Bennet Puryear, Enslavement & Race

Bennet Puryear (1826-1914), a faculty member at Richmond College (1848-1858 and 1866-1895) and longtime chairman of the faculty (a role akin to president in which he served from 1869 to 1885 and 1888 to 1895), was also an enslaver and exploiter of enslaved individuals through the “slave hire” system. Following the Civil War and while the leader of Richmond College, he gained wider public stature through his published views on matters of race, which focused on denying Black children access to public education, thwarting Black men's access to the ballot, and advancing claims of white superiority. 

Enslavement

Childhood and Early Adulthood

Raised in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, Bennet Puryear described himself as having been “born and bred on a plantation of negroes.”¹ His father, Thomas Carlton Puryear (1775-1838), was part of an influential slaveholding and slave-dealing family whose properties spanned southern Virginia and northern North Carolina and extended to large forced labor agricultural operations in Alabama. In 1830, when Puryear was four, his father enslaved at least 24 adults and children.² Following Thomas C. Puryear’s death in 1838, his estate was managed by his widow, Elizabeth Goode Marshall Puryear (1790-c.1852), and adult son, William M. Puryear (c.1810-unknown). Elizabeth Puryear continued to raise her younger children on the family’s 739-acre property on Allen’s Creek in Mecklenburg.³ When Bennet Puryear was 14, his mother enslaved 20 adults and children.⁴ 

Richmond College Campus

Puryear joined the Richmond College faculty in 1849 and resided on campus in the Columbia mansion occupied by Richmond College President Robert Ryland (1805-1899) and the Ryland family. Between 1849 and 1858, Puryear and other members of the institution’s faculty were served by enslaved laborers whom the college had leased from their enslavers through “slave hire” agreements.⁵ In December 1856, the board allocated $25.00 for the “hire of a servant to attend to Prof. Puryear’s room and assist him in preparing lectures.”⁶ 

Panorama, Ben, and Klebber

The names of three enslaved persons who apparently served Puryear are recorded in his personal accounts. He noted small amounts of cash given to “servants” and “negroes.” Payments are recoded for Panorama (or Panoramia), Ben, and a man or boy named “Klebber,” whose name has been recorded in other sources as “Cleber” and “Clebbo.”⁷ The payments may correspond to the board’s requirement that faculty pay personally for the “attendance” of servants, or to work performed by enslaved individuals outside the institution who took on extra labor for small cash payments. 

Godfrey

While a professor at Richmond College and in residence on the campus, Puryear inherited an enslaved man named Godfrey through his father’s estate. At Thomas C. Puryear’s death in 1838, those he enslaved were to be divided between his heirs. Puryear’s mother, Elizabeth, and brother William delayed the distribution for fourteen years, citing their reluctance to separate families and to remove laboring men from the family farm.⁸ In October 1852, Elizabeth and William Puryear were sued by the remaining heirs, including Bennet Puryear, who sought the enslaved individuals due to them, with the agreement that mothers with infant children not be separated from one another. 

No record of Puryear being taxed on enslaved people has been located for the years immediately after he acquired Godfrey, suggesting Puryear may have sold or leased him out as part of the “slave hire” system.⁹ Of those once held by Puryear, Godfrey’s is the only name that has been located.

Government Records

Additional evidence of Puryear’s enslavement of individuals appears in property tax assessments, federal census data, and records of enslaved men impressed into labor for the Confederacy. 

Confederate Impressment

Enslaved individuals had been pressed into service for the Confederate military prior to 1862. To provide the enormous workforce needed for construction and ongoing operations, however, Virginia legislation established an “efficient system of collecting and delivering slaves to Richmond,” and thousands of enslaved men were forced to construct the fortifications around the city.¹⁴ Counties were provided with a minimum number of enslaved men to be turned over to the government from their locality. Mecklenburg officials compiled lists of men between the ages of 18 and 55 enslaved by residents, including Puryear. Each enslaver was told the number of men he or she must provide for the government’s use and received compensation for those impressed.  

Writings on Race & Racial Exclusion

1875-1881: At Richmond College

1875-1876: “Civis” on Public Education

Puryear’s “Civis” Essays: The Religious Herald

In spring 1875, while leading Richmond College as chairman of the faculty, Puryear published a series of essays in the Religious Herald under the pseudonym “Civis,” detailing his opposition to public education. The Religious Herald was a prominent Baptist newspaper edited by Richmond College trustee Jeremiah Bell Jeter (1802-1880). By May 1876, Civis was widely known to be Puryear, with a San Francisco newspaper referring to him as one of the “learned men” committed to “relegat[ing] the colored race to a condition of menial servitude.”¹⁷ Three months later, Puryear published a rebuke of William H. Ruffner (1824-1908), Virginia’s Superintendent of Public Education (who had criticized him by name in a Richmond newspaper), and openly acknowledged the writings as his own.¹⁸

The Virginia public school system was in its infancy, and at the center of competing views about the state’s debt.  “Funders” argued the state’s primary priority should be paying off its full pre-Civil War debts to bondholders (bonds had funded over 40 years of the state’s infrastructure projects). The debt had ballooned as payments were halted during the Civil War. “Readjusters” sought to refinance the debt to keep schools open, aiming to reduce the interest rate and challenge the principal amount owed.¹⁹ Puryear was fully in the Funder camp, and in essays (and responses to subsequent letters of opposition), argued that public education eroded what he viewed as the natural social order and that those with wealth should not be forced to support the education of children whose families did not pay taxes:

• “I indignantly protest against the compulsory payment of a single cent for the education of the children of worthless vagabonds, who are quartered by law upon my labor for support.”
• A “tax bill that takes my money to educate another man’s children is a wanton and wicked aggression upon my rights, and is disastrous to all parties, and to the State at large.”
• Children, “by God’s appointment,” inherit the “physical, moral, and intellectual characteristics of their parents; and when the parentage is bad, the offspring is bad, both from inherited proclivities and defective or vicious training.”²⁰

Puryear felt that the education of certain classes of individuals was “in most cases impossible; in some, undesirable.” These include physical laborers—“scavengers, boot blacks, coal heavers, hod-carriers [who carried bricks and other material for masons], plough-men, ditchers, field hands, cooks, chamber maids, and in general, the mere operatives in our manufacturing establishments, &c, &c, &c.”²¹ In many instances, those holding these jobs were Black. 

Excerpts and full reprints of Puryear’s writings, and praise and criticism of them, appeared in newspapers in Virginia, other parts of the South, and the Midwest.²² The Religious Herald kept attention focused on Puryear’s contributions by publishing five lengthy responses from Barnas Sears (1802-1880), the former president of Brown University; former Richmond College trustee; and, at the time, General Agent of the Peabody Fund, which promoted education in the South.²³ Puryear (as Civis) published two “Rejoinders” to Sears.²⁴ William Henry Ruffner (1824-1908), the first superintendent of Virginia’s public school system, accused the Herald of refusing to publish his critique of Puryear’s Civis essays.²⁵ Among the many praising the Civis writings was Robert Ryland (though at the time he did not appear to know the writer’s identity). Ryland compared the “Public School” essays to the letters of the 18^th-century British polemicist Junius, praising Civis’s “excellent” style which gave him “advantage in the argument.”²⁶ 

“The Public School in its Relations to the Negro” 

Between December 1875 and May 1876, again writing as Civis, Puryear took his views on the public schools to the pages of the Southern Planter & Farmer, a monthly journal widely circulated in the South and often reprinted or excerpted in newspapers across the nation.²⁷ Puryear referred to his Religious Herald essays and more narrowly focused the new series, titled “The Public School in its Relations to the Negro.” The four essays were later combined and published as a pamphlet in 1877. Representative excerpts depicting the racist views Puryear advanced in the essays are below.

No. 1 (December 1875)

Puryear wrote that he was drawing on his upbringing on “a plantation of negroes” and his lifelong observation of “the peculiar qualities of the race” for his primary argument that Black adults and children were best suited for “menial offices and subordinate positions” rather than “higher walks of life, and particularly for the great functions of citizenship,” such as voting and elected office. He believed three qualities were common to Black people: “extreme docility,” “improvidence of the future,” and “remarkable sweating capacity,” the latter conducive to manual labor in hot climates but not for railway cars, jury boxes, or “the halls of legislation.”²⁸ 

He described himself as “the owner of slaves until robbed of my property under the forms of law”²⁹ (i.e., Emancipation and the 13^th Amendment) and offered a two-part justification for enslavement (which he referred to as “250 years of labor”) that would have been familiar to many readers: 

• Enslavement “brought absolute savages into contact with civilization and taught them to be skillful laborers in agriculture, in household duties, and to some extent, in the mechanic arts”; 
• Enslaved Black people were provided triple the necessary “compensation for service”: they were clothed; fed (he noted that infants and the elderly who could not labor received clothes and food as well); and they received “tuition” (i.e., education) in a “School of Association” (i.e., their exposure to white people through enslavement) that raised the race to a higher plane of life than it has ever reached in any other age or any other quarter of the globe.”³⁰ 

Puryear argued that Black political representation reverses “the car of progress” and “civilization,” which “withers and dies before the hot breath of these black barbarians.” Puryear wrote that men “familiar with the facts and competent to form a sound opinion” were convinced of Black inferiority and unsuitability for voting responsibilities: Black people were of “an inferior type of the human family, a lower grade of organization” and therefore a “dangerous . . . tool in the contest of politics.”³¹

No. 2 (January 1876)

In his second entry in the series, Puryear published racist and pseudoscientific “observations” of Black people and fears of their rising from a subordinate role:

• “Inferiority” was “stamped plainly and indelibly on the negro alike in his intellectual, moral and physical being”; 
• In creating the races, God was committed to “inequality, not equality.” Invoking both the Bible and the “mud-sill” formulation articulated by United States Senator James Henry Hammond (1807-1864) that a lower class must exist to support a higher class, Puryear wrote that some “are and must be mudsills . . . ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water.’”
• If educated, Black people would resist labor: “The cook, that must read the daily paper, will spoil your beef and your bread; the sable pickaninny, that has to do his grammar and arithmetic, will leave your boots unblacked and your horse uncurried.”³²
• In the meeting of “an inferior and superior race,” one of three things will happen: the disappearance of the “inferior,” racial mixing, or the dominance of the “superior” race. He advocated the third.³³ 

No. 3 (February 1876)

The third essay focused further on what he viewed as the unsuitability of education for Black people:

• Puryear wrote that public schools, and the idea of equal access to education, rested on the “assertion, in its most dangerous form, of the hideous doctrine of negro equality.”³⁶ 
• Formal education was “cruelty in the extreme to the negro himself,” allowing him to believe in his right to participate “in the higher walks of life” while despising “those menial pursuits to which his race has been doomed.” This brought him into unequal competition with white men, and “in such a competition the negro inevitably goes down.”³⁷
• Education of Black children would result in white industrialists’ loss of labor. He recalled the enslavement era as a time that the wealth gathered “from our fertile soil” was more “than was ever acquired by similar means since the dawn of authentic history,” with enslaved labor the means for these “grand results” while the “superior skill” of others fashioned the “crude products of their labor” into “infinite forms of comfort . . . elegance . . . and luxury.”³⁸
• Enslaved people were “comfortable and happy to an extent never realized before by any other laboring class”; Black people raised since the end of enslavement were “sadly unreliable,” the consequence of “thrusting of the negro into politics.”³⁹ 

No. 4 (May 1876)

Puryear’s last essay in the “Public School in its Relations to the Negro” series continued his objection to ”negro education” and tied it to his approach to Black suffrage. He argued that any evidence of Black educational success was faulty since, he claimed, Black children only attended school for free food and to avoid labor, and were then “coaxed and petted into the acquisition of the rudiments of learning.” Because such evidence—reflecting only “imitative processes of education”—was being used by “special friends” of Black people (those committed to some measure of equality) to justify Black suffrage, equal access to the ballot was fundamentally “absurd.” Puryear believed Black people to be incapable of “the intelligent discharge of the duties of citizenship” and was “unwilling to expend vast sums of money . . . on a silly attempt to accomplish an impossibility.” Southerners who “deny the revolting doctrine” of equality should not be “heavily taxed to prove it true.” In his view, the only way to demonstrate a readiness for suffrage was through Black achievement without publicly funded education or immediate access to the vote: “Let the negro, in his own way, without help or hinderance from any quarter, make good his claim that he may safely be invested with the rights of citizenship.” He was convinced that racial differences would doom the experiment to failure just as, without fertilizer, a “barren field . . . lapses at once into its original infertility.”

Puryear advocated poll taxes and property ownership requirements to prevent the poor from participating in elections, arguing that “condition,” specifically wealth, “defines and determines our rights” and that any who oppose curtailing the right to vote for Black people and the poor would “almost wholly be from that class who are so low they do not even hope to rise.”⁴⁰  

Puryear’s series was again excerpted in numerous publications,⁴¹ and over a short period, “The Public School in its Relations to the Negro” resulted in his becoming “one of the most widely known men of the whole South.”⁴²

1878: “Letters From ‘Civis,’” Religious Herald

In 1878, Puryear, writing as Civis, published in the Religious Herald a new series on the state debt. He continued to argue for property rights and related privileges (“Property is the very basis of civilization”) and against taxation (“Taxes, beyond the amount necessary for the economic administration of government, is simple robbery” that “debauches morals and checks and cripples material development”).⁴³ He also opposed state funding for public colleges and universities in Virginia.⁴⁴ Weaving the language of “The Public School in its Relations to the Negro” into the series, he extended earlier points: 

• “The elevation to citizenship of our servile population, as unfit for its duties as the teams they drove afield, was a CRIME AGAINST LIBERTY AND LINEAGE, against order and civilization . . . . Lofty traditions . . . were abandoned to embrace, with shuddering horror, a filthy companionship.”
• White people are “burdened” by the presence of Black people, who, exposed to the “slime and filth of universal suffrage” struggle “to rise above the fetid atmosphere that surrounds them.”⁴⁵
• The poll tax would “purify suffrage,” prohibiting the large majority of Black men from voting.⁴⁶
• Because Virginia’s debt was not paid, the state could not justify offering “to every boy within her limits, whether rich or poor, and without distinction of race, color, or previous condition, free tuition from the alphabet up to and through the University!”⁴⁷

In the sixth entry in the series of essays, he called for the use of whipping, rather than incarceration, as punishment for lower-level crimes of “laborers.” At that time, white criminals were rarely whipped in Virginia, and his readers would likely have understood “laborers” largely to refer to Black people. He viewed state prisons, which he referred to as “State Hotels,” as financial drains offering “Warmth and idleness, peace and plenty” to prisoners “soothed by the gentle lullaby of the James!”⁴⁸ According to census statistics published two years later, 1,195 of Virginia’s 1,543 prisoners were Black.⁴⁹ Puryear insisted that Virginia could have reduced its prison population by “at least three-fourths” if immediate physical punishment were used:

Tie him to a post, let the lashes come fast and furious, until he squirms and howls and begs, let him become supple, submissive, humble, and he will care less about his dignity, and more about his conduct. Such a punishment would be well suited to at least three-fourths of those who are shut up in corrupting idleness in our jails and penitentiary.⁵⁰

Reprints and excerpts of Puryear’s Religious Herald contributions again appeared in other newspapers,⁵¹ and Richmond College students praised the “able letters of Civis,” saying no one could share knowledge “more forcibly and elegantly” than he.⁵² Student editors of the campus literary magazine, Monthly Musings, cited Puryear (in relation to his Civis writings) as among the Richmond College faculty who “keep more alive with the times and teach more in keeping with the practical demands of the day” than professors at other institutions.⁵³

Following the publication of his “Letters From Civis,” Puryear was awarded honorary degrees from two Baptist institutions in the South: Howard College (Alabama)⁵⁴ and Georgetown College (Kentucky).⁵⁵ Richmond College students wrote: “Our honored Professor of Chemistry, Prof. Puryear, has received the title of L.L.D. from Georgetown College, Kentucky. We are extremely glad that ‘Civis’’ worth is recognized in our sister States as well as in the Old Dominion.”⁵⁶ Later, student debaters adopted Puryear’s work to advance an anti-public school resolution.⁵⁷

1881: “Views of Prof. B. Puryear,” Philadelphia American 

In 1881, Puryear was among the prominent southerners selected to provide opinions on relations between the North and South for the Philadelphia American. His contribution took the form of a list of grievances, including the enforcement of “negro equality.” He described formerly enslaved people as “semi-barbarians inflamed with wrath and hatred” who had been handed the reins of government. Despite Black southerners having been “frequently galvanized by inflammatory rhetoric into spasmodic courage,” he argued that the Black man was retreating from a brief period of believing in his equality, realizing, “after a few years of convulsive struggle, that political rule was not his role, and that his only security was to be found in his natural place of acknowledged inferiority.” 

Puryear asked “the people of Pennsylvania” how they would feel “if heathen Chinese were suddenly thrown in their state, enfranchised in a mass, in such preponderating numbers that the political power of the Commonwealth was likely to pass immediately into their hands,” suggesting that Pennsylvanians would take up arms in response. Yet, Puryear argued, after the Civil War, white southerners had “calmly asserted their innate superiority, exerted a just power of repression and control, and so vindicated their God-given right to rule.” Calling Reconstruction “the crime of the age,” he urged the North to “repent” for what he viewed as its “gross and frequent violations of the Constitution.”⁵⁸

Again, Puryear’s contribution was widely reprinted or excerpted in newspapers in Virginia and well beyond.⁵⁹

1898-1901, Post-Richmond College 

1898

“The Underwood Constitution, A Vigorous Letter Denunciatory of it by Prof. B. Puryear,” Richmond Dispatch

In 1898, then residing in Madison County, Virginia, Puryear published a long letter advocating the replacement of the “Underwood Constitution,” the 1868 Virginia constitution that offered protection for Black political power. Puryear termed it an “unconstitutional constitution” framed by a “governing majority of yankees and negroes, aliens and enemies, fanatics and fools.” Elite white Virginians, he insisted, should have “a controlling place” in shaping a new constitution: “If they will be true to blood, and race, and lineage, they can rescue the Commonwealth from the filthy vultures that prey on it.”⁶⁰

1900

In a lengthy letter published in the Richmond Dispatch, Puryear reminded readers of the 1877 pamphlet version of The Public School in its Relations to the Negro, and advised the newspaper’s editors to reprint it, claiming he had foreseen the outcome of Black education and suffrage. After revisiting the arguments he made nearly 25 years before, Puryear linked Black social, educational, and political equality to lynching: “A few have accepted the doctrine of equality, so flattering to their weakness and vanity, and have gone on from one presumptuous act to another to a crime which brings lynching as the nearest approximation to commensurate punishment.”⁶¹ Puryear’s readers would have understood that he was referring to claims of sexual assaults of white women by Black men.

1901

In 1901, as Virginia approached the constitutional convention Puryear had called for two years before, he revisited the subject in two items published in the Richmond Dispatch.

“Prof. B. Puryear: He Expresses His Views on the Constitutional Convention,” Richmond Dispatch

In February 1901, Puryear decried the “dangerous and mendacious dogma of negro equality,” insisting that “Anglo-Saxon people must have an Anglo-Saxon Constitution.” He called for a $250 property requirement for voters (a limit seen as too low by some who replied to his letter). Borrowing and extending earlier language, he wrote that those who would be prevented from voting by a property requirement “are so low that they do not expect to rise; men without energy, without industry, without hope, without ambition; the lazy, the thriftless, the incompetent, designed by nature to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, the mudsills of society.”⁶² 

“Professor Puryear: He Gives the Public His Views On Constitution Making,” Richmond Dispatch

In August 1901, Puryear repeated previous positions on the constitutional convention and argued that the political equality held by Black men was “goading” them into “offensive assertions” of their rights. He described a “black fiend” who believed “that he was entitled to equal rights with the white man on the cars, at hotels, and theaters; that all things a white man could do, he could do.” Puryear asked readers to imagine a Black man “tied to an iron stake” who had “committed a crime unknown among us until thirty years ago, but now so common it is justly designated as the ‘usual crime,’” a term used by southern newspapers for alleged raping of white women by Black men. Puryear describes the accused man’s clothes covered in oil and flames at his feet, a “scheme of torture” meant to inflict pain and prolong death; a woman, who was the victim of “foul murder and a crime worse than a thousand murders” and whose father “strikes the match and ignites the pyre”; and of the “unutterable agony” of the white family.⁶³

For over a quarter century, Puryear’s racist writings appeared in widely circulated periodicals, and for more than 20 years his fame as their writer overlapped with his leadership of Richmond College and his role as the public face of the institution. Puryear’s only known publication after 1901 focused on his opposition to the prospect of uniform divorce laws in 1907.⁶⁴ At his death in 1914, his obituaries typically concentrated on his decades of college leadership. Only one mentioned Puryear’s work as “Civis,” and “The Public School in its Relations to the Negro,” articles that had once “attracted wide attention” and “were everywhere talked of.”⁶⁵