Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (28 page)

THE FOUNDER OF
anthropology in the United States, Dr. Samuel Morton, jumped into the origins debate on September 1, 1839, when he published
Crania Americana
. He had made use of his famous “American Golgotha” at Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, the world’s largest collection of human skulls. Morton wanted to give scholars an
objective tool for distinguishing the races: mathematical comparative anatomy. He had made painstaking measurements of the “mean internal capacity” of nearly one hundred skulls in cubic inches. Finding that the skulls from the “Caucasian Race” measured out the largest in that tiny sample, Morton concluded that Whites had “the highest intellectual endowments” of all the races. He relied on an incorrect assumption, however: the bigger the skull, the bigger the intellect of the person.
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Loving reviews from distinguished medical journals and scientists came pouring into Philadelphia about Morton’s “immense body of facts.” Not from everyone, though. German Friedrich Tiedemann’s skull measurements did not match Morton’s hierarchy. So Tiedemann concluded there was racial equality. Like the Germantown petitioners in the 1600s, and John Woolman in the 1700s, Tiedemann showed that racists were never simply products of their time. Although most scholars made the easy, popular, professionally rewarding choice of racism, some did not. Some made the hard, unpopular choice of antiracism.
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One of the first major scientific controversies in the United States began with what seemed like a simple observation. Harvard-trained, antislavery psychiatrist Edward Jarvis reviewed data from the 1840 US Census and found that northern free Blacks were about ten times more likely to have been classified as insane than enslaved southern Blacks. On September 21, 1842, he published his findings in the
New England Journal of Medicine
, which was and remains the nation’s leading medical journal. Slavery must have had “a wonderful influence upon the development of the moral faculties and the intellectual powers” of Black people, Jarvis ascertained.
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A month later, in the same journal, someone anonymously published another purportedly scientific study, “Vital Statistics of Negroes and Mulattoes.” Biracial people had shorter life spans than Whites and “pure Africans,” the census apparently also showed. The writer called for an investigation into “the cause of such momentous effects.” Dr. Josiah C. Nott of Mobile, Alabama, came to the rescue in the
American Journal of Medical Science
in 1843. In “The Mulatto—A Hybrid,” the distinguished surgeon contended that biracial women were “bad
breeders,” because they were the product of “two distinct species,” the same way the mule was “from the horse and the ass.” Nott’s contention was as outrageous as the insanity figures, but scientists reproduced it.
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When Jarvis looked more closely at the 1840 census data, he found errors everywhere. Some northern towns reported more Black lunatics than Black residents. Jarvis and the American Statistical Association asked the US government to correct the census. On February 26, 1844, the House of Representatives asked Secretary of State Abel Upshur to investigate. He never had the opportunity. Two days later, Upshur was among the six people killed on the warship USS
Princeton
. President John Tyler named none other than John C. Calhoun as Upshur’s replacement. Calhoun saw two matters on Upshur’s desk: the census issue and an antislavery letter from the British foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen. The Brit expressed hope for universal emancipation and a free and independent Texas.
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Slaveholders’ pursuit of Texas’s annexation as a slave state was guiding the 1844 election. Tennessee slaveholder James K. Polk, a Democrat, narrowly defeated Whig Henry Clay, who lost swing votes to James Birney of the new antislavery Liberty Party. Refusing to vote, Garrison leaned on the American Anti-Slavery Society to adopt a new slogan: “
NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS!
” He was trying—and failing—to stop the drift of the movement toward politics. Antislavery voting blocs had arisen in the 1840s. They were sending antislavery congressmen to Washington—from John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts to Joshua Reed Giddings of Ohio, and soon Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Owen Lovejoy of Ohio, and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. These congressmen were openly debating slavery and emancipation after 1840, to the horror of John C. Calhoun.
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In April 1844, months after withdrawing his own presidential candidacy, Secretary Calhoun informed the British foreign secretary that the treaty of annexation was a done deal. Slavery in Texas was a concern of neither England nor the US government. The United States must not emancipate its slaves because, as the census had proved, “the condition of the African” was worse in freedom than in slavery.

Needing more data to defend US slavery before Western Europe, Calhoun sought out the latest scientific information on the races. He summoned pioneering Egyptologist George R. Gliddon, who had just arrived in Washington as part of his national speaking tour on the wonders of ancient “White” Egypt. Gliddon sent Calhoun copies of Morton’s
Crania Americana
and Morton’s newest, acclaimed bombshell,
Crania Aegyptiaca
, which depicted ancient Egypt as a land of Caucasian rulers, Hebrews, and Black slaves. Morton’s research, Gliddon added in a letter to Calhoun, proved that “Negro-Races” had always “been
Servants
and
Slaves
, always distinct from, and subject to, the Caucasian, in the remotest times.” Bolstered by Gliddon’s “facts,” Calhoun defended American domestic policy before antislavery Europe. The “facts” of the 1840 census were never corrected—and slavery’s apologists never stopped wielding its “unquestionable” proof of slavery’s positive good. They continued to assert that slavery brought racial progress—almost certainly knowing that this proof was untrue. “It is too good a thing for our politicians to give [up],” a Georgia congressman reportedly confessed. On the eve of the Civil War, a Unitarian clergyman said it best: “It was the census that was insane, and not the colored people.”
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THE FIRM POLITICAL
and scientific support for slavery made it all the more difficult for the abolitionists to change the minds of the consumers of slavery’s “positive good.” Would the voice of a runaway, expressing his or her own horrific experience, be more convincing? In 1841, William Lloyd Garrison spent three joyous days with abolitionists on the nearby island of Nantucket. As the August 11 session came to a close, a tall twenty-three-year-old runaway mustered the courage to request the floor. This was the first time many White abolitionists had ever heard a runaway share his experience of the grueling trek from slavery to freedom. Impressed, the Massachusetts Antislavery Society (MAS) offered Frederick Douglass a job as a traveling speaker. Douglass then emerged as America’s newest Black exhibit. He was introduced to audiences as a “chattel,” a “thing,” a “piece of southern property,”
before he shared the brutality of slavery. Though he understood the strategy of shocking White Americans into antislavery, Douglass grew to dislike the regular dehumanization. Whether enslaved or free, Black people were people. Although their enslavers tried, they had never been reduced to things. Their humanity had never been eliminated—a humanity that made them equal to people the world over, even in their chains. Douglass was and always had been a man, and he wanted to be introduced as such.

Douglass also grew tired of merely telling his story over and over again. He had honed his speaking ability and developed his own ideas. Whenever he veered off script into his philosophy, he heard a whisper: “Tell your story, Frederick.” Afterward, White abolitionists would say to him, “Give us the facts, we will take care of the philosophy.” And do not sound like that when you give the facts: “Have a
little
of the plantation manner of speech than not; ’tis not best that you seem too learned.” Douglass knew exactly why they said that. Usually, minutes into his speeches, Douglass could hear the crowd grumbling, “He’s never been a slave.” And that reaction made sense. Racist abolitionists spoke endlessly about how slavery had made people into brutes. Douglass was clearly no brute.
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When Douglass was finally able to tell his story and philosophy in full in his own words, it offered perhaps the most compelling counterweight yet to the 1840 census and the positive good theory. In June 1845, Garrison’s printing office published
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
. In five months, 4,500 copies were sold, and in the next five years, 30,000. The gripping best seller garnered Douglass international prestige and forced thousands of readers to come to grips with the brutality of slavery and the human desire of Black people to be free. No other piece of antislavery literature had such a profound effect. Douglass’s
Narrative
opened the door to a series of slave narratives. For anyone who had the courage to look, they showed the absolute falsity of the notion that enslavement was good for Black people.

William Lloyd Garrison penned the preface to Douglass’s 1845
Narrative
. Enslavement had “degraded” Black people “in the scale of
humanity,” Garrison claimed. “Nothing has been left undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, debase their moral nature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind.” Though starting at different places and taking different conceptual routes, Garrison kept arriving in the same racist place as his enslaving enemies—subhuman Black inferiority. But if you let Garrison tell it in Douglass’s preface, antislavery had “wholly confounded complexional differences.” Garrison chose not to highlight the chilling physical battle with a slave-breaker that thrust Douglass on his freedom course. Garrison enjoyed presenting two types of Black people: degraded or excelling. He hoped the narrative elicited White “sympathy” and “untiring” efforts “to break every yoke.” The narrative did do that, and the many slave narratives that followed it attracted White antislavery sympathy, too, especially in New England and Old England. But these narratives did not attract nearly as much White antiracist sympathy. After all, Garrison had packaged the book in his assimilationist idea of the enslaved or free African as actually subpar, someone “capable of high attainments as an intellectual and moral being—needing nothing but a comparatively small amount of cultivation to make him an ornament to society and a blessing to his race.”
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Garrison’s own preface—though powerfully persuasive, as his readers expected—was a compellingly racist counterweight to Douglass’s
Narrative
. Another compelling counterweight was Alabama surgeon Josiah Nott’s
Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races
in 1845. He had moved from racist biracial theory to polygenesis, once again using the faulty census data as evidence. As a separate species, “nature has endowed” Black people “with an inferior organization, and all the powers of earth cannot elevate them above their destiny.” Nott’s polygenesis had become “not only the science of the age,” declared one observer, but also “an America science.” Popular northern children’s books were speaking of the “capacity of the cranium.” Best-selling New England author Samuel Goodrich wrote, in
The World and Its Inhabitants
, that “Ethiopians” ranked “decidedly lowest in the intellectual scale.”
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Douglass’s
Narrative
had to contend with the rapidly changing news media as well. In early 1846, the newly formed Associated Press used
the newly invented telegraph to become the nation’s principal filter and supplier of news. The rapid speed of transmission and monopoly pricing encouraged shorter and simpler stories that told and did not explain—that sensationalized and did not nuance, that recycled and did not trash stereotypes or the status quo. News dispatches reinforcing racist ideas met these demands. In January 1846, New Orleans resident James D. B. De Bow met the demand for a powerful homegrown southern voice, launching
De Bow’s Review
. It struggled early on, but by the 1850s it had become the preeminent page of southern thought—the proslavery, segregationist counterpoint to the antislavery, assimilationist
The Liberator
.
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Regular contributors drove the expansion of
De Bow’s Review
, writers like Louisiana physician Samuel A. Cartwright, a former student of Benjamin Rush. Cartwright wrote about healthy Black captives laboring productively and loving enslavement. Whenever they resisted on the plantation, Cartwright wrote in 1851, they were suffering from what he called
dysesthesia
. “Nearly all” free Blacks were suffering from this disease, because they did not have “some white person” to “take care of them.” When enslaved Blacks ran away, they were suffering from insanity, from what he called
drapetomania
. “They have only to be . . . treated like children,” Cartwright told slaveholders, “to prevent and cure them” of this insane desire to run away.
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Southern medical experiments found an airing in
De Bow’s Review
. Researchers routinely used Black subjects. In 1845, Alabama’s J. Marion Sims horrifically started experimenting on the vaginas of eleven enslaved women for a procedure to heal a complication of childbirth called
vesicovaginal fistula
. The procedures were “not painful enough to justify the trouble” of anesthesia, he said. It was a racist idea to justify his cruelty, not something Sims truly knew from his experiments. “Lucy’s agony was extreme,” Sims later noted in his memoir. After a marathon of surgeries into the early 1850s—one woman, Anarcha, suffered under his knife thirty times—Sims perfected the procedure for curing the fistula. Anesthesia in hand, Sims started healing White victims, moved to New York, built the first woman’s hospital, and fathered American gynecology. A massive bronze and
granite monument dedicated to him—the first US statue depicting a physician—now sits at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street, across from the Academy of Medicine.
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