Yale School of Medicine and Slavery

Faculty Financial Connections to Slavery: The Case of Benjamin Silliman

Figure 1. Portrait of Benjamin Silliman by Daniel Huntington (ca. 1850s). Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine.

Benjamin Silliman (1779-1864), one of the four founding faculty members of Yale School of Medicine, was a slaveholder who also possessed intergenerational wealth and business investments built on enslavement. Both of Silliman’s parents owned enslaved people, whom they used to farm land, staff the family estate, and finance major purchases, including Silliman’s undergraduate education at Yale. Silliman’s parents also passed ownership of at least one enslaved person on to their son Benjamin. The Silliman family earned more money by “hiring out” enslaved people in the early 1800s. Even after ending his direct relationship with enslaving, Silliman had business arrangements with Yale students from southern slaveholding families. Silliman also invested in Virginia gold mining, which in the antebellum period was an industry that ran on enslaved labor. He passed some of those investments on to his son, Benjamin Silliman Jr. (1816-1885), thus continuing the intergenerational transfer of slave-backed wealth. As Silliman was one of the medical school’s earliest and most prolific financiers, we argue that he provided a crucial traffic of slave capital into the institution. Silliman’s money went to the training of teachers and the purchase of anatomical objects, both of which aided in establishing the school and growing its reputation. He also used his own funds to maintain key educational facilities, such as the Yale College Laboratory (founded in 1808), where medical students learned chemistry and pharmacy. In short, Benjamin Silliman provides a clear example of how wealth derived from slavery contributed to the making of Yale School of Medicine.

Figure 2. Statue of Benjamin Silliman outside of Yale's Sterling Chemistry Lab, created in 1884 by sculptor John Ferguson Weir. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Benjamin Silliman (Figure 1) was born in Trumbull, Connecticut in 1779 to a wealthy family that owned land throughout Fairfield County. He graduated from Yale College in 1796 and received his MA degree in 1799. That year, he became a tutor at the college and also wrote his first antislavery piece, a poem titled “The Negroe,” which discussed the evils of slavery and especially the slave trade. Silliman also studied law between 1800 and 1802. In 1802, he became Yale’s first professor of chemistry and natural history, and he remained on faculty and was heavily involved in Yale administration until 1855. He was instrumental in the founding of the Yale School of Medicine (1813), the Sheffield Scientific School (1847), the Yale School of Engineering (1852), and the Peabody Museum (1866). Silliman became one of the most famous scientists in the United States. In 1818, he founded the American Journal of Science, which became one of the nation’s most prestigious scientific journals. He was a regular on the scientific lecture circuit, delivering lectures on chemistry and natural history throughout the country, including the South, where he sometimes stayed with former students, some of whom were enslavers. [1] Toward the end of his life, he served as a scientific advisor to President Lincoln and in 1863 helped to found the National Academy of Sciences. In 1940, Silliman became the namesake of one of Yale’s residential colleges. [2] Today, there is a statue of his likeness outside Yale’s Sterling Chemistry Laboratory (Figure 2).

Slavery contributed to Silliman’s familial and personal wealth. At the time of his birth, Silliman’s family owned at least twelve enslaved people. [3] Silliman’s father, Gold Selleck Silliman (1732-1790), and his mother, Mary Fish Noyes Silliman (1736-1818), both came from slaveholding families. One enslaved man named Peter, who was born in Africa and enslaved to the Noyes family in childhood, became enslaved to the Silliman household after Gold and Mary wed. [4] When Gold died, Mary sold off two enslaved people to pay the Yale College tuition for Benjamin Silliman and his brother. [5] According to Mary’s account book, she sold four enslaved people during the 1790s, including a man named “Ja[me]s Blackman” and another unnamed enslaved man, whom she sold together for forty pounds in 1792. Several years later, Mary sold an enslaved couple, Tego and Sue.

However, Mary continued to enslave Tego and Sue’s children, and eventually leased them out as indentured labor until, in accordance with Connecticut law, they were eligible to be emancipated at age twenty-one, or required to be emancipated at age twenty-five. [6] The remaining enslaved people – who included adults and children – continued to live and work at the Silliman family’s main residence Holland Hill, in Trumbull. Benjamin Silliman took over the financial management of Holland Hill after he graduated from Yale College in 1796. [7]

Around the same time, Silliman reflected on his upbringing at Holland Hill and the enslaved people who served his family. In a letter to a friend, he recalled how:

Under our roof, or roofs, (for there was a distinct building for the black servants,) there were, at the time of my father’s death, about a dozen negroes, young and old, including those who were occasionally there from their connection with ours. Among them were two married pairs, and their children swelled the list of consumers, but not of producers. The mothers served in the kitchen and the laundry, and the older girls and boys were waiters. Some of the older boys worked on the land. The principal man, Tego, (a corruption from Antigua, from which island he came,) was an able man, but now having no master, he was bold and sometimes impudent to my mother. His wife, Sue, was kind and faithful. [8]

This passage suggests that, as a young adult in the mid-1790s, Silliman believed slavery to be a relatively unproblematic aspect of his upbringing. In his mind, enslaved men were expected to be docile and respectful to the white mistress of the household, while enslaved children were viewed as burdensome “consumers” until they were able to work for their keep. An anti-slavery moderate who supported colonization, by the time Silliman had reached old age he had become more critical of his family’s involvement in slavery, and thus, his childhood memories had to be whitewashed. “Although my father was an owner of slaves and although I was brought up among them,” he wrote to another friend in 1863, “I do not remember the time when slavery was not detestable even to my juvenile mind.” [9]

However, family financial records and correspondence reveal that Silliman clearly did not detest slavery. He enslaved at least one woman named Cloe, whom he had inherited from his parents. Silliman’s brother had tried to take Cloe with him when he moved to Rhode Island in 1792. But Cloe resisted, correctly arguing that by law she could not be removed from Connecticut, and was thus able to remain at the family estate. [10] According to one historian, Silliman acquired ownership of Cloe around the same time that he graduated from Yale College and took over Holland Hill in 1796. Cloe was one of the enslaved people that Silliman’s parents held at Holland Hill, and she may have remained there while Silliman owned her, or he may have brought her to his New Haven residence on occasion.

In 1802, after benefiting from her labor for several years, Silliman considered selling Cloe. He apparently decided against it after Cloe and her husband, Iago, protested the sale. Iago was also enslaved to the Silliman family and held at Holland Hill, though it is not entirely clear which Silliman family member owned him. Silliman’s brother-in-law, who was living at Holland Hill at the time, wrote to Silliman about the sale, explaining that it would be more of a hassle than it was worth. “Iago is determined to prevent it,” he explained, while Cloe insisted that “she was yours.” The protest worked and Cloe was able to remain at Holland Hill. [11]

In addition to owning enslaved people, throughout the first decade of the nineteenth century the Silliman family continued to lease out slave labor. Most of these enslaved people had been born after the passage of gradual emancipation in 1784, but between 1800 and 1810, they were still too young to be legally emancipated. For example, in 1803 the family leased out an enslaved woman named Annise.

Born in 1786, Annise still had four years of enslavement remaining before she could be emancipated at age twenty-one. The Sillimans agreed to lease Annise’s labor for those final four years of slavery, and for that transaction they collected $100. In another case, the family leased out a nineteen-year-old enslaved man named Ely for a term of seven years. Technically, this lease was illegal, as Ely would have become eligible for emancipation before completing the term of service. It is not clear whether Ely served out the entirety of the lease. Nor is it clear whether anyone in the Silliman family became aware of their mistake and rectified it, or if they continued to ignore the law to generate income from Ely’s labor. [12] Given that the Sillimans seemed to understand how the law would impact a lease on Annise’s labor – not to mention that Benjamin Silliman had studied law – it seems unlikely that family members were simply unaware of the infraction.

In any case, the family’s leasing of enslaved labor provided a side income for Silliman. Together with his inheritances of land, investments, and enslaved people; his faculty salary from Yale College; and the fees he collected for legal services, this placed him in a solid position to support the creation of various educational institutions, including the Medical Institution of Yale College. In 1811-1812, Silliman worked closely with fellow founding faculty member Jonathan Knight to prepare for the opening of the medical school. During the fall and winter of 1811-1812, Knight, who was the medical school’s treasurer and would become its professor of anatomy, took several classes in the medical department at the University of Pennsylvania. Silliman paid for Knight’s classes and his board. [13] In addition to this, Silliman periodically visited Knight in Philadelphia. During one visit in January, 1812, he gave Knight $200 to purchase “anatomical preparations” for the future medical school (for more on this purchase, and Yale’s anatomical museum, see our essay on “Traces in the Archive”). This sum – the equivalent of $3,800 today – represented one of the largest single credits to the medical school’s total finances in 1812. [14]

Later that month, Silliman wrote to Knight saying he was thrilled that Knight was able to connect with “Dr. Wistar” (probably Caspar Wistar, professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania) to purchase anatomical supplies. Silliman described the materials he wanted in great detail:

[T]hree skeletons would be desirable; one with the bones connected by wires to be suspended by a cord & pully in the anatomical room in full view of the class for constant reference; one similarly put together but capable of having the bones unhooked & taken apart so as to be shown in pieces when necessary; and one with the bones connected by the natural ligaments dried & unvarnished. …Besides these it would be well to have plenty of separate bones of various sizes -- sacral crania and parts, etc. etc. and one of the skeletons should be a female. A good blood vessel subject would be desirable -- several prepared hearts -- corroded wax injected preparations of the liver &c with some specimens of injected lymphatic nodes &c. [15]

Clearly, Silliman wanted to be sure that Knight would use his money wisely to purchase an extensive anatomical collection from or through Wistar – a professor at the leading medical school of the day – so that Yale’s medical school would start out on a similar level. Knight did as Silliman wished. In February 1812, he used the money to purchase the “anatomical preparations” and transport them from Philadelphia to New Haven. [16] In April of that year, Silliman gave Knight another sum of $65 to purchase more “preparations, skeletons, and separate bones, bought of Mr. Brux and others” and another $18 to transport the materials. [17] About a year and a half later, Knight would use the knowledge he had learned and the objects he had acquired in Philadelphia to teach anatomy to the first class of medical students at Yale.

Silliman’s money was thus crucial to establishing the instructional capacity of Yale’s medical school. Anatomical knowledge and teaching objects were not required to start a medical school, but all leading medical schools of the day had them, and Silliman knew that Yale needed to as well if they wanted to be competitive in attracting paying students. [18] Considering how often the school’s anatomical collection was mentioned in circulars and medical journal advertisements, it is also safe to assume that Silliman’s donations were also important for building the school’s reputation over the following decades. [19] A good reputation meant that students, faculty, and donors continued to pour their labor and resources into the school, thus helping it weather war and other financial downturns over the course of the nineteenth century. All of this was made possible in part thanks to early and significant funding from a man who had owned enslaved people, profited from their labor, and inherited wealth that they had helped to create.

We do not know exactly when the Silliman family, or Benjamin Silliman in particular, stopped owning and leasing enslaved people. We do know, however, Silliman continued to benefit from a flow of slave capital throughout the early nineteenth century. According to Silliman’s personal account books, he fronted costs for several students from the South to attend Yale College and the medical school. The accounts show that Silliman kept meticulous records of the money he had spent on the students’ tuition, room, board, fuel charges, and “servant” fees, as well as their medical and dentistry bills, washing bills, and clothing costs. In the case of Thomas Legare, one Yale College student whom Silliman financed in 1829-1830, Silliman even put up the $7 membership fee for Legare to join the Calliopean Society, a Yale debate society that drew much of its membership from southern states. [20]

Page from Silliman account book: Yale College Laboratory and American Journal of Science and Arts, 1826-1841

Figure 3. Line in Benjamin Silliman's ledger for student Thomas Legare, $7 membership fee for Legare to join the Calliopean Society. Account Book: Yale College Laboratory and American Journal of Science and Arts, 1826-1841, vol. 3, p. 10. Box 47A, folder 15, Silliman Family Papers (MS 450), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Legare came from a slaveholding family in Charleston, South Carolina, and presumably either they, or Thomas himself, later reimbursed Silliman. At some point, Legare became a doctor and by the end of his life he owned several plantations on James Island in South Carolina. [21] Another one of these southern students was Thomas B. Kempe of Natchez, Mississippi. Kempe’s father, James Kempe, was joint owner of Rifle Point Plantation in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, which included nineteen enslaved people. [22] During the time when Kempe attended medical classes in 1832-1833, Silliman paid for board at “Miss Sines,” Kempe’s washing bill, as well as his use of a “servant” for “3 and ½ months for $7.” [23] The account books make it clear that Silliman continued doing business with slaveholding families, even after his own family had ceased enslaving.

Silliman also profited from several gold mines in Virginia that ran on enslaved labor. While the California Gold Rush of the late 1840s holds a prominent place in American historical memory, there was an earlier gold rush in the South during the first several decades of the nineteenth century, especially in Virginia and North Carolina. This antebellum gold mining industry relied on the labor of enslaved people, many of whom worked in the mines when they were not working on tobacco, rice, or cotton plantations. During agricultural “slack times” – usually the period of time just after the harvest and before planting began for the next season – plantation enslavers often hired out enslaved “field hands” to work in other industries such as mining, logging, shipping, or factories. This practice ensured that planters could continue to earn profits throughout the year. [24]

In the early 1830s, Benjamin Silliman began investing in Harris Mine in Louisa County, Virginia, where the mining labor was most likely done by hired-out enslaved people. In 1831, Silliman received a letter from Henry H. Bissell, a former Yale College student who was touring mines in Virginia, possibly as a corresponding agent for Silliman’s American Journal of Science. As Bissell explained, there was an “exceedingly rich vein recently opened – yielding large amounts of gold” at Harris Mine, in addition to two other prolific veins that had already been producing gold for several years. According to Bissell, the “proprietors” of the mine discovered the new vein after some initial cuts into the ground yielded “gold dust mixed with crystals” and strains of quartz, both of which indicated gold deposits further below. [25]

In addition to describing the geology of Harris Mine, Bissell had a quite a lot to say about mining labor. Although he did not explicitly state that the miners were enslaved, he did note that “after a discontinuance of labor for some months, it was resumed about a fortnight since.” Given what historians know about the use of hired-out enslaved labor at southern mines, we can speculate that this pause in mining labor was due to the fact that the miners were forced back to the plantation for the harvest season. However, labor disruptions at Harris Mine were soon to be a thing of the past. Bissell went on to say that “a lease of this mine has been recently made to the North Carolina Gold Mining Co. and it is anticipated that regular and extensive working will be commenced at an early period.”  [26] This was because the North Carolina Gold Mining Company had its own enslaved people who could be put to work year-round. [27]

If Silliman knew about southern mine owners’ enslaving practices, he did not mention it. Yet, he did discuss the geological qualities of Harris Mine, as well as its great financial potential. In a short addendum to Bissell’s letter, dated August 29, 1831, Silliman jotted down further thoughts on these matters: “along with Mr. Bissell’s letter I had the pleasure of seeing a rich collection of specimens from the mine about [sic] described: they far surpass anything that I had seen elsewhere both in commercial value and in those characters of color, luster, crystallization, and volume, which rendered them most desirable objects for a cabinet of mineralogy.” Lastly, Silliman remarked on Bissell, whose “talents, education, and formal knowledge” made him highly qualified to judge the commercial and scientific value of Harris Mine and other mining operations. [28]

Apparently, Silliman trusted his former student so much that he was willing to become an investor in Harris Mine, and perhaps other Virginia mines. In 1836, Silliman, along with his son, Benjamin Silliman Jr., traveled throughout the Virginia gold belt to inspect potential mines. During his travels, Benjamin Sr. kept a private journal where he noted that “slaves were employed about the mines.” He described enslaved men breaking quartz rocks to collect the gold contained inside. [29]  However, Silliman did not mention slavery at Harris Mine, or at any other Virginia mines, in his report on the region, which he published in the American Journal of Science in 1837. He did say that Virginia mineral deposits were extensive and “valuable,” while cautioning his readers to seek them out and invest in them in a judicious manner. True, the state possessed “great mineral treasures,” but according to Silliman, those treasures “are to be obtained only by sober industry and skillful application of knowledge and capital.” He insisted that “all her hidden treasures of gold, if brought to light,” would not “form any adequate compensation for the abandonment and the substitution of a spirit of wild speculation.” [30]

Although it is not clear how much money Silliman made from gold mining, it is clear that he was able to pass on some of his investments, as well as his knowledge of mining and geology, to his son, Benjamin Jr. The son may have taken control of his father’s Virginia gold mining investments at some point before Benjamin Sr. died in 1864, but the younger Silliman definitely owned them by 1866. In September of that year, Benjamin Jr. sold off his stakes in Virginia mines and his ownership of a gold mine in California. [31] After graduating from Yale College in 1837, Silliman Jr. worked in his father’s laboratory and assisted him with editing of the American Journal of Science. He was appointed professor of applied chemistry at Yale in 1846, and from there, he had an illustrious scientific career that closely resembled his father’s. He became one of the original members of the National Academy of Sciences in 1863 and received an honorary medical degree from the Medical College of South Carolina in 1849 and an LLD from Jefferson Medical College in 1884. [32] Benjamin Jr. was also a scientific leader in (and a leading profiteer of) the early petroleum industry, which took off in the 1850s. [33] Silliman Sr.’s professional and financial success, which can be partly traced back to slavery, had thus provided a foundation of intergenerational wealth and professional capital that his son could tap into when he came of age.

Much research remains to be done on the Yale College Laboratory, where medical students studied chemistry and pharmacy and where Benjamin Silliman Sr. and Jr. made their careers as two of the most famous scientists in the antebellum United States. In 1803, the Yale Corporation ordered the construction of what would become known as the “Lyceum” on the “Old Brick Row,” an area that is known today as Yale’s “Old Campus” (Figure 3). In 1808, Benjamin Silliman Sr. founded the laboratory in the basement of the Lyceum. In the low-lying, windowless room, Silliman created a central location for the study of chemistry, mineralogy, geology, and pharmacy at Yale. The lab also became the homebase of Silliman’s journal, the American Journal of Science. [34]

Phelps Halls and Lyceum from campus, Yale College

Figure 4. The Lyceum (center-right of this frame) around 1901. The building was demolished in the early 1900s. Image taken by William Henry Jackson, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Library of Congress.

The College funded the building of the lab and allocated some funds for Silliman to keep it running, but the lab’s financial records reveal that Silliman himself was the institution’s largest benefactor in its first several decades of operation. He also served as its director and treasurer. Additionally, it is clear that this laboratory ran on the labor of dozens of unnamed “boys” and “servants.” Silliman kept track of funds for the laboratory in his personal account book. In 1806, he began purchasing necessary scientific instruments, but also paid yearly salaries of $12.50 to a “laboratory boy” and a “servant.” In 1806-1807, there were more servants “cutting wood” and washing laundry, and a “chimney boy” who cleaned and stocked the fireplace. In 1808, there was a “boy in the laboratory,” another “boy cleaning bottles and pipes,” and a third unnamed “boy” who was responsible for cleaning “soda jars.”

Excerpts from Silliman account books, 1806-1808

Figure 5. All excerpts from Account Book: Benjamin Silliman, 1798-1807. Box 47, folder 13, Silliman Family Papers (MS 450), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

These lab-related labor expenses often appeared alongside Silliman’s personal expenses, which also included unnamed laborers. In 1808, Silliman paid for a “servant at my brother’s” and another “boy” to accompany him on trips to Newport, Rhode Island, New York City, and Philadelphia. [35] Payments to and mentions of unnamed “boys” and “servants” can be found in financial records until at least 1832.

One longtime laboratory assistant was Robert M. Park, a free Black man whom the Yale and Slavery Project has shown to have worked in the laboratories of both Silliman Sr. and Jr.  Park helped Silliman Sr. perform experiments and in 1835 spent a month with him in Boston, setting up demonstrations for Silliman’s lecture series at the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, leading Silliman to remark that Park “is regarded by the audience as a sub-professor.”  Park later spent over two decades as “janitor” to the Yale secret society Skull and Bones. [36]

Without more identifying information, we cannot say for sure whether these were all free laborers, indentured servants, formerly enslaved people, or enslaved people. The fact that many were paid for their labor suggests that they were not enslaved to Silliman, although it is still possible that someone else was being paid for their work, especially in the early years of the lab, when it was still legal to hire out enslaved people under the age of twenty-five. Furthermore, the account book entries for 1806-1808 coincide with the Silliman family’s hiring out of at least two enslaved people, Annise and Ely. [37]

Yale School of Medicine did not have a traffic of enslaved people’s bodies like some medical schools did. [38] Yale did, however, have a clear traffic of slave capital via Benjamin Silliman. This connection to slavery makes Yale similar to other institutions of higher education in the northern United States that continued to take money from enslavers and to use that money to grow their wealth. [39] The Civil War brought an end to slavery in the United States, but it did not destroy all of the wealth that slavery had created, some of which lives on in prestigious northeast institutions like Yale.

Endnotes

1. George P. Fisher, Life of Benjamin Silliman, M.D., L.L D. 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1866), 2: 20; for a discussion of Silliman’s anti-slavery poem, see Chandos Michael Brown, Benjamin Silliman: A Life in the Young Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 95. We would like to thank Hope McGrath, David Blight, and the researchers involved in the Yale and Slavery Research Project for sharing their research on Silliman’s connections to slavery, which includes the details in this note as well as others in this essay which will be indicated in citations as “courtesy of the Yale and Slavery Research Project.”
    
2. Eric Herschthal, The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 203; Richard Conniff, “How Science Came to Yale,” Yale Alumni Magazine (March/April, 2015). https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/4066-how-science-came-to-yale, accessed June 6, 2023.
    
3. Fisher, Life of Benjamin Silliman, 1: 21.
    
4. Joy Day Buel and Richard Buel Jr., The Way of Duty: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America (New York: Norton, 1984), 96. Courtesy of the Yale and Slavery Research Project.
    
5. Brown, Benjamin Silliman, 33.
    
6. Buel and Buel, The Way of Duty, 209-211.
    
7. Brown, Benjamin Silliman, 33.
    
8. As quoted in Fisher, Life of Benjamin Silliman, 1: 21-22.
    
9.  Fisher, Life of Benjamin Silliman, 2: 296.
    
10. Brown, Benjamin Silliman, 88.
     
11. As quoted in Herschthal, The Science of Abolition, 132.
     
12.  Brown, Benjamin Silliman, 56, 119-20.
     
13.  See entries for December 1811 through April 1812 in ledger titled “B. Silliman in account with J. Knight” (undated) in box 1, folder 35, Yale University School of Medicine Miscellaneous Papers (MS Coll 4), Medical Historical Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine.
     
14. See Day Book A, p. 1B in Jonathan Knight, Account books of the Medical Institution of Yale College (1812-1839), Medical Historical Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine.
     
15. Letter from Benjamin Silliman to Jonathan Knight, New Haven, 1812 January 29, in box 1, folder 1, Yale University School of Medicine Miscellaneous Papers (MS Coll 4), Medical Historical Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine.
     
16. Day Book A, P. 1A in Knight, Account books, Medical Historical Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine.
     
17. See line item for these materials entered on April 4, 1812 in “B. Silliman in account with J. Knight” (undated) in box 1, folder 35, Yale University School of Medicine Miscellaneous Papers (MS Coll 4), Medical Historical Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine.
     
18. On the importance of anatomical instruction and collections at antebellum medical schools see John Harley Warner, Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), and Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
     
19. See for example “Circular,” in Catalogue of the Officers, Graduates, and Students of the Medical Institution of Yale College (New Haven: Baldwin and Treadway, 1832), 14–15; and Annual Circular of the Medical Institution of Yale College, for the Lecture Term of 1839–40 (New Haven: Woodward & Carrington, 1839), 7; Annual Circular of the Medical Institution of Yale College, for the Lecture Term of 1845–6 (New Haven: William H. Stanley, 1845), 7.
     
20. Legare’s account, which includes charges for all of his tuition and living expenses as well as the Calliopean Society membership fee, can be found on p. 10 in Vol. 3 of Silliman’s personal account books in Series IV, box 47A, folder 15, Silliman Family Papers (MS 450), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
     
21. For more on Thomas Legare and his family’s enslaving activities see Legare Family Papers, 1861-1863, MS 43/0542, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, SC.
     
22. See the details of Louisiana Supreme Court case Kempe’s heirs vs. Hunt et. al (October, 1832) in Branch W. Miller, ed., Report of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana, 4 (New Orleans: Gaston Brusle, 1833), 478.
     
23. Kempe’s account can be found on p. 146 in vol. 3 of Silliman’s personal account books in Series IV, box 47A, folder 15, Silliman Family Papers (MS 450), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
     
24. Ann Marsh Daly, “‘Every Dollar Brought from the Earth’: Money, Slavery, and Southern Gold Mining,” Journal of the Early Republic 41, no. 4 (2021): 553-585; on Virginia specifically see Fletcher M. Green, “Gold Mining in Ante-Bellum Virginia,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 45, no. 4 (Oct., 1937): 357-366.
     
25. H. Bissell, “Notice of Harris Gold Mine” (1831) in Series III, box 34B, folder 58, Silliman Family Papers (MS 450), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
     
26. Bissell, “Notice of Harris Gold Mine.”
     
27. For more on this company’s enslaving, and slavery in North Carolina gold mining more generally, see Daly, "‘Every Dollar Brought from the Earth’: Money, Slavery, and Southern Gold Mining,” and Richard F. Knapp and Brent D. Glass, Gold Mining in North Carolina: A Bicentennial History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
     
28. Bissell, “Notice of Harris Gold Mine.”
     
29. As quoted in Fisher, Life of Benjamin Silliman, 1: 378
     
30. Benjamin Silliman, “Remarks on Some of the Gold Mines, and on Parts of the Gold Region of Virginia, founded on personal observations, made in the months of August and September, 1836” in the American Journal of Science 32 (1837): 98-130. As quoted in Green, “Gold Mining in Antebellum Virginia,” 358.
     
31. Agreement concerning the sale of a gold mine to Lewis M. Hills by Benjamin Silliman Jr. (September 1, 1866) in box 49, folder 30, Silliman Family Papers (MS 450), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
     
32. Margaret W. Rossiter, “Benjamin Silliman and the Lowell Institute: The Popularization of Science in Nineteenth-Century America,” New England Quarterly 44 (1971): 602–26.
     
33. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1900; paperback, 1992), see esp. 19-29.
     
34. Kevin Adkisson, “How Science Was Built: 1701-1900,” Yale Scientific (October 2, 2010): https://www.yalescientific.org/2010/10/how-science-was-built-1701-1900/, accessed July 14, 2023.
     
35. Account books for 1806-8 can be found in Series IV, box 47, folder 13, Silliman Family Paper (MS 450), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
     
36. David W. Blight with the Yale and Slavery Research Project, Yale and Slavery: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), 121-123, 283-284.
     
37. The Silliman Family Papers (MS 450), held at Yale's Beinecke Library, contain many boxes of Yale College Laboratory business records which might hold more information on these laborers, and perhaps more connections between the laboratory and slavery.
     
38. For more on the traffic of enslaved bodies to antebellum medical schools, which included institutions in the South and the North, see Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies; and Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Values of the Enslaved from the Womb to the Grave (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017).
     
39. Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2013).