Raised in a large Quaker family in Hempstead, Long Island, Mitchill reached his scientific conclusions in part through the pacifist and egalitarian impulses of his faith. Several months after the Whistelo verdict, Senator Mitchill emancipated Jenny Jiggins, a twenty-eight-year-old black woman. In 1811 he freed a black man, Ned. In June 1816 he released another black woman, Betsy, through the New York Manumission Society. The senator was not the only slaveholder at the trial. Mayor DeWitt Clinton, who sat in judgment, was born into a slaveholding family. Drs. Obsorn and Pascalis had extensive medical experience in the South and the Caribbean, and David Hosack and William Moore, both faculty at Columbia and Queens, and James Jay of Columbia all owned slaves.27
If European intellectuals—particularly British and French researchers—dominated the study of race in the emerging fields of anatomy, natural history, and anthropology, much of their evidence came from the observations and other productions of the individuals at the frontiers of Europe’s contact with Africa, the Americas, and Asia, including slave owners and slave traders. “New World” students carried a wealth of knowledge. While Scotland exercised broad influence over the rise of American science, Scots were a minority of the student body at Edinburgh, where one of every six students was from the Americas. Colonial students abounded in the science and medicine courses, and Americans were generating much of the new scholarship on medicine, pharmacology, and disease in the colonial world.28
RACE AND THE LIBERATION OF THE ACADEMY
There was a political incentive emboldening this science: to the extent that science supplanted theology, it eroded the remnants of ecclesiastical control over the academy. But if science could be used to displace theology by claiming a superior position for understanding human history and social relations, then it could also be impressed into the service of slavery. In fact, the politics of slavery hastened the ascent of the academy in public affairs. Even at the height of the scientific challenge to slavery, that opening was well lighted. Judeo-Christian theologians used the curse of Ham to evade the conflict between their inescapable belief in the common origins of mankind and their support for, or acquiescence to, the social tyranny of modern slavery. The journey for scientists was never that complicated.
Scientists generally believed that the social hierarchies of the world would prove as natural as the common origins of all peoples. They assumed the inferiority of colored bodies while closely guarding their commitment to the basic humanity of all people. During the Whistelo proceedings, Felix Pascalis argued that all racial mixtures tended toward equilibrium—meaning either a complexion between those of the mother and father or the balancing of complexion with other features. As an example, Dr. Pascalis proudly claimed a relative, the Haitian general André Rigaud, a dark-skinned mulatto, who also “had the features and form of a white man—was very handsome and well made.” The physician’s belief in the existence and superiority of white features did not require an abandonment of his faith in a shared genesis. He sat in elite intellectual company. Georges Cuvier isolated three races—Caucasian, Mongolian, and Negro—with the first of these dominating the cultural and intellectual history of humankind, and producing the “handsomest [people] on earth.”29
This construction of the sciences allowed humankind to have a single origin but varied progress; thus a contemporary racial hierarchy was consistent with a single genesis. The first graduate of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, John Wakefield Francis, received the honor of being invited to immediately partner in practice with his mentor, David Hosack. A key witness in Whistelo, Hosack was among the most accomplished physicians and scientists in the nation. Francis had excelled as a student at Columbia, where he graduated in 1809. Two years later he earned his medical degree at Physicians and Surgeons, and the following year he added a master’s degree from Columbia. In 1813, just before the city’s two medical faculties united, Francis was appointed professor of the institutes of medicine and materia medica. He later served as professor of obstetrics and forensic medicine at Rutgers.30
Dr. John Wakefield Francis
SOURCE: Library of Congress
One of the most instructive moments in his career came while he was an undergraduate at Columbia. Just months before the Whistelo trial, John Francis had presented the findings from his undergraduate research in a paper titled “On the Bodily and Mental Inferiority of the Negro.” Francis read his thesis at the inaugural meeting of the Medical and Surgical Society of the University of the State of New York, which comprised the medical faculties of Columbia College and Physicians and Surgeons and was charged with regulating and governing medical education. The medical society included at least half of the Whistelo witnesses.31
TRADING SCIENCE
The transition to a more focused scientific racism required not a leap but a casual step. The institutionalization of medicine—the organization of science faculties and medical colleges in the colonies—happened as slave owners, planters, land speculators, and Atlantic merchants began sponsoring scientific research. The families who paid for the establishment of medical schools and science faculties also oversaw those developments. The founding of medical colleges on American campuses brought science, particularly the human sciences, under the political and financial dominion of slave traders, slave owners, and their surrogates. The class influences upon science were apparent during the Whistelo trial. The court invited experts whose educational credentials, professional titles and appointments, and institutional affiliations mapped the half-century rise of academic science in North America. That deference was, in fact, a fair reflection of how fully science had been tamed. As slaveholders and slave traders paid for medical colleges and science faculties, they also imposed subtle and severe controls on science.
As Atlantic slavery underwrote the production of knowledge, it distorted the knowable. “When a governing board sat down to consider the affairs of the colonial college,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “there was usually assembled at the table a group of men who were accustomed to seeing each other frequently at the counting houses, in each other’s homes, and in the vestries of churches.” As noted earlier, John Morgan, a founder of the medical school at Philadelphia, traveled to the West Indies to make connections and raise money. The cofounder of the medical college, William Shippen Jr., had extensive land interests in Pennsylvania, and was tied through marriage to regional dynasties including the Livingstons of New York and New Jersey. On April 3, 1762, Shippen had wed Alice Lee of the prominent Virginia plantation family.32
The New York surgeon John Bard, president of the local medical society, secured his family’s economic position by investing in land and slaves. His son Samuel’s education at King’s College (Columbia) and Edinburgh was a departure from his career path. Surgeons traditionally received their training as apprentices, while physicians studied the arts and sciences at universities. The two professions were also divided by specialty: surgeons performing external and mechanical treatments, such as bleedings and amputations, and physicians focusing on internal medicine. Dr. Bard fully supported his son’s professionalization, offering suggestions for scientific and medical reading, and lovingly supervising Samuel’s study habits, dress and manners, social activities, and courses. He gave Samuel detailed advice on courting a wife. He sent money for his expenses, encouraged him to seize every educational opportunity while abroad, and, self-conscious about their colonial status, reminded him of the importance of “appearing like a Gentleman.”33
While Samuel Bard was studying in Scotland, his father invested in Hyde Park, a 3,600-acre plantation along more than three miles of the Hudson River in Dutchess County, New York, with a resident overseer “to support his the said John Bard[’]s slaves in good and sufficient Cloathing and Bedding.” When Samuel Bard returned to New York City to establish its first medical college, he turned to merchants for support. His son William eventually married Catherine Cruger, the daughter of the St. Croix slave trader Nicholas Cruger, and his d
aughter Eliza married John McVickar, professor of political economy at Columbia and heir of a West Indies and China trader whose ships carried the products of slavery and opium. William Bard became a founder of the New York Life Insurance and Trust Company. In 1860 William and Catherine’s son John Bard founded St. Stephen’s College (Bard) as a preparatory school for General Theological Seminary in New York City. Bard donated a chapel and land for the campus. Columbia eventually honored John McVickar and Samuel Bard with the memorial McVickar Professorship of Political Economy and the Bard Professorship of the Practice of Medicine.34
The son of a humble Maine family, Isaac Royall used his early maritime experience to launch serial slave trading ventures. He bought an Antiguan sugar plantation and entered elite society. In 1737 the Royalls returned to New England with twenty-seven enslaved black people and built an estate in Medford—on the site of the original grant of Governor John Winthrop—just a few miles north of Cambridge. Ten Hills Farm (a portion of which is now the campus of Tufts University) included a grand main house and slave quarters. In 1739 Isaac junior inherited the estate and increased the holdings; more than sixty enslaved black people worked Ten Hills during his tenure. In his 1781 will, Royall bequeathed two thousand acres to Harvard College to provide a perpetual fund for a professor of law and a professor of anatomy and physic. The following year the trustees used that gift to establish Harvard Medical College under John Warren, anatomy and surgery; Benjamin Waterhouse, physic; and Aaron Dexter, chemistry and materia medica. In 1817 the governors belatedly established Harvard Law School.35
American science evolved with American slavery. Beginning in 1780, just before the establishment of Harvard Medical School, businessmen and bankers began dislodging academics and clergy on the Harvard Corporation. That change came as the officers tried to stabilize revenues during the American Revolution. A growing ideological struggle between Unitarians and Trinitarians for control of Harvard spilled into the legislature. The predominantly Unitarian merchant class increased its financial support for the college and consolidated their control with the installation of John Thornton Kirkland, an in-law of the wealthy Cabot family, as president. Merchants financed research and education, and they oversaw the new academic initiatives. The wealthy West Indies trader John McLean endowed the Massachusetts General Hospital and the McLean Asylum for the Insane. He also created the McLean Professorship of Ancient and Modern History at Harvard. In 1782 James Perkins of Boston sailed on a ship owned by his mother to Saint-Domingue, where he joined in a slaving partnership. Perkins later brought his younger brothers Thomas and Samuel into the trade. The Perkinses were nearly killed at the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, and James fled back to Boston, where he again entered the slave trade. That business allowed him to fund the Perkins Professorship in Astronomy and Mathematics at Harvard.36
Again, the sources of such generosity mattered. In the decade before the Revolution, John Bard continued investing in lands and slaves, including a black man named Jamaica and a child named Cuffy, whom he included in a 1765 lease. They were among the innumerable enslaved people whose bodies, labor, and lives paid for the rise of Atlantic science. Just months after Harvard opened its medical school with the Royall bequest, “Belinda, an African,” recorded the torments of her life after being captured and sold into American slavery. “Fifty years her faithful hands have been compelled to ignoble servitude, for the benefit of Isaac Royall,” reads her February 14, 1783, petition to the Massachusetts legislature. Seeking support from the Royall estate, the enslaved woman’s appeal reminded the court that her work had augmented the Royalls’ fortune. Now more than seventy years old, she had been exploited every moment of her life since being snatched from West Africa by “men whose faces were like the moon.” The aged woman was struggling to find a way to maintain herself and her sickly daughter. A week later the General Court allotted Belinda (Royall) a yearly stipend of about £15.37
“Is nothing to be allowed for the feelings of the mind?” the Irish jurist William Preston eloquently begged. “Are the negroes such mere machines, indeed, that exemption from death and torture, and the necessary sustenance of animal duration are sufficient to their happiness?” Those simple moral questions were difficult for many people in the Americas and Europe to answer.38
The conceit of science could and did shift from correcting theology’s logical sins to claiming the superior position for legitimating the dominant civilization. Within decades of the Whistelo trial, race researchers were actively questioning the unity of humankind. In little time, the political and economic weight of slavery’s defenders, beliefs about the inferiority of black people that under-girded inquiries into the nature of mankind, and the fragility of the scientific defense of monogenism combined to doom African Americans to a scientific verdict as harsh and irreversible as that received at the hands of theologians.
THE REGIONAL SPECIFICITY OF KNOWLEDGE
The North-South divide, the sectional crisis, is not a particularly useful template for explaining the course of science or the behavior of college faculties and governors in the antebellum nation. Academics both were conscripted into these political conflicts and searched for opportunities to apply science to social questions. Eighteenth-century race researchers had largely believed that science could verify Christian monogenism, but nineteenth-century scientists increasingly held that their research would discover the impassable biological distance between the races. Academic science lunged toward polygenism: the theory that the races of humankind had separate origins. Such ideas gained popularity in pre–Civil War colleges, North and South. There were certainly distinct regional strategies and preferences for deploying science in politics; however, throughout the antebellum nation, intellectuals were largely striving toward a single goal: a science that proved the inferiority of the Negro and thereby quieted the moral speculations and political agitation of abolitionists, race agnostics, and foreign critics. That ambition alone constituted a revolution within the profession.
Moral philosophers such as Adam Smith of Glasgow and the controversial David Hume of Edinburgh had dominated the intellectual culture of Scotland during Benjamin Rush’s student days. The cooperation of theologians and scientists in the greater national project of modernization distinguished Scotland within the European Enlightenment. A vibrant dialogue between theology and science shaped the Scottish Enlightenment and benefited from the mingling of theologians and scientists in learned societies.39 Moral questions influenced the course of scientific investigation.
Scottish students ventured out to study in the centers of European science. Almost a thousand Scots had enrolled at Leiden in the century before the establishment of the Edinburgh medical college. Scottish theologians encouraged the growth of the science faculties, cultivated the medical programs, and helped give direction to science. By the close of the eighteenth century, medicine was the largest academic program at Edinburgh, and medical missions—linking science and evangelism to address human needs—were among its leading vocations. James Ramsay enrolled at King’s College, Aberdeen, and then studied medicine in London. In 1762 he sailed to St. Kitts, where he practiced medicine and where his antislavery convictions were born. When he returned almost two decades later, Ramsay published a thorough exposé of the brutality and immorality of slavery in the British possessions in which he also countered the emerging racist defenses of slavery from intellectuals such as David Hume.40
Dr. Benjamin Rush
SOURCE: University Archives, University of Pennsylvania
A confidence that theology and science had a common social purpose also convinced Rush that the moral currents of human society were converging to end African slavery. “The abolition of domestic Slavery is not a Utopian Scheme,” he promised. He saw the institution faltering under its own economic inefficiencies and growing public hostility.41
The idea can be pushed further. Rush and many of his peers viewed science as rescuing a theology that had been hijacked in defense of slav
ery. Theological racism hampered Christians’ response to modern social questions. Science could save theology by addressing that failure. The German scientist Carl Vogt, a professor at the University of Geneva, was likely answering this concern when he concluded that “the term ‘race’ expresses, perhaps, only a theological idea.” The origins of racialism were to be found in a theology that had been corrupted by social sins ranging from color prejudice to human bondage.42
“The vulgar notion of their being descended from Cain, who was supposed to have been marked with this color, is too absurd to need a refutation,” Rush had insisted. It was not difficult to expose religion as the primary offender in the emergence of modern racial thought, he continued. The moral silence of American ministers on the issue of slavery was troubling by itself. “But chiefly—ye Ministers of the Gospel, whose dominion over the principles and actions of men is so universally acknowledged and felt,” the doctor demanded, “let your zeal keep pace with your opportunities to put a stop to slavery.” Nor could slavery be rationalized as a mechanism for Christianization, since a just religion could not spread by unjust means. “A Christian Slave is a contradiction in terms,” he concluded.43
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