A few years into the 1840s, McCune Smith undertook a key refutation of racial pseudoscience—the U.S. Census of 1840. The “monster of the mind” to which this essay’s epigraph refers was promulgated by our nation’s most influential nineteenth-century scientists, including Louis Agassiz, Samuel Cartwright, Josiah Nott, and Samuel Morton. They pronounced African Americans to be acutely inferior, unintelligent, and animalistic but strong and designed for subtropical servitude. Their screeds lent the weight of medical science to proslavery arguments.
The results of the 1840 census, which by the time of McCune Smith’s review in 1844 were under the ultimate control of Secretary of State John C. Calhoun, showed data on the health of both white and Black Americans, the latter of which were divided into categories of “free” and “enslaved.” According to these data, enslaved Black Americans enjoyed much better health than free ones, particularly mental health. Free African Americans were eleven times more likely than enslaved ones to be mentally ill, he found. Enslavement was therefore beneficial, according to the census data, and freedom could prove fatal.
Except for protests by one physician, antislavery activists offered only pallid rebuttals, while McCune Smith analyzed the data and found it rife with fraud and error. He demonstrated that many of the figures were specious or invented and that by every meaningful measure, from life expectancy to disease rates to mental health, free Blacks enjoyed far superior health than the enslaved.
McCune Smith presented his detailed report to the U.S. Senate in 1844. Former president John Quincy Adams, then serving in the House of Representatives, ordered an investigation, but Calhoun, a slavery advocate and former medical student, appointed a proslavery crony who pronounced the census flawless. Thus the 1840 census was never formally corrected, and enslavement was held to be necessary for African American health.
McCune Smith continued his abolition work despite snubs. The New York Academy of Medicine refused to consider his fellowship application, a slight that was mitigated by his posthumous acceptance at my request in 2018. After the orphans’ asylum was burned to the ground by rioting whites in the 1863 draft riots, he relocated his family to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for safety. He had planned to leave New York for an academic position at Wilberforce University in Ohio but was unable to do so because of an illness.
James McCune Smith, who fought enslavement valiantly on two continents, lived to see it banned by the Thirteenth Amendment before his 1865 death.
The distortion of medicine to support nineteenth-century enslavement is more than a shameful bit of history. Contemporary research reveals a widespread belief among physicians that, for example, Blacks are impervious to pain. Bias also persists in the dramatic underrepresentation of African American men among the nation’s eighteen thousand medical students: they make up 6 percent of the country’s population but less than 2 percent of medical students. And that number is falling: their peak year for medical school graduation was 1978.
1849–1854
OREGON
Mitchell S. Jackson
Back when I was a youngin living in Portland, Oregon, almost my whole block was Black. There was the old woman across the street, whose blinds were forever cracked, the easier to spy on us juveniles and snitch to our parents or guardians. There was the lil patna Poobear, who lived a couple houses down and whose front porch could’ve doubled as a junkyard. There was Ms. Mary in the middle of the block, whose cherry tree was the most fertile in the land but who would chase you off her lawn with a switch should you dare to pick a single sweet orb. There were the Mayfields at the end of the block, a family with huge Doberman pinschers stalking behind a fence too short to keep them from bounding it and turning canine-petrified me into doggie grub.
In a shabby duplex across from the Mayfields lived a Native American family (foolish me, I called them Indians in those days), whose yard always featured a dismantled car on cinder blocks. Back then, us neighborhood kids would build go-carts and race them down a hill, or we would stage concerts using upturned coffee cans, or on special summer days, we would chase down the ice cream truck and cop frozen treats—ice cream sandwiches were my fave—and lounge in someone’s front yard and hold tacit speed-licking contests. As far as I can recall, there was but one white person on the block, an old woman who didn’t much engage with the rest of us. This was the 1980s, and my block was situated in Northeast Portland, what us denizens came to call the NEP.
The NEP was one of the few mostly Black neighborhoods in the city. Because of that fact, because I didn’t venture much outside my neighborhood as a kid, and because I was ignorant of my state and city’s racial history, I knew not that I was living in a white man’s land, that it had been intended as one from its founding, and that Black folks had long been an unwanted presence.
The lone person, on record, to be expelled from Oregon was a fair-skinned Black man named Jacob Vanderpool, purportedly a sailor from the West Indies. Vanderpool had arrived by ship in what was then the Oregon Territory (Oregon didn’t achieve statehood until 1859) and settled in Oregon City, where he opened a boardinghouse/saloon. Vanderpool must’ve been one helluva businessman because the following year, August 1851, a man named Theophilus Magruder, himself the owner of a hostelry, complained that Vanderpool’s presence in Oregon City was a violation of the territory’s exclusion law, passed in 1844.
The case went to trial later that month. Vanderpool’s lawyer claimed the law violated several provisions of the U.S. Constitution, that the Oregon legislature hadn’t owned the jurisdiction to create it in the first place, and also that the charge itself had not been executed properly. But strong defense be damned, the very next day, August 26, 1851, the judge ruled Vanderpool guilty of violating the exclusion law and ordered him “removed from said territory within thirty days.”
Another expulsion order on Oregon’s historical ledgers occurred in September 1851 and involved brothers O. B. Francis and Abner Hunt Francis, free Blacks who owned a mercantile store in downtown Portland. Abner was also an abolitionist and friend of Frederick Douglass. Historians theorize that the brothers’ business and antislavery ties aroused the concerns of racist whites, and therefore while Abner was away, O.B. (and his wife) were ordered to leave the territory within six months. On appeal to the Oregon supreme court in September 1851, that judgment was shortened to four months. Abner, implicating himself in the expulsion, published a letter about his and his brother’s plight in Douglass’s newspaper, The North Star: “even in the so-called free territory of Oregon, the colored American citizen, though he may possess all the qualities and qualifications which make a man a good citizen, is driven out like a beast in the forest.” Fortunately for the Francis brothers, 225 local citizens signed a petition that allowed them to remain in Oregon on an exception. Though lawmakers spent beaucoup time debating said petition, in the end, they tabled it and never revisited it.
A third expulsion order targeted a man named Morris Thomas, who was married to a woman named Jane Snowdon. Like those targeted for ousting before him, he was an entrepreneur, his business a barbershop. As in the case of the Francis brothers, local citizens, 128 of them, filed a petition asking that Thomas and his family be spared expulsion.
About the time I reached the era of double-digit birthdays, folks who never had to worry one bit about being kicked out of the state or the city (most often white men in shabby suits) were roaming our neighborhood. They weren’t door-to-door salesmen hawking encyclopedias or water purifiers, but door-to-door home buyers. And they were offering residents, some of them our grand- and great-grandparents, cash for abodes some had owned for decades. Those deals must’ve seemed sweet or else the best of an inevitable swindle, because people started selling.
By the mid-1990s, many of the neighborhood’s residents were white. By the early 2000s, forget about it, almost all the families from the old neighborhood were gone, which is also to say, Northeast Portland had become what
most of Portland is, what most of Oregon is, a place that nurtures whiteness. While the tactics for its whitening, for the most part, didn’t involve foreclosures or blatant evictions, its transformation featured racialized expulsion nonetheless.
Though it was amended in 1849, the legal means to expel Vanderpool, the Francis brothers, and Thomas, as well as the ethos of Oregon as a white monolith, had been established in 1844 via the Oregon Territory’s exclusion law. Of the numerous people responsible for the racist writ, the lion’s share of onus belongs to a certain few: a Native surnamed Cockstock, a free Black man named James Saules, and white men named Elijah White and Peter Burnett.
So it goes, Saules had been beefing with Cockstock in a land dispute. In the resulting confrontation, two white men, along with Cockstock, were killed. A few weeks later Saules was involved in another dispute, and this time he threatened a white settler that he’d incite the Natives to violence against him. For making that threat, Saules was arrested and, in time, handed over to Elijah White, an Indian subagent. White wrote a letter to the secretary of war in D.C., calling Blacks “dangerous subjects” and arguing that Saules and every other negro “ought to be transported” and their “immigration prohibited.”
As one might guess, the secretary of war was the wrong contact for White to complain to. However, White’s cause was soon taken up by an Oregon politician named Peter Burnett. It was Burnett who had written the 1844 exclusion law and its revision, who had proposed it to Oregon’s territorial government, who had convinced the white men who composed that government to pass his racist legislation—the lone law of its kind passed by states admitted into the union.
And now, what do we have all these decades hence? The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) 2016 statistics (for the year 2015) note that the population of whites in the state of Oregon is 84.89 percent and the percentage of Blacks is 1.90 percent. In Portland, the figures are 77.37 percent for whites and 5.7 percent for Blacks. Compare those numbers to the 2016 national statistics, where whites comprise between 61.3 and 76.9 percent of the population depending on whether Hispanics and Latinos identifying as white are included (which is an essay in itself), and Blacks are 12.7 percent. You needn’t be an analyst to glean that in my fair state, in my beloved city, my people are scant, scant by design.
As it turns out, white folks, the ones who made us scarce in the NEP and who compose a majority everywhere in Oregon, love them some ice cream just as much as my old neighborhood crew did. In the new NEP, there’s a famous ice cream parlor named Salt & Straw, so famous that people sometimes line up for a block for the chance to taste its artisanal flavors. (Anyone for Mummy’s Pumpkin Spice Potion, or Black Cat Licorice and Lavender, or Cinnamon Snickerdoodle?)
Back in 2015, during a street fair just a few blocks from where I grew up that now attracts thousands, a sixteen-year-old Black boy fired a gun into a crowd, wounding two teenage boys and a twenty-five-year-old woman. Per protocol, the police taped off the crime scene. They also ordered Salt & Straw closed. One would think the would-be customers would’ve respected the gravity of the incident and set aside their ice cream hopes for the day. But on the contrary, before it was closed, two dozen or so more people approached the crime scene tape not to inquire about victims but to beseech the police to let them past to cop their frozen treats. Others snapped selfies using the crime scene as a backdrop, some cracking jokes about dessert-fueled motives. Others dined at restaurants just a few feet from where police searched for shell casings. It’s oh so obvious to me that the people who transmuted that crime scene into a collective case of blatant, damn near parodic insouciance were reflecting the ethos of that long-ago territorial government, one set on nixing eternal the presence of my people for the supposed safety, privilege, and prosperity of a great white monolith.
1854–1859
DRED SCOTT
john a. powell
The most elemental questions of American citizenship, democracy, and identity were ill defined and surprisingly undetermined by colonial, revolutionary, common law, and antebellum traditions. The Constitution itself, prior to 1868, failed to specify the precise nature of national citizenship, and how it was to be defined or acquired, despite the fact that in two major provisions (Article IV, Section 2, and Article III, Section 2), it extended to citizens critical protections and privileges that it denied to noncitizens. It was also not entirely clear about on what basis new territories might be admitted to the Union as states, or how the territories should be governed.
The period 1854 to 1859 crystallized disastrous answers to these questions with calamitous consequences, including Bleeding Kansas, the dissolution of the Whig Party and the formation of the Republican Party, the acrimonious debates over slavery in the territories, and the doctrine of popular sovereignty. The idea of popular sovereignty was epitomized by the Lincoln-Douglas debates and, above all, by the infamous Dred Scott decision, a combustible mixture that exacerbated a sectional crisis and precipitated the Civil War.
The entire tapestry of American history may contain no more singularly revealing or defining event than the infamous Dred Scott decision. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning book on the case, Don Fehrenbacher asserts that Dred Scott is “a point of illumination, casting light upon more than a century of American” law and politics that preceded it. This tells only half the story. The light of Dred Scott also extends forward in time, straight through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and well into the twenty-first.
Dred Scott was, among other things, a complex, multifaceted case addressing aspects of territorial sovereignty, the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise’s prohibition of slavery above the 36° 30´ latitude line, and the meaning of American citizenship. However, the case is best known for the indelible scar etched by an overreaching chief justice, Roger B. Taney. Writing on behalf of the Court, Taney held that persons of African descent—whether free or slave—were not, and could never become, citizens of the United States. Some today still embrace this claim.
To resolve the issue of whether Dred Scott and his wife and children could file suit against John Sanford for their freedom—on the basis of their sojourn in either a free state or a free territory—the Court did not have to overturn part of the Missouri Compromise or draw a race line into American citizenship. Instead, it could easily have dismissed the case on the grounds of standing. Or it could have said that Dred Scott’s return to a slave state meant that the condition of slavery reattached. Or that a formerly enslaved person, who had won their freedom and became a state citizen, was also a federal citizen, as some Southern theories—under which federal citizenship was derivative of state citizenship—would suggest. Or it could have held that a freeborn African American, born a citizen of a state, was also a federal citizen.
But the Supreme Court did none of these things. Instead, it held that no person of African descent, whether born free or slave, whether manumitted or held in chains, or whether a citizen of a state or not, was a federal citizen nor could they ever become one. In so doing, Taney not only inverted the states’ rights paradigm and nationalized the denial of citizenship to African descendants, stripping northern Black citizens of their federal citizenship rights, but he also denied states the ability to do anything about it.
In Taney’s view, the framers of the Constitution did not intend to include members of the “enslaved African race” because they did not consider them to be members of their political community that framed that instrument. Chief Justice Taney explained his reasoning in the harshest terms: “They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” Thus, persons of African descent were not members of the political community; nor could they
benefit from the instruments that were formed for the benefit and protection of the (white) people of the United States; nor were they “members of the political communities in the several states.”
The Dred Scott decision not only extended the protections of slavery nationally, but it stripped free Black citizens of free states of their federal citizenship status and rights. And it made whiteness, and white identity, the sine qua non of American national citizenship. This legacy lives with us still. Whenever restrictive immigration laws and travel bans are erected primarily against nonwhite peoples, Dred Scott casts its long shadow in the continuing predicate of whiteness as a condition of fitness for American citizenship.
Since citizenship is the primary distributive decision we make, and the political community defines the polity, Dred Scott posed a simple question: who belongs? And Chief Justice Taney’s answer to that question was unequivocal. In that sense, Dred Scott is the fulcrum of American identity. It defines, through who is included and who is excluded, the very nature of our national and civic identity.
Since Dred Scott has never been formally overturned by the Supreme Court, it was left up to the political branches to do so. Virtually every instrument expanding equality has taken aim at Dred Scott. The Thirteenth Amendment was the first volley, limiting slavery. The next step was the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and, more directly, the Fourteenth Amendment, which defined that federal and state citizenship are acquired by birthright citizenship, by being born or naturalized in the United States. It extended critical protections to those citizens (and all persons) with the equal protection clause, the due process clause, and the privileges and immunities clause, among others.
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