Higher Education on the Texas Blackland Prairie: Trinity University’s Civil War Era

• Published in: The Journal of southern history 2024-08, Vol.90 (3), p.503-538
• Main Author: Kaufman, Sarah Beth
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 19th century; American Civil War; Black people; Children; Civil War, 1861-1865; College students; Colleges & universities; Colonialism; Education, Higher; Higher education; Historiography; History; Military aspects; Race; Slavery; Students; United States history; War
• ISSN: 0022-4642; 2325-6893; 2325-6893
• DOI: 10.1353/soh.2024.a932553

Scholars argue that Civil War-era racial capital deserves more attention.2 The story of Trinity University's founding illuminates one aspect of this era: how higher education funneled wealth gained from enslavement before the Civil War to Protestant Anglo children after slavery's abolition. Today, Trinity University is a small private school in San Antonio, Texas. The story of their success-previously chronicled as a triumph of pious men-is also embedded in the failure of southern Reconstruction to create meaningful opportunities for those freed from enslavement.6 In a process sociologists call "opportunity hoarding," the founders consolidated scarce resources for use by their own scmicloscd networks.7 They founded an all-white, private university with wealth gained from enslavement while simultaneously undermining attempts to establish an educational system for Black children, an illustration of the inextricable entwinement of racialization and capital accumulation-or racial capitalism-developing in the early modern United States.8 Trinity University remained closed to Black students until after Brown v. Board of Education (1954).9 But its first generation of all-white graduates were positioned to profit from the emerging "military-cotton complex" that swept nineteenth-century Texas, helping sustain the severe economic and racial hierarchies of the region into the twentieth century.10 As such, Trinity's history connects the field of universities studying slavery into the era of Reconstruction and beyond. [...]the essay details the university's struggle for survival during its first years after the Civil War, as its founders worked to amass wealth for the benefit of white students while resisting equality for Black Texans.