Elihu Yale

Yale University Benefactor

If you picture Elihu Yale, after whom the university was named, as an intellectual, or academic, or devotee of higher learning, or even as the founder of Yale, you’re wrong.

Yale the person never laid eyes on Yale the institution. Born in Boston in 1649 to English-Welsh parents, he was whisked to Merrie Olde England when he was a tiny tyke and never came back. Which is not to say he never traveled. For much of his adult life he lived in exotic Madras, India—today’s Chennai—where he worked for the British East India Company. He was appointed president of Madras and governor of Fort St. George. He had a wife, at least two mistresses, a vigorous entrepreneurial spirit, and few moral constraints. To supplement his salary he used company funds to buy land for himself, imposed high taxes on the natives, and made a fortune in the illicit diamond trade.

But why stop there? For generations Madras had been the hub of a vast slave trade linking Africa and Southeast Asia. Yale asked himself why he shouldn’t get in on the action, and was unable to find a reason. So he and his colleagues—who, after all, ran the place—made a rule that no outgoing ship could leave port unless it was carrying at least ten slaves. Perhaps it was a matter of efficiency: with ten slaves you could sail in the maritime equivalent of the carpool lane. Or perhaps it was for other reasons. In any case, in a single month in 1687 more than 660 slaves were sent to the British colony on the island of St. Helena in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

It took almost three decades, but at a certain point the British East India Company had finally had it with Yale’s shady/horrible practices. He was removed as governor, and in 1699 he returned to England, wealthy, respected, and famous—so famous, in fact, that his reputation (as a brilliant merchant, not a slaver or criminal) reached the pious Christian ears of Cotton Mather on the other side of the wide, wide Atlantic.

Mather, helping to launch Collegiate School in New Haven, wrote to Yale with a request for funding and a hint that, with a big enough gift, the donor’s name might be slapped on something and thus immortalized. Yale went for it in a modest way, shipping nine bales of random stuff, 417 books, and a portrait of King George I. It doesn’t sound like much to us—we give away portraits of George I in junk mail today—but back then the merch fetched around £800. The haul was enough to erect a single building. And lo, Yale College—that is, a building called “Yale College” that was to be part of a larger academic institution—was born. The name was later expanded to encompass the entire nascent institution, allegedly because the name of the person who was actually hands-on responsible for making it happen was Jeremiah Dummer, and the trustees would not countenance having their precious school go through life as Dummer College.*

Elihu Yale, no doubt flattered, attempted to leave the school a fat sum in his will. But it was not to be. After Yale died, Catherine, his wife, still… let’s say miffed about one or more of his affairs, took time off from her busy schedule of mourning and brought her case to the House of Lords. It worked! Boola boola! Fight fight fight! Bow wow wow! Eli’s will was voided and the fortune stayed with her.

For years a portrait of the school’s eponym, flanked by a dark-skinned servant wearing a metal slave collar, adorned a wall in Yale’s Woodbridge Hall. Students complained, as students will do, and finally, in 2007, the administration deep-sixed the painting, stating officially that although Elihu Yale never personally owned slaves, they were relegating the thing to a storage room to avoid “confusion.”*