Race, Slavery, & the Founders of Yale Law School - A Rare Book Exhibit

Race, Slavery, & the Founders of Yale Law School

An exhibition curated by Kathryn James and Fred Shapiro in Fall 2022
On view this October 16, 2024 - January 12, 2025

In 1824, the Yale College catalogue included the names of some of the students of the private law academy established in New Haven by Seth Perkins Staples, B.A. 1797, and later overseen by Samuel J. Hitchcock, B.A. 1809, and David Daggett, B.A. 1783. This moment marks one of the earliest associations of the New Haven law school with Yale College, a relationship that was later formalized by the establishment of Yale Law School.

What was the role of slavery in the lives, work, and law instruction of the founders of Yale Law School? This exhibition represents only one of many possible responses as a contribution to a much broader discussion of this question. It takes as its point of entry the founders’ involvement in two of the formative law cases relating to slavery and abolition in antebellum America: in 1833, the trial of Prudence Crandall for admitting young Black girls as students into her Connecticut school; and in 1839 to 41, the trial of the West African men and children, victims of an illegal slave trade, who had seized control of their transport ship, the Spanish L’Amistad.

These two cases were situated within the New Haven and New England law communities and against a broader national context. The same decade that saw the Prudence Crandall and Amistad cases also brought the fierce opposition by Daggett, Hitchcock, and other white New Haven leaders to the establishment of a “Negro college” there. In 1833, the “Black Law” prohibited the teaching of any Black student not resident in a Connecticut town without the town’s permission. Decades later, in 1857, Daggett’s ruling in the Prudence Crandall case would be prominently cited as a precedent in the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision.

In following the work of Staples, Hitchcock, and Daggett over the course of this decade, the exhibition makes visible the ways in which white abolitionist and pro-slavery advocates worked with and alongside each other within a law community and within a world informed by racism and white supremacy. Drawing on original documents and contemporary publications, the exhibition traces the work of Seth Perkins Staples, Samuel J. Hitchcock, and David Daggett and their long influence on American law through the twentieth century.