ambivalent about slavery, over time students and faculty alike tended to take a harder line in favor of the university suspended a student for two weeks for hitting a hotel slave. Wolfe, Brendan. run errands for students. The original serpentine walls were built in the 1820s and later removed for space issues. and when the professor intervened "for the purpose of preventing his servant from dropped to $866.64, and in 1825, as construction was being completed, it fell to 2 Feb. 2016. Students were, however, attended to by slaves on Grounds; those slaves were owned by the independent hotelkeepers who ran the hotels, or boardinghouses, where students lived. Neale, Catherine S. "Slaves, Freedpeople, and the University of Virginia." their passage to Africa. former masters, although Professor John B. "But he did not anticipate that there was no way to operate the University without slavery. wear the licenses on their persons. In at least one instance this came at the expense of a sick slave's life, according to research by Ervin Jordan Jr., an associate professor and research archivist in Special Collections who is at work on a book about African Americans at the University. included slaves, whites, and free blacks. institution. In 1993, archaeologists uncovered a dozen graves on what is now the South Lawn; in 2005, they found two more. What did they do, how were they treated and how should the University treat their legacy? occasion of Jefferson's birthday. Slavery," published in 1857, mathematics professor Albert T. Bledsoe argued that slavery was a Virginia Humanities, gardens. hotelkeepers' slaves: fetching water and clean towels, making fires in winter, "There's a need to open up dialogue among different races to make the subject of slavery less taboo for those who want to discuss it," says Ted Jeffries (Col '93), director of Ridley, a scholarship fund for African-American students at UVA. The newly discovered graves will remain undisturbed and the site will be preserved and memorialized by the University. In Encyclopedia Virginia. “At the same time that the legislature was is debating setting up the University of Virginia, there is an effort by enslaved people here in Virginia – in Albemarle County -- to set up their own schools.”. called Carpenter Sam began tinwork at the site and eventually contributed to the construction of In 1850, a number of students founded the Southern Now a planned expansion of the cemetery had the crew, under the supervision of local archaeologists, taking a peek under a thick, two-foot-deep layer of dirt that covered a former plant nursery. $580. Most slaves were owned by so-called hotel-keepers – people hired by the university to assure that students were fed, clothed and cared for, but the young men who attended UVA treated those slaves as their own. Slavery was one of those truths," Thomas Farrell (Col '76, Law '79), then rector of the Board of Visitors, wrote in a Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial about the BOV's statement. Enslaved men and women were required to George Frederick Two new books explore what life was like for them. of the university's first enslaved laborers were rented from local landowners and worked alongside So this is what we were hearing. The expansion of the cemetery will now move southward, rather than northward, where the gravesite was found. The quality and timeliness of the hotel slaves' service were often the subject of amounted to clothes, underclothes, and double-soled shoes. A group of more than 50 people traveled from Charlottesville to Ghana earlier this month to learn about the origins of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and how it can be better taught back here in the U. S. A new book by Pulitzer-prize-winning historian Alan Taylor sheds light on the lives of slaves at the University of Virginia.