Background
Thomas Bray was born in Marton, Shropshire, England, in 1658. He earned an AB degree from All Souls College, Oxford, in November 1678 and was ordained a minister of the Church of England in 1681. By 1696 he had completed the coursework for bachelor’s and doctorate degrees in divinity at Oxford. In the autumn of 1695, Henry Compton, the bishop of London, appointed Bray commissary of Maryland, or the church’s chief representative in the colony, but Bray did not travel to America for four years. Instead, on March 8, 1699, he and four laymen founded the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), a group that sent missionaries to the colonies and established libraries there and throughout England and Wales. Bray finally visited Maryland in March 1700 but stayed only a few months. While there, he advocated for the establishment of the Church of England in the otherwise Catholic colony, an act that passed in May of that year.
Upon his return, Bray undertook a new project, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). Chartered by King William III on June 16, 1701, the group focused on ministering abroad while the SPCK confined its missionary and library work to Britain. To Bray’s chagrin, however, neither organization prioritized educating and converting Indigenous peoples and African Americans.
Founding of the Associates
In 1699, Bray became acquainted with Abel Tassin d’Alonne, the king’s secretary for Dutch affairs. The two corresponded on the subject of converting African Americans, and when d’Allone died in 1723, his will left one-tenth of his English estate, or about £900, “to the Revd. Dr. Thomas Bray & his Associates” for the construction of schools to educate the children of enslaved people.
Bray appointed four men to serve as his “associates,” although the SPG briefly and unsuccessfully challenged the decision, arguing that d’Allone had intended his bequest to go to that group. Founded on January 15, 1724, the Associates of Dr. Bray spent the next six years sending about twenty missionaries to America with instructions to teach enslaved people and, in some cases, Indigenous peoples, in Protestant Christian practice. In the meantime, Bray fought off attempts by some of his partners to use the d’Allone money to fund a missionary college in Bermuda.
On January 15, 1730, the Associates of Dr. Bray reorganized, expanding the group’s number of trustees to twenty-six as part of James Oglethorpe’s project to establish a convict colony in Georgia. Because of legal problems, another document was recorded on June 24, 1730, by which time the number of associates had increased to twenty-nine or thirty. (Bray himself had died a few months earlier, on February 15.) Twenty-one of these trustees were named in the charter that founded the colony of Georgia in 1732. On May 31, 1733, the Associates broke off from the Georgia project in order to focus on the conversion and education of African Americans and, to a lesser extent, the distribution of books and the establishment of libraries.
Williamsburg
The Associates funded missions that didn’t succeed first in and around Georgia and then in Charleston, South Carolina. In January 1757, the group’s secretary, the Reverend John Waring, wrote to Benjamin Franklin suggesting that an itinerant teacher be sent to Pennsylvania to educate enslaved people. Franklin and one of his friends, the Reverend William Sturgeon, suggested a school be founded instead, because, as Franklin wrote, “At present few or none give their Negro Children any Schooling, partly from the Prejudice that Reading & Knowledge in a Slave are both useless and dangerous; and partly from an Unwillingness in the Masters & Mistresses of common Schools to take black Scholars, lest the Parents of the white Children should be disgusted & take them away.” The Philadelphia Bray school opened on November 20, 1758, with one female teacher and thirty students, a number that jumped to thirty-nine by June of the next year. Franklin was elected a member of the Associates in 1760 and consulted about potential locations for additional schools. He proposed schools in New York; Newport, Rhode Island; and Williamsburg.
Franklin may have seen Virginia as an appropriate site for a Bray school in part because of its tradition of proselytizing to Black people and Virginia Indians. James Blair, a friend of Thomas Bray and the Church of England’s commissary in Virginia, had helped to establish the College of William and Mary in 1693 in part to proselytize to sovereign and tributary Indigenous nations in Virginia in an attempt to convert them to Christianity. When Franklin visited Williamsburg in 1756 and received an honorary degree from the College of William and Mary, he would have encountered a clerical faculty already providing religious education to Black people. It is not surprising, then, that of the two men Franklin selected to operate the school, one was the Reverend Thomas Dawson, the church commissary, rector of Bruton Parish, and president of the College of William and Mary, an affiliation that helped protect the school in a culture largely opposed to education for Black people. The other was Franklin’s friend William Hunter, printer of the Virginia colony, publisher of the Virginia Gazette, and deputy postmaster of the colonies.
Dawson and Hunter’s school opened on September 29, 1760, although Dawson died soon after, on November 29, 1760. Hunter recruited Robert Carter Nicholas and the Reverend William Yates, Dawson’s successor, to help oversee the school. When Hunter died on August 14, 1761, Nicholas and Yates became the school’s sole administrators. Yates died on October 5, 1764, after which Nicholas operated the school largely on his own, although he received some assistance from successive commissaries. The school’s first and only teacher was Ann Wager, a widowed mother of two and private tutor who had previously taught the children of Carter Burwell, a member of the House of Burgesses.
The Williamsburg Bray school never had a permanent home but operated out of various buildings and houses, including ones owned by Dudley Digges and John Blair Jr. Because some enslavers used the school to warehouse mischievous children, withdrawing them before literacy took hold, Nicholas drew up rules in September 1762 that required each student to attend classes for at least three years. The day would begin at six in the morning during the summer and at seven during the winter. Wager was enjoined “to instruct [students] in the Principles of the Christian Religion according to the Doctrine of the Church of England,” as well as how to be “faithful & obedient” and “diligent in their Business, & quiet & peaceable to all Men.” On Sundays, Wager would accompany her charges to church services.
Students were taught reading in this and other Bray schools and the most recent evidence suggests that writing was taught as well. It is clear from the school’s rules that the intention was to offer instruction in reading, spelling, grammar, sewing, and knitting, as well as “such other things as may be useful” to the enslavers of the students. The textbooks utilized by the school promoted a pro-slavery religious doctrine designed to convince African Americans to accept their roles as enslaved peoples. Bacon’s Two Sermons, Preached to a Congregation of Black Slaves, which was requested by Robert Carter Nicholas in 1762, tells enslaved people that they “have a great advantage over most white people” in that they do not have to worry about making a living or supporting a family “and have nothing but your daily labor to look after.” They are further instructed: “There is only one Circumstance which may appear Grievous, that I shall now take Notice of, and that is CORRECTION – Now, when Correction is given you, you either deserve it, or do not deserve it – But whether you really deserve it or not, it is your Duty, and Almighty GOD requires, that you bear it patiently.”
The school struggled financially, and when in 1768 Nicholas billed the Associates for £30 instead of the customary £20, Waring refused to pay, arguing that enslavers ought to make up the difference. “How can Gentlemen on Your Side [of] the Water,” he wrote to Nicholas on April 20, 1768, “expect that We on this shou’d Subscribe two, three, or four Guineas a Year apiece, as I have for many Years, to promote the Instruction of the Slaves of those Masters, who themselves will contribute Nothing to it.” A year later the argument reached an impasse, with Waring writing that “if the Gentlemen at Williamsburgh are willing to have the Negroe School continue they may: but then They must engage to defray all Expenses above 25£ Sterling a Year. If these terms, very easy to them & on our parts very generous are refused, You are desired to put an End to the School at the End of this present Year 1769.” Rather than ask enslavers for contributions, Nicholas made up for the shortfall by reducing Ann Wager’s salary; it appears Wager must have agreed to these terms. Six years later, on November 17, 1774, Nicholas wrote a short, rather abrupt letter to Waring announcing Wager’s death and the school’s subsequent closure.
Williamsburg Bray School Students
In 1762 the school enrolled thirty students, including three-year-old Rippon and Elizabeth, who was the oldest in the class at ten years old. The average age of students was about six or seven years old. By 1765 the student roll had expanded to thirty-four, including siblings Isaac and Johanna Bee, who were enslaved by John Blair Sr. In addition to members of the gentry, tavern keepers such as Christiana Campbell and Jane Vobe sent enslaved people to the school, including possibly Gowan Pamphlet, who lived with Jack and Sal, two children that Vobe sent to the school in the 1760s. A large portion of tradespeople in Williamsburg, including wigmakers, blacksmiths, saddle makers, and milliners, also sent enslaved students to the Williamsburg Bray school.
The 1762 roll and others also record free Black children from the Jones and Ashby families attending the Williamsburg Bray school. Based on existing records, approximately 10 percent of the students at the school were free Black children, which is similar to other Bray schools prior to the American Revolution. Approximately 50 percent of the students who attended the school were Black girls; in 1769, Black girls accounted for over half of Ann Wager’s classroom.
Although historians are still learning more about these students, it is apparent from oral histories, written records, and members of the Black descendant community that some students used their instruction at the Williamsburg Bray school to improve their lives or resist slavery. Colonel Lafayette Jones, whose free Black ancestors attended the school, recalled hearing his grandfather say that “some of the children who had attended the Bray School were able to read and write and were referred to by many as ‘The first black teachers in Virginia’,” imparting skills that were used by later generations to escape north from slavery.
Fredericksburg
On September 25, 1764, the Reverend James Marye Jr., of Saint Thomas Parish in Orange County wrote to John Waring suggesting that a Bray school modeled on Williamsburg’s be established in Fredericksburg in Spotsylvania County. The growing town on the Rappahannock River was located in Saint George’s Parish, where James Marye Sr. was the minister. The Associates approved the idea, and Fielding Lewis—a merchant, justice of the peace, and member of the House of Burgesses—was recruited to run the school with the elder Marye’s help. What Lewis called the School for the Education of Negroe Children opened in April 1765, and that September he reported to Waring that in spite of having trouble finding a teacher, he had enrolled sixteen students and implemented Robert Carter Nicholas’s rules from the Williamsburg school.
Lewis encountered many of the same problems seen in Williamsburg. Enslavers used the school for their own purposes and were not necessarily committed to education. Funds also were in short supply. On October 31, 1768, Lewis apologized to Waring that enrollment had dropped to nine students; only four had attended during the summer. “And I have greatest reason to think that there will not soon be any greater Number,” he wrote, “for I observe that several have left the School as soon as they could read tolerably to attend in the Houses of the Proprietors, or to take care of the Younger Negros in the Familys to which they belong.”
Enrollment had not increased by the summer of 1769, even after Marye, from the pulpit, called upon enslavers to educate their enslaved people. Lewis closed the school shortly thereafter. In 1772, he wrote to Waring that he worried that “so much Money should have been expended”—£100 sterling over five years—”to so little purpose.” He concluded that Fredericksburg was still too small to sustain such a school and that “many believe” that teaching enslaved African Americans to read “is rather a disadvantage to the owners, we having had some examples of that sort.”
Legacy
There were Bray schools proposed by the Associate of Dr. Bray in colonial Virginia that never operated, including in Orange County, Caroline County, Hanover Parish, Gloucester County, and Portsmouth, Yorktown, and Norfolk. However, libraries were sent to the counties in which they were suggested, which was a tactic utilized by the Associates of Dr. Bray to incentivize local ministers and enslavers to support instruction for enslaved peoples. Books sent by the Associates were distributed in at least one instance to a “well-dispos’d Negro belonging to a Gentleman … to Endeavour at instructing his poor fellow Slaves in Reading & some of the first Principles of Religion.”
The Bray school in New York City operated from September 22, 1760, until October 1774, when its teacher died. The Newport, Rhode Island, school was open from 1762 until about 1776, and the Philadelphia school also closed in 1776; this school reopened in 1786 and stayed in operation until the mid-nineteenth century. Multiple Bray schools began to operate in Philadelphia from 1786 to 1845; these institutions differed significantly from colonial schools owing to that city’s large free Black population. In addition, Bray schools in the Caribbean and Canada run by Black Loyalists who left America after the Revolution began to operate in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One of these schools, located in Birchtown, Nova Scotia, remained in operation until 1961.
According to the scholar John C. Van Horne, the success of the Bray schools varied temporally and geographically. The schools were plagued by a shortage of teachers and funds. Enslavers were loath to contribute financially to the schools and, in many instances, were hostile to the very idea of educating enslaved people. In the eighteen years they were open before the American Revolution they enrolled at most perhaps 1,000 students out of almost 500,000 free and enslaved Africans and African Americans in the British North American colonies (although this number could be larger). Van Horne argues that even among the students whom the Associates did reach, they “may not have achieved a useful degree of literacy.”
However, as Antonio Bly notes, oral histories and written records provide examples of students who were “rising, thriving, persevering, helping one another—up from slavery to freedom” as a result of the education they received at the Bray schools. Despite their limitations and efforts to reinforce slavery, Bray schools represented one of the very few educational opportunities available to America’s Black youth at the time.
The varied and competing ways that a Bray school education was used by students in colonial Virginia to survive in a slave society is still being explored today.
