Everyone who looks up the history of Bates College, taken part in one of the admissions tours, or received brochures and/or magazines knows that there’s one narrative that Bates never lets go of: that we were founded by “abolitionists.” Such a compelling statement prevents its audience from asking questions on how authentic this history is, and what information is missing from this narrative.
Inspired by Bates Alum, Emma Soler's analyzation of the founding of Bates College in her thesis "Founded by Abolitionists, Funded by Slavery: Past and Present Manifestations of Bates College’s Founding Paradox," we understand that this narrative is not only a marketing tool to position Bates as a school that has been progressive since its founding but also a way to reduce the complexity of Bates history to this one statement.
In his piece Cotton Comes to Harvard, Craig Steven Wilder’ describes the ways in which many elite higher education institutions got their start from the cotton industry and enslaved labour. It's no surprise American colleges are omitting parts of their history to appeal to students. It also no surprise that colleges just like Bates are erasing their ties to slavery, and how their involvement in the cotton industry made the foundations of the school possible.
Our final project will use an intersectional feminist approach to dismantle the harmful narrative that Bates Colleges has institutionalized and normalized in the discourse surrounding their history. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot said "any historical narrative is a bundle of silences". Using archival data invoices between the Bates Manufacturing Mill and cotton firms detailing when and where the cotton was sold, cotton weights, interest, insurance, and commission of the transaction and the profit from this resource, we want to explore this data and see what it reveals about Bates’ financial history. Our analysis will not only complicate the simple abolitionist narrative, we have been forced to accept but also dismantle this narrative and furthermore find ways to pay homage to the individuals whose skills, labor, and livelihoods involuntarily made it possible for Bates College to exist.
For our final project, we will be analyzing how Bates College financial history distorts its one-dimensional narrative of being “founded by abolitionists” and what it implies about the archival “power” they hold as a higher education institution. How can we use archival pieces to bring forth the voices and experiences of individuals who are rendered invisible by data, specifically within the Bates Manufacturing Mill invoices?
Frameworks
Racial Capitalism
In his talk What is Racial Capitalism and Why Does It Matter Robin Kelly, a former professor of political science and black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He states that racism is fundamental to the production and reproduction of the violence that is necessary for creating and maintaining capitalism. Therefore, racial capitalism isn’t a type of capitalism, it is capitalism, and a “non-racist capitalism” does not exist. Capitalism didn’t begin with money, but rather “seizing the control of natural resources and turning it into commodities”, a fundamental settler colonial practice. The enslaved people whose skills and labor who made the founding and funding of Bates college possible is nowhere to be found in the college's archival documents. The donors of Bates college, who were white given the socio-political climate these documents are situated in (the 1800s), are the only individuals accounted for in the creation of Bates College. The invoices are a prime example of how capitalism operates as a racist regime, as the wealth of Benjamin Bates and funding of Bates College is a result of enslaved labor. The Bates Manufacturing Mill invoices are a microcosm of the ways in which the U.S. was able to create an impenetrable labor force for centuries based on the subordination and domination of black bodies which is another practice of racial capitalism.
Bates Cotton invoices is an example of settler colonialism and capitalism because it assigns value to cotton. This context proves that our economy couldn’t exist without racial capitalism, which is dependent on slavery and is indeed founded on it. So, it’s no surprise that there’s more to Bates foundation than “abolitionists.” The Bates Cotton invoices aren’t solely numbers on a page and through the abolitionist narrative that Bates has pushed for decades as a marketing and communication tool, they have inherently reduced the experiences, skill, and labor of the enslaved labour behind this data. Additionally, the abolitionist narrative obscures a significant amount of historical facts and complexity that’s interwoven into the funding of the college; the hypervisibility of this narrative since the 1960s, through the marketing tools and branding excludes the exploitation imbedded in this data.
Archival Silence
Marisa J. Fuentes’ Power and Historical Figuring: Racheal Pringle Polgreen Troubled Archive emphasizes the harm that archival silence can cause especially towards enslaved workers. Rachel Pringle Polgreen was a mixed enslaved owner who was praised because of agency in sex work industry, successful business, and the property she owned. It’s unknown in mainstream discourse that her success is a direct result of her involvement in the exploitation of enslaved black bodies. Polgreen was successful because she relied on black enslaved people and she was situated in an enslaved society that is dependent on and benefits from the commodification of black bodies. Benjamin Bates was successful and wealthy because of such conditions and as a result was able to fund the Maine State Seminary. There’s much more nuance and complexity to Polgreen’s success which many historians disregard by omitting her partake in slavery. This erasure of Polgreen's participation in slavery in modern day discourse parallels Bates College archival history, which leads into our next argument on “archival power”. Bates use of their “archival power” and lack of context around their founding reinforces a misleading narrative.
Intersectional Feminism
Looking at the archival documents in isolation wouldn’t provide its audience with an adequate amount of information to understand the qualitative data that is being presented. D’Ignazio and Klien emphasize the importance of situating knowledge in the context it was created. This means asking about the social, cultural, historical, institutional, and material conditions that the archive was created under. To better understand the Bates Manufacturing Mill, we must use an intersectional feminist approach which emphasizes connecting data to the context in which it was produced. If we don’t ask questions regarding the data, we will only understand what it is presenting at a surface level. The enslaved labor that produced the cotton, that Benjamin Bates was able to buy and manufacture, thus creating his fortune would remain unknown as their contribution and existence are obscured from the data. Racial capitalism and practices that exploit the labor and skills of black bodies can manifest through obscurity in data visualization. Furthermore, when data is left to be interpreted or analyzed without any context or understanding of the culture or environment surrounding the data, potential harm and perpetuations of system inequalities is bound to arise. In the case of the invoices we must use the feminist framework outlined by D’Ignazio and Klien who emphasize how imperative it is that readers of the data are aware of the social powers that were prevalent during the period the documents were created, and how the power imbalances lead to the silencing and exclusion of specific voices.
Design Justice Theory
We, as individuals analyzing these archival pieces & engaging in the process of reproducing this data, should use the design justice theory to heal and empower future generations from historically exploited communities. Sasha Costanza-Chock beautifully expressed how the collection, production, and storage of data has indirectly and directly perpetuated white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism, the main tenets of the matrix of domination. However, when using an intersectional feminist framework and the design justice theory individuals who sustain the matrix of domination are held accountable for their actions, data becomes more accessible to those who want to have a role in the collection, design, and implementation process, especially when it pertains to their community, and data can be used for uplift rather than exploitation.
The most important data for us to use, in understanding the exploitation of enslaved people, the profit Benjamin Bates and the Bates Manufacturing Mill Company made during the 1850s, and how the funding and founding of Bates College is rooted in racial capitalism came from the “cotton_purchases.csv” data set. This data set contained information regarding eighty-eight invoices between Bates Manufacturing Mill and firms who purchased cotton and resold them to the Bates Mill. The details include the date of the purchase and invoice, the amount of cotton bales bought, the total cost, the commission, insurance cost, and interest rate.
Part 1
Finding the Profit of the Bates Manufacturing Mill Company from 1854-1857
We first began our analysis with calculating the net profit Benjamin Bates made from 1854-57. We incorporated the economic framework outlined in The Profitability of Antebellum Manufacturing: Some New Estimates by Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway. Their study on the economies of scale in antebellum manufacturing provided us with the formula that we can assume that there was a 10% return on cotton expense that Bates would have profited from. With this assumption we used the total cost spent on cotton from the eighty-eight invoices between Benjamin Bates and cotton firms, over the course of three years to calculate his profit. We had to standardize our data first because some of the entities in total cost column had no data, so we had to remove the rows that contained N/A. After adding up the cost of cotton that the Bates Manufacturing Mill Company spent on cotton, we got $207,658.71, he made back $228,424.57 and a net profit of $20,765.87.
When calculating the total cost, the mill spent on cotton we had to use price per pound times total pounds because many of the shipments didn’t have any value for the total cost column. When we calculated the total cost using our price per pound and total pound, we got a different result compared to the total cost column. The discrepancies are a result of the total cost column consisting of the tables that didn’t have any quantity in them which resulted in a skewed answer.
To put these numbers into perspective we used an inflation calculator to see what those numbers would amount to in the present day. The mill spent $6,358,732.26 on cotton, they made back $6,994,629.07, and Bates made a profit of $635,875.37. We thought it would be interesting to see the present day equivalent of the spending and profit from cotton, to give the audience a better understanding of, not only, the hefty sum of money Bates invested into the cotton industry but also the amount of money he got in return and thus was able to accumulate his wealth. Using an intersectional feminist framework which emphasizes the concept of situating data in the socio-political, cultural, and environmental conditions it was created in, we wanted to go further in our analyzation of how wealthy Bates was by quantifying how invested he was in the slave economy (over the course of three years).
Part 2
The Amount of Stolen Days from the Enslaved Workers
For the seconds part of our analysis we focused on the enslaved workers, who are omitted from the invoices. Our objective was to represent the enslaved labor, experiences and skills of the people who involuntarily made it possible for Benjamin Bates to accumulate his wealth, furthermore, donate substantial amounts of money for the founding of Bates College.
Using the same data set, “cotton_purchases.csv” we standardized the total pounds column by taking out “NAs” (which meant there was no documented quantity). We applied the conditions of a plantation in Westchester, N.Y as described by Ed Baptist in The Half had Never Been Told, who articulates the increase in cotton production during the 1850s, to the conditions of the plantations the firms purchased cotton from in the invoices. On the Westchester plantation an enslaved worker picked 1.5 bales in 1849, and by the end of the decade an enslaved worker picked five bales of cotton. The increase in the number of bales of cotton produced per enslaved worker was 30 % between 1850 and 1860 in that region. Assuming this increase in exploitation happened nationwide, we then used Baptists formula to calculate the average amount of stolen days from enslaved workers, which is the total pounds of cotton divided by 150. Our findings produced, between 1854 & 1857, amounted to 12,483 days or 34 years stolen from all the enslaved people who picked the cotton on these invoices. We then found the average of the stolen days, which resulted in sixty stolen days per enslaver worker in between 1854 and 1857. Assuming the increased rate of cotton (30%) was maintained from the beginning to the end of the 1860s, the total amount of stolen days per enslaver worker nearly tripled to two hundred stolen days (.5479 years) in 1864 to 1867.
Part III
The Connection Between Benjamin Bates Donations to Bates College and the Stolen Days of Enslaved Workers
For the final part of our analysis we wanted to illustrate the relationship between the profits Benjamin Bates was making, the stolen days of enslaved labor, and the total donation Benjamin Bates made to the college. To be more specific we wanted to know how many years Benjamin Bates would have to work, to continue to make the same net profit he made in 1854 to afford his grand donation to Bates College. Furthermore, how many years of stolen labor would amount to afford this donation.
We continued using the “cotton_purchases.csv” data frame for our final analysis. We subset our data set into the year of 1854 and calculated the profit for just that year. To standardize the data, we had to remove the NAs in this column. Then, we 200,000 by how much total profit he made in that year alone. If 1854 is a typical year, Bates had to be working for thirteen and a half years to make the $200,000 he made to the college. We calculated how long he would have been working for if 1856 was a typical year, however there's barely any data for that year, so when you sum that up and divide it by 200,000, it's a huge and inaccurate number (33 years), so we decided to omit it. With this information We calculated how many lives in total were stolen over the 13 years Benjamin Bates was working. We used the subset data frame of just data from 1854 and created a vector of the stolen days from just 1854 and removed the NAs. If 1854 is typically how many days are exploited every year (8,146 days), the median amount of days stolen per enslaved worker is 49 and the mean amount of days per enslaved worker is 125 (it's a big number because of the outliers). I multiplied the sum by 13 and in total ~109,639 days (300 years) are stolen and exploited from these people's lives.
Further exploring the relationship between the cumulative amount of profit and stolen labor over time, we were able to create a new column that converts year, month, and day into something readable by R and sorted the dates in order. We then wrote a for loop that calculates the total cumulative profit (for that invoice). We then plotted the cumulative profit over time, and we see that his profit increases over time. We also plotted stolen labor over time and while the graph we plotted above shows a positive correlation between stolen labor and profit, there doesn’t look like there’s a positive correlation between the two (even though the regression line is increasing), so we decided to omit this graph. The line graph for stolen labor over time didn’t present any clear relationship so we decided to omit that graph as well. (Refer to the figures below)
Although Cheyney's intention was to build a school rooted in abolitionism, our findings reveal that his intentions did not manifest the way he had planned? During a time where slavery was not only the U.S. economy but the standard for funding institutions, it only makes sense that the origins of Bates College is implicated in slavery. Cheney was only an “abolitionist” by name. He accepted Benjamin Bates donations, which goes against his values. As Kelly explained in “What is Racial Capitalism and Why Does It Matter,” it's no surprise that Benjamin Bates relied heavily on enslaved labor and that it was a huge source of funding for the Maine State Seminary, as capitalism is a racialized system.
While members of the Bates administration is aware of this information, to varying extents, the decision to omit this history & replace it with an inadequate narrative further erases the necessary complexities of Bates founding and history; it deflects the college from responsibility and uncomfortability. Similar to the argument made in Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History and Fuentes’ Power and Historical Figuring: Pringle Polgreen’s Troubled Archive, Bates has power, and their archival power gives them control over the discourse that is carried out about the founding of the school. It allows their abolitionist narrative, and contributions of white donors to be visible and survive while silencing the lives of enslaved workers to be rendered invisible. But that is why we wrote this piece. We want Bates history to demonstrate and represent all narratives, not just specific ones. Bates needs to present a genuine version of their founding by including and giving credit to the enslaved workers who involuntarily gave up their skill, labour, and livelihood that provided the funding for the school. Knowing the source of Bates funding reshapes and adds more nuance to the way students, especially prospective students, thinks about Bates idealistic foundation. In addition to erasing the narratives of enslaved workers, the Bates Cotton Invoices, reduces their lives and labor to just numbers, which we were able to bring to light.
This project acknowledges the interconnection of power and data. Using the tenants of the design justice theory we strive to redistribute the power so that individuals that are not a part of the dominant class are no longer rendered invisible. We hope this project inspires people from historically vulnerable communities to engage in the collection, production, visualization, storage, and distribution of data so that they can be in control of information that pertains to their communities and dismantle hegemonic practices in data culture.
Works Cited
Baptist, E. E. (2014). The Half Has Never Been Told. New York: Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.
Costanza-Chock, S. (2018). Design Justice: Towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice. Proceedings of the Design Research Society 2018, 1-14. doi:10.21606/drs.2018.679
D'Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. (2020). Introduction: Why Data Science Needs Feminism. Data Feminism. doi:10.7551/mitpress/11805.003.0002
Fuentes, M. J. (2010). Power and Historical Figuring: Rachael Pringle Polgreen’s Troubled Archive. Gender & History, 22(03), 564-584. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0424.2010.01616.x
Kelly, R. D. (2017, November 7). What is Racial Capitalism and Why Does it Matter? Retrieved October 16, 2020, from http://scholarsforsocialjustice.com/what-is-racial-capitalism-and-why-does-it-matter/
Trouillot, M. (1995). Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Vedder, R. K., & Gallaway, L. E. (1980). The Profitability of Antebellum Manufacturing: Some New Estimates. The Profitability of Antebellum Manufacturing: Some New Estimates, 54(1), 92-103. doi:10.2307/3114278
Wilder, C. S. (2013). Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
"History reveals itself only through the production of specific narratives. What matters most is the process and conditions of such narratives...only through that overlap can we discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others." ーMichel-Rolph Trouillot
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Credits:
Created with images by S O C I A L . C U T - "untitled image" • Neel - "untitled image" • Markus Spiske - "Made with Canon 5d Mark III and loved analog lens, Leica APO Macro Elmarit-R 2.8 / 100mm (Year: 1993)"