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three-year-old girl. He conducted an autopsy, and “found in her Intestines 7 worms some of them 12 & 13 Inches, roll’d up together in a bundle.” On Saturday a third little girl expired. The new week began with the doctor carrying up a dead girl. Two days later, on June 13, he autopsied a baby and witnessed her “stomach chock’d full” of worms. Two enslaved people were dying each week, most of them children. The fourteenth brought the passing of two small boys, including another child “whom I might call my own,” lamented Chancellor. This boy had ulcerated lungs. On Thursday, June 21, a boy and a girl died. Deaths continued to mount. 37
    Little children were primary casualties of Livingston’s investment. “At noon threw over a boy slave who died,” the surgeon casually noted on July 13. This was the second child discarded that month. “I forgot to mention that yesterday to add to many misfortunes we threw over board a child of 3 years,” Chancellor jotted a week later. This little girl had suffered with green flux, white flux, and bloody flux—manifestations of severe dysentery—and measlesduring her long imprisonment. Dr. Chancellor became more comfortable handling dead children, but the escalating casualties had his emotions swinging between compassion and rage. He twice accused the Africans of murdering each other, and even blamed them for dying—the journey being at “the mercy of vile slaves”—since every lost life prolonged the voyage. August began with Chancellor removing “12 large worms” from the corpse of a baby girl. Three little girls and two other captives died that month. The crew tossed scores of human bodies into the water as the
Wolf
cruised along the African coast for more than a year. 38
    Despite a revolt before they departed for America and the deaths of two imprisoned Africans at sea, Captain Wall piloted the
Wolf
into New York harbor in May 1751, completing a horrific, but ordinary, slaving voyage. The Livingston network, tying interests in New York, Great Britain, the West Indies, and the African coast, again paid off. According to Dr. Chancellor’s diary, Captain Wall purchased 147 people on the African coast, but Philip Livingston reported only 66 at New York City. Wall claimed seven people as part of his contract. Livingston had killed almost as many people as he traded. He and Wall then quickly put the survivors up for sale. 39
FROM TRADERS TO TRUSTEES
    By 1753 William Livingston, the youngest brother of Philip, was unquestionably the most vocal opponent of the Anglican college that was being planned in New York City. His father, the elder Philip, had sent him to Yale and then to study law. William Livingston had little interest in the bar or the merchant house. He was more of a literary man. He became a prominent advocate of the arts and sciences in New York City and a strident opponent of corruption in the colonial government. He was a founder of the New York Society Library and the Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge. Beginning in 1746 he threw his energies into a plan for a college in New York City. However, the Anglican minority soon began maneuvering for an Episcopal seminary underthe leadership of Samuel Johnson, an Anglican priest from Connecticut, who would also be installed at Trinity Church. The successful founding of the Presbyterian College of New Jersey had touched a nerve among New York’s Anglicans. Eighteenth-century New Yorkers were as likely to see conspiracies from above as they were to see plots from below. The Anglican grab on the college aggravated deeply rooted fears of the Church of England and the crown’s desire to crush dissent in the colonies. William Livingston led the backlash. He accused the Anglicans of religious tyranny, and they charged that Livingston was manipulating public opinion to protect the Presbyterian college. 40
    In 1753 William Smith, a