Thread by @sams_reckoning

The very 1st financial donation to the University of North Carolina came in the form of 20,000 acres of stolen Chickasaw land located in what is now northwest Tennessee.

The gift was made in 1789 by Benjamin Smith, a founding @UNC trustee & the largest slaveholder in NC by 1790.

Benjamin Smith was born in 1756 in SC into a dynasty of major slavers. (He was named for his uncle, who was a slave trader in Charleston). In the 1790 Census, Smith is listed as enslaver of 221 men, women & children in Brunswick County, NC.

Smith served as an officer in the Revolutionary War. As a “thank you,” veterans of the war received claims, or “bounty warrants,” for huge tracts of land, specifically in areas where the new American empire was dispossessing Native people of their land.

In this era, Tennessee was still part of the state of North Carolina. NC refused to acknowledge the Chickasaw claim to its own land around the Mississippi River. Instead, it established what it called “military reservations” where these giant veterans’ estates were staked out.

It was under this system that Benjamin Smith received 20,000 acres of stolen Chickasaw land in the area that would become Obion County, TN. Overall he amassed more than 100,000 acres of stolen land through these warrants and other land speculation.

At the first meeting of the Board of Trustees on Dec. 18, 1789, Benjamin Smith offered this 20,000 acres of “bounty land” in western Tennessee to @UNC, to be sold and for the proceeds to jumpstart the new institution’s endowment fund.

But there was a problem: in 1786 the US government and the Chickasaw people had signed the Treaty of Hopewell, recognizing the territory of the Chickasaw Nation. Smith’s land claim was situated within its boundaries.

Smith and @UNC weren’t about to just let go of the land. For 48 YEARS they fought the Chickasaw, the federal government, and the new state of Tennessee for rightful title to the land. In 1837, UNC finally sold it to a Boston land company for $14,000.

What else was happening in 1837? It marked the end of Chickasaw removal from Mississippi Valley territories to Oklahoma. No coincidence. The sale that year was clearly an opportunistic move by @UNC to get what it could out of the land when the Chickasaw were fully dispossessed.

Smith was a piece of work. His rice plantation failed, he squandered his wealth on a lavish lifestyle & went deep into debt. He was a combative alcoholic, “hated all around,” prone to dueling & died penniless in 1826. Creditors sold off and split up the 200+ people he enslaved.

Regardless of being widely disliked, UNC honored their “first benefactor” in 1851 by naming Smith Hall after him - a building built by skilled enslaved and free black craftsmen. But, in 1924, UNC changed the name to Playmakers’ Theatre. Did Smith’s poor reputation play a role?

Benjamin Smith was stripped of another honorific: his eponymous home town of Smithville in Brunswick County, NC was renamed in 1887 to Southport.

Note: the story of @UNC's second major benefactor is almost identical to the first: Charles Gerrard willed 13,942 acres of stolen Native land in Tennessee ("bounty land" for military service). It was sold to bankroll construction of Gerrard Hall, finished in 1837, named for him.