Ebony and Ivy

by Craig Steven Wilder

  A Pennsylvania alumnus, Matthias Williamson, dramatically called the question: “If this was the child of that woman by that man, it is a prodigy,” he declared, and “he did not believe that prodigies happened, though daily experience unfortunately proved that perjuries did.” Williamson enjoyed close ties to the families who funded and governed the colleges in Princeton and New Brunswick. Brought in because of his long residence in the South, John C. Osborn was equally vehement that Whistelo could not be the father of the child and that the child’s complexion was not the consequence of albinism or any other extraordinary condition. The prior year Osborn had moved to New York City from North Carolina and joined the faculty of Columbia, teaching obstetrics and the diseases of women and children. Benjamin DeWitt, professor of chemistry at Physicians and Surgeons, closed this cycle of testimony with an assurance that the child’s father was likely white and certainly not black.8

  The almshouse’s case now rested upon the testimony of Dr. Samuel Mitchill. The Columbia professor held to his opinion. After defining the racial categories of mulatto, quadroon, and sambo, Mitchill informed the court that there were reliable rules of race but these operated with greater complexity than the majority opinion permitted. For instance, changes to skin color, hair color or texture, and the presence or absence of hair were all possible during conception. The doctor added that he had little reason to doubt Lucy Williams’s sworn testimony that Alexander Whistelo was the father of her child. Under direct and cross-examination, Mitchill provided a spirited rehearsal of cases in which skin color changed at various periods in the life cycle. Aside from albinism, which he argued rarely presented in New York, changes in complexion were common. He offered examples of the malleability of color documented in his own research, historical accounts, biblical texts, and classical literature. He even revived the idea that shocks during conception or irritations to the minds of women could influence the appearance of babies: A pregnant woman who discovered the slaughter of a favored domestic animal later gave birth to a deformed infant. Mitchill swore that he had seen the child, armless with disfigured legs, playing in the street, and he personally interviewed the parents to learn the cause.9

  The defense could not easily dismiss Dr. Mitchill. He had so excelled in the medical program at Edinburgh, during the high point of its scientific influence, that Columbia awarded him an honorary master’s degree upon his return to the United States. A professor at Columbia, Physicians and Surgeons, and Queen’s, he later became the founding vice president of Rutgers Medical College after it reopened, under the equally famous David Hosack. Mitchill wrote on subjects ranging from medicine to mineralogy and published the nation’s first medical journal. Within a decade of the trial, DeWitt Clinton dedicated a public lecture on New York history to the “Honourable Samuel L. Mitchill.” At the time of his testimony, Samuel Mitchill was a United States senator from New York.10

  Tested repeatedly by the defense, Senator Mitchill was certain that science, history, and religion supported his position. A midwife in New Brunswick, New Jersey, had told a woman in labor about the circumcision of a Jewish infant, he recounted, and the agitated woman then brought forth a boy child with a diseased penile foreskin. A Scottish case involved a man who repeatedly put off the demands of his amorous wife; after he accidentally spilled ink in her shoes, the spurned woman produced a black child. However, by the end of his testimony, the longest examination of the trial, Mitchill’s conclusions hinged on the testimony of Lucy Williams rather than his braiding of literary and historical proofs.11

  The expert testimony confirmed Whistelo’s innocence. But the court still suspected him, and therefore called two additional experts. The noted Philadelphia physician Felix Pascalis Ouvriere assured the judges that science could solve the riddle of paternity. In 1795 Pascalis had won a prize from the Hartford Medical Society for the best essay on the causes of the yellow fever outbreak in New York, and he also investigated the Philadelphia outbreak of 1797. One aspect of his research was examining the course of disease in black people by exploring the relevant medical and plantation literatures. Africans, he told the judges, had definite characteristics, the three most obvious being their curly hair, dark hue, and elongated heels. In his compendium of the Edinburgh curriculum, William Nesbit identified the latter as a specific skeletal feature of Africans. Pascalis added that at least one of these characteristics was evident even in perfect mulattos and other mixtures. Under cross-examination, Pascalis argued that an emotional or other shock would more likely produce abortion or deformity than a change in complexion. Dr. Pascalis concluded that Whistelo was not the father of the child. Sir James Jay was the last physician to testify. A Columbia graduate and a founder of Physicians and Surgeons, Jay had once served as Columbia’s European fund-raising agent. He definitively informed the court that the child was not Alexander Whistelo’s.12

  Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, United States Senator,

  who testified in the Whistelo trial

  The defense’s summation stressed that the great majority of the expert witnesses had scientifically concluded that Alexander Whistelo did not father the child in question. It also attempted to dismantle and ridicule the testimony of Professor Mitchill—the only scientist to openly support the almshouse’s case—accusing him of attacking “the doctors en masse” to defend Lucy Williams’s virtue. A sarcastic assault on her character followed:

  Soon after the vernal equinox, in the year of the vulgar era one thousand eight hundred and six, an Adam-colored damsel submitted to the lewd embraces of a lascivious Moor, and from that mixture sprang three miracles.

  1st. In the course of one month’s time she quickened and conceived.

  2d. She bare a child, not of her primitive and proper color, nor yet of the African—but strange to tell, of the most degenerate white.

  3d. And the greatest of all these wonders, she remained, as the counsel for the Almshouse charitably testifies, a lady of virtue and unblemished credit!13

  The almshouse’s attorney had earlier argued that if Williams intended to commit perjury, then she had more incentive to accuse the white man. Whistelo’s lawyer reversed that logic. The defense cautioned that the court risked establishing a dangerous precedent that would make black men forever vulnerable to supporting the bastard children of white men. It urged the judges not to allow women to keep white men to sleep with and black men to pay for the pleasure. Using the scientific testimony, the defense now attacked the almshouse’s entire case:

  Ten or twelve of the most experienced physicians declare this thing next to impossible. … Some of the professional witnesses have resided long in those countries where, if such facts were natural they must have fallen within their notice; but they never saw one such as would warrant their belief in this case—others have practised in that particular and useful branch which enables them to judge with certainty in matters of this nature; and envy cannot deny of them that they have brought more into the world than they have sent out of it. The very gentlemen who ushered into life the babe, whose name will be bright in the annals of zoology, physiology, pathology, and all the ologies, (Dr. Secor,) agrees that it is the child of a white man.14

  The impact of this lampooning became clear when the judges ruled on the evidence. Their decision respected the prestige of science in Atlantic thought, and it exposed their confidence in the capacity of science to find truth. The court maintained an unshaken belief in the provable existence and logical operation of race despite the conflicting arguments, wildly speculative claims, and inconsistent testimony that it had heard.

  The mayor began by restating the conundrum: “The defendant is a negro—the mother a mulattress—and the child has the hair and most of the features of a white, the color, indeed, somewhat darker, but lighter than most of the generality of mulattoes.” The virtually unanimous testimony of the medical experts vindicated Whistelo, Clinton continued. Sir Jay and Dr. Pascalis agreed on this matter and enjoyed the support of “the president of the Medi
cal Society, and several professors and other distinguished physicians.” Mayor Clinton then noted that the court “obviously” had less confidence in the testimony of Lucy Williams than in the statements and conclusions of the experts. Supported only by Senator Mitchill, who had merely shown the improbable to be possible, the almshouse failed to sway the judges, who absolved Alexander Whistelo.15

  THE TRIUMPH OF SCIENCE

  Ecclesiastical courts had routinely handled fornication and adultery cases in the early years of the colonies. Over the next century, civil authorities began determining questions of paternity, while church officials adjudicated sexual morality. Civil courts approached these matters as investigations into paternity rather than sin—the purpose being to establish financial responsibility, not necessarily moral culpability. The mid-eighteenth-century scandal that enveloped the Reverend Wilhelm Christoph Berkenmeyer, accused of fathering a child with his enslaved woman, Margareta Christiaan, was largely resolved within the Lutheran Church of Athens, New York. In that same period, Job Comecho, a Native man from Natick, Massachusetts, was sitting in prison “charged with the maintenance of a Bastard child.” To raise money, Comecho sold five acres of Natick land to Prince Vitto, a black man who formerly had been enslaved to the Reverend Oliver Peabody, Harvard’s missionary to the Natick Indians. The selectmen of Lebanon, Connecticut, seized “two male bastard negro children” from Debb, a Pequot woman, and bound them out until age twenty-five to spare the town the cost of their upkeep. As late as 1803, the church in Groton, Massachusetts, required parents who had children within seven months of their marriage to make public confessions.16

  One of the Whistelo trial’s most modern features was the judicial assumption that questions of generation, or paternity, were beyond the reach of the church and theologians. Questions of faith and morality were not absent at the trial, but research into race had spurred an intellectual revolution in British and American academies that encouraged a new legal deference to science. Judges and lawyers validated the power of science, and scientists certified the precision of the law. Whistelo was a product of two extraordinary social and intellectual developments: the ascent of science, particularly race science, as a secular corrective on religion, and the consequent dissociation of the academy and the church.

  The morality of slavery was quietly debated in Whistelo; in fact, it had to be. “It seems to be the destiny of mankind to arrive at perfection in the sciences,” wrote a student of Joseph Hawkins, adding that the current generation had to push the limits of knowledge. Friends were publishing Hawkins’s account of his travels to Africa to support him after he lost his vision. Dr. Felix Pascalis Ouvriere, who testified in Whistelo, contributed a letter recommending the book, which, he argued, confirmed his impressions from his encounters with enslaved people in the Caribbean. Pascalis added that the travel diary proved the immorality of “trafficking with slaves and prisoners of Africa, and keeping, consequently, those nations in the customary ignorance, barbarity and warfare.”17

  The sociologist Nancy Stepan finds that the majority of early race scientists opposed slavery. Many researchers believed that the scientific study of race would confirm the egalitarian presuppositions of Judeo-Christian faith. In 1752 the Reverend Thomas Church invoked this religious tradition in science during the Lady Sadleir Lecture at the Royal College of Physicians, London. “The Lord hath created the physician,” Church said of the divine origins of science. God endowed human beings with the intellectual capacity to understand and cure illness, blessed mankind with the compassion to serve those in need, and provided the physical materials to remedy the sick. He reminded the new physicians of the miraculous workings of the human body and the other wonders of nature that reflected divine inspiration.18

  The Judeo-Christian belief in the common origin of all mankind had extraordinary influence on early science, and it was affirmed during the Whistelo trial. The expert testimony synthesized a generation of research that used linguistics, physiology, history, and geography to establish not the equality but the unity of humankind. Articulated in religious and scientific language, monogenism had the potential to deliver a serious blow against those who used distinctions of color to justify enslavement.

  Whistelo occurred at a formative moment in the history of Euro-American science. The experts were students of physical and abstract science, society, and nature. About 1802 Dr. Hosack purchased land outside the city boundaries to establish the Elgin Botanical Garden, the first of its kind in the United States. It served as a laboratory for students training in medicine, the natural sciences, and pharmacology. When the New York Horticultural Society was incorporated in 1822, David Hosack was its president and Wright Post and Samuel Mitchill served on the executive committee.19

  The trial doctors were researchers in fields as diverse as botany, horticulture, history, natural history, philosophy, chemistry, anthropology, physiology, anatomy, and geology, and they belonged to medical faculties that were self-consciously reproducing the learned societies and research structures of the best European universities. Three of the witnesses—Hosack, Moore, and Post—led the local dispensary, which had both charitable and academic functions. An interest in the history of man and nature placed Hosack and Mitchill among the founders of the New-York Historical Society (1804). Several of the doctors were students of religion. The scientific fascination with the natural world reflected, in part, the allure of creation. Religion drew many scientists to fields such as botany, zoology, and geology, which eventually incubated evolutionist thought. Inheriting their perception of science from the Enlightenment, these scholars pursued a science that constantly interacted with faith. Born the same year as the Whistelo trial, Charles Darwin later abandoned the medical course at Edinburgh to pursue divinity at Cambridge University.20

  Whistelo offers a detailed cross section of the state of science and intellectual society in the early national academy. The witnesses focused obsessively on the physicality of Alexander Whistelo, Lucy Williams, and the little girl because most were convinced that black and white people differed by development but not by design. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s research into the physical and natural history of human beings, including his seminal categorization of the human races by region and color, was circulating in the major science centers during the period when the Whistelo experts trained. His work on human anatomy was also widely available in the years before the trial. Assuming the common origin of mankind, Blumenbach sought answers to human diversity in the geography, environment, and history of its various branches. An edition of his Elements of Physiology had also been published in Philadelphia, where four of the Whistelo doctors had studied.21

  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.22

  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.23

  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 ea
rned 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.24

  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.25

  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.26