Ebony and Ivy

by Craig Steven Wilder

  Such environmental arguments, particularly the assertion that complexion was unstable, bolstered religious liberalism. Rev. Smith was certain that “no example can carry with greater force on this subject than that of the Jews,” whose religion kept their family lines braided and largely unfrayed although they were scattered across the globe. Jews were “marked with the colours” of every nation despite being descended from a single people and intermarrying over centuries. Their complexions conformed to the climatic realities of their locations in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. A generation later, Hugh Williamson invoked the black and white Jews of Asia to explain the skin color of Native Americans. These works rested upon a century of research. In the early 1700s Cotton Mather had treated color as an environmental reaction to dismiss the idea that it should operate as a barrier to the Christianization of enslaved Africans. By midcentury Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, examined the Jews and Jewish history to understand how environment influenced complexion for his encyclopedic compilation, Histoire Naturelle.12

  “There is an obvious difference between him and his fellow-students in the largeness of the mouth, and thickness of the lips, in the elevation of the cheek, in the darkness of the complexion, and the contour of the face,” Rev. Smith wrote of Quequedegatha (George Morgan White Eyes), a fifteen-year-old Lenape scholar who matriculated in 1779. Professor of moral philosophy and vice president at New Jersey, Smith succeeded to the presidency upon the death of his father-in-law, John Witherspoon. Professor Smith estimated that the Indian student “is much lighter than the complexion of the native savage,” as he had been losing color since his arrival on campus. The boy remained darker than his classmates primarily because his entrance into Christian society came after the age of seven, when his physical characteristics had already begun to set. “But these differences are sensibly diminishing,” the minister said, and one could observe Quequedegatha’s color and features seeking the standard of his peers.13

  By animating human complexion, Smith sought to reconcile volatile ideas about the human family. Mounting information about human populations, the spectrum of language and culture, and phenotypic variation destabilized knowledge about color forged in the prior two centuries. The expansion of the African slave trade and African slavery, along with the devastation of Amerindian nations, seemed to reveal the group meanings and social consequences of such dissimilarities. Edward Long’s influential History of Jamaica concluded that “the White and the Negroe are two distinct species” and specifically rejected the idea that skin color was primarily a consequence of environment. By correlating complexion and climate, Rev. Smith accommodated data on the increasingly complicated human family while respecting the Judeo-Christian belief in single origin. He also made the marker of civility achievable for nonwhite people, although his argument did nothing to decouple the association between Europe and civilization.14

  A leading theologian embracing science to rescue Christian monogenism provides an enlightening peek into the social processes through which knowledge gets produced. Eighteenth-century colleges were the primary sites for processing growing and discordant bodies of information about human beings, an occupation that marshaled the expertise of theologians and scientists. Scholars struggled—and at times competed—to craft coherent explanations for the diversity of the world’s peoples. Professor Smith both generated new ideas and refined existing theories about Indian peoples and human color in his APS address.

  The rise of scientific racism, like theological racism, required interventions in the academic and intellectual realms, from the passive distortions of unreliable and biased sources to the active invasions of slave traders and slave owners seeking intellectual proofs for their suspicions and assertions about the nature of color. Lamenting the lack of trustworthy conclusions about race after two centuries of conquest and enslavement, Thomas Jefferson turned to science, praying that “the subject may be submitted to the Anatomical knife, to the Optical glasses, to analysis by fire, or by solvents.”15

  Rev. Smith had a terrible task in a world adorned with Indian skeletons. Collecting and cataloguing aboriginal peoples had become an Atlantic industry. At the end of the seventeenth century, Cotton Mather cracked the jaw off the skull of Metacomet, or King Philip, the Wampanoag sachem who nearly conquered the New England settlements in the seventeenth century. Mather’s neighbor, the jurist Samuel Sewall, better known for authoring an early antislavery tract, sent Native American scalps to the London doctor and researcher Charles Morton. Jefferson also collected and exchanged human remains. When he attended William and Mary, Brafferton Hall still housed the Indian College, and Native Americans were about 10 percent of the student body. To satisfy his own interests about the nature of indigenous peoples, Jefferson ventured off his plantation to neighboring Indian mounds, where he ordered his slaves to break into graves. Long-buried skulls crumbled in his hands as he searched for evidence for his speculations. In 1779 he established a professorship in anatomy and medicine at William and Mary, beginning its medical program. He later personally designed the anatomy theater for the University of Virginia.16

  Throughout the Atlantic world, planters, slave traders, soldiers, explorers, merchants, and missionaries were producing, by accident and by design, the material for an emerging science. “They are the best temper’d People, and make better Slaves than any of the Rest,” ship’s surgeon T. Aubrey concluded of one of four subgroups of Africans. He described these people as being “a natural Black” color and “lusty, strong, vigorous, chearful, merry, affable, amorous, kind, docile, faithful, and easily diverted from Wrath.” In contrast were the groups with thin, short black hair and “dark russet” skin who made for terrible slaves because they were “naturally sad, sluggish, sullen, peevish, forward, spiteful, fantastical, envious, self-conceited, proper at nothing, naturally Cowards, very indecent, and nasty in all their Transactions.” Merchants, officers, and crewmen often wrote and spoke of Africans with such authority and certainty. Those of a more “yellow” complexion were also to be avoided, a natural tendency to laziness and stupidity unfitting them for any useful service. “Chocolate Colour[ed]” peoples with short brown hair possessed an enviable blend of independence and bravery but were prone to certain chronic ailments.17

  When the Scottish philosopher David Hume contemplated human variety, he was using these kinds of sources. Historically people had managed to rise from the lowest orders of society, but “there are Negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity.” Dismissing rumors of a learned black Jamaican, Hume countered that this man was likely receiving exaggerated praise for modest achievements, “like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.” Race required the creation of a new global intellectual authority. Edward Long cited Hume in his 1774 history of Jamaica, concluding that science had shown an absence of intelligence in Africans.18

  Thomas Jefferson agreed, adding that the most celebrated black people in his lifetime—including the young poet Phillis Wheatley—had only managed a poor aping of the genius of the white race. “Religion, indeed, has produced Phyllis Whately; but it could not produce a poet,” he derisively commented. “The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.” Nature, not slavery, explained the intellectual inferiority of the Negro, Jefferson continued, borrowing directly from Hume and Long. Slavery in antiquity was harsher, but the most oppressed classes of ancient Rome and Greece authored great prose and verse. His condemnation of the enslavement of Indians as “an inhuman practice” was rooted in his sense of their potential for civilization. Even their rude carvings and rough drawings showed innate understandings of design and artistry. They possessed brilliance, “which only wants cultivation.” Jefferson argued that the 1774 speech of Logan, a Mingo (Ohio Iroquois), rivaled the speeches of Cicero in its eloquence, and Indians “astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory.” In contrast, he continued, “never yet could I find that a black h
ad uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never seen even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.”19

  The Virginian judged black people ugly and artless. Beauty and passion manifested in red and white skin, but blackness was an “eternal monotony,” an “immovable veil” that covered the senses and expressions of African peoples. Jefferson’s extended analysis of the bodily functions and secretions, odors, emotions and natural reactions, physicality, intelligence, and social relations of black people was borrowed from Edward Long, who had used similar arguments in deciding that black people constituted a separate species from white people, one more akin to nonhuman primates. Jefferson advanced his allegations of African brutishness with a base assertion of “the preference of the Oran-ootan for the black women over those of his own species.” Long had contended that orangutans displayed basic emotions and a rudimentary intelligence, which, he added, approximated the capacities of Africans. Male orangutans “conceive a passion for the Negroe women,” the doctor elaborated, “such as inclines one animal towards another of the same species.”20

  Long and Jefferson used anatomical metaphors throughout their respective works. Eighteenth-century theorists refined evidence and arguments from a broad range of sources, often importing medical and biological jargon to form and address cultural and social questions. The Comte de Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, a primary source for later researchers, assumed expertise over everything from the appearance, intelligence, and odors of varied African populations to their moral and cultural proximity to the European norm.21 The hunt to find race catalyzed a social science that could discover facts in even the casual observations of travelers.

  Atlantic colleges took these myriad pieces of social information and forged “truths” about human difference. The merits of a college could be reasonably measured by its collection of human remains, a good catalogue of skulls, skeletons, and skins being a considerable advantage in a competitive academic market. The January 1764 fire that destroyed Harvard Hall took with it one of the earliest academic museums:

  The entire library of five thousand volumes, excepting some two hundred that were lent out at the time, was consumed; the whole philosophical apparatus, the portraits of presidents, benefactors … were burnt up; the stuffed animals and birds, model of the Boston man-of-war, piece of tanned negro’s hide, “Skull of a Famous Indian Warrior,” and in fact the entire “Repositerry of Curiosities,” were seen no more.

  New Hampshire governor Benning Wentworth—a Harvard graduate, who later endowed Dartmouth College—and the New Hampshire legislature helped to rebuild the collection.22

  The profession and hobby of collecting and exhibiting Indians spread alongside the perception of Native Americans as defeated and extinct peoples. If Dartmouth ever was an Indian college, it ceased being that when the administration began warehousing Indian remains and taking in donations to enhance its human collections. In 1797 the trustees established a medical school, and the following year Dr. Nathan Smith began lectures in Dartmouth Hall. (Smith later left to help establish the medical school at Yale College, where Bishop George Berkeley’s earlier gift included a supply of texts on anatomy, surgery, and medicine.) He built a modern medical program at Dartmouth and instituted instructional dissections. “Doct[or Alexander] Ramsay is now engaged in making an Anatomical museum for Mr. Professor Smith,” Lyman Spalding, a medical student, reported in November 1808. “We are all obliged to labour with our own hands at these preparations; in fact the rooms are an immense workshop, you see every kind of anatomical manufacturing going on.” Trained at Edinburgh, Ramsay had already produced a hundred anatomical preparations and instituted a course of anatomical demonstrations. “He is all fire and animation while speaking, chaining down your attention and carrying you along with him convincing you of the truth of his doctrines by demonstrative facts,” continued Spalding, who was excited to use his hands rather than “hearing dismal psalm tune lectures.” Amherst and other nineteenth-century colleges also established Indian museums. In Philadelphia, the scientist Samuel Morton gathered the largest assemblage of skulls on the continent.23

  Colonial scholars returned from Europe and laid the foundations of American science. Samuel Bard began advocating an American academy of science similar to the royal societies of Britain and France. It was not an attempt to mirror Europe; in fact, Bard was motivated by a concern that Americans had too reflexively deferred to European science and too uncritically accepted the conclusions of European researchers. Besides the danger of learning through “hearsay,” Bard cautioned, the Americans needed a science and philosophy that addressed their “peculiar” natural and environmental realities. He predicted that scientific independence would improve the intellectual products of Europe by testing them against the realities of the Americas, give rise to new knowledge, and result in “new truths [being] discovered.” Bard’s generation created this continental science. William George Nice, a Virginian who later studied under Benjamin Smith Barton at Philadelphia, heard lectures that encompassed the history of European medicine, the medical theories of and personal anecdotes about leading European scientists such as the Monros and Cullen, and correctives on this science from American researchers who had practiced in the West Indies and mainland North America and now constituted the primary authorities on color.24

  By that time, Atlantic intellectuals had transformed nonwhite peoples into human curios, whose very bodies held answers to the puzzles of society. Anatomy had generated an intellectual revolution, and the coldly intimate act of dissecting colored corpses demonstrated the social power of the academy and the temporal reach of science.

  DISSECTING EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY THOUGHT

  “For this purpose any healthy penis will do,” instructed Andrew Fyfe, “but large ones are generally preferred.” His primer sought to improve instruction by locating specimens that lent themselves to dissection and exhibition. “Select the hand of an aged female … that has died of a lingering disease,” reads one preparation. “The liver of a child is to be preferred to that of an adult,” goes another, “it occupying much less room.” He offered twenty-one different preparations for a fetus. Old alcoholics had the best kidneys for laboratory and classroom study, the Edinburgh anatomist continued. “Still-born children … afford a number of beautiful preparations,” he noted, while assuring students that a variety of kidneys also guaranteed a compelling public display.25

  The American invasion corresponded to the ascendance of anatomical studies in the European academy. In the early fourteenth century, Mondino de Luzzi introduced instructional dissection at the University of Bologna (established 1088), where he held the chair in anatomy and surgery. By 1407 Parisian students could attend dissections, and the connections between anatomy, surgery, and medical science were firming. In Leiden and Amsterdam, Dutch surgeons raised the profile of their profession in part by establishing the value of medical dissection. In 1632 the young Rembrandt van Rijn painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, which was commissioned by the Amsterdam surgeons guild. By the early eighteenth century, anatomy was fully entrenched in the British universities.26 Anatomy transformed surgery into an art, and dissection became the foundation of medical instruction and research in Europe.

  As early as 1648 the Reverend John Eliot had observed that plantations needed anatomists to advance religious work among Indians by countering the powwows with science. The Puritan missionary recognized the strategic benefits of spreading European science and the social rewards of allowing colonial doctors to improve their skills. Eliot did not believe that dissection would discover eternal differences or racial divisions between Indians and Christians; rather, he may have been encouraged by a contemporaneous event. Giles Firmin, a graduate of Cambridge University who became a gentleman farmer and physician in Ipswich, Massachusetts, performed a dissection for students interested in medicine. Firmin’s anatomy lesson came just prior to Eliot’s call for instructional dissections. In the following century, the governo
rs of Harvard took up the task of promoting anatomy. In the summer of 1712 the trustees resolved to give the students the opportunity to dissect “once in four years Some Malefact[o]r” that the court could provide.27

  A half century later, Samuel Bard jealously informed his father that two Americans, William Shippen Jr. and John Morgan, were planning a Philadelphia medical school on the Scottish model. Shippen presented the trustees of the College of Philadelphia with recommendations from the Edinburgh faculty and an endorsement from Thomas Penn. Opened in 1765, it was the first medical school in the British colonies. The faculty consisted of Shippen’s contemporaries. Morgan, a graduate of Philadelphia, had apprenticed in a doctor’s office and completed a four-year term as a military doctor. Benjamin Smith Barton returned to Pennsylvania to become professor of natural history. Benjamin Rush, a native of the city, joined the Philadelphia faculty after he finished Edinburgh. Rush also enhanced his wealth through a marriage to Julia Stockton, daughter of the New Jersey jurist, landowner, and slaveholder Richard Stockton, later a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Stockton gave the couple the Mount Lucas estate and mansion near Princeton. Caspar Wistar, son of the affluent German immigrant and glassmaker, attended Philadelphia and then studied medicine at Edinburgh. Wistar returned to teach anatomy, chemistry, and surgery in the medical college, where he later served as a trustee.28

  But the success of medical colleges depended in part on their access to corpses, which raised the possibility of new uses for the bodies of subjugated peoples. The Philadelphia medical program began with Shippen’s lectures on anatomy in 1762. On November 16 Shippen commenced his anatomy course at the Pennsylvania State House. That year the Pennsylvania Hospital gave Shippen “the body of a negro, who had committed suicide.” Five years earlier, on April 9, 1757, Tom, a black man enslaved to Joseph Wharton, became the first patient to die at the hospital. The doctors drew up policies for handling corpses and expanding opportunities for dissection. Bodies from suicides and the corpses of criminals were soon being transferred directly to Shippen’s anatomical museum. The hospital also served large numbers of black patients, who became the material of its research program. Darius Sessions, a West Indies merchant and deputy governor, favored moving the College of Rhode Island (Brown) to Providence, a large town, to access the public library, excellent private collections, ample supplies and uninterrupted communications, and an abundance of physicians and anatomical authors who could enhance the students’ educations.29