Ebony and Ivy (36 page)

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.
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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.
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“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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 slavery. 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.
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“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.
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Nonetheless, Rush enjoyed broad intellectual influence over medical science in the slave states. In June 1813 the members of the Medical Society of South Carolina gathered in the Circular Church in Charleston to memorialize Benjamin Rush. The Philadelphia physician had taught or mentored half the members of the society, a telling measure of his influence, the reach of the Pennsylvania medical program, and the legacies of Scottish universities in American medicine and science. When Rush began teaching, he had fewer than two dozen students; the year before his death he taught more than four hundred. Dr. David Ramsay, a New Jersey graduate and the son-in-law of John Witherspoon, delivered the eulogy. He recounted Rush's heroic sacrifices during the yellow fever outbreaks in Philadelphia, his contributions to science and public health, his service in the Continental Congress, and his educational and humanitarian endeavors.
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In fact, southern scholars had routinely and vigorously debated slavery. Student literary societies at the University of Georgia took up the question, and such exchanges were fairly common on southern campuses before the escalation of sectional tensions in the antebellum era. In 1828 Georgia's Phi Kappas decided that slavery
was unjust, and a decade later they debated themselves to an abolitionist conclusion. Another campus society, the Demosthenians, came within a single vote of endorsing abolition. Students at Georgia became more reflexively proslavery as the sectional crisis intensified. In 1832 William Gaston, a graduate of New Jersey, included an antislavery critique in an address at the University of North Carolina. The university published the speech and kept it in circulation for decades. Gaston served as a trustee at North Carolina for forty years.
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Scholars became more reluctant to criticize slavery in the face of the social anxieties that followed Nat Turner's 1831 slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia; the political pressure of an aggressive, organized Atlantic movement to abolish slavery; and the economic promises of financial speculation in Mississippi cotton lands and slaves. Professor Thomas R. Dew, a slave owner from a wealthy plantation family, earned the presidency of the College of William and Mary in part with his forthright defenses of slavery in the wake of the Turner uprising. President Thomas Cooper of South Carolina College (University of South Carolina) ended academic debate of slavery at that institution and insisted upon a full, positive defense of human bondage. Professor James H. Thornwell, who later served as president of South Carolina, lobbied to stop Presbyterians from publicly criticizing and opposing slavery, and he became an architect of a proslavery Christian theology that asserted the eternal morality of servitude in Judeo-Christian tradition.
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Academics had long exploited political opportunities to demonstrate the validity of science—as in the
Whistelo
trial—and southern scholars were equally adept at using the sectional crisis to establish their value to the region and the nation. “Are we to have peace or fratricidal war?” worried Professor William Barton Rogers of William and Mary. In 1819 Hannah Blythe Rogers and Patrick Kerr Rogers, professor of chemistry, had moved to Williamsburg with their four sons: James Blythe, William Barton, Henry Darwin, and Robert Empie. William and James entered the undergraduate class with young men like Thomas R. Dew. The Rogerses lived in Brafferton Hall—the old Indian College—which had its
own crew of slaves. William Barton disliked the South. He panned his classmates for their incessant “feasting, dancing, and music,” and he predicted that their graduations would hasten the decline of a civilization that was already “fast falling to decay.” In 1824 he warned Thomas Jefferson that his alma mater was lost. There was simply something about the place, he explained, that “must forever prevent it from being prosperous or successful.” In 1828 William Rogers replaced his father on the faculty. His concerns soon shifted to the political climate of the region. “In this part of the State the politics are ultra-Southern,” he lamented to his uncle. Nonetheless, he and his brothers Henry and Robert had substantial careers in tobacco and cotton country.
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The region's dependence upon northern and European scholars added to these tensions. The cotton wealth that funded southern education had enticed many ambitious northern- and European-born intellectuals to adapt to the slave regime. The pedigrees of intellectual outsiders came under greater scrutiny as slavery came under greater criticism in Atlantic discourses. The rapid expansion of the southern academy in the decades after the Revolution had brought a migration of scholars from the North and Europe to the plantation states. Academics looking for opportunities found new southern colleges and universities flush with money and students. They also found a growing defensiveness about slavery and a rising insecurity about the migration of people and ideas into the South.
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