Graves of enslaved owned by 7th VP unearthed
When a group of Clemson University students went looking earlier this year for a campus site where dozens of enslaved people were buried, they found an unmarked and unkempt plot of land. A fence meant to protect the gravesite had fallen down in places. Distraught, the students alerted a professor.
Six months later, Clemson now says it has found more than 200 unmarked graves there — many belonging to enslaved people owned by John Calhoun, the nation’s seventh vice president, whose plantation later became the school’s campus.
The school has now hired a full-time historian to assist a professor working to document the lives of those buried there, and promised to work with local Black leaders to decide how best to memorialize the site.
“We are committed to taking all the critically important actions to enhance these grounds, preserve these gravesites and to ensure the people buried there are properly honored and respected,” Smyth Mckissick, chairman of Clemons’s board of trustees, said in a statement.
The discovery adds new pressure on Clemson to further acknowledge its deeprooted connections to slavery. The university is built on the Fort Hill Plantation, which belonged to Calhoun, a politician who vehemently defended slavery throughout his career. In June, after pressure from students and graduates, including two NFL players, Clemson removed Calhoun’s name from the honors college, and voted to rename another building honoring Ben Tillman, a senator and governor who was a white supremacist and helped found Clemson.
The university says it’s making concerted efforts to bring transparency to its history.
“Clemson is dedicated to developing and sharing a full and accurate history of this area and to develop a preservation plan to protect it and those who rest here,” Mckissick said in the news release.
When he wasn’t in Washington serving as a vice president, secretary of state or in the Senate, Calhoun was at Fort Hill Plantation, where he owned 70 to 80 enslaved people, according to Clemson’s history. Calhoun was outspoken about his support of slavery, calling it a “positive good.” When he died, the plantation and enslaved people were passed down to his children. His daughter Anna Maria married Thomas Green Clemson, a politician who fought for the Confederates. The two lived at Fort Hill and when Clemson died, he left the plantation to the state, requesting that it establish a college there in his name.
The Calhoun family is buried in the center of Woodland Cemetery, which now sits next to Clemson’s football stadium. In 1922, the cemetery expanded to include faculty.
It is unclear how long the university knew enslaved people were also buried there in unmarked graves. In September 1960, Clemson received court approval to move buried remains that were marked with fieldstones, which were typically used as grave markers for African Americans, several hundred feet south. According to the news release, the university attempted to identify and preserve the original gravesites in the early 1990s and again in the early 2000s, but the efforts were “inconclusive.”
The latest project at the cemetery began in February when students who were touring the campus through a program called “Call My Name,” which chronicles the history of African Americans at Clemson, visited the disheveled gravesite, south of the Calhoun family plot, which was sectioned off by a fence.
“They came to me very distraught, very upset and asked what could be done,” Rhondda Thomas, a professor of 18th- and 19thcentury African American literature who started the program, told WYFF.
Thomas encouraged the students to talk to the university’s historian, Paul Anderson. By June, Anderson formed a team to start surveying the area, looking out for groups of fieldstones and marking them with a small flag. But they soon found stones outside the fenced-in area that was designated as the enslaved people’s burial site.
“That got us curious.” Anderson told WYFF.