Ebony and Ivy

by Craig Steven Wilder

  This odd rationalization of a human tragedy was made worse by President Stiles’s belief that any remaining social injustices would disappear with Native Americans and Africans, whose decline seemed inevitable. It was “God’s good providence,” the president continued, that the vanishing of nonwhite people would also erase the moral problem of dispossession and enslavement. Breaking with a long theological tradition, Stiles applied the curse of Ham to Indians too: “I rather consider the American Indians as Canaanites.” These were Noah’s least fortunate descendants, and their destruction proved God’s benevolence toward white people. Stiles fathered a new metaphor: the United States was “God’s American Israel.” Filled with allusions to superior blood and other suggestions of European supremacy, President Stiles’s sermon exposed the tight braiding of eighteenth-century natural rights philosophy, science, and theology. “Can we contemplate their present, and anticipate their future increase, and not be struck with astonishment to find ourselves in the midst of the fulfillment of the prophecy of Noah?”59

  White Christians had used their experiences and histories with Native Americans and Africans to assert their own divine privilege, and they were weaving these same ideas into universal and dangerous “truths” about the nature of human populations. In the decades after the war, hundreds of thousands of white people moved into Iroquoia and western Pennsylvania.60 They surrounded and segregated the last of the Indian nations as they laid claim to new entitlements.

  Samuel Kirkland also returned. In 1791 he authored a “Plan for Education for the Indians,” in which he proposed a college in Oneida to bring several youth from the Six Nations each year for instruction and then return them to their communities as teachers. The original design included Indian trustees and white and Indian resident students. In a letter to Joseph Brant, Kirkland detailed the benefits of the school for the Iroquois. However, after it was chartered in 1793, Hamilton Oneida Academy—named for Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton, a trustee and a veteran of Washington’s army—enrolled “only one eight-year-old Indian boy.” The Indian grammar school floundered and went several years without a teacher, which Kirkland blamed on a lack of funds. The secretary of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge later begged Rev. Kirkland to explain the failure of Indian education at Dartmouth and Hamilton. “Indeed we are still left very much in doubt whether any efforts however ably or zealously conducted will have effect in any considerable degree to change the character of the Indian Tribes,” the Reverend John Kemp regretfully admitted from Edinburgh. His questions were less an attack on Kirkland and Wheelock than a reflection of the SSPCK’s frustration with Indian missions. Perhaps, Kemp queried, the attempt to civilize indigenous peoples was itself destroying them. Perhaps, he probed in even more dire terms, “it is true as has been strongly asserted to us, that they decline so fast in number that there is reason to apprehend a speedy extinction of the race.” By 1799 Hamilton had fifty students—but not one Indian.61

  Joseph Brant by Gilbert Stuart

  SOURCE: Fenimore Art Museum

  My work being done and my mind at ease, I lay hold

  of the first opportunity of spending an hour with you,

  & communicating to you, a little of the satisfaction I

  feel myself. The Day before yesterday I was dub’d a

  Doct[o]r. with all the form & ceremony necessary

  upon the occasion. Doct[o]rs Monro senior & junior,

  with Doct[o]r Cullen were in all my private Tryals.

  —DR. SAMUEL BARD, 1765

  Once a stable for horses,

  Now a College for asses.

  —GRAFFITI, COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS

  AND SURGEONS, CA. 1820

  Have they not, after having reduced us to the deplorable

  condition of slaves under their feet, held us up as

  descending originally from the tribes of Monkeys or

  Orang-Outangs? … Has Mr. Jefferson declared to the

  world, that we are inferior to the whites, both in the

  endowments of our bodies and our minds?

  —DAVID WALKER, 1829

  Chapter 6

  “All Students & All Americans”

  The Colonial Roots of Racial Science

  Decades before he became president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson contemplated the future of the lands beyond the western boundary of white settlement. After his inauguration, President Jefferson hired his Virginia neighbor Meriwether Lewis as his private secretary, and the two men secretly got to work on a plan to map the West. Jefferson had earlier turned to the American Philosophical Society (APS) in Philadelphia, where his interest in a continental expedition bore no fruit. Having personally taught Lewis to survey, President Jefferson now dispatched his emissary to the APS for a crash course in natural history, botany, geography, and medicine. There was certainly no better site in the United States to prepare for the expedition. Benjamin Smith Barton, the younger Caspar Wistar, and Benjamin Rush trained Lewis and set the scientific and medical agenda for the expedition. Lewis also took guidance from practical experts on Indian affairs, navigation, and cartography, including Andrew Ellicott of Lancaster, an experienced surveyor who had traversed the Mississippi. In Indiana he joined up with Captain William Clark and, predictably, his enslaved black man York. Lewis and Clark added other people along the way, including Sacagawea, an enslaved Shoshone woman. At roughly the same time, Jefferson authorized his minister to France, Robert Livingston, to negotiate the purchase of New Orleans. By the spring of 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte’s desperation for money and his inability to recapture Haiti after its revolution allowed the United States to secure the whole of the Louisiana Territory for $15 million, pennies per acre. Lewis officiated at the transfer ceremonies in St. Louis the following year.1

  THE AMERICAN INVASION OF EUROPE

  The academy refined and legitimated the social ideas that supported territorial expansion, a process that transformed the people of the new nation from revolutionaries to imperialists. It advanced the project through which the United States extended its borders across the North American mainland. Jefferson had access to researchers who were a recent addition to American society. Colonial students had been crowding the medical and science programs of Europe for two generations, carrying the political and social beliefs and desires of their communities to the intellectual centers of the Atlantic world. Students from North America crafted a science that justified expansionism and slavery—a science that generated broad claims to expertise over colored people and thrived upon unlimited access to nonwhite bodies. They did not abandon the search for truth; they redefined truth. Atlantic intellectuals had deployed science to prove the prophecies of the Bible, and now, with similar vigor, they pursued the visible and manifest truths of the material world.

  Race did not come from science and theology; it came to science and theology. Racial ideas were born in the colonial world, in the brutal and deadly processes of empire building. Science and theology deferred to race, twisting and warping under the weight of an increasingly popular and sweeping understanding of human affairs that tied the social fates of different populations to perceived natural capacities. Atlantic intellectuals operated under social and economic constraints that limited and distorted the knowable. The greatest accomplishments of the Enlightenment occurred within the inhumane and destructive realities of colonialism.

  Students from New England and the Mid-Atlantic, Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland, and the Caribbean were common at Oxford and Cambridge in England, Trinity in Dublin, and Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland. In 1695 the Barbadians Allan Lyde and Richard Carter, the son of James Carter, arrived at Cambridge, and six years later Richard Salter sent his son Timothy from Barbados to Cambridge. The second-generation Richard Henry Lee of Virginia—”Richard the Scholar”—studied at Oxford. A biographer adds that he afterward made a habit of keeping “his notes in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.” Fewer colonial students went farther north, to Ab
erdeen University in Scotland, but, as with Edinburgh and Glasgow, many of its graduates left for the British colonies. In 1729 Andrew Rosse took his degree from the University of Glasgow, where his father taught and his brother became dean of faculty, and set up in Virginia as a merchant.2

  There were enough Americans at the University of Edinburgh to found a Virginia Club. Before the American Revolution, fifty colonial doctors belonged to the Royal Medical Society and colonists had even served in the presidency. In 1754 William Shippen Jr. of Pennsylvania graduated from the College of New Jersey (Princeton); he then left to study medicine in Edinburgh and London. He was part of a remarkable North American migration to Scotland. The political and institutional cultures of Scotland were decidedly antimonarchical, which attracted American students as the conflict between the colonies and England intensified. Scottish migrations to North America had familiarized the colonies with Scotland’s intellectual and religious cultures. Classes at Scottish universities were usually in English, and the colleges had shifted instruction from the tutorial system to a more liberal arrangement of fee-based lectures and demonstrations. Students could select the most popular professors and subjects, repeat courses, and pay for tutors when needed. A single diary entry reveals quite a bit about Shippen’s education: “Rose at 6 operated till 8, breakfasted till 9, dissected until 2, dined till 3, dissected till 5. Lecture till 7, operated till 9, supped till 10 then bed.”3

  Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia was smitten with the science course at Edinburgh, which he viewed as the intellectual gateway to countless fields of knowledge. “I have now ye Honour of being a member of the Medical Society,” he boasted to Jonathan Smith, a schoolmate in the New Jersey class of 1760, “an institution which was founded in ye Year 1737 by some students of Physic [physiology and pathology], and is now so reputable that most of ye Professors in ye College are members of it.” Rush studied with the famed anatomist Alexander Monro, listened to debates on innovations in medical science, and gloried in the faculty decision to make the examinations and graduation requirements more numerous and rigorous, which “will tend to keep up the Reputation of the College. It[’]s now in ye Zenith of its Glory, the whole world I believe does not afford a Sett of greater men than are at present united in ye College of Edinburgh.” Hugh Williamson, a member of the first class of the College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania), also studied at Edinburgh. He took a range of offerings, including anatomy and surgery, theoretical medicine, and materia medica, or pharmacology. Like other young men of means, he sought additional training in England and finished his education at the University of Utrecht, Holland.4

  Samuel Bard braved the dangers of the Seven Years’ War to cross the ocean and pursue medical training. When he finally reached Scotland, he informed his parents—the New York City surgeon John Bard and Suzanne Valleau—that he was safe, had rented a small comfortable room, and was taking meals “with several agre[e]able young Gentlemen, all students & all Americans.” He later reported that he was spending his evenings revising notes from a chemistry course with the renowned William Cullen and diagramming the medical and scientific equipment being employed and refined at the university. A graduate of Edinburgh and a physician, Cadwallader Colden had brought John Bard to New York on the recommendation of Benjamin Franklin. Colden later hosted Samuel for a summer at Coldengham, his grant in Ulster County, New York, where Jane Colden, the daughter of the councilor, tutored the boy in botany. In 1765 Bard completed his thesis on the medical uses of opium—volunteering with his friends for his own experiments. His father then sent him to polish his skills in London and Paris.5

  Cadwallader Colden, acting governor of New York, by Matthew Pratt

  SOURCE: New York State Museum

  This was not a passive transfer of information from European intellectuals to colonial students. American scholars were expanding knowledge in ways that transformed Atlantic academies. Benjamin Smith Barton of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was raised in his father’s Anglican mission among the Lenape. During his term at Edinburgh, Benjamin Barton offered lectures on the indigenous peoples of North America and albinism in the colonies. He later became a member of the Royal Medical Society. Samuel Bard proudly forwarded “a Copy of the Papers which I read before the Medical Society this Winter” to his father with apologies for any errors in “the first Fruits of my medical labours.”6

  The colonies contained valuable information. Cadwallader Colden’s interests in science and Native American cultures combined in his studies of botany. Native communities cultivated medicinal herbs and plants, and by the eighteenth century white colonists were actively cataloguing Indian remedies. Descriptions of the colonies and travel accounts regularly included natural history and Indian pharmacology. John Wesley, founder of Methodism, encountered Creek and Cherokee medicine during his brief mission in Savannah, Georgia, and then published Primitive Physic, a discourse on natural medicine and healing, upon his return to England. Dr. Colden’s extensive political experience with the Iroquois Confederacy had given him opportunities to study the treatment of disease and injury in Native communities, Indian materia medica, and regional natural history. In February 1764 the Edinburgh botany faculty awarded Samuel Bard their gold medal.7

  Colonial intellectuals shared ideas and data acquired in Africa and the Americas. European academies were synthesizing much of this material. William Byrd II of Virginia went to England when he was seven years old. The son of a wealthy Virginia planter, Byrd was there to acquire a classical education: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, music, logic, history, and mathematics. After a short return to North America in 1696, the young man gave a presentation before the Royal Society in London on an eleven-year-old black boy from Virginia who had been brought to England. Born with a pigmentation disorder, the boy developed irregular patches of discolored skin on his neck and chest. The affected areas increased as he aged. Byrd determined that the “wonderfully White” spots, at least as pale as “the Skin of the fairest Lady,” were not the same as the skin of white people, as “the Skin of a Negro is much thicker.” White skin appeared more alive, he concluded, while noting that the boy was otherwise healthy and would likely lose all of his color in time. The Royal Society later selected Byrd as a fellow; he was the first Virginian to receive that honor. In 1716 Cotton Mather informed the Royal Society that his slave Onesimus had taught him inoculation as practiced in Africa. Mather convinced Dr. Zabdiel Boylston of Boston to test the procedure, which Boylston did using his teenage son and his two slaves.8

  The rise of scientific racism—the attempt to discover the social destinies and identify the assumed divisions of human populations—required Americans. Alexander Monro, Alexander Monro Jr., William Cullen, and Andrew Duncan made few references to complexion and race in their science lectures at Edinburgh. Early medical and science faculties generally taught under the assumption that their research would verify Christian monogenism—the belief that all human beings descended from a single pair. It was frequently colonial students taking degrees in Scotland and England—as in France and Holland—who searched for other answers to the demographic puzzles of their world. Americans produced essays, dissertations, lectures, and letters that mark the triumph of race over science. “The present era will be famous for a Revolution in Physic [medicine],” Rush predicted, and American colonists were catalysts.9

  The collected experiences and testimonies of colonists and European travelers accelerated investigations into the history of human beings, and raised new questions about the range of physical diversity between populations, the influences upon culture and character, the origins and ancestry of language, and the determinants of longevity. Americans struggled to discover the spiritual and material causes of intelligence, culture, character, and social fate. Colonial students were complicating, multiplying, and offering answers to these questions.

  SHADE-SHIFTING JEWS AND INDIAN CURIOS

  The spectrum of skin color corresponds to climatic variation, explained the Re
verend Samuel Stanhope Smith in 1787, and the logic of God’s creation manifests in human adaptations to nature. His influential treatise on complexion, delivered before the American Philosophical Society, defended monogenism against emergent theological and scientific arguments about the separate origins of varied populations of people. Not just the color of our skin but our carriage, manners, appearance, and intellect demonstrate our environmental destiny, Rev. Smith expounded. His belief that color was a reaction to environment affirmed his faith in the shared creation of mankind. Meaningless, brute work deepens color, distorts human features, and dulls the senses, he continued. In savage society, people lack the knowledge and freedom to protect themselves from the punishments of nature, intensifying their complexions. The living conditions, diet, and habits of poor and heathen peoples add to their swarthiness. In civilized society, color relents as one ascends the social ladder. Beauty too is biased toward the higher orders of society, since leisure encourages a concern for the aesthetic; thus, physical attractiveness is more frequently expressed in fair skin.10

  The laboring classes are invariably darker and more primitive in their features and gait than the upper classes. Black skin differs from white, Smith allowed, but only in that it announced the failure to realize natural and social potential. Each station of life, everywhere, carries corresponding degrees of exposure to natural and climatic conditions, the cumulative effects of which color the social geography of human history. Africans, Asians, and Americans are darker than Europeans; however, the most civilized nations in Europe are fairer than its less advanced nations, and within the most progressive nations the elite are whiter than the commoners.11 The gaps between the palest and the most sable peoples, the brightest and the dullest, the most civilized and the most savage are real, but they are neither eternal nor impassable.