All posts by Nelson Mundell

Thomas Anson

This is a guest blog written by independent researcher Audrey Dewjee. Audrey has more than 40 years of research, mainly examining and unearthing the history of Black and Asian people in Britain. She collaborated with the project while it was in the research stage, allowing access to her personal database of runaway advertisements that she had painstakingly built up over the period.

Nelson Mundell’s blog about Caesar, who absconded from Novar Estate in the Highlands of Scotland in 1771, inspired me to write about a runaway from another remote location, this time in Yorkshire, in 1758.

At the end of the 1990s, I started my own runaways database which covers the years 1659-1795.  Thomas Anson was one of the earliest entries on my list.

‘Thomas Anson’, Runaway Slaves in 18th Century Britain database, University of Glasgowhttps://www.runaways.gla.ac.uk/database/display/?rid=641 [accessed 13.11.18]

                                        R  U  N     A  W  A  Y,
From Dent in Yorkshire,on Monday the 28th of Aug. last,
THOMAS ANSON, a Negro Man, about five Feet six Inches High, aged 20 Years or upwards, and broad set, Whoever will bring the said Man back to Dent, or give any Information that he may be had again, shall receive a handsome Reward from Mr. Edmund Sill of Dent, or Mr.David Kenyon, Merchant in Liverpool.[1]

The Sills were yeoman farmers and their farm, High Rigg End, was situated high on the slopes of Whernside, near to the village of Dent.[2]  At 2,415 ft. (736 m.), Whernside is the highest mountain in the Yorkshire Dales National Park and it is subject to harsh weather conditions. 


High Rigg End from the Barbon Road, c.2000 (Audrey Dewjee)

Like many of the farmers in the area, the Sills looked for a means of supplementing their income to tide them over difficult times when failed harvests, floods or other disasters befell them.  Most residents of Dent supplemented their income by knitting.  The “Terrible [i.e. terribly good] Knitters” of Dent were famous both for the speed and quality of their work.  At a time before industrialisation, hand knitting was a very important skill and the people of Dent, both male and female, learnt to knit at a very early age.  They were especially known for their knitted stockings which were sent to London and other parts of the country.

However, some residents of the town looked further afield for an income and in particular to aspects of the lucrative transatlantic trade and plantation economy of the Americas.

John Sill (brother of Edmund who placed the runaway advertisement) was a merchant in Redcross Street, Liverpool, and in 1757 he became part-owner of two ships – the Dent and the Pickering– which both sailed for the West Indies in September of that year.


Williamson’s Liverpool Advertiser, 19 August 1757

The Dent (owned by John Sill and David Kenyon) set sail at the end of September, 1757, arriving in Jamaica on 6 January, 1758.[3]  She returned safely to Liverpool on 24 September, 1758, with a cargo of sugar and cotton.  Shortly afterwards on 31 October, the Dent was sold and subsequently renamed the Planter.  John Sill was no longer one of the owners.

The Pickering, bound for Cork and St. Christophers (St. Kitts), left Liverpool a few days before the departure of the Dent, arriving at Cork on 24 September, 1757.[4]  I have been unable to find any record of her reaching her destination or returning to Liverpool.[5]   

A clue to the fate of the Pickering may lie in Gomer Williams’s History of the Liverpool Privateers and Letters of Marque, with an Account of the Liverpool Slave Trade, published in 1897.  In Appendix III on page 665, a ship named The Pickering is included under the heading of “List of Vessels trading to and from Liverpool Captured by the Enemy during the Seven Years’ War, 1756-1763”.  This is not definitive evidence as the Master’s name is not entered on the list.  However, this disaster might explain why John Sill ceased investing in shipping, as his name doesn’t appear again in the Plantation Registers after 1758.[6]

Four weeks before the Dent arrived back in Liverpool, Thomas Anson absconded from Dent Town.  How did he get away?  Where did he go?  Did he succeed in evading recapture?  I have wondered about his fate for well over 20 years.  No doubt David Kenyon placed the advertisement in the paper as he was based in Liverpool and was already in business with the Sill family via his ship-owning partner John.  The advertisement was repeated in the same newspaper a week later.

At some point John Sill went to Jamaica where he bought a plantation called Providence situated near Montego Bay.  When he died in 1774, he left his estate to his nephews – Edmund, John and James, the sons of Edmund Sill of Dent.  At the time of his death, there were 266 enslaved workers on the plantation which produced sugar, rum and molasses.[7]  Profits from the plantation, which was subsequently run by overseers, enabled the brothers to buy up land and farms in and around Dent and towards the end of the century they built a new mansion for themselves in Deepdale which they named West House.

All three brothers died young, leaving their sister Ann heiress to their fortune and occupier of the new house.  She survived until 1835, dying at the age of 69.  In her will she left legacies to many relatives as well as people in the local area.  On Emancipation, her heirs benefited from the compensation of £3783 1s. 8d. paid for the 174 enslaved workers on Providence plantation.[8]

So, what happened to Thomas Anson?  I’m pleased to say that he did indeed escape from the clutches of Edmund Sill.  Recently I have been researching and writing for the African Stories in Hull and East Yorkshire project.[9]  As a consequence I have been in touch with a number of old colleagues from BASA (Black and Asian Studies Association).  I met up with John Ellis to compare our databases (mine of parish records and runaways; his of 18th century Black soldiers and military bandsmen) to see if we had people in common.

Imagine my delight when I discovered that a Thomas Anson, born in Africa, had been discharged from the 4th Dragoons in 1768, aged 30.  As the name and age fit with the details in the runaway advertisement, I am certain this is the same man.  He had joined the regiment in 1760, and served eight years as a trumpeter. 

How did he find his way to the 4th Dragoons?  He was not the only Black runaway to do so around that date.  James Williams and Joseph Blenheim also enlisted in the regiment and were subsequently discharged on account of “being a slave” and “being the property of” their masters.  Both absconded a second time – James in 1756, and Joseph in 1758.[10]

At the beginning of 1760, the 4th Dragoons were in Scotland, returning to England later in the year.  They were then stationed near London and probably remained in England until 1764 when the 4th returned to Scotland for a year.  This was at the time of the Highland Clearances.  The Regiment returned to England in 1765 and was reviewed by King George III in 1767.[11]

The Dragoons were mounted regiments.  Thomas Anson would have been dressed in an elaborate uniform and ridden a fine horse.  As John Ellis explains,

In battle the role of a trumpeter was an extremely important one; they were the battlefield communication system, accompanying troop commanders and other senior officers and being responsible for relaying orders over the din of battle.  However once such order as chargereform and retreat had been given, trumpeters drew sabres and participated in whatever action their unit was engaged in.  Unfortunately trumpeters suffered a major disadvantage in battle, and because fashion and tradition dictated that they were dressed in the reverse colours of their regiment, they became popular targets for enemy fire (the greatest incentive for killing a trumpeter was the obvious damage that would be done to the enemy’s ability to communicate).[12] 

Luckily, the years 1760-68 were fairly quiet ones for the regiment, so Thomas Anson would not have been involved in a major battle.

He was discharged to pension on 7th June 1768 after eight years’ service because he had “lost his tooth,” which no doubt meant that he could no longer blow his trumpet.[13]  At least he had the benefit of a continued income and therefore would not be completely destitute.


Royal Hospital, Chelsea: Regimental Registers of Pensioners, 1717-1775.

Nowadays, very few people are engaged in researching British Black History.  Discovering what happened to Thomas Anson demonstrates the importance of sharing information with others who continue to carry out this research.

Audrey Dewjee


Footnotes

[1] Williamson’s Liverpool Advertiser, 8 September 1758.

[2] Dent Town, as it was known in the 18th Century, used to be in the West Riding of Yorkshire but, after the county boundary changes in 1967, it is now in Cumbria.

[3] Lloyds List, No. 2321, 7 April 1758. 

[4] Lloyds List, No. 2270, 7 October 1757.  The owners of the Pickering were David Kenyon, John Sill, John Atkinson, and her Master, John Hughes – see Liverpool Plantation Registers, 27 August 1767 – National  Museums Liverpool, Maritime Archives and Library, C/EX/L/3/1-4.

[5] A ship named Pickering with a different Master (William Fish) arrived in Liverpool from Tortola on 11 August 1758, but this was a different vessel. 

[6] The Liverpool Plantation Registers contain the text of owner’s declarations under the Act for preventing Frauds and regulating Abuses in the Plantation Trade, 7-8 William and Mary (1695-6) chap. 22, recording, amongst other details, the vessel’s name, home port, where built, the name of the master, type of vessel, tonnage, and name of owner or part-owners.  Liverpool Plantation Registers: National Museums Liverpool, Maritime Archives and Library, C/EX/L/3/1 – 4.

[7] Details from the online database of Legacies of British Slave-ownership, University College London, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/estate/view/3184  [accessed 10/12/2018]

[8] Ibid.http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/1287751141  [accessed 18/01/2018]

[9] African Stories in Hull and East Yorkshire  https://www.africansinyorkshireproject.com/index.html  [accessed 10/12/2018]

[10] Whitehall Evening Post, 17 February 1756; London Chronicle, 16 March 1758.

[11] I am grateful to John Ellis for information about the 4th Dragoons.

[12] John Ellis, ‘The Visual Representation, Role and Origin of Black Soldiers in British Army Regiments During the Early Nineteenth Century’, MA thesis, University of Nottingham, 2000.

[13] Royal Hospital, Chelsea: Regimental Registers of Pensioners, 1717-1775.

Glasgow University Rector sold man for £100 and spent the money on wine

The slave labour of Africans made Robert Cunningham Graham a wealthy man. After 20 years in Jamaica, he returned home to Scotland in 1772. Before leaving, Graham and his wife sold some of the enslaved people they owned, but they brought two enslaved people back to Scotland as servants. One, a young man named Martin, did not adjust to life in Scotland, and was sent back to Jamaica to be sold for more than £100, which Graham spent on wine.

A little over a decade later Graham was elected Rector of his alma mater, the University of Glasgow. After serving for a year Graham stepped down. He left a parting gift to the University of £100, endowing a prize for the best student work on political liberty. He was succeeded in 1787 by moral philosopher and political economist Adam Smith. Smith was one of a succession of Glasgow academics who spoke out against the transatlantic slave trade and slavery itself. The University Senate also petitioned Parliament against the slave trade, and some years later the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson described abolitionist sentiment within the University as ‘a great honour’.

Benefiting from slavery while supporting abolitionism may have been contradictory but they are both integral to the history of the University. It is an institution that grew in a city tied to the trade in tobacco, sugar and cotton, all of which were initially produced by enslaved Africans. In July 2016, the University launched an in-depth investigation into how it benefitted from the profits of historical racial slavery. This was a brave decision, but one rooted in the core values of an educational institution dedicated to the pursuit of truth and social justice.

The report shows that this slavery ‘dividend’ took two forms. People who had made or inherited money some of which had been generated by or through slavery either made gifts to support students and research or contributed to the building of new campus in the west end of Glasgow between 1866 and 1880.

The report makes clear the extreme difficulties of such research. Surviving records are fragmentary, and what proportion of any given gift may have been slavery-related is often impossible to determine. Similarly, the different scales used to determine the present-day value of historical gifts vary widely and are notoriously imprecise. However, despite this uncertainty the report clearly establishes that the University of Glasgow did receive significant amounts of slavery-related money.

Just how much, and what it is ‘worth’ today, may never be known, but of prime importance is the University’s public acknowledgement of the existence of this slavery ‘dividend’. What matters most is how this new knowledge is used, and the action it inspires. As part of its response the University has committed itself to ‘Moving forward: a programme of reparative justice’ to be rolled out over the coming years.

By commissioning this report and developing this reparative justice programme, the University of Glasgow is seeking to acknowledge its past in the most positive and productive ways possible, echoing the approaches of American universities from Yale and Harvard to Georgetown and Virginia.

Professor Simon P. Newman

(This appeared in The Sunday Times 16 September 2018. The report can be accessed at https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/humanities/slavery/report2018/#d.en.606332).

Scot Free: Dr. James McCune-Smith and the long arm of racism, pt.III

In a three-part series of blogs, Professor Simon Newman writes on the cultural significance of James McCune-Smith, describing Smith’s status as one of nineteenth-century America’s great public intellectuals. Part I can be found here, and part II can be found here.


In the final part of this blog series on James McCune-Smith, Prof. Newman examines some of the other articles Smith published, and questions the impact of Smith’s impressive cultural and intellectual achievements.

“The Critic at Chess” (1855) is a very clever essay in which Smith describes an afternoon spent with Philip Bell (an African American newspaper editor and abolitionist), playing chess and discussing Tennyson’s recently published “Charge of the Light Brigade.” Even though Bell laments Smith’s ability to “spoil a game of chess by your nattering,” the pair’s discussion of Tennyson’s poetry enables Smith to convince Bell that the English poet had utilised an old Congo war chant later used as a battle cry by Haitian revolutionaries. The chant, which Smith shows to share important characteristics with Tennyson’s famous lines, had been published in the Revue des Mondes: Smith had “picked it up at Ballière’s” book shop, “published four years ago, and as old as Africa.” As they move chess pieces around the board, with each player’s move described in brackets when that player next speaks, Smith makes clear that he is trying to show human culture and learning to be universal rather than racially defined and limited. African Americans and indeed all people could draw on non-white history, learning and culture, and he affirmed that the pages of black abolitionist newspapers need not depend on items “scissored from the New York Tribune, nor transcribed from Mother Goose’s melodies, nor Sinbad the Sailor.”

“Moving in May in the City” (1859) described the annual tradition of seeking out a new and better family home, and Smith relished describing “Maying” amongst New York City’s black residents. Smith delighted in making fun of himself, remembering his and his wife’s first experience of Maying: “With number one in the right arm, number two in my left (he is now a stout boy…), a large flexible handled basket full of things slung around my neck in front, and a tin pail ditto ditto in the opposite side, you would have seen a picture indeed.” The style and the tone of this essay is not unlike those found in far more modern newspapers, describing daily life in the city, although Smith did not hesitate to move beyond humorous anecdotes to a discussion of property values and the huge fortunes founded upon New York realty.

Smith’s review of a musical performance by Elizabeth Greenfield, perhaps the most celebrated black singer of the antebellum era, enabled him to see and discuss the possibility of a very different kind of society. Although born a slave Greenfield had white, Native American and African ancestry yet embraced an African American identity. Smith knew the importance of that choice, writing that “There is one thing our people must learn, and the victory is won: we must learn to love, respect and glory on our negro nature!” Smith watched and listed to ‘The Black Swan” with two thousand New Yorkers in March 1855, sitting amidst a “thoroughly speckled” interracial audience. Black men sat beside white women, white men sat near black women, and Smith celebrated the power of this melding which was illegal in the South and unusual in the North.

One of the most moving of Smith’s many newspaper and magazine essays was “The New Pen and Old Graveyards” (1856). Reporting that he had recently enjoyed “the strange pleasure of attending grave yards” Smith compared Quaker and ancient Egyptian burial practices, contrasting the humble simplicity of Quakers who eschewed tombstones with the flamboyant ancient Egyptian rulers whose pyramids endured for millennia. To Smith, however, neither practice had much to commend it, and he concluded that the graves of the Quakers and Egyptians showed “no imagination, [and] no faith.” In contrast Smith found the simple epitaphs on worn gravestones in St. Paul’s cemetery off Broadway “infinitely more eloquent, more harmonizing, more elevating” to those who read them. “An affectionate wife, a tender parent, and an humble follower of the BLESSED JESUS,” he read before noticing that this woman’s husband had died just two years after her. For all that he was one of America’s best-educated intellectuals and a leader of the Abolitionist movement, Smith was also a doctor and pharmacist and the physician to an orphan children’s home. He spent much of his working life among ordinary working New Yorkers, and in essays like this one he showed a profound respect and deep empathy for his fellow citizens.

*                      *                      *

How is it that Americans have all but forgotten one of the leading African Americans of the nineteenth century, a great and an accomplished essayist? The nation’s first black medical professional, an accomplished essayist and a leading abolitionist, Smith had joined with men such as Frederick Douglass, John Brown and Gerritt Smith to found the Radical Abolitionists political party in 1855. Indeed, Smith had chaired the party’s national convention: more than one hundred and thirty years would pass before another African American would hold the same office. But Smith did not seek out major public roles, he never published an autobiography, and many of his essays are buried in long forgotten ephemeral magazines and journals. And for all that Smith was a major intellectual he was neither a willing nor a particularly able public speaker, and his relatively few major speeches were soon forgotten. Dying young, just a few months following the death of the Confederacy, Smith’s children with Malvina Barnet–who was yet more light-skinned than him–were listed in the 1870 census as white. Within a generation of his death Smith had no descendants who identified themselves as black and who would treasure and protect his memory. It was only in 2004 when his great-great-great granddaughter recognised Smith’s name in a family bible that Greta Blau realised that she had a significant black ancestor. Today it is in his many published essays and articles that we can rediscover James McCune Smith, enjoying his wit and wisdom, and recognising his celebration of African ancestry and identity and his commitment to a society in which race—as most of his contemporaries recognised it—no longer mattered.

McCune Smith matriculating in Medicine 1835-6, Medical Matriculations, 1822-43 (GUA31247)

McCune Smith, MA degree 1836. Graduation Album: Names of Masters in Arts, 1835-36 (GUA26676)


Professor Simon Newman holds the Sir Denis Brogan Chair of American History at the University of Glasgow, and the Director of the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies.

Scot Free: Dr. James McCune-Smith and the long arm of racism, pt.II

In a three-part series of blogs, Professor Simon Newman writes on the cultural significance of James McCune-Smith, describing Smith’s status as one of nineteenth-century America’s great public intellectuals. Part I can be found here, and part III can be found here.


In this second blog on James McCune-Smith, Prof. Newman analyses Smith’s series of articles on New York’s working class African Americans which appeared under the general title ‘Heads of the Colored People’.

Many of Smith’s essays were written for Frederick Douglass’s publications and quite often Smith addressed these to Douglass, abandoning literary conventions in order to write something of interest and importance to a valued friend. Many of his essays shared a concern with rejecting the condescension and paternalism of whites (including Abolitionists) and showing African Americans to be as able, as hard-working, as loving and as spiritual as white Americans. Moreover, Smith delighted in highlighting the ways in which African American culture infused and enriched American life, anticipating Ralph Ellison’s suggestion that Euro-Americans were more African than they knew. In an essay celebrating the multi-racial society of Nicaragua published in 1852 Smith astutely observed that white Americans who doubted the intellect and ability of black Americans did so because they did not see the person in front of them but instead observed “a hideous monster of the mind… so utterly and ineffably monstrous as to frighten reason from its throne, and justice from its balance, and mercy from its hallowed temple,” the product of centuries of racism.

Amongst the most interesting of Smith’s essays are a series of ten biographical character sketches entitled “Heads of the Coloured People,” which were published in Frederick Douglass’s Paper between 1852 and 1854. Smith used his considerable literary skills to paint carefully crafted word portraits of the lives and work of members of New York City’s black working class, many of them people he encountered through his medical practice and pharmacy. This was an era of significant and sometimes violent racism in the city, made worse by a lengthy economic recession that made competition for jobs all the more difficult. Moreover, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 meant that escaped slaves who had made lives for themselves in New York faced recapture and return to the South, forcing many to leave. It was this embattled community, seldom the subject of serious study in mid-nineteenth century America, upon which Smith focused, with essays on a newspaper seller, a washerwoman, a bootblack, a church sexton and others. In order to capture these people Smith experimented with his writing, rejecting the sentimental fictional norms of the day for a kind of realism that was ahead of its time. He described and reported their thoughts and words, often in idiomatic English, and he celebrated them as dignified and respectable residents of the city who deserved respect. Indeed, Smith’s portrayals of the “heads” of black people implicitly lampooned the phrenologists who claimed African Americans were somehow less civilized and not as advanced as white Americans.

Smith’s portraits seamlessly blend classical literary allusions into rich descriptions of working people and their environments. “The Black News-Vendor” was a runaway slave from Virginia who had left the city whenever slave catchers came near, losing his legs two years earlier following a shipwreck off the coast of New Jersey. Smith watched this husband and father, “razed to the knees,” engaging with white customers, observing that “the true heart of the American people beats kindly and with warm sympathy towards him!” From hung-over Irishmen who sometimes view African Americans with great suspicion to “the dandy, who thinks… the negro almost a dog,” the vendor’s customers treated him with respect and kindness, “human creature to human creature”. “The Boot-Black” was an illiterate former slave who was committed to the education of his children, a parent determined that his children would enjoy the advantages denied to him. With no little relish Smith reported that the man’s eldest daughter had become a teacher with a successful school of her own. Smith’s sketch of “The Whitewasher” appears strikingly modern, with its portrayal of a man employed to paint and whitewash walls as one who understood the roots and nature of America’s racial divide and who did not hesitate to exploit it, overcharging the same white customers he lampooned. Admiring the man’s skill as a craftsman, an artist and a businessman, Smith was perhaps most impressed by this African-born former slave’s learning and wit. Still able to write Arabic and recite portions of the Qu’ran he was “full of apt proverbs… always hot and pithy.” When the whitewasher told a “wag” that he had come from Africa, the young white man asked “What brought you here?” “Your broder” responded the whitewasher, and when challenged he went on “Well, he had straight hair, blue eyes, small mout’, and white skin, must be your broder!” With no little satisfaction Smith reported that as “they say in Congress, the “conversation dropped.”” In “The Washerwoman” Smith described a powerful African American woman who as she irons clothes thinks with a smile of the care package she has just sent South to “her sisters and their children who toil as hard but without any pay!” It is the rhythm of her work which defines Smith’s literary sketch, the “Dunk! Dunk!” of the smoothing iron on the board punctuating descriptions that elevate the woman and the dignity of her work.

Although he published all of Smith’s “heads” portraits, Douglass did not entirely approve of them, as he made clear in a “Letter from the Editor” (May 1853). Douglass contended that “little can be learned of the coloured people as a whole by merely seeing them in the streets,” and in contrast he described and celebrated the respectable, middle class African Americans who were members of a church affiliated literary society, before mentioning other prosperous businesses owned by black Americans. “In respect to talents and real ability,” Douglass concluded, the “colored citizens of New York” were an impressive people who showed themselves the equal of whites, and he asked “Why will not my able New York correspondent bring some of the real “heads of the colored people” before our readers?” But Smith ignored his friend, for Smith refused to locate the future of his race solely in the emulation of middle class white respectability by an emerging black middle class. While Douglass felt that Smith’s portraits were demeaning, Smith continued to celebrate craftsmen and labouring men and women who were as able to transcend racism as bourgeois black Americans.

McCune Smith. Prize-list, Humanity Class, 1833-34 (Sen10/3, p.47)

 


Professor Simon Newman holds the Sir Denis Brogan Chair of American History at the University of Glasgow, and the Director of the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies.

Scot Free: Dr. James McCune-Smith and the long arm of racism, pt.I

In a three-part series of blogs, Professor Simon Newman writes on the cultural significance of James McCune-Smith, describing Smith’s status as one of nineteenth-century America’s great public intellectuals. Part II can be found here, and part III can be found here.


In this first blog Prof. Newman describes James McCune-Smith as he prepares to leave Glasgow and embark on his return home to the United States, reflecting on how his life and education in Glasgow had affected him.

In May of 1837 a young American named James McCune Smith walked from the centre of Glasgow down to the River Clyde. Among a forest of ship masts he spotted the stars and stripes flying above the Cannonicus, and made his way to the ship where he approached John Bigley, the ship’s captain. Smith had spent five years in Scotland studying at the University of Glasgow, and in an era when few Americans attended university, and fewer still bothered to finish their degrees and graduate, Smith had earned a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree and finally a medical degree. Fluent in Latin, Greek and French and with a working knowledge of Hebrew, Italian, Spanish and German, Smith was one of the best educated Americans of the nineteenth century, and he would become a leading American intellectual. But Captain Bigley refused to allow the young doctor to book a cabin for the journey to New York City. Smith was a twenty-four-year old African American, and Captain Bigley told the young man “I have not been accustomed to live with Coloured people.” When Smith protested, Bigley retorted that “such was the custom in the United States, and as his was an American vessel, the same rule would be followed by him.”

When Smith had left America in 1832 he would have been familiar with such treatment, and likely would have been used to accepting it. Smith had been born a slave in New York City on April 18, 1813, the son of a formerly enslaved woman named Lavinia and an unknown white man. The young boy remained enslaved until Independence Day in 1827 when he and all of New York’s remaining slaves were liberated. A fortunate beneficiary of the New York African Free-School on Mulberry Street, Smith was a particularly able pupil. While working full time in a blacksmith’s shop Smith had studied Latin and Greek in the evenings, preparing himself for the medical career he had chosen. When Smith applied to the medical schools at Columbia College and Geneva College in New York, however, he was denied admission on account of his race. In contrast the University of Glasgow in Scotland admitted Smith, and recognising the boy’s academic ability some of New York’s more prosperous African Americans combined to pay Smith’s passage to Scotland and contribute towards his tuition and living costs, which would later be shared by the Glasgow Emancipation Society.

Smith flourished in the demanding academic environs of one of Britain’s “ancient” medieval universities, and a leading seat of the Scottish Enlightenment. The University of Glasgow had been the intellectual home of scholars such as Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid and Joseph Black, and between 1832 and 1837 Smith studied everything from Logic to Anatomy, and from Greek to Physics. Perhaps his happy years in Glasgow explain why Smith was surprised and angered by Captain Bigley’s refusal to allow him first class passage to New York, a decision that most black Americans of this era might have resented but would have quietly accepted. News of the incident soon appeared in Glasgow’s newspapers, spurring to action Smith’s fellow students, his professors and members of the Glasgow Emancipation Society, all of whom sent letters to Bigley protesting Smith’s treatment. The fact that so many influential Scots were as outraged as Smith gives a sense of the environment in which he had lived for five years. Their collective pressure succeeded and Smith sailed back to the city of his birth in a first class cabin, where The Colored American reported that the city’s black population welcomed his return “to his native home, to his doting mother, and to his loving and beloved friends.”

Smith returned to America as the first African American to hold a medical degree, and he is celebrated as such in the National Museum of African American History and Culture. But Smith was far more than an able professional physician. The holder of class prizes in Logic and Humanity and of three separate degrees, Smith came home not simply as a gifted and able African American but rather as one of America’s leading and best-educated intellectuals. His education and life in Scotland enabled Smith to become a fuller, freer man. Frederick Douglass listed Smith first and foremost among the black American friends who encouraged and supported him, recognising the deep significance of Smith’s five-year sojourn outside the United States. “Educated in Scotland, and breathing the free air of that country,” Douglass recalled, Smith “came back to his native land with ideas of liberty which placed him in advance of most of his citizens of African descent.” Racism and racial inequality were inherent in all aspects of American life and culture, and even in New York City a man such as Smith could not pass a single day without encountering prejudice and discrimination. Britain was by no means free of racism: indeed, slavery still existed in the British Caribbean when Smith arrived in Glasgow, and this was an age when Britons who were confident of their racial primacy were violently conquering, subduing and ruling people of colour across the globe. Yet in his daily life in Glasgow and in his studies at the university Smith found himself treated no differently than white students: indeed, he was a popular and respected classmate among white students who viewed him not only as their equal but in many cases as their intellectual superior. By escaping from America for a half-decade and living beyond the pervasive and destructive racial hierarchies of antebellum America, Smith was able to glimpse what was possible for black men and women in a society in which race mattered less, in which people were judged by their qualities and abilities. However simple this may sound, it was a vision that was scarcely comprehensible to most black Americans. What Smith brought back to New York City and America was a faith in the belief that things could be different, and he never wavered from that conviction.

While his abolitionist speeches and writings supported an end to slavery and black civil rights, most of Smith’s publications were the work of a black intellectual commentator who did not define himself solely by his race, who celebrated the nobility of Africans and their descendants, and who resisted the racial categorizations of others. Smith was not a major public speaker like Douglass, and he left behind no autobiography. It is in his published essays and articles that Smith’s supreme confidence in the full equality of black and white Americans are revealed, while the breadth and variety of his writings bear witness to the intellectual range of one of nineteenth-century America’s greatest minds. Smith resisted the dominant anthropological beliefs justifying white racial superiority. Ideas of American “Manifest Destiny” were premised on the conviction that the innate superiority of white Euro-Americans justified their subjugation of both Native Americans and African Americans, and Smith’s contemporary the celebrated white Southern doctor Josiah Knott believed that racial hierarchy could be measured and demonstrated. Phrenology, for example, appeared to be a modern and scientific means of relating cranial shape to human behaviour. Those who believed in racial inequality utilized phrenology to suggest that there were physiological limits to what black people could achieve. Smith wrote about medicine, science, pharmacy, and geography, but his education and his own interests encouraged him to transcend his professional world and write about the people and world around him, from a series of literary portraits of working class African Americans of New York to the first published assessment of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick by an African American.

McCune Smith, MD degree 1837. Register of the names of Doctors of Medicine, graduates of the College of Glasgow , 1728-1888 (GUA26677)


Professor Simon Newman holds the Sir Denis Brogan Chair of American History at the University of Glasgow, and the Director of the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies.