Ebony and Ivy (29 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

The spectrum of skin color corresponds to climatic variation, explained the Reverend 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.
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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.
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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.

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
.
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“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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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