 - Bef 1732
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| Name |
BRAY Thomas [1] |
| Prefix |
Col. |
| Gender |
Male |
| Reference Number |
1025 |
| Death |
Bef 1732 |
New Kent, New Kent County, VA  [1, 2] |
| Notes |
- WMQ Vol XIV pg. 266:
Col. THOMAS BRAY (James1) lived. in New Kent county, and was dead before 1732 (Hening, Statutes, IV, pg. 310). He married Sarah Fenn, daughter of Samuel Fenn, of Middle Plantation, Williamsburg (who gave two acres for a church), and widow of Capt. Thomas Claiborne, of King William County (Va. Mag., I., pg. 317j QUARTERLY. IIl., pg.77). Hia wife, Sarah. Bray, founded a scholarhip at William and Mary College. "Madam Sarah Bray departed. this life October 18, 1716" (St. Peter's Register, New Kent county).'
They appear to have left no issue.
The Bray School opened in 1760 and operated until 1774. This was the year the school's mistress Ann Wager died. What do the records tell us about the fourteen years of the school's existence? What type of instruction did the students receive? Did Franklin visit and keep track of its progress?
We know an extraordinary amount about it, thanks to a documentary edition by John Van Horne of the correspondence of the London charity that saw to the establishment of the school. The charity was called the Associates of Dr. Bray and was one of a number that the Reverend Thomas Bray set up or inspired to see to the Christian education of heathens. The Bray Associates were particularly interested in the religious education of blacks in the colonies, free and enslaved, and the charge of the school was to teach the children the tenets of Anglican Christianity, which Mrs. Wager did, from the Bible and a variety of texts sent to the school from London. But the children were also taught general deportment and good behavior and the girls were instructed in sewing and needlecraft. The children were to be taken in an orderly way to divine services\emdash that would have been in Bruton Church, not too long a walk from the school itself.
The Associates were assiduous in seeking accounts of the school, not just for the expenditure of the funds they provided but also of the numbers of children and the degree of success in their education. They were fortunate to find excellent trustees for the school, especially Robert Carter Nicholas, a powerful official in the Colony's government, who oversaw it closely and wrote meticulous letters concerning its successes and its difficulties. The frustrations were that students didn't always stay as long as they might have benefited from. With enrollment constantly changing, documenting success was not easy.
One measure might not have pleased everyone, by the way. None of the education was intended to question slavery as a system\emdash indeed a well instructed and religious slave would learn of God's divinely organized hierarchy in which some people were placed by divine will as masters and others as slaves. All would learn to respect that divine order and not rebel against it. Yet some of the black children in the Bray School, according to local black tradition, became "the first black teachers in Virginia," and took the skills of reading and writing back to members of Williamsburg's free black community. In the nineteenth century, still according to oral tradition, members of the free black community were then able to use those skills to help forge papers for slaves escaping from further South\emdash they would be put on the boat at Jamestown to make their way to Baltimore. That would make the Bray School somehow involved in the Underground Railway, at least after its demise. I don't know of any other evidence of that, but it's an interesting example of the unintended consequences that education can have.
Ann Wager, hired to run the "Negroe school," was a private instructor in the homes of prominent Williamsburg citizens before her appointment at the Bray School. What do we know about Anne Wager's life?
As far as actual life facts, we don't know as much as we'd like to. Anne Wager was the widow of a man who had some standing apparently. Their son became a justice of the peace and a member of the House of Burgesses. We know that she was born about 1716, and died in 1774, which would make her about 44 when she took on the Bray School. We know that she was recruited to be its school mistress by the original Williamsburg trustees of the Bray School, one of whom was the President of the College of William and Mary. Wager had been a highly regarded teacher of white children, including at the plantation of Carter Burwell, a magnificent plantation not far from Williamsburg called Carters Grove. She had no home of her own in Williamsburg and appears to have been entrusted with a sum and allowed to find and lease a house that would serve both her need for a home and for a school for day students.
Which house she leased is at the heart of the uncertainty about whether the structure I've found did serve as the school. Independently, the question had come up over the decades when the house was thought to no longer exist and Colonial Williamsburg researchers had made the link, as early as a half century ago. But the complexity comes in a document that mentions Mrs. Wager's leasing the house from a "Colonel Dudley Digges." There were a surprising number of "Dudley Digges" at the time. Only one was generally known as "Colonel," from Yorktown, and he seems to have been already liquidating his earlier property in Williamsburg. But we are also learning more about another Williamsburg Digges. He may have been a colonel too. Still, the matter is not yet fully resolved and will need some further attention.
You note that as many as thirty slave and free black students attended the Bray School at any given time and that many Williamsburg citizens placed their black slaves there in the years before the American Revolution. What more do records reveal about the identity of the students who attended the school? Do we know the total number of students enrolled there? And what sources led you to find out about them?
We have several lists of the children. In the Van Horne edition I mentioned, thirty are listed in 1762, with their owners' names\emdash everyone from the wife of the President of the College to high-ranking individuals involved in the affairs of the Colony of Virginia like Peyton Randolph, John Randolph, and Robert Carter Nicolas, to more middle class folks. Three of the children, Mary Anne, Mary Jones, and Elisha Jones, are listed simply as "a free negroe" or "free." In 1769 we have another list of some thirty children, again a list pretty varied by owners' class. Two of these children, John and Mary Ashby, are described as "free"\emdash I'm told that their parents were local free blacks. These were perhaps the students who became "the first black teachers in Virginia" that I mentioned. There is a William and Mary masters thesis on the Williamsburg Bray School by Jennifer Oast, who was able to follow through on the children and develop more information about them and their subsequent appearances in colonial records.
Benjamin Franklin's interest in the Williamsburg school was part of a much larger vision by a London-based philanthropy called the Associates of Dr. Bray, which hoped to finance schools for slaves throughout the English colonies. Dr. Bray believed that African slaves and freedmen were as worthy of religious instruction as whites. What can you tell us about Dr. Bray and what one historian has called his "radical Anglican humanitarianism"?
Dr. Thomas Bray (1658-1730) has to go down in history as one of the most successful philanthropic entrepreneurs ever, directly or indirectly responsible for several organizations active in Christian evangelizing especially in the new world, even to being involved in the establishment of the colony of South Carolina. He was a good friend of James Blair, William and Mary's first president\emdash both were Commissaries, or representatives, of the Bishop of London, Blair in Virginia and Bray in Maryland, though Bray was actually in Maryland a relatively brief time. But both men took very seriously the Bishop of London's responsibilities for the Christian instruction of blacks and Indians in the new world. Blair's great accomplishment was of course the founding of the College of William and Mary, with its charter as in part a kind of Anglican seminary, in part a university for the liberal arts and sciences, and of course in part, through the Brafferton school, a center to educate Indians. Bray's accomplishments were through the charities he organized or inspired for Christian education.
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| Person ID |
I35 |
Booth Family |
| Last Modified |
22 Aug 2013 |
| Father |
BRAY James, b. Abt 1610 d. 24 Oct 1691, Middle Plantation, York County (Age ~ 81 years) |
| Mother |
GIBSON Angelica, b. 1634, James City County, Virginia d. 1663, Williamsburg, VA (Age 29 years) |
| Marriage |
1658 |
| Family ID |
F10 |
Group Sheet | Family Chart |
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| Event Map |
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 | Death - Bef 1732 - New Kent, New Kent County, VA |
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| Sources |
- [S164] William & Mary Quarterly...on file (Reliability: 2).
- [S197] Lonnie Baird records Letter from Jean Johnson.
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