University of Maryland publishes first report on school’s connections to slavery

The University of Maryland, College Park this month published its first research report on the institution’s connections to slavery, detailing how founder Charles B. Calvert was a descendant of enslavers and owned at least 55 slaves who worked on his Riverside plantation, land that makes up part of UMD’s campus.

As part of an international consortium called Universities Studying Slavery, UMD launched The 1856 Project last year, named for the founding year of the university, then called the Maryland Agricultural College. Along with Calvert, who was a descendant of Lord Baltimore George Calvert, several of the college’s 600 initial financers were slaveholders or had ties to the slave economy.

“That was not part of the base knowledge of folks who were coming in as students at the institution or who were working here as faculty and staff,” said Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, co-chair of The 1856 Project and an associate director of engagement, inclusion and reparative archiving.

A group of student researchers, university archivists and community historians contributed to the project’s first report. One goal of the project is to repair relationships with the surrounding community, connect with descendants of local enslaved people and reckon with the university’s legacy.

The Maryland Agricultural College was created to teach farmers new farm management and technology practices, according to the university. The school was established on the Piscataway tribe’s ancestral land, purchased from a slaveholding farmer who was an advocate for agricultural education.

Among the first shareholders of the university were tobacco farmers and plantation owners who relied on slave labor. William Tilghman Goldsborough and Alexander Keech, two of the earliest members of the university’s Board of Trustees, enslaved 55 and 20 people, respectively. Keech, a teacher, owned land that would become Lakeland, a historically Black community in Prince George’s County, that borders College Park.

Dr. William Mercer, one of the largest investors and an honorary trustee, invested $5,000, the equivalent of more than $150,000 in 2023, according to the report. Mercer, of Cecil County, was a surgeon who owned four plantations in Louisiana and enslaved at least 140 people.

Although the college’s first president, Benjamin Hallowell, accepted the role under the condition that no slaves were used at the college, successive presidents were either high-ranking Confederate officers or expressed sympathy to the Confederates, according to the research report. That included Calvert, who wrote to Abraham Lincoln twice in 1861, five years after founding the college. He asked Lincoln to confine slaves who were given refuge in military camps so their owners could retrieve them, according to letters that were stored at the Library of Congress.

“His avid support for the preservation of slavery lends itself to understanding how the MAC was a safe harbor for anti-Black rhetoric and ideals, as well as a beacon for Confederate empathizers and leadership within the Confederacy,” researchers wrote in the report.

Other Maryland universities are reckoning with their ties to slavery. Loyola University Maryland, which is part of the Universities Studying Slavery, last month published a report on how the Catholic Jesuit school in Baltimore benefited from the slave trade. The Johns Hopkins University changed the name of an English professorship named after the wife of one of Maryland’s prominent slave owners. Hopkins’ revelation in 2020 that its Quaker founder and namesake was an enslaver shattered a near-century-old myth.

Researchers’ examination of the legacy of UMD, which was formerly segregated, comes at a time when other chapters of Universities Studying Slavery are struggling to gain support for their research amid political attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion programming.

Hughes-Watkins said that his research colleagues in states that are more against DEI might be losing support for their work investigating the history of slavery at their institutions.

“Some folks are literally terrified to continue to advocate for this work,” Hughes-Watkins said. “For the University of Maryland to draw a line in the sand to say this work is critical … it lends itself to us as far as our model of fearless leadership.”

The report also details that in the 1840s and 1850s, the land that became the campus was used by Black freedom-seekers as an Underground Railroad route. A turnpike used to connect Baltimore and Washington became less traveled with the creation of the B&O Railroad in 1830, allowing for runaways to traverse the roads and forested land.

The oldest building on UMD’s campus, a tavern called the Rossborough Inn, employed enslaved staff who likely gave directions and provisions to freedom-seekers, according to the report.

The 1856 Project plans to publish three more annual research reports with a focus on the stories of those who were enslaved. The team also intends to publish a book on their findings in the future. In addition, UMD is hosting a conference for the chapters of Universities Studying Slavery in 2026.

“This project helps us center ourselves in finding humanity in all of us and in all of our histories,” Hughes-Watkins said.