Ebony and Ivy (35 page)

Early race researchers were secure in their belief that, however derived, the scientific answer to human origins would confirm a single genesis. The research of the French scientist Georges Cuvier was also available to the
Whistelo
experts. The field of comparative anatomy, argues Stepan, which Cuvier and his Parisian contemporaries pioneered, laid the foundations of race science. It allowed
researchers such as James Cowles Prichard to address the questions of racial differentiation using modern scientific tools.
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The Edinburgh connection is significant. In 1681 Charles II had chartered the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh and, before the close of the century, its Surgeons' Hall hosted courses in chemistry and materia medica. In 1705 the university established a professorship in anatomy and soon funded professorships in chemistry and medicine. By 1726 the medical department was organized into a separate college, the first and best in Britain and, within decades, a rival of the faculty at Leiden, Holland.
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Philadelphia was especially receptive to the medical and scientific culture of Scotland. Edinburgh alumni established the colonies' first medical school through the College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania), and by the end of the eighteenth century Philadelphia graduates dominated the medical faculties in the mid-Atlantic schools. In 1769 Dr. Benjamin Rush, a graduate of New Jersey who earned a medical degree at Edinburgh, became professor of chemistry and, later, professor of the institutes and practice of medicine at Philadelphia. Upon Rush's arrival, the college expanded its medical curriculum into a full medical school on the Scottish model.
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At least four of the
Whistelo
witnesses studied under Rush as the Pennsylvania medical program was experiencing remarkable growth. Valentine Seaman, a health commissioner during the 1795 yellow fever outbreak in New York City, admitted that influence. His report on the epidemic paid tribute to Rush's “innovations” in treating the fever in Philadelphia two years earlier. The New York surgeon also used his dedication to acknowledge the excellent medical education he received under Dr. Rush.
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During his testimony at the
Whistelo
trial, Dr. Samuel Mitchill, who likely had prolonged the case with his wildly speculative but forceful counterarguments, made repeated reference to an emerging literature on complexion. His investigation of a black man who had turned white concluded that the case undermined the logic of slavery and racism: “Such an alteration of color as this militates powerfully against the opinion adopted by some modern philosophers, that the negroes are a different
species
of the human race from the whites, and tend strongly to corroborate the probability
of the derivation of all the
varieties
of mankind from a single pair.” The ability to treat color as a fluid variable triggered by climate and nature incited a direct attack on racial slavery. “How additionally singular would it be, if instances of the spontaneous disappearance of this sable mark of distinction between slaves and their masters were to become frequent?” Senator Mitchill wondered.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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 daughter 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.
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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.
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