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PRESBYTERIAN
FALL 2024
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REFLECTIONS
College and Cotton
By the Rev. Dr. Roland De Vries, Principal, The Presbyterian College in Montreal, Que.
The title of this piece may gener- ate quizzical expressions. What can these two have to do with each other—college and cotton? Particularly if we are talking about The Presbyterian College, which is a long way from cotton fields and cotton production.
It doesn’t take much digging, though, to find a link between these two, which comes by way of someone named David Morrice. Morrice was a wealthy industrialist, originally from Scot- land, who immigrated to Canada in 1855 and moved to Montreal in 1863. He was eventually among the wealthiest people in Montreal, and perhaps in the country.
Morrice was also a Presbyteri- an, and, upon arriving in Montre- al, became a member of the Coté Street Church. There, he met the Rev. Dr. Donald Harvey MacVicar, pastor of the congregation. The two struck up a meaningful and collaborative relationship, includ- ing in relation to a future college in the city.
The story of Morrice the in- dustrialist is too complicated to
fully recount here. Suffice it to say that by the 1860s he had a controlling interest in many cot- ton and woollen mills in Eastern Canada. Indeed, by the early 1880s, “David Morrice’s firm had established itself as the exclusive selling agent for more than 35 textile mills in Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Sco- tia. In addition to monopolizing the distribution and sale of cotton textiles, Morrice was by this time a major shareholder in several textile manufacturing companies across the four provinces.” (From “Marriage, Property, and the Law in a Square Mile Family: The Case of Annie Stevenson Anderson vs. David Morrice, 1884–1885” by Peter Gossage and Lisa Moore.)
The Presbyterian College was established in 1865 and Morrice’s friend MacVicar served as the first principal, from 1873 to 1902 (a long tenure!). Among other things, MacVicar presided over the construction of a new college building in 1873, and then over a significant expansion of the facility in 1880. That expansion doubled the size of the building, adding a convocation hall, library, dining hall and dorm rooms. And it was all paid for by...David
The Presbyterian College and Presbyterian College Chapel, Montreal, circa 1960s. PHOTO CREDIT: THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH ARCHIVES
Morrice.
The next question concerns
the cotton itself: the source of Morrice’s wealth. Where did it come from? Cotton exports from the U.S. dropped off almost en- tirely during the Civil War (1861- 1865), during which other global sources of raw cotton were de- veloped. But after the Civil War, U.S. exports exploded, and it is generally understood that the vast majority of cotton imported to Canada after 1865 had its origin in the American South.
Evidently, after the Civil War, the States and cotton producers
had to revise their approach to planting, harvesting and produc- tion. The result was a system of sharecropping, which in the end was little different from slavery for many Black individuals and fami- lies. A sharecropper was granted a right to farm a piece of land, with a portion of their revenues paid as rent to the landowner. However, the sharecropper also had to pur- chase seeds, tools, fertilizer and food. In many cases they never made enough money to pay off their debts, so that these former slaves frequently became trapped in lives of indentured servitude.
“The sharecropper and his family’s typical day consisted of long hours working the fields. Rain or shine, sick or well, from dusk to dawn, sharecroppers sowed, weeded, picked, and hauled cotton. By the end of the day, the laborers would return home exhausted. The cycle never ended—the next day, the share- cropper started the process all over again.” (From the University of Memphis project “Tent City: Stories of Civil Rights in Fayette County, Tennessee.”)
We skip forward almost a cen- tury to the 1960s. In that decade, The Presbyterian College worked out an exchange by which it trad- ed its original building to McGill University for a piece of prop- erty on adjacent University Street (along with a sum of capital). The college’s current building sits on that new piece of property while the former building, a part of which still stands on McGill cam- pus, is today called Morrice Hall.
The inescapable conclusion? Some proportion of the current
physical assets of The Presby- terian College (less than a third, probably, but still some mean- ingful portion) owe their exist- ence and value to the labour of enslaved Black men and women who cleared the forests and wet- lands to establish plantations. Also, a portion of assets are owed to the labour of impoverished Black sharecroppers (and also some poor white sharecroppers), who sustained the cotton industry in the post–Civil War era. College and cotton are more intimately entwined than we would wish.
A difficult question that arises here is whether there should be some attempt at restitution to those exploited for our gain, which is also a politically divisive question.Withoutdenyingtheim- portance of that question, we can at least realize that today’s college lives very much against the grain of those patterns of exploitation, violence and racism.
At the same time, it seems im- portant to simply name and ac- knowledge this history. There are few institutions that have escaped involvement in histories of vio- lence, racism and exploitation— and The Presbyterian College is no exception. This is our history.
We could put our realization as follows: When we are in a class- room or in the library or in our offices, we inhabit a space made possible by the horrific history of slavery and sharecropping in the cotton industry. That realization should, all by itself, be enough to animate us toward humility, regret, compassion and a long- ing to faithfully inhabit Christ’s kingdom.
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