Ebony and Ivy (33 page)

merchants in New York.

—WALTER BARRETT,
THE OLD MERCHANTS OF
NEW YORK CITY
(1863)

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 as 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

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.
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