agricultural College Professor, G.M.P. King of Portland, Maine who believed in the liberation of slaves, left after a few short weeks. Plummer wrote that the college "paid him his entire year's salary just to get rid of him. No abolitionist for them!"

• Some contradictory information comes from outside sources. Frederick Law Olmsted, a famous landscape designer, visited the college and recorded that Irishmen, instead of slaves, were being used for labor at the college. He wrote in his book, Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, "Mr. C. is a large hereditary owner of slaves, which for ordinary field and stable-work, constitute his laboring force. He has employed several Irishman for ditching, and for this work, and this alone, he thought he could use them to better advantage than Negroes. He would think of using Irishmen for common farm-labor, and make light of their coming In competition with slaves…"

Berlin and his class will focus on finding more information about the creation of the university and answering the following questions: Was it viewed as a source of opportunity to people in the neighborhood, black or white? Were people seeking jobs on-campus? Did merchandisers crowd around the new establishment? Is there a slave burial ground nearby? Did Calvert free certain slaves? Did they demand anything?

They are just going to follow their noses, Berlin said, no matter how difficult it gets.

"It becomes a question of how much time you want to invest in that," McAllister said. "It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack."

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