Pavilion X Exhibition

Violence

Faculty, hotelkeepers, and especially students coerced the enslaved people whose labor, skills, and knowledge served as the foundation of the University. Routinely subjected to arbitrary acts of violence, enslaved people navigated a frightful landscape of tyranny.

The University’s perilous environment proved particularly difficult for enslaved women. The women who prepared food, washed laundry, and performed domestic services for faculty members often faced the threat of sexual abuse by students. In 1830 a student, G. Tucker, broke into Pavilion V and sexually assaulted an enslaved woman who worked there. In another horrific encounter in 1850, three students, George H. Hardy, Armistead C. Eliason, and James E. Montandon, raped a 12 year-old enslaved girl near the University cemetery.

Approximately 40 percent of the known burials in the University’s enslaved cemetery were young children. Enslaved children served a critical role in the University’s labor force and proved particularly vulnerable to abuse, as illustrated by an 1856 incident in which student Noble B. Noland beat a ten-year-old enslaved girl until she passed out. In a chilling defense of his actions, Noland insisted to the faculty “that the correction of a servant for impertinence, when done on the spot & under the spur of the provocation, is not only tolerated by society, but…may be defended on the ground of the necessity of maintaining due subordination.”