Yale School of Medicine and Slavery

Abolitionism at Yale School of Medicine

Before the Civil War, professors at Yale School of Medicine rarely took a public position against slavery and, when they did, professed only conservative—what some historians have called “moderate”—antislavery stances. Many students came from slave societies, and some would go on to argue publicly in support of slavery and rebel against the United States as part of the Confederacy. However, there are hints of growing antislavery sentiment among Yale medical faculty and alumni during the decades before the Civil War. Among the professors, Benjamin Silliman expressed such moderate antislavery feelings at times and participated in organizations that promoted the colonization of free Black people to Africa, even as he continued to benefit financially and professionally from slavery. Future faculty members joined Silliman in speaking against the expansion of slavery in the Kansas and Nebraska Territories in the 1850s. Professor Nathan Smith did not directly express views on slavery so far as we know, but he founded a number of medical schools—including Dartmouth Medical School in 1797 and the Medical School of Maine at Bowdoin College in 1821—that accepted Black students earlier than Yale. These schools’ early admission of students of color suggests that Smith may have been more supportive of Black education than many of his Yale colleagues. The ambiguity surrounding Yale professors’ relationship to abolitionism and antislavery was partially due to the awareness among faculty members that the medical school relied on tuition from and connections with students and alumni who owned slaves, thus making it advantageous for them to avoid expressing strong positions on slavery.

Today it can be tempting to imagine that the fight over slavery in the United States was a straightforward, two-sided affair with proslavery, plantation-owning southerners opposed to abolitionist, racial-egalitarian northerners. The nineteenth-century debate over slavery, however, was much more complicated. Proslavery activists and politicians disagreed among themselves about the costs and benefits of slavery, while abolitionists disagreed over how quickly slavery should end and how and whether freed people could or should fit into U.S. society. White moderates on both sides often agreed that free people of color should be coerced into emigrating out of the country and in 1822 established the colony of Liberia in West Africa as a place to resettle them.

We have found no outspoken defenders or critics of slavery at Yale School of Medicine in the nineteenth century, but Benjamin Silliman, the founding professor of chemistry and pharmacy, did make public and private statements criticizing slavery. His critiques of the institution were muted and cautiously avoided alienating enslavers, however, and he benefitted financially and professionally from slavery throughout his life. The strength of Silliman’s convictions about slavery remains uncertain, and the ambiguity of his position reflects both how antislavery stances changed over time and Silliman’s own multifaceted personal relationship to slavery.

Figure 1. Portrait of Benjamin Silliman by Daniel Huntington (c. 1850s). Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine.

Silliman was born in Trumbull, Connecticut, on August 8, 1779, in the midst of the American Revolution, and the trajectory of his antislavery views seems to fit with those of many white northerners of his generation. Silliman’s father was a Brigadier General in the Revolutionary Army who had been captured by the British at his home only months before Benjamin’s birth. [1] The conflict had given new meaning to budding antislavery opinion in the thirteen colonies. In 1774, the (First) Continental Congress banned slave trading in its “Association” agreement to boycott metropolitan British goods and to economically pressure metropolitan Britain to repeal the Intolerable Acts which the British Parliament had imposed in retaliation for the Boston Tea Party. [2] Enslaver Thomas Jefferson, in a 1776 draft of the Declaration of Independence, then blamed the British king for preventing colonists from outlawing the slave trade and for inciting enslaved people to violent revolt against their owners. [3]

Colonies-turned-states began passing antislavery laws during the U.S. War of Independence and most remained in effect after the war, with further laws to come. As part of their revolutionary effort, all states had enacted either bans on the slave trade or high taxes intended to undercut its profitability, and these laws would stay in effect until the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. By 1804, every state north of Maryland had passed laws gradually abolishing slavery or enacted constitutional prohibitions against it. [4] The first gradual abolition law was passed in Pennsylvania in 1780, the year after Silliman was born. The law, “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” intentionally freed no slaves in order to avoid infringing on individual property rights but began the process of ending slavery by freeing the children of enslaved people. [5] This pattern of not freeing any enslaved people directly but freeing their children would be repeated widely in other states, including Connecticut. Connecticut’s legislature passed a gradual abolition law in 1784, the year after the Treaty of Paris was signed ending the Revolutionary War, and then four years later prohibited ships owned by Connecticut citizens from carrying enslaved people. In the 1790s, these acts were strengthened by another that prevented enslaved people from being taken out of the state, and the Connecticut Anti-Slavery Society was formed. [6]

Many U.S. “Founding Fathers” who enslaved people also spoke during the revolutionary era against the institution of slavery as a threat to the nation. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, argued for the abolition of both the slave trade and slavery in the United States. As mentioned earlier, his draft of the Declaration of Independence had blamed the British king for continuing the slave trade and inciting enslaved people to violence. [7] Later, Jefferson penned legislation that would have banned slavery in U.S. territories west of the original states, and while President he signed “An Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves into any Port or Place within the Jurisdiction of the United States.” [8]

Silliman, like Jefferson, came from a slaveholding family but expressed doubts about slavery as an institution. The Silliman family enslaved at least twelve people in the 1790s and benefitted financially from their enslavement while navigating these changing laws. Benjamin’s mother had partially funded his undergraduate education at Yale by selling people enslaved by the family. [9] However, around the time when he received his MA degree from Yale in 1799, Silliman wrote a poem attacking slavery and especially the slave trade. [10] With his slavery-funded education, Silliman was appointed Yale’s professor of chemistry in 1802 and in that role helped found the Medical Institution at Yale College in 1810. The financial benefits Silliman had received from slavery helped him establish the medical school and to support the school and himself.  Yet he continued to express personal concerns about slavery.

During a trip to England in 1805 to purchase books and scientific equipment for Yale, Silliman visited a slave ship in the Liverpool harbor and privately lamented, “My own country . . . stands disgraced . . . for being at once active in carrying on this monstrous traffic, and prompt to receive every cargo of imported Africans.” [11] He also met with members of Parliament Henry Thorton and William Wilberforce who were campaigning for Britain to outlaw the slave trade. [12]

Despite Silliman’s doubts about slavery, he benefited professionally from ties to slave traders and owners. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, he began collecting specimens for what would become Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History with the help of enslavers. He negotiated first the loan and then the purchase of a major mineral collection from George Gibbs, a Rhode Island enslaver whose family had become wealthy from slave trading and from distilling rum from slave-grown Caribbean sugar. Yale had to raise funds to buy Gibbs’s collection, and many slave-owning southern alumni, including John C. Calhoun, contributed. [13] Calhoun had been one of Silliman’s first chemistry students at Yale and in the 1830s and 1840s would become one of the South’s greatest defenders of slavery while a U.S. Senator. Silliman and Calhoun maintained a close connection through the 1810s and 1820s. Calhoun helped fund the launch of Silliman’s American Journal of Science in 1818, and as Secretary of War, in 1822 Calhoun asked Silliman to review West Point’s science curriculum. [14] Whatever personal feelings Silliman had about slavery, they did not stop him from profiting from it financially or from benefiting from the patronage of enslavers.

The revolutionary spirit that spurred the passage of gradual abolition laws also encouraged the acceptance of non-white citizenship. The 1780 Pennsylvania gradual abolition law repealed previous legislation that had discriminated against free people of color, effectively giving them the same voting rights as white citizens. [15] The 1784 Connecticut gradual abolition law similarly placed no restrictions on Black voting, implicitly allowing males who met the property requirement to vote. [16] As the number of free Black people grew in the nineteenth century, however, prejudices intensified and led to new limits on Black civil rights in the North. In Connecticut, the 1818 state constitution limited voting to white citizens, and for most of the 1830s Connecticut prohibited educating Black students from outside the state. [17]

Figure 2. First page of the Connecticut Constitution of 1818. This Constitution declared “That, all men when they form a social compact, are equal in rights,” but limited future voting to “white male citizen[s] of the United States.” “Constitution of 1818,” Connecticut State Library, 2013.

Growing regional tension over slavery spurred by the 1820 Missouri Crisis and the growing white belief that Blacks were not and could not become good citizens contributed to a split in U.S. antislavery views from the 1820s. “Moderate” antislavery politics increasingly emphasized colonizing people of color out of the United States while more “radical” activists demanded immediate abolition and civil rights for people of color. Colonization was a popular “gradualist” approach that appealed to white New Englanders who wanted to end slavery but avoid a North-South conflict. The American Colonization Society was founded in 1816 with the goal of removing free people of color from the United States, and in 1822 it created the colony of Liberia in West Africa as a place to settle free people of color and emancipated slaves. Many white slaveholders joined abolitionists in supporting the American Colonization Society because they shared a belief that free Black people could not be integrated into U.S. society. Though opposed on the issue of slavery, these groups often shared stereotyped views of free Black people as, in the words of one historian, “vagrants, drunks, and criminals.” [18] Abolitionist supporters of colonization feared what would happen if the free Black population continued to grow in the North and also hoped that colonization would encourage enslavers to emancipate their slaves. The majority of Black Americans quickly rejected colonization and its underlying goal of racial exclusion. By the late 1820s, some white abolitionists joined Black activists in denouncing colonization and began pushing for greater racial justice and inclusion. The position of these “radical” abolitionists, however, made most white Americans, including many antislavery northerners, uncomfortable because the demand for “immediate” emancipation could be interpreted as a call for violence or as an attack on private property rights. [19]

In the 1820s, Silliman and some of his Yale colleagues championed gradualist antislavery and colonization, shunning immediatism as too radical. Silliman and his colleagues did not want to upset the many southerners who contributed tuition and donations to the college and the medical school or who were part of their professional networks. [20] In 1825, Reverend Leonard Bacon of the Center Church on the New Haven Green, future Yale President Theodore Dwight Woolsey, and three friends organized an “Anti-Slavery Association.” [21] This small group of friends then built a larger antislavery network that led to the organization of the African Improvement Association in 1826 and the Connecticut Colonization Society in 1828. [22] Crucially, these founding members saw no conflict between “improving” the local Black population through education, especially their idea of proper religious and moral education, and removing Black people from the United States via colonization to Africa.

Silliman quickly began participating in these organizations despite his many connections to slavery. In 1827 he spoke at a meeting of the African Improvement Society of New Haven, and Silliman and Bacon were chosen vice presidents of the Connecticut Colonization Society when it was formed in 1827. [23] Silliman had taught Woolsey and Bacon geology and chemistry as undergraduates, and they likely knew of both his entanglements with and distaste for slavery. [24] More importantly, Silliman agreed with Woolsey and Bacon that slavery should be ended gradually through legal means, and they viewed education and colonization as steps in that direction. As Bacon explained in an “Address to the People of Connecticut,” colonization provided a way around “the invectives of heated politicians” and was a “remed[y] by which [slavery] may be alleviated and subdued.” [25]

Silliman publicized his views on slavery and colonization in an 1832 speech at a Connecticut Colonization Society meeting held at Bacon’s Center Church in New Haven. Silliman described colonization “a golden mean” between immediately ending slavery and it continuing forever, and he argued that colonization could “preserve the public peace and in the end bestow freedom and improvement upon the African race.” [26] While Silliman described slavery as a “curse” and “national evil,” he expressed consideration for the South’s position. He blamed the introduction of slavery on “the policy of the mother country” Britain, as Jefferson had, and “concede[d] that the different physical features and agricultural productions of the South and North have, more than the force, or absence of proper moral feeling,” led to abolition in the North while slavery persisted in the South. [27] Silliman was trying to walk the line of criticizing slavery without criticizing slaveowners. In this vein, colonization encouraged enslavers to emancipate the people they enslaved by removing slaveowners’ fears of the growing “mass of free people of color, already, in their view, too numerous for their safety.” [28]

Silliman also strove to placate promoters of “African improvement,” describing “African improvement and African colonization” as “natural allies.” [29] Silliman, however, was speaking the year after a group of abolitionists had tried to establish a Black college in New Haven. [30] White city leaders had quashed the project, but Silliman took the opportunity in his speech to attack the idea behind a college education for Black students. “Visionary attempts to elevate, suddenly, the free colored population,” he insisted, were “impracticable” or possibly “injurious.” [31] Instead, Silliman stressed the need for “religious, moral and instructed men . . . acquaint[ed] with business and with useful arts and trades” to support the Liberian colony. [32] Like most northern white colonizationists, Silliman wanted to placate both radical abolitionists and enslavers, and he believed doing that included giving people of color a religious and moral education without elevating them to the level of college graduates.

Figure 3. First page of African Repository reprint of Benjamin Silliman's speech, "Some of the Causes of National Anxiety." Silliman maintained that “visionary attempts to elevate, suddenly, the free colored population” with a college education were “impracticable” or possibly “injurious.” Instead, Silliman stressed the need for “religious, moral and instructed men . . . acquaint[ed] with business and with useful arts and trades” to support colonization. American Colonization Society, The African Repository and Colonial Journal, vol. 8 (Washington: James C. Dunn, 1833), 176.

Some local New Haven antislavery activists became radical abolitionists in the 1830s, but conservatives or “moderates” like Silliman continued to push for slowly educating, emancipating, and colonizing enslaved people. In 1833, Simeon S. Jocelyn and Arthur Tappan, who had been part of the attempt to organize the Black college in New Haven, broke with the colonizationists and joined with immediatist abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and others to form the American Anti-Slavery Society. The society called for “immediate and general emancipation” and equal rights for all people of color while tempering its radial aims by emphasizing legal and constitutional reform and the moral persuasion of enslavers. Black New Haveners’ activism likely encouraged the move of Jocelyn and Tappan toward immediatism, and Silliman and Bacon must have known of the community members’ actions as well. Jocelyn had ministered to Black parishioners since 1820, and the congregants included John Creed and Vashti Duplex Creed, the parents of Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed who would be Yale’s first Black medical school graduate. John Creed became a local agent for Garrison’s Liberator in 1831 and participated in the effort to organize the Black college with other local Black leaders. [33]

In the face of the growing divide between colonizationists and immediatists, Silliman and Bacon joined the “American Union for the Relief and Improvement of the Colored Race,” which aimed to use “steady and cautious researches of science” to determine how to end slavery while “avoiding conflict in public arenas.” [34] They continued to hope that a gradual, reasoned approach to slavery based in science could end the institution without greater upheaval. However, their appeal to science ignored the extent to which science was already a political force for debating slavery.

Science and medicine were central to the political debates over slavery. Anatomy and physical anthropology were immediately political disciplines because they addressed human difference and could be used either to argue for white racial superiority and Black inferiority or to refute them. For instance, an anatomy textbook assigned at Yale in the 1860s described “the white race” as having the largest brains and therefore the greatest intellect. [35] These arguments and the conclusion that people of different races differed in their anatomies and capabilities made their way into medical textbooks and lectures, even though the extent and meaning of those differences continued to be debated.

Politicians drew on anthropology, anatomy, and physiology to support their arguments about slavery, while scientists and physicians weighed in on political debates to build their reputations and the cultural authority of their fields. From the 1830s, southern physicians argued that the South needed its own medical schools to train students in the peculiarities of the region and the supposed differing “physical or organic characters” among people of different races. [36] This position could be used to support slavery by reinforcing southern regional and racial distinctiveness, but southern physicians also deployed this argument about regional specificity in order to bolster their claims to specialized knowledge and professional standing. In fact, these claims were only a specific instance of the principle of medical specificity that stressed the impact of local climates, populations, and social and cultural environments on health and healing, a posture that physicians in all parts of the United States shared that stressed the importance of local knowledge. [37]

Some doctors became public figures because of their opinions on slavery. [38] Southern physician Josiah Nott made a career out of publicizing supposed racial anatomical differences and enlisting them in a defense of slavery.  In 1851, another southern physician, Samuel Cartwright, published his “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” in which he infamously described “drapetomania,” the disease that caused enslaved people to run away, and “dysaesthesia ethiopica,” a disorder that caused them to not respond to punishment. [39] Cartwright’s description of these medical conditions as specific to people of African descent helped to sustain the argument that enslaved people were healthier under slavery than they would be if freed, while at the same time Cartwright’s ideas were rooted in the widely-shared medical belief that different races fell prey and reacted to diseases differently. Furthermore, Cartwright’s standing as a public intellectual led him to make political speeches unrelated to slavery that were republished in newspapers around the country. [40]

Silliman also had a national reputation as a public intellectual, thanks in part to his 1818 founding and editing of the United States’s leading scientific journal, the American Journal of Science. Unlike Cartwright and Nott who leveraged their renown to make bold defenses of slavery, Silliman only made cautious criticisms of the institution in his scientific work. In 1831, the administration of southern enslaver U.S. President Andrew Jackson hired Silliman to head a scientific study of U.S. sugar production. Yale’s president agreed to cover Silliman’s expenses, and Silliman pocketed $1,200 for his work at a time when cabinet secretaries were paid $6,000 annually and the vice president $5,000. [41] In the United States, sugar was cultivated almost exclusively with enslaved labor on plantations in Louisiana, and Silliman’s correspondence related to his study included questions about the condition of enslaved people. However, Silliman failed to include his responses to such information in his replies, and, more significantly, his final report did not even include the word “slavery.” Instead, Silliman focused on new steam engine technologies that could reduce the need for labor, and he mentioned that sugar could also be obtained from beets and maple trees in the North, a suggestion abolitionists commonly made to reduce the demand for slave-grown cane sugar. Silliman also complemented the skills of northern sugar factory workers, which implied the superiority of free labor to enslaved labor. [42] While this study had placed Silliman in a position to denounce slavery, he made only indirect criticisms while offering recommendations to enhance the system’s profitability.

Silliman again in 1837 passed up an opportunity to comment on slavery in a scientific paper. He had recently toured Virginia gold mines—including one in which he was an investor—that were predominantly worked by enslaved people and published a report on the state’s “great mineral treasures” in his American Journal of Science. However, Silliman failed to mention slavery at all in his article despite having recorded in his private journal that “slaves were employed about the mines” and describing how enslaved men were forced to break quartz rocks so their white masters could get the gold contained in the crystals. [43] Silliman avoided mentioning slavery in his published scientific works rather than using them as an opportunity to undermine slavery.

Benjamin Silliman, “Remarks on Some of the Gold Mines, and on Parts of the Gold Region of Virginia..."

Figure 4. First page of Benjamin Silliman's 1837 article “Remarks on Some of the Gold Mines, and on Parts of the Gold Region of Virginia.” Silliman failed to mention that most of the mines he observed were worked by enslaved people though he mentioned it in his private journal. Benjamin Silliman, “Remarks on Some of the Gold Mines, and on Parts of the Gold Region of Virginia, Founded onPersonal Observations, Made in the Months of August and September, 1836,” American Journal of Science 32 (1837): 98-130.

Black Americans did not have the luxury of a moderate response to slavery, especially one centered around removing them from the country. In 1830, New Haven's Scipio Augustus, who like John W. Creed had worked for the Calliopean Society, was a delegate to the first Black convention held at Mother Bethel AME church in Philadelphia. The following year, an interracial group of abolitionists selected New Haven as the site for a college for Black men; their proposal was squashed by white leaders and property owners in town. Also in 1831, a group of Black people in New Haven, the “Peace and Benevolent Society of Afric-Americans,” published a set of resolutions, passed unanimously, condemning colonization. In the years following, New Haven's Black churches were home to various antislavery conventions. Amos Beman, pastor of the Temple Street Congregational Church, was a leader in the "Colored Conventions" movement and hosted the 1849 Connecticut State Convention of Coloured Men at this church.  Other residents, like John Creed, father of future Yale medical student Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed, supported the abolitionist cause as an agent for the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. [44]

In the 1850s, a handful of Black intellectuals alternatively renounced race science or remade it into claims of Black superiority. In a commencement speech at Western Reserve College, Frederick Douglass rejected scientific attempts to describe Black people as belonging to a different species than whites, denouncing them as attempts “to overthrow the instinctive consciousness of the common brotherhood of man.” Douglass further pointed out that the people making these arguments were only trying to “excuse themselves for refusing to make the slave a freeman.” [45] These were political arguments presented as science, and Douglass explained that he had “no doubt” that proslavery scientists and physicians “were duly consulted by our slavery propagating statesmen.” [46] Douglass also repeated the logic of Black abolitionist Martin Robinson Delany that if proslavery southerners were correct that only Black people could labor in the South then Africans were the superior race since they could also work in the North. [47] Silliman could have followed these Black writers in attacking the medical and scientific premises of Black inferiority and slavery, but he opted not to mention them in his scientific publications.

Enslavers’ positions on slavery changed and diversified between the Declaration of Independence and the Civil War. As political battles over the westward expansion of slavery intensified, southerners began depicting the institution more positively. In the words of a February 1837 speech by Yale College graduate and U.S. Senator John C. Calhoun, a friend and former student of Silliman: “the relation now existing in the slaveholding states between the two [races] is, instead of an evil, a good – a positive good.” [48] Calhoun argued that slavery had allowed African-descended people to “improve,” claiming “the black race of Central Africa . . . came among us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and, in the course of a few generations, it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions . . . to its present comparative civilized condition.” [49] According to this view, the institution of slavery was an institution of progress that spread true (Western Christian) civilization to heathen people otherwise doomed to barbarism.

In the 1850s, as the Fugitive Slave and Kansas-Nebraska Acts spurred northern passions, Silliman and others at Yale slowly took more public stances against slavery. The United States had won the Mexican-American War in 1848 and forced Mexico to cede over half its territory in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, giving the contiguous United States close to its modern form. The influx of new land in the West renewed debates over whether slavery should be allowed in western territories. The Compromise of 1850 tried to find a balance by admitting California as a free state and Texas as a slave state, banning the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and organizing the Territories of Utah and New Mexico without specifying whether they would have slavery or not. The Compromise also included the Fugitive Slave Act, which required federal officials in every state to capture and return escaped enslaved people. The commissioners that oversaw hearings determining a captured person’s slave status were to be paid $10 for ruling they were a slave but only $5 for ruling they were free. Additionally, the act prohibited “the testimony of such alleged fugitive” from being “admitted in evidence” in the hearing determining their status. [50] Many northerners balked at the federal government overriding state laws and customs as well as at the unfairness of the law.

"Seize him! Seize him!" cartoon

Figure 5. Political cartoon depicting northern states being used by the South to recapture enslaved people who had run away. Antislavery northerners used cartoons like this one to criticize the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Mary Hallock Foote (illustrator) and William H. Burridge (engraver), “Seize Him! Seize Him!,” Engraving, 1862, Slavery in South Carolina and the ex-slaves: or, The Port Royal Mission. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division.

In New Haven, the response to the Fugitive Slave Law was initially muted, at least among some white elites. Bacon and Silliman attended a “Union meeting” that passed resolutions declaring loyalty to the Union and the Compromise while denouncing “attacks on the institutions of other states,” open-ended language that could be read to mean either attacks on slavery or on free states being forced to surrender possible runaways. [51] This position likely appealed to Bacon and Silliman who were still advocating a gradual end to slavery.

The Fugitive Slave Law did, however, begin to change the minds of others and fostered new Black and white resistance to slavery. However, William De Loss Love, a recent Yale Divinity School graduate, gave a passionate sermon on “the obligation to obey God rather than men” and entreated his New Haven parishioners to “bear the penalty of a law that commands sin” if “called to assist in arresting your fugitive neighbor.” [52] Northern opinion was moving toward resistance, and over the following months Bacon published criticisms of the Fugitive Slave Act while continuing to support the Compromise’s other elements. [53] Yale President Woolsey also came to oppose the law and joined local ministers in creating a vigilance committee to defend Black New Haveners from capture, while Amos Beman, the Black pastor of the Temple Street African Church, publicly declared that his church assisted escaping enslaved people. [54] However, according to one Yale student, Bacon and Woolsey “braved public sentiment” with their statements that went against the feelings of most white New Haveners “and were supposed . . . to endanger the interests of Yale by standing against the fugitive slave law” because the South “sent large bodies of students to it." [55]

Whether and how much Bacon’s, Silliman’s, and especially Woolsey’s increasingly forceful statements about slavery affected Yale is impossible to say precisely, but the College and the Medical Institution did enroll many students from the South and other slave societies such as Brazil and Caribbean sugar islands. Because student tuition at antebellum American medical schools directly paid professors, a dip in enrollment could seriously hurt their personal income as well as that of the school. The proportion of medical students from slave states and countries had peaked in the late 1830s and early 1840s with an average of about six percent of the class per year. By the late 1840s, the average proportion had dropped to under five percent. Southern enrollment took a major dip in the years after the Fugitive Slave Act: in 1851, only 2.7 percent of medical students were from slave societies and, in 1852, 2.9 percent. Southern student numbers then rebounded to 4.9 and 6.5 percent the next two years before again falling with the next national uproar over slavery. [56] Medical professors, including Eli Ives, Nathan Smith, and Jonathan Knight, also rented rooms to students, and alienating southern students could limit their rental income as well. For instance, when Professor Ives rented rooms to medical students between 1814 and 1838, roughly ten percent came from the South. [57]

Yale School of Medicine students from slave societies, 1813-1870

Figure 6. Chart of percentage of Yale School of Medicine students from slave societies, 1813-1870

We have not uncovered a direct response from Silliman to the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act, and he may have been biding his time to retirement before becoming more outspoken about slavery. In August 1849, he had communicated his desire to retire at the end of the following academic year, but the death of his wife in January 1850 led him to stay and focus on his work rather than be alone with his grief. [58] Silliman again announced his intention to retire in September 1852 and was granted emeritus status in July 1853. [59]

Silliman’s retirement may have given him a freer hand when the next great conflict over slavery exploded in 1854. In response to the 1820 Missouri Crisis, the U.S. Congress had banned slavery in western lands outside of Missouri and north of 36°30′ north latitude, Missouri’s southern border. But in 1854, Congress repealed that prohibition as part of the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which organized the Kansas and Nebraska Territories, leaving the question of whether slavery would be legal in them up to a popular vote. This change shocked northerners who had believed that by containing slavery it would slowly disappear. [60] The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act by the Senate in January 1854 triggered “anti-Nebraska” meetings throughout the North to discourage the House of Representatives from concurring with the bill. In anti-Nebraska meetings held in New Haven in March, Silliman gave a speech attacking Isaac Toucey, a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, as “a northern dough-face” and “a traitor to this county.” [61] A “doughface” was understood to be someone easily molded by another person’s stronger will, and since the Missouri Crisis in 1820, “doughface” had come to mean specifically a northern politician who voted with the South on issues related to slavery. Toucey had voted for the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in January, and by calling Toucey a doughface, Silliman was denouncing him as a weak-willed toady of the South. Silliman castigated Toucey for supporting slavery as a northerner, but he couched his words in a way to prevent alienating his southern friends. He explained that he had “been through the South” and there were “many men are in that section of the country whom I honor and respect, although we may differ widely in views.” Silliman declared, however, that he would never accept a doughface as a friend because they were not honest about their politics. [62]

Silliman was not the only person connected with Yale School of Medicine to play a role in the New Haven anti-Nebraska meetings. Jonathan Knight, then professor of principles and practice of surgery at Yale and the president of the American Medical Association, was elected a vice president of the meetings, though he did not speak at them. Additionally, Eli W. Blake and Charles Ives served on the executive committee that organized the meetings, with Ives speaking and Blake being elected a vice president alongside Knight. Ives and Blake may have been former Yale medical students who attended the school from 1824 to 1826 and 1839 to 1841, respectively. Alternatively, the Ives who took part in the meetings could have been the future Yale professor of the theory and practice of medicine who was in the faculty post from 1868 to 1873. Yale medical alumni and current and future faculty continued to fight the expansion of slavery after the House of Representatives ratified the Kansas-Nebraska Act and it was signed by President Franklin Pierce in May 1854. [63]

Figure 7. Portrait of Nathan Smith by Samuel Finley Breese Morse, 1826. Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine.

 

Another founding professor, Nathan Smith, left no record we have found of his views on slavery, but his association with medical schools that admitted Black students suggests he may have supported Black education, though possibly only with the proviso not uncommon at antebellum medical schools that graduates emigrate to Liberia after completing their medical studies. Smith was born in Massachusetts in 1762, seventeen years before Silliman, and his family moved to present-day Vermont. At the time, Vermont was claimed by both the colonies of New York and New Hampshire. When the Revolutionary War broke out, residents of the area declared their own independence and in July 1777 adopted the Constitution of Vermont. However, Vermont was not accepted into the United States until 1791, when New York finally relinquished its claim. The 1777 constitution effectively outlawed slavery with the provision “no male person . . . ought to be holden by law, to serve any person, as a servant, slave, or apprentice, after he arrives to the age of twenty-one years; nor female, in like manner, after she arrives to the age of eighteen years, unless they are bound by their own consent.” [64] Whether and to what degree the teenage Smith was inspired by the revolutionary discourse of freedom is hard to say, but he did serve as part of the state’s militia near the end of the war. [65]

Vermont Constitution, 1777

Figure 8. Vermont Constitution, 1777. Collection of the Vermont Historical Society.

Smith founded and taught at numerous medical schools over his career. In 1797, he became the first and only member of the Dartmouth Medical School faculty and would remain so for the next thirteen years. He was then appointed the first professor of the theory and practice of physic, surgery, and obstetrics at Yale when its medical school opened in 1813. In 1821, while still teaching at Yale, Smith founded the Medical School of Maine at Bowdoin College, teaching every course besides chemistry at the new school for its first four years. Smith also lectured at the University of Vermont’s medical school as his son, Nathan Ryno Smith, was working to get it started. The elder Smith died in 1829, before any of the schools he helped to start enrolled Black students. [66] However, Dartmouth in 1839 was the first U.S. medical school to grant a MD degree to a Black student, and in 1849 Bowdoin graduated two Black medical students. [67] Smith could have helped put these schools on the path to enroll Black students, but more likely these New England institutions were simply more insulated from trans-Atlantic trade than Yale. Yale School of Medicine, unlike Dartmouth and Bowdoin, was located in a major port conducting commerce with slave societies, and many of its students came from places with slavery. It would wait to admit its first Black student in 1854, following the upheaval of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Still, it is tempting to imagine that Smith had more progressive views about race and slavery—though even if he did, he did not act on them publicly.

The opinions that some antebellum Americans publicly expressed about slavery and abolition changed over time as the political situation changed. At Yale School of Medicine, Silliman adopted a conservative, gradual antislavery stance favoring colonization and took care not to alienate his southern students and supporters. As the tide of northern public opinion strengthened against slavery and southern political machinations, Silliman became more outspoken, but he remained committed to gradual abolition. Younger, future faculty members also joined Silliman in opposing the westward expansion of slavery. In hindsight, there were no antislavery heroes among the Yale medical faculty. Economic and professional interest muted public action, and it would take the purposeful speech and action of others to end slavery in the United States.

Endnotes

1. George Park Fisher, Life of Benjamin Silliman, M.D., LL.D., Late Professor of Chemistry, Mineralogy, and Geology in Yale College: Chiefly from His Manuscript Reminiscences, Diaries, and Correspondence (C. Scribner, 1866), 1:2, 6–7.
    
2. Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1904), 20 October 1774, 76–77.
    
3. “Jefferson’s ‘Original Rough Draught’ of the Declaration of Independence,” The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, accessed January 8, 2019, https://jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/selected-documents/jefferson%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Coriginal-rough-draught%E2%80%9D-declaration-independence.
    
4. Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765-1820 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 295–99; Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery, ed. Ward McAfee (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 42–43, 139–41; Jed Handelsman Shugerman, “The Louisiana Purchase and South Carolina’s Reopening of the Slave Trade in 1803,” Journal of the Early Republic 22, no. 2 (2002): 263–90.
    
5. Pennsylvania Packet, March 30, 1780.
    
6. Chandos Michael Brown, Benjamin Silliman: A Life in the Young Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 32, http://archive.org/details/benjaminsilliman00brow.
    
7. “Jefferson’s ‘Original Rough Draught’ of the Declaration of Independence.”
    
8. Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” in Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: The Library of America, 2011), 264; Thomas Jefferson, “Report on Government for Western Territory,” in Peterson, ed., Writings, 377.
    
9. Brown, Benjamin Silliman, 33.
    
10. Brown, Benjamin Silliman, 34–35.
     
11. John F. Fulton and Elizabeth H. Thomson, Benjamin Silliman 1779-1864: Pathfinder In American Science (New York: Henry Schuman, 1947), 45, http://archive.org/details/benjaminsilliman0000john.
     
12. Fulton and Thomson, Benjamin Silliman, 53.
     
13. Eric Herschthal, The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 135–37.
     
14. Herschthal, The Science of Abolition, 139–40.
     
15. Pennsylvania Packet, March 30, 1780.
     
16. “An Act Concerning Indian, Molatto and Negro Servants and Slaves,” in Acts and Laws of the State of Connecticut in America (New London, Conn: Timothy Green, 1884), 233–35, https://archives.library.wcsu.edu/omeka/items/show/2625; Ramin Ganeshram and Elizabeth Normen, “Constitution of 1818 & Black Suffrage: Rights For All?,” Connecticut Explored, January 18, 2019, https://www.ctexplored.org/constitution-of-1818-rights-for-all/.
     
17. Ganeshram and Normen, “Constitution of 1818 & Black Suffrage”; Katherine J. Harris, “‘No Taxation without Representation’: Black Voting in Connecticut,” Connecticut Explored, June 1, 2016, https://www.ctexplored.org/no-taxation-without-representation-voting-petitions-in-connecticut/; Robert Austin Warner, New Haven Negroes, a Social History (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 53–59; Hilary J. Moss, “Education’s Inequity: Opposition to Black Higher Education in Antebellum Connecticut,” History of Education Quarterly 46, no. 1 (2006): 16–35.
     
18. Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 117.
     
19. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism, 112–20; Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 163–65.
     
20. This interpretation of Silliman’s support for colonization was informed by Herschthal, The Science of Abolition, 131–46. Herschthal concludes that “By supporting colonization, Silliman was able to maintain his antislavery beliefs without offending his slaveholding donors . . . . When faced with the choice of appeasing his slave-owning patrons or embracing a newly radical antislavery agenda, Silliman chose the safer middle ground of colonization” (145).
     
21. Leonard Woolsey Bacon, Anti-Slavery Before Garrison (New Haven, Conn.: Tuttle, Morehouse and Taylor, 1903), 26; George A. King, Theodore Dwight Woolsey, His Political and Social Ideas (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1956), 23, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001452436. Robert Warner claims the Anti-Slavery Association was not formed until 1826, the same year as the African Improvement Society. He has probably incorrectly assumed the two related organizations started at the same time. The Improvement Society was likely founded in 1826 as the offspring of the earlier the Anti-Slavery Association from 1825. See Warner, New Haven Negroes, a Social History, 46.
     
22. Theodore Davenport Bacon, Leonard Bacon, a Statesman in the Church, ed. Benjamin W. Bacon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931), 191–92, 194, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015026253560; King, Theodore Dwight Woolsey, 46.
     
23. “African Improvement Society,” The Religious Intelligencer (New Haven: American Periodicals Series II, April 28, 1827); American Colonization Society, The African Repository, and Colonial Journal, vol. 3 (Washington, 1828), 92, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.$b541057?urlappend=%3Bseq=5. Historians have listed a range of years from 1825 to 1828 for Silliman’s involvement in New Haven antislavery societies, but these are the earliest primary sources we have found.
     
24. King, Theodore Dwight Woolsey, 9; Bacon, Leonard Bacon, 38–39.
     
25. Quoted in Bacon, Leonard Bacon, 194.
     
26.  American Colonization Society, The African Repository and Colonial Journal 8 (Washington: James C. Dunn, 1833), 176.
     
27. American Colonization Society, The African Repository and Colonial Journal, 8:168–69.
     
28. American Colonization Society, The African Repository and Colonial Journal, 8:172.
     
29. American Colonization Society, The African Repository and Colonial Journal, 8:172.
     
30. Moss, “Education’s Inequity”; Warner, New Haven Negroes, a Social History, 58–61.
     
31. American Colonization Society, The African Repository and Colonial Journal, 8:175.
     
32. American Colonization Society, The African Repository and Colonial Journal, 8:173.
     
33. Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 225–26; David W. Blight with the Yale and Slavery Research Project, Yale and Slavery: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), 143-45.
     
34. Warner, New Haven Negroes, a Social History, 61.
     
35.  Joseph Leidy, An Elementary Treatise on Human Anatomy (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1861), 514.
     
36. Samuel Cartwright, “The Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race [Continued],” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 8 (September 1851): 194.
     
37. John Harley Warner, “A Southern Medical Reform: The Meaning of the Antebellum Argument for Southern Medical Education,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 57, no. 3 (1983): 364–81; John Harley Warner, “The Idea of Southern Medical Distinctiveness: Medical Knowledge and Practice in the Old South,” in Science and Medicine in the Old South, ed. Ronald L. Numbers and Todd L. Savitt (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 179–205; Steven M. Stowe, Doctoring the South: Southern Physicians and Everyday Medicine in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), esp. chap. 7; Christopher D. E. Willoughby, “Running Away from Drapetomania: Samuel A. Cartwright, Medicine, and Race in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Southern History 84, no. 3 (2018): 579–614.
     
38. George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 78–83.
     
39. Samuel Cartwright, “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 7 (May 1851): 691–715.
     
40. Willoughby, “Running Away from Drapetomania,” 592.
     
41. Herschthal, The Science of Abolition, 140–41; William A. Weaver, Register of All Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval, in the Service of the United States, on the Thirtieth of September, 1835 (Washington: Blair & Rives, 1835), 1, 12, 77, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015008102264?urlappend=%3Bseq=18.
     
42.  Herschthal, The Science of Abolition, 142–43.
     
43. Benjamin Silliman, “Remarks on Some of the Gold Mines, and on Parts of the Gold Region of Virginia, Founded on Personal Observations, Made in the Months of August and September, 1836,” American Journal of Science 32 (1837):98-130. As quoted in Green, “Gold Mining in Antebellum Virginia,” 358. Silliman’s journal quoted in Fisher, Life of Benjamin Silliman, 1:378.
     
44. On Black abolitionism in New Haven, see David W. Blight and the Yale and Slavery Research Project, Yale and Slavery: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), 130-132, 141-156, 143, 195-200.  See also “Amos Beman Scrapbooks, 1830-1858,” https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/amos-beman-scrapbooks-1830-1858, and Hope McGrath, “Picturing John W. Creed: New Haven Abolitionist, Custodian, and Business Owner,” https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/article/picturing-john-w-creed. Our thanks to Hope McGrath for these references.
     
45. Frederick Douglass, The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered: An Address before the Literary Societies of Western Reserve College, at Commencement, July 12, 1854 (Rochester, NY, 1854), 15, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.69015000002739.
     
46. Douglass, The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered, 16.
     
47. Douglass, The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered, 35. See also Martin Robison Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (New York: Arno Press, 1968), esp. 202.
     
48. John C. Calhoun, Speeches of John C. Calhoun: Delivered in the Congress of the United States from 1811 to the Present Time (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1843), 225.
     
49.  Calhoun, Speeches, 224.
     
50. “Fugitive Slave Act 1850,” Avalon Project, 2008, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/fugitive.asp.
     
51. Warner, New Haven Negroes, a Social History, 106–7.
     
52.  William De Loss Love, Obedience to Rulers: The Duty and Its Limitations: A Discourse Delivered December 22d, 1850, on the Two Hundred and Thirtieth Anniversary of the Landing of the Pilgrims (New Haven, Conn.: Storer & Stone, 1851), 3, 14, https://www.loc.gov/item/15023169/.
     
53. Hugh Davis, Leonard Bacon: New England Reformer and Antislavery Moderate (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 146, http://archive.org/details/leonardbaconnewe0000davi.
     
54. Warner, New Haven Negroes, a Social History, 110; King, Theodore Dwight Woolsey, 46–48; Robert A. Warner, “Amos Gerry Beman-1812-1874, a Memoir on a Forgotten Leader,” Journal of Negro History 22, no. 2 (1937): 209, https://doi.org/10.2307/2714429.
     
55. Quoted in King, Theodore Dwight Woolsey, 44–45.
     
56.  These numbers come from the annual medical school catalogs which included lists of students and where they came from. Students from states and countries where slavery was legal at the outbreak of the Civil War were counted in comparison to the total number of students listed in the catalogs. See https://onlineexhibits.library.yale.edu/s/ysmslavery/item/19231.
     
57. This percentage was determined by counting students who listed Prof. Ives as their “Rooms” in the annual medical school catalogs. See https://onlineexhibits.library.yale.edu/s/ysmslavery/item/19231.
     
58.  Fulton and Thomson, Benjamin Silliman, 218–19.
     
59. Fulton and Thomson, Benjamin Silliman, 237.
     
60. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 261–62; David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher, reprint edition (1976; New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), 225, 356; Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 190, 220-21.  See also Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire, revised edition (1985; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 130–31.
     
61. James F. Babcock and Thomas Anthony Thacher, eds., Speeches and Other Proceedings at the Anti-Nebraska Meetings: Held in New Haven, Connecticut, March 8th and 10th, 1854 (New Haven: J.H. Austin, 1854), 18.
     
62. Babcock and Thacher, Speeches and Other Proceedings at the Anti-Nebraska Meetings, 17–18.
     
63. Babcock and Thacher, Speeches and Other Proceedings at the Anti-Nebraska Meetings, 3. The Ives and Blake families were numerous and often named their children after relatives, making exact identification impossible without some corroborating source. Yale catalogs listing students and a professor with these names can be found at “Yale University Catalogue,” Yale University Publications | Yale University, accessed September 15, 2022, https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yale_catalogue/.
     
64. “Vermont Constitution - 1777,” Vermont State Archives & Records Administration - Vermont Secretary of State, accessed July 10, 2023, https://sos.vermont.gov/vsara/learn/constitution/1777-constitution.
     
65. Emily A. Smith, The Life and Letters of Nathan Smith, M.B., M.D. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1914), 4, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001576290.
     
66. G. E. Lindskog, “Yale’s First Professor of Surgery: Nathan Smith, M.D. (1762-1829),” Surgery 64, no. 2 (1968): 524–28.
     
67. Susan Green, “Grit and Determination,” Dartmouth Medicine Magazine, 2020, https://dartmed.dartmouth.edu/spring20/html/features_grit-and-determination/; “History,” Africana Studies, Bowdoin College, accessed May 18, 2023, https://www.bowdoin.edu/africana-studies/history/index.html