Ebony and Ivy

by Craig Steven Wilder

  Professors, administrators, and students used bribery and collusion to create body-snatching networks that included local grave-diggers and mayors. “I heard that they would there give fifty dollars for a [human] subject,” Charles Knowlton recalled with delight. He became a skilled grave robber while apprenticing under Dr. Charles Wilder in Templeton, Massachusetts. Knowlton sold corpses to Dartmouth Medical School to pay his tuition, support himself, and fund private study in physicians’ offices to supplement his courses. In 1823 he passed his exam for the doctor of medicine degree. He was jailed the following year for body snatching in Royalston. Dixi Crosby, an 1824 graduate of Dartmouth’s medical program, disgraced himself and his family by grave robbing in his hometown of Gilmanton, New Hampshire; nonetheless, in 1838, Dartmouth extended Crosby a professorship in anatomy and surgery. Manhattan’s medical colleges dispatched body snatchers to upstate New York during the winter to exploit a cold climate that preserved corpses in the ground and during transportation. Philadelphia’s medical schools had a secret pact not to compete for corpses, to reduce the risks of public or professional scandals.48

  “Civilization seems not to have removed the prejudice of the popular mind against the dissection of the human body,” complained Edward Dixon, an 1830 graduate of Rutgers Medical College. The union of Columbia’s medical school with Physicians and Surgeons created a powerful lobby that weakened Rutgers’s medical program—once second only to Philadelphia’s. The rivalries also intensified the quest for cadavers. Dixon viewed this sport, however tasteless, as a logical consequence of an ill-conceived public policy. As editor of the Scalpel, a professional journal for surgeons, Dr. Dixon later vilified the hypocrisy of a government that held surgeons liable for “the most trivial blunder” while jailing those who exhumed bodies in order to practice their craft. After he was released from jail, Dr. Charles Knowlton gave two lectures on the battle between science and superstition. In the decade before the Civil War, the professors of medicine at the University of the City of New York (New York University) were still lobbying the state legislature to deregulate dissection.49

  Between the Revolution and the Civil War, seventeen separate mobs attempted to stop dissections and resurrections. In 1824 citizens from New Haven and West Haven raided the medical college at Yale after they discovered that the body of Bathsheba Smith, the teenage daughter of a local farmer, had been stolen from its grave. The residents found her corpse in the cellar of the school and carried it in a wagon through the city. Yale’s students rushed to the medical school with guns and clubs, and officials eventually called out the militia. The Connecticut legislature responded by toughening the laws against body snatching and providing deceased criminals to medical programs. In 1830 a mob invaded Castleton Medical College in Vermont. The residents of Lexington, Kentucky, repeatedly vandalized Transylvania Medical College. Body snatchers trespassed upon the spiritual dignity of their most vulnerable neighbors in their most vulnerable state and disturbed the psychic comforts of the living. Doctors and students reached into the graves of those who could not protect themselves in death and practiced upon their bodies, rendering their corpses little more than “meat.” Those most vulnerable to exhumation and dissection were from the lowest social orders: African Americans, Irish, and Indians.50

  Experimentation on colored corpses had fewer ethical, legal, and political constraints. The American printers who kept European anatomy texts and dissection manuals in constant circulation often sold these primers on newspaper pages that carried advertisements for slaves. The announcement for the anatomy course at New York Hospital, which appeared just months before the riots, ran alongside a plea for the capture and return of Isaac Allen, a twenty-three-year-old black baker enslaved to Ann Payne, and an alert that Bartholomew Andrew was looking to purchase a black boy through his dry goods store on William Street. White people’s unlimited access to the bodies of slaves could hardly be thought to cease at death. Free black people and poorer white residents had greater, but not full, self-determination. Researchers routinely accessed the corpses of poor and subjected people. In Philadelphia they took cadavers directly from the poorhouse, a practice that was certainly repeated in Manhattan, where the leading professors at the medical colleges were attending physicians at the almshouse.51

  The dissecting room at Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia

  SOURCE: Library of Congress

  A PENIS OF A DIFFERENT COLOR

  Atlantic slave traders, planters, and land speculators funded the rise of colonial science, incentivized a competition to prove the natural bases of social relations, and exposed colored peoples to invasive and involuntary research. The rampant violations of nonwhite bodies in daily life repeated in the social order of the human sciences. American and European medical students used anatomies that read like primers on the proper preparation and exhibition of Negroes and Indians. American medicine exploited colored bodies precisely because the racial civilization placed them—free or enslaved, alive or dead—beyond the protection of the law or of moral civilization. By the end of the eighteenth century Indians and Negroes stood as universal objects of anatomical inquiry, science had generated a world of myths about their bodies, and the dissection of their corpses was a cornerstone of research.

  Influenced by the work of colonial theorists such as Edward Long and Thomas Jefferson, the English physician Charles White was certain that science had established racial difference to an extraordinary degree of specificity. Anatomists, he celebrated in 1799, had even proved black men’s penises to be larger than those of white men. “I have examined several living negroes, and found it invariably to be the case,” White reported of his research upon black people confined to the asylum in Liverpool. There were real-world consequences to such observations. They reinforced notions of African primitivism and encouraged scientists to take black people to the cutting table. On both sides of the Atlantic, colored people in public institutions became prey for race researchers. Claims about the size of black men’s penises led White and his contemporaries to hypothesize about corresponding peculiarities in the genitalia of black women, and a search for clitoral elongation, peculiar vaginal folds, extraordinary buttocks, and outsized breasts and nipples began anew. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, for example, dismissed the suggestion that African women had larger than normal breasts based upon his own research but affirmed the “cloud of witnesses” who testified that black women’s breasts were “long and pendulous.” He was also compiling data on black penises. Andrew Fyfe’s anatomy text, published in the United States through Philadelphia, instructed students to seek large penises for dissection.52

  White’s assignment of this particular characteristic fit neatly with Fyfe’s directions for choosing specimens to point students toward Africans. Social and scientific racism demanded such desecrations. Black penises, for example, were on view in natural history museums and academies across Europe and North America. Charles White and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach even kept such trophies in their offices.

  Science, at their benign Command,

  Holds out her guiding Ray;

  Nor Suffers Error’s treach’rous Hand

  To lead our Steps astray.

  —HYMN SUNG BY CHARITY SCHOLARS,

  ST. GEORGE’S CHAPEL, NEW YORK, 1783

  A new era is arising in which the powerful and wealthy

  are with generous ardor responding to the claims of

  science and humanity. Thrice honored be New England,

  that the jubilee of that inauguration has been already

  heard within her boundaries and that her liberal sons

  while providing for the intellectual and moral wants of

  the community, through their rich endowments in

  behalf of knowledge, are by the generous training thus

  diffused, preparing the way for that time when power

  and riches will be everywhere blessed as the customary

  ministers of philanthropy.

&nbs
p; —WILLIAM BARTON ROGERS, ADDRESS

  AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE, 1855

  I may as well note that this College [of Physicians and

  Surgeons], established by an act of the Legislature of

  the State in 1791, has had among its trustees, since it

  commenced operations in 1807, some of the best

  merchants in New York.

  —WALTER BARRETT, THE OLD MERCHANTS OF

  NEW YORK CITY (1863)

  Chapter 7

  “On the Bodily and Mental Inferiority of the Negro”

  Institutionalizing Race in the American Academy

  A bastardy case in New York City, Commissioners of the Almshouse v. Alexander Whistelo, a Black Man (1808), reveals the broad influence of the popular science of race—the social consumption of academic theories about human variation—and the political vulnerability of scientific research. Ultimately, the Whistelo trial was about much more than paternity. The court heard from an impressive number of experts, and it engaged profound questions, including the morality of slavery. The judges required answers to the complex issue of the operation of race: how color and its perceived qualities transferred across generations, when and why racial characteristics manifested, and how race shaped the individual and how it behaved in larger populations. They relied upon science to access the explanatory power of race, despite the fact that the testimony and deliberations exposed doubts about the reliability of this knowledge. The witnesses belonged to royal academies in Britain. They had founded medical programs, scientific societies, and professional associations in the United States. They held professorships at a cluster of American universities and had earned undergraduate and advanced degrees from the best universities in Europe and the United States. Those credentials and affiliations signaled the institutionalization of medicine and science in the American academy. The process of establishing medical and science programs at American universities brought scientific research under the financial control of the commercial elite and ultimately domesticated science. Whistelo was a modern trial. The trial uncovered a scientific academy building a new intellectual order upon divisive, unequal, and brutal social relations. The medical witnesses used the proceedings to advance the social and intellectual authority of science. The judges deferred to their expertise. But the paths that the experts took to show the value and power of science were also the paths through which science got deployed in politics. The expansion of the northern and southern academies in the decades before the Civil War accelerated the politicization of science and the institutionalization of race.

  Whistelo’s spectacle came largely from the hubris of science, law, and modernity, but the evidence explained more about the life of Lucy Williams, described as a “mulattress” and a “yellow woman,” than about her child’s paternity. In April 1806 Alexander Whistelo propositioned Williams, telling her that he was divorced and never intended to return to his wife. “I refused,” she recalled, “for I did not choose to have him—I did not love him.” Cast by the defense as a whore, a woman of low character, questionable morals, and a liar, Williams provided a reluctant and poignant account of the violent events that led to her pregnancy. Under the guise of going to visit his female cousin, Whistelo took Lucy Williams to a “bad house,” where he locked her in and forced himself upon her. Under cross-examination, Williams also admitted that a white man later “turned the black man out [of bed] with a pistol” and took his place. She fought this attacker too, but was overpowered and again raped. Later that spring, when Whistelo returned to New York City from a tour at sea, Williams told him that she was pregnant. She was certain that he was the father because she believed the sexual connection with the white attacker insufficient for conception. On January 23, 1807, Lucy Williams gave birth to a girl.1

  Troubled by the baby’s complexion—lighter than those of Lucy Williams and Alexander Whistelo—the commissioners of the almshouse, where Williams and the child were being supported, turned to the magistrate’s court to rule on paternity under a new state bastardy law. Reproduction and fertility within and between the varied branches of humankind, however categorized, were a core fascination of race research. The court could access more than a century of compiled knowledge on this subject. European encounters with and observations of the colored world quickly worked their way into the academy. Such exchanges—both scientific and those that amounted to little more than global gossip—fed a historic intellectual engagement with the anthropology of the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

  During June and July 1808 the judges took sworn statements from the region’s leading physicians and researchers. Dr. Joshua Secor, who delivered the child, testified to the infant’s appearance at birth. George Anthon, a professor and trustee at Columbia College, was the first outside expert to address the court. Dr. Anthon pointed to Williams’s and Whistelo’s “woolly” hair as proof the defendant could not have fathered the child, whose hair “has every appearance of its being the offspring of a white person.” David Hosack, who had employed Whistelo as a coachman, also determined that the father had to be a white man or light mulatto man. Dr. Hosack had attended the College of New Jersey (Princeton), earned a medical degree in 1791 from the University of Pennsylvania, and then finished his training at the University of Edinburgh. At the time of the trial he taught surgery, clinical medicine, physic, obstetrics, and midwifery at Columbia and at Queen’s College (Rutgers). Wright Post, professor of surgery at Columbia, explained the science behind the seeming consensus that Whistelo was not the father: “When persons of different colors have connection together,” he instructed, “their offspring is generally of a color approaching to a mixture of both the father and the mother.”2

  The case might have ended there if not for the court’s predisposition to hold Alexander Whistelo accountable and for the statements of two nonconforming doctors: Samuel L. Mitchill and Edward Miller. Professor of physic and clinical medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, Miller offered something of a compromise. The child’s hair and complexion suggested that Whistelo was not the father, he stated, but her “thick lips and flat nose are the indication of the father’s being an African.” Samuel Mitchill was more adamant, insisting that it was not only possible but probable that Whistelo was the father. A professor at Columbia and a professor of natural history and botany at Physicians and Surgeons, Mitchill argued that the earlier testimony treated skin color as too stable and predictable a characteristic. Miller and Mitchill were colleagues. A 1789 graduate of the medical program at Pennsylvania, Miller had even coauthored an address to physicians with Mitchill.3 Now the pair united to provide enough doubt to continue the proceedings.

  Confused by the child’s complexion and the contradictory expert testimony, the magistrates and the attorneys agreed to have the case heard anew before a panel comprising Mayor DeWitt Clinton, the city recorder, and three aldermen. Beginning August 18, 1808, the mayor’s court took direct testimony from Lucy Williams. The prominent physician Benjamin Kissam, who had studied medicine at Edinburgh and founded the New York Academy of Sciences, informed the judges that, after “examining those parts of the child which particularly indicate the color of the race,” he did not believe this to be the child of a black man. Dr. Kissam was sure that the child’s father had to be white.4

  The court combed the mid-Atlantic colleges for race experts. David Hosack returned. He assured the judges that the laws of nature negated the possibility of Whistelo being the father of the child. Despite his broad training in Atlantic science, Hosack had his conclusions rigorously challenged as the almshouse’s lawyer tried to limit the damage of his testimony. Asked if “irritation, terror, or surprise” at the moment of conception could have altered the appearance of the child, the professor dismissed this possibility. Asked if albinism might explain the child’s light appearance, Hosack rejected this suggestion. The surgeon Wright Post defended Hosack’s position. “There were instances of black men with black women producing children a
s fair as this,” he allowed, “but they were exceptions to the general laws of nature.” The court then heard from the doctor credited with introducing vaccination to New York City. Valentine Seaman graduated from Pennsylvania’s medical school and was an expert on childbirth and midwifery. He was a particularly strong defense witness. A surgeon at New York Hospital, he also served as the visiting physician for pregnant women confined at the almshouse. Dr. Seaman concurred with the majority, concluding that Whistelo could not be the father of Williams’s child.5

  Five of the Whistelo witnesses had studied at Edinburgh, and most were corresponding members of British medical and science societies, which circulated much of the available literature on race and forensic medicine. Andrew Duncan had used his chair in the institutions of medicine at Edinburgh to enact a series of lectures on forensics, provide medical testimony in criminal and civil cases, and conduct medical investigations for courts. As Duncan explained:

  Many questions come before courts of justice, where the opinion of medical practitioners is necessary either for the exculpation of innocence, or the detection of guilt. In many cases, on their judgment, questions respecting the liberty and property of individuals must be determined by the civil magistrate.

  In 1792 Duncan published his lectures on medicine and law, which included lessons on pregnancy and childbirth. Additionally, the Edinburgh medical curriculum had been published years before the trial. The series had comprehensive volumes on dissection and anatomy, including material on human genitalia and the reproductive process.6

  Dominated by Edinburgh graduates and affiliates, the second round of testimony again appeared of a single mind. A president of the Medical Society of New York County and a founder of Physicians and Surgeons, James Tillary testified that there were “no principles of physiology nor philosophical data” to support the idea that this was the child of a black man. Born in Scotland, Dr. Tillary studied at “the great medical school of Edinburgh,” a colleague later noted, but left and finished his surgical training in the British army. He came to New York during the American Revolution and stayed after the British surrender. William Moore, a professor at Columbia and Queen’s, also exonerated Whistelo. He had done his medical training in London and Edinburgh, and, in 1793, received an honorary doctor of medicine degree from Queen’s. Moore served as president of the local medical society and, like Post and Kissam, had worked as a doctor for the almshouse. Dr. Anthon again testified and further strengthened the defense.7