Science

By: William Pencak

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Science

With two exceptions, black contributions to science in early America were anonymous. Most notably, the rapid growth of rice plantations in South Carolina before the 1730s can be explained only by the transfer of elaborate hydraulic systems, unknown to Europeans, used to cultivate rice in central Africa. That South Carolina slaves worked under the loosely supervised task system, where a certain amount of work had to be completed every day, rather than the gang system of the tobacco farms, where work was directly supervised for a required number of hours, also suggests that African American rice farmers' technological contributions enabled them to negotiate the terms of their labor to some extent.

One South Carolina slave is known to history for his scientific contribution. In 1751 Caesar received his freedom and the substantial sum of one hundred pounds sterling by act of the colonial legislature. He had discovered an antidote to rattlesnake poisoning, consisting of various roots and rum, a remedy that was published in South Carolina, Philadelphia, and Boston over the next halfcentury.

Even more useful was the information provided by Onesimus, slave to the minister Cotton Mather of Boston, who recorded it in his book The Angel of Bethesda. In 1721, during the first of several smallpox epidemics to plague the town during the eighteenth century, Onesimus told Mather about inoculation, a common practice in Africa. A small quantity of smallpox virus was introduced into the bloodstream, imparting immunity to the disease. Unlike vaccination, discovered in 1796 by the British physician Edward Jenner, who showed that the use of much milder cowpox produced the same immunity, inoculation was somewhat dangerous: Jonathan Edwards, president of Princeton University, died from an overdose in 1758. Mather was criticized by other doctors and ministers in Boston for advocating inoculation, but thanks to inoculation, deaths from smallpox declined exponentially in future epidemics. Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, the Boston physician who conveyed news of Onesimus's contribution to England, was elected to London's Royal Society. History does not record what happened to Onesimus.

The only black scientist to receive recognition in early America was Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806), who was born in Maryland. His maternal grandmother was a white indentured servant who operated a small tobacco farm with the help of her husband, Bannaka; her children and grandchildren, all of whom were freed slaves; and two slaves of her own. Benjamin's grandmother saw that he was educated. At age twenty-two he constructed a functional clock carved from wood. Clocks were rare, luxury items in the colonies; the young man took apart a watch and enlarged its parts many times over to make his clock. Banneker lived in obscurity as a respected farmer until the early 1790s, when, with the help of his friends the Ellicotts—wealthy white mill owners who were also interested in science—he began to publish an almanac based on his own astronomical calculations. Somewhat to the dismay of Banneker, who wanted to be appreciated for his personal merit, his printer, Elias Ellicott, used the almanac to further the cause of abolition. In 1795, for instance, Ellicott placed the portrait of an obviously black Banneker on the almanac's cover. The almanac's accompanying text suggested that few whites had made as good use of their formal education as Banneker had made of his rudimentary one. In 1791 Andrew Ellicott was chosen to lay out the boundary of the ten-mile-square national capital, and he selected Banneker as his assistant to make the required astronomical calculations for surveying purposes.

Then Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson received copies of Banneker's almanac, but he never responded to suggestions that Banneker was living proof that his belief in black inferiority might be questionable. Jefferson inherited racial prejudices that had been passed down from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Black was the color of dirt, evil, and the devil; white was the color of purity and God and the ideal color of human beings, from which some humans deviated. That blacks appeared to whites as naked and uneducated (logical consequences of enslavement) confirmed the belief that they were a lower form of human suited to serve their betters. Until the mid-eighteenth century Europeans and Americans used the word and concept of “race” loosely. Jews and the Irish were considered distinct races, and Native Americans were sometimes thought of as yellow or brown. That some blacks in the Americas, who were probably partially white, had lighter skin tones than newly imported slaves suggested to some (incorrectly) that race might be mutable.

Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), and Samuel Stanhope Smith, president of Princeton, in his Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787), offered the best argued and most representative scientific approaches that differentiated the races during the early Republic. Enlightenment thinkers, who believed God had constructed a good and reasonable world, sought “scientific” proof that the Great Chain of Being, the hierarchy of all creation from the deity down to inanimate objects, included distinct races with different moral and intellectual characteristics. While almost everyone in the era of the American Revolution believed that slavery was morally wrong, many, including Jefferson, used “scientific” proof of black inferiority to argue that it would be impossible to emancipate slaves because they could not coexist as equals with white Americans. Jefferson argued that such inferiority was innate; Smith thought that it was the result of climate, society, and habits of living.

Assuming such theories, most Americans who confronted the problem believed that blacks would become burdens on the public purse and threats to social order, as free black communities—many of which assisted nearby slaves, to whom they were related by blood—were perceived to be. Ironically, the one area in which blacks were supposedly superior, sexual prowess, was yet another mark of their danger to social order. (For many scholars, this supposed sexuality represented the projection by white men onto African Americans of their own sexual desires for black women.) By the early nineteenth century most Americans considered colonization or removal (Jefferson preferred Haiti, but most whites favored Africa) as the prerequisite if more blacks were to be freed.

See also Banneker, Benjamin; Free African Americans to 1828; Health and Medicine; Jefferson, Thomas, on African Americans and Slavery; Mather, Cotton, and African Americans; Race, Theories of; Sexuality; and Skin Color.

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