The First ‘Crucian' at Yale
- Mark Dworkin
- Oct 6
- 9 min read
Updated: Oct 7
John F. McKeon
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A few weeks ago I visited Yale University. My wife and I were spending the weekend in the sleepy town of Trumbull, Connecticut while visiting my niece and her family. Their two boys Michael age twelve and Mathew age ten accompanied us as we strolled the Yale campus. I was excited to visit its library, archives and art galleries.
We chanced upon an exhibit introducing visitors to a fellow named John W. Creed. It warmed my heart to read that Mr. Creed was born on the island of St. Croix in 1801. My inner historian immediately shifted into gear. Who was Mr. Creed and how did he enter the Ivy league halls of Yale?
John William Creed was a business owner, abolitionist, service worker, father, and community leader. The photo provided in this article was taken in 1863. It was discovered in the back of a photo album belonging to a member of the Yale class of 1863 named George Sheffield. The photo album contained an array of fellow members of the Russell Trust Association, better known as the ultimate secret society; The Skull and Bones.
Yes, the same Skull and Bones that served as an elite, undergraduate, secret society at Yale University. The society was founded in 1832 and was known for its prominent alumni in business and government, and for being the subject of numerous conspiracy theories. The organization is considered the oldest and most important of Yale's "Big Three" secret societies, but it has become more diverse over time, though it still maintains strict secrecy about its rituals and activities.
The photo’s inscription reads “Old Creed, janitor.” Creed ended his career as steward of the storied society. He was renowned for preparing the commencement dinners for Yale alumni for decades, Creed had also been steward of the Calliopean Literary Society, favored by Southern students during the antebellum period.
The Age of Revolutions
At the time that John Creed was born on the island of St. Croix it was a time of the beginning of transformation across the Americas. An era known as the "Age of Revolutions" that occurred during the early 1800s. An era that produced successful independence movements in Spanish, French and Portuguese colonies. These movements saw the overthrow of European monarchies and the establishment of independent republics across Latin America, culminating in the formation of new nations and the widespread adoption of republican governments that began to challenge colonial rule. The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) was occurring at the time of Creed’s birth. It was the most significant revolution in the Americas, where enslaved people successfully overthrew French colonial rule and established the independent nation of Haiti, demonstrating the power of a popular uprising. Concurrently various Spanish colonies in South America and Mexico fought for and achieved independence. This was the world that John Creed was born into.
Creed had traveled far from St. Croix in a time when the obstacles he faced surely would have dissuaded a less determined man. Yet there is more about Mr. Creed that needs to be told. Creed began working at Yale in the early nineteenth century as a janitor and caterer, providing a glimpse into a rarely documented life within the university. Creed was one of thousands of Black and biracial people that migrated from the Caribbean to northeastern cities in the wake of the Haitian Revolution, his story is one of the few with surviving documentation. His work as a janitor and steward for student societies, including catering prestigious commencement dinners, placed him in the social circles of powerful white families, leading to extraordinary opportunities for his son to advance in the difficult circumstances of the nineteenth century
Arrival In New Haven
In 1820 when John W. Creed was accepted as a member of his Connecticut church, slavery remained legal in both St. Croix and New Haven. Creed was described as a free “man of color” in the records of Center Church. The newly formed African Ecclesiastical Society in New Haven became the city’s first independent Black church, known today as Dixwell Avenue UCC.(1).
In 1830 Creed married a young woman named Vashti Duplex, who would go on to be the city’s first Black school teacher. She came from a prominent family, her father had fought in the Revolutionary War, and her brother, was the first clerk of the church. John W. Creed himself was active in New Haven’s anti-slavery movement.
In 1831, in effort to establish a college for Black men in New Haven, both Black and White abolitionists gathered at the ‘First Annual Convention of the People of Color’ in Philadelphia, Creed, was selected to serve on the committee in New Haven to support the proposal. The city’s mayor, upon hearing the plan immediately called for a city meeting, and on Saturday, September 10, over 700 voters, all property-owning white males, gathered at the City Hall and voted almost unanimously against allowing the college to be established in their city.(2) That same year, Creed became a local agent selling the recently founded abolitionist newspaper ‘The Liberator.’ (3)
Creed valued education as the only path upward for his children. His eldest son Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed, graduated from a private preparatory school. John W. Creed died in 1864, leaving a substantial estate and a library, the fate of the nation still unknown. He is buried in Grove Street Cemetery, along with his wife, son, and other family members—a marking of the secret society where he worked is engraved on his monument. Yet it is what followed that speaks to the man’s legacy
Attendance at Yale University
In the 1800s, due to systemic exclusion "Negro attendance" at Yale was practically non-existent. Yale was deeply involved in the New England slave trade network, and the institution itself remained largely white. Yale did not permit Black individuals to earn degrees until much later in the century. For most of the 1800s, Black people were systematically barred from full participation in Yale.
Increasing tension over the political future of slavery in the United States and the outbreak of violence over the issue contributed to Yale admitting Black medical students, but “most of the students it finally enrolled were either a local like Creed or Liberians” (4 ), connected to the ‘repatriation’ project of “returning” people of African descent in the United States to Africa.(5) Yale faculty opened the institution to students of color slowly, in line with contemporary conservative antislavery views, and, in doing so, lagged behind the other New England medical schools at Dartmouth and Bowdoin Colleges.
New Haven, where Yale is located, was part of the global slave trade, and enslaved people were present in Connecticut at the time. In 1804, all states north of Maryland had prohibitions against slavery or enacted laws gradually abolishing slavery. In the following decades, however, most of these northern states passed laws restricting Black people’s civil rights. Black people’s access to public education and other institutions was reduced. In Connecticut, the Black Law was passed under the 1818 state constitution. It limited voting to white people. Black people living in Connecticut only regained the right to vote in 1870.
Between 1831 and 1838, Connecticut law prevented schools from enrolling Black students from outside the state, but that did not prevent Yale from enrolling local students...
The Yale School of Medicine did not admit any Black students or allow Black students to attend lectures until 1854, even though antislavery opinion had strengthened in Connecticut in the late 1830s. The Black Law was repealed in 1838. Courtlandt Van Rensselaer Creed was admitted to the Yale School of Medicine in 1854 and became the first Black person to graduate from Yale in 1857.
The Amistad
In 1839 racial attitudes were slowly changing, the landing of the slave ship Amistad in New Haven further spurred local antislavery activism. The enslaved cargo of the Amistad had successfully revolted and demanded the surviving sailors return to Africa. Instead the crew steered the ship north, where it was captured by a US cutter and brought to New Haven. The capture of the Amistad led to competing court cases over the freedom and ownership of the previously enslaved people onboard, ultimately leading to an 1841 Supreme Court case granting the Africans their freedom. John W. Creed lived through all of this. All the while he labored to insure the prospects of his children.
Starting in 1827, the Calliopean Society paid John Creed $4.75 per semester for “attending” to the society, and by 1846, paid him $15 per semester for three months of services. “Attending” and providing “services” may have meant that he looked after society members as a servant would, but this employment relationship proved to be a long-term one. John continued to work for the society until it disbanded due to debt in 1853. All the while John W. Creed built a life that placed him in the social circles of powerful white families. He did this for the benefit of his church, his activism and more so for his son Cortlandt.
It appears that John Creed’s son Cortlandt also accepted payment from the Calliopean Society. Cortlandt himself worked for the society for the same amount of time and pay that his father did, just three years before he enrolled in Yale Medical School.
While Cortlandt Creed was enrolled, one year of medical school tuition cost $73.50, and the total cost of attending medical school at Yale for two years plus the graduation and the licensing and diploma fee amounted to $166.50, over ten times what John was paid per semester by the Calliopean Society. (6)
Knowing that prejudice against color was apparent, Creed wrote in a letter to famed Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, describing the apprehensions he felt before he applied to Yale medical School. Despite his fears, Creed wrote “both in college and out of its walls . . . I never experienced any other than the most polite treatment from my fellow class-mates.” (7) Creed would go on to write his thesis “On the Blood” and earn his MD degree in 1857 Cortlandt was the first known Black graduate of Yale. At the onset of the Civil War, he longed to join the fight for freedom and wrote to the governor resulting in Cortlandt Creed receiving his commission as a surgeon in the Union Army. After the war he practiced medicine in New York and Connecticut. US President James Garfield’s doctors contacted Creed for his medical expertise about how to find the bullet when the president was shot in 1881.They presiding physicians even recruited Alexander Graham Bell to apply his newly invented medical detector to find the bullet. Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed was admitted to the Connecticut Medical Society in 1885 and died in New Haven in 1900. He is buried in Grove Street Cemetery with his father, mother and family. John W. Creed was a Cruzan to be remembered and honored.
Historian John F. McKeon lives on St. Croix USVI and in Southampton NY. He holds degrees from Trinity College Dublin, (MPhil with Distinction). and St. Joseph's University New York (Summa Cum Laude) B.A. East Asian History with a Philosophy Capstone Minor in Labor, Class and Ethics. John also has certificate from the Oxford University Epigeum Research Integrity Center. He is a current member of the Society of Virgin Island Historians.
Foot Notes
In 1820, group of twenty-four free men/women and former slaves met with Simeon S. Jocelyn and formed the African Ecclesiastical Society. There were approximately 1,000 Blacks in New Haven at the time, and they were unwelcome in the established white churches.
In 1833 when headmistress Prudence Crandall admitted Black students to her Canterbury Female Boarding School in Canterbury, Connecticut, the state legislature enacted a law to prevent future attempts to educate Black people in the state. The “Black Law” outlawed schools from teaching Black students from outside of the state unless local officials explicitly approved the plans, and that law would remain in force until 1838. Though James Pennington, a fugitive slave, was the first Black person to audit classes at the Yale Divinity School from 1834 to 1839.
The Liberator’s success depended on free Black people like Creed, who made up about 75 percent of its subscribers.
Web 2025, https://onlineexhibits.library.yale.edu/s/ysmslavery/page/black-students
For a more in depth explanation on the Repatriation plan see: The St. Croix Times : Abraham Lincoln, Denmark and the Island of St. Croix. John F. McKeon, 2025
ibid : https://onlineexhibits.library.yale.edu/s/ysmslavery/page/black-students
Harvard had admitted three Black students in 1850, but white student outcry forced the faculty to not reenroll the Black students after their first session, preventing them from completing their education at Harvard.
