Yale School of Medicine and Slavery

Yale Medical Alumni and Slavery

It was not just the Yale medical graduates who came from enslaving families who would go on to be enslavers and use their medical credentials to defend the institution of slavery. This essay examines the lives of two Connecticut-born graduates of the Medical Institution of Yale College who became prominent leaders of the medical profession in the South. There, they played leading roles in establishing new medical schools, journals, and societies. These institutions provided platforms for defending slavery and perpetuating scientific racism.

Content warning: This essay also explores Connecticut-born physician Ashbel Smith’s involvement in the sex slave trade, and we wish to caution readers that this content is disturbing.

Figure 1. Photograph of Ashbel Smith (ca. 1870s-1880s). Source: University of Texas Libraries, accessed June 9, 2023.

The careers of Ashbel Smith (1805-1886) and Noah Bennett Benedict (1809-1863) illustrate how a Yale medical degree could help someone to build a professional reputation and to acquire positions of influence in an enslaving society. Ashbel Smith (Figure 1) had a prolific career as a physician, a medical reformer, a military officer, a statesman, and an educational reformer in Texas. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Smith attended Hartford Public Schools and Yale for his bachelor’s degree (1824) and his medical degree (1828). Like many American physicians, he then studied medicine in Paris where he treated sick people during the cholera epidemic of 1832. Smith returned to the United States in 1833, opening a medical practice in Salisbury, North Carolina before moving to the new Republic of Texas in 1837. There, he became a close friend of Samuel Houston, the first and third president of the Republic of Texas. Houston appointed Smith to the post of surgeon general of the Republic of Texas Army, where he was instrumental in founding the first hospital in Texas and in fighting against yellow fever in the Galveston area. [1]

Smith would go on to serve as Houston’s envoy to the Comanche, negotiating further dispossession of Indigenous lands and helping to pave the way for more white settlers to move into Texas. He also served as a three-term state senator after Texas was admitted to the United States and as an officer in the U.S.-Mexican War and in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. [2]

Figure 2. Statue of Ashbel Smith in Baytown, Texas. Source: Wikimedia Commons, accessed June 9, 2023.

In addition to his political career, Smith had an illustrious career as a medical leader in Texas. In 1853, he became the first president of the Texas State Medical Association. In the 1870s, he helped to found the “Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, for the benefit of the Colored Youths,” which would eventually become Prairie View A&M University. In 1881, five years before his death, Smith was appointed president of the Board of Regents of the newly established University of Texas in Austin. [3] Thanks to this storied career, he has been remembered in Texas popular history as the “Father of Medicine in Texas” and the “Father of the University of Texas.” Indeed, there are many statues of Smith (Figure 2); endowed professorships and academic awards in his name; and buildings named after him, including “Old Red,” the first building of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston (Figure 3).

Ashbel Smith Building in Galveston, Texas

Figure 3. Built in 1890, the Ashbel Smith Building is a prominent fixture on the campus of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. Source: Wikimedia Commons, accessed June 9, 2023.

From the late 1830s until slavery was abolished in 1865, Smith was also a profitable and brutal enslaver. In 1837, he purchased land in what is today Baytown, Texas, near Galveston Bay (Figure 4). He quickly became one of the most prominent enslavers in the area, and at his height he held some thirty-two people in bondage at his Evergreen and Headquarters cotton plantations. [4] Smith purchased many of his enslaved people when they were children. For example, in 1838, he purchased three children in New Orleans, aged ten, twelve, and seventeen, separating them from their parents and shipping them to Baytown. [5] Smith also condoned the liberal use of physical violence on his plantations. In 1852, Benjamin Roper, his overseer for Evergreen and Headquarters, wrote to Smith to inform him that “on the night of [April] 30 I cut Lewis [an enslaved man] with a knife.” Another man named “Dr. Whiting” was attending to Lewis’ injury, but Roper vowed that as soon as Lewis “is able to bear punishment I shall bring him home and give him a very severe whipping.”[6]

Map of Ashbel Smith property

Figure 4. Map of Chambers County, Texas, showing the likely location of Smith’s plantation just across the Harris County line in what is now Baytown, Texas. Texas General Land Office, “Map of Chambers County, Texas,” Library of Congress.

Smith also defended the institution of racial slavery by force. When the Civil War began in 1861, he organized a local militia called the Bayland Guards, whose initial mission was to police plantations, capturing or murdering enslaved people who tried to flee or rebel against their overseers. [7] The Bayland Guards drilled at Evergreen plantation before they were mustered in as Company C in the Galveston Infantry Regiment of the Confederate Army in August 1861. [8]

Ashbel Smith’s ownership of enslaved people and his pro-slavery politics are well known to historians, but the Yale School of Medicine and Slavery Project has unearthed new archival evidence of his involvement in the sex slave trade in Texas. Historians of the sex slave trade – the “fancy” trade as it was known at the time – have argued that it created a category of enslaved woman – the “fancy maid” – and represented a cultural and economic concentration of long-standing white fixations on Black sexuality and ideas of white supremacy. Enslavers across many local markets priced “fancy” women and girls based on perceptions of attractiveness, skin tone, and the pleasure white men might derive from these women. The fancy trade in antebellum Texas was part of the broader “domestic” slave trade, which spanned all of the U.S. South. [9] With the help of expansive networks of speculation, credit, and debt, many plantation enslavers from the Upper South, along with other white settlers from all over the United States and abroad, relocated to Deep South states such as Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, where by the 1820s there was a booming cotton economy. Between roughly 1790 and 1860, nearly one million enslaved people were forcibly moved from the Upper South to Deep South. [10] The slave markets in Natchez, Mississippi and New Orleans, Louisiana often supplied Texan planters with these internally trafficked enslaved people. New Orleans slave-trading firms such as Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard did extensive business in the fancy trade, specifically, soliciting their network of agents to ship women and girls from the Upper South to the Lower Mississippi Valley and Texas. [11]

In November 1839, Ashbel Smith was in Houston serving as Secretary of State for the Republic of Texas when he received a letter from one such New Orleans slave trader by the name of Durant Davis. Davis was an experienced vendor of enslaved people, both “fancy” and otherwise. [12] The letter makes it clear that Davis and Smith had known each other for several years. Both had served in the Texas Army under Sam Houston, and both owned plantations in Baytown. At the time of his writing, Davis was in Greensboro, Alabama and had just completed a trip to Tennessee, where, as he told Smith, he had purchased “a very likely lot of negroes and at very fair prices – say from $600 to $800 – consisting of young men, women, plough boys and girls.” According to Davis, all fifteen of these enslaved people “would be considered No. 1s in the N.O. [New Orleans] market” (Figure 5). [13] Davis lamented that he would have to sell these people in New Orleans, stating that he would prefer to “take them to Texas and settle a farm immediately” as it was “just such a lot as I would have selected for you & myself to have purchased jointly for the purpose of farming or any other way that would have been most profitable to us.” But Davis recalled that Smith had been noncommittal about whether or not he would be willing to put up the money for such a purchase. [14] Davis was unwilling to pass up the guaranteed profit he could make in the New Orleans market, so his plans to start another plantation with Smith would have to wait.

Excerpt from letter describing the enslaved people Durant H. Davis had recently purchased in Tennessee.

Figure 5. Excerpt from Davis’s letter describing the enslaved people he had recently purchased in Tennessee. Letter from Durant H. Davis to Ashbel Smith, November 24, 1839, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Davis, however, remained very keen to enlist Smith’s help in selling some enslaved people on his behalf, including enslaved women whom Davis considered suitable for sexual slavery. Davis asked Smith to speak to a man named Johnson to see if he “still wishes me to bring him that ‘tip top likely yellow girl’ that he told me to be sure and bring for him this winter.” Apparently, Davis had four enslaved women whom he would be happy to sell to Johnson, or “anyone else that wants two or three real fancy articles of the kind.” In the parlance of antebellum sex enslavers, “tip top” and “yellow” were adjectives used to describe enslaved women considered to be particularly attractive, with “yellow” referring to light-skinned enslaved women. [15] Davis was proud of his skill in selecting Black women to force into sexual slavery, and in his ability to deliver them to white enslavers who would seek to sexually abuse them. As he reminded Smith “I am a pretty considerable dealer in that way” (Figure 6). [16]

Excerpt from Durant H. Davis letter asking Ashbel Smith to speak to another enslaver regarding purchasing an enslaved woman for sexual slavery.

Figure 6. Excerpt of the Davis letter in which Davis asks Smith to speak to another enslaver named Johnson regarding his potential purchase of an enslaved woman for sexual slavery. Davis states that he has several enslaved women he believes would be suitable for this purpose. Letter from Durant H. Davis to Ashbel Smith, November 24, 1839, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Davis went on to discuss an enslaved woman named “Mary.” It appears that both he and Smith knew her well and were in the habit of judging the appearance of other enslaved women by comparing them to her. Davis stated that of the four enslaved women whom he would be willing to sell to “any one that would buy [them],” two were more attractive than Mary and two others were “very little inferior [to Mary] in regard to appearances.” It also appears that Davis had brought Mary with him on his current slave trading venture, but at some point he had abandoned her or possibly manumitted her: “I have turned Mary out to Grass – haven’t seen her in 4 or 5 months. I have given her to herself.” [17] It is also possible that Mary ran away and Davis was trying to save some face.

In any case, having ended his association with Mary, Davis stressed that he would henceforth require anyone wishing to use the women he brought to Baytown, including Smith, to pay for the experience. “I wish you to understand particularly – that should I bring any of my girls over with me they are for sale and none are a Mary,” he stated. Davis not only meant that he would not allow Smith, or anyone else, to abuse the women for free, but in emphasizing that none of these women “are a Mary,” it also seems that Davis may have been referring to the fact that he, and perhaps Smith too, had used Mary for forced sex in the past. Davis’s statement also implies that he was assuming Smith would still want to use enslaved women in this way. Davis, for his part, wanted to turn over a new leaf, and put what he apparently now deemed to be immoral sexual relations behind him. “I am done with my old tricks,” he insisted, “and shall class myself hence forward as strictly a moral man – as my recuperation and station in life and circumstances will permit.” Davis closed the letter by promising Smith that, if Smith could raise enough funds in the ensuing months, then “we can willingly enter upon for the purchase of negroes in time (I think) to make a Crop the next spring” (Figure 7). [18]

Excerpt from Durant H. Davis letter discussing an enslaved woman named "Mary."

Figure 7. Excerpt of Davis's letter discussing an enslaved woman named “Mary.” Durant H. Davis to Ashbel Smith, November 24, 1839, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

One of the most striking aspects of this letter is the casual tone that Davis uses to describe his enslavement, commodification, forced relocation, objectification, and possible sexual abuse of enslaved women. His manner of speaking shows how all of this violence was commonplace for enslavers like him and Smith. But ordinariness surely did not make violence any less painful for the women on whom enslavers inflicted it.

It is difficult to say what Davis considered to be immoral about his past relationship with Mary. To him, immorality may have meant forcing himself on her, acting on his baser desires, or having a consensual relationship outside of marriage. It is possible that Mary could have entered into a relationship with Davis willingly – perhaps in an attempt to acquire some kind of social or economic benefit – but even a willing relationship between the two would not have been exempt from the structural power dynamics of interracial sex in the antebellum South. [19] Moreover, the fact that Mary was enslaved to Davis, and legally his property, makes it less likely that she would have been given a choice in the matter.

We do not know anything more about Mary, or the other women Davis mentioned in his letter. However, historians of Black women’s experiences under slavery have much to tell us about other enslaved women who were forced into the “fancy” trade. Some of these women hid their emotions from their enslavers and abusers. Some let their despondency, pain, and anger show. Some resisted sexual violation, using a variety of tactics. There were enslaved women who tried to negotiate the terms of their sales, and some women and girls ran away or threatened to run away. Others killed their enslavers, though many of these women were killed in retribution or found guilty of murder, even when they contended that they had killed by accident or in self-defense. [20] Many enslaved, formerly enslaved, and free Black women tried to help the victims of sexual violence survive, escape, resist, and perhaps find hope in other aspects of their lives. Black women also spoke out against the rape and sexual abuse of enslaved women, in everywhere from the plantation and the slave market to newspapers, abolitionist publications, and public forums. [21]

There is also a long tradition of African American critique of enslaver sexual violence and the forces within white American society that would seek to erase its history. This tradition began with narratives of formerly enslaved people that were published before the institution was abolished. In 1861, for example, a formerly enslaved woman named Harriet Jacobs (pseudonym Linda Brent) wrote a memoir of her life under slavery in North Carolina, wherein she vividly described how her physician-enslaver, Dr. James Norcom, pressed her for sex, touched her inappropriately, and physically punished her and threatened to sell her children if she did not submit to his demands. [22] Likewise, interviews with formerly enslaved people conducted by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s contained critiques of enslaver sexual violence that ranged from subtle to unsparing. [23] Twentieth-century African American writers and historians have continued this tradition of exposing the pervasiveness of rape and sexual assault under slavery, often discussing such acts candidly and pointing out how white-dominated, academic historical scholarship has minimized sexual violence under slavery. In the 1956 book Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family, African American civil rights activist Pauli Murray argued that sexual violence under slavery was not only extensive but also normalized within white society. Murray, who in 2017 became the namesake of one of Yale’s Colleges, insisted that the discipline of history – and American society more broadly – must reckon with this massive trauma that white people inflicted on Black families. [24]

Figure 8. Reverend Noah Benedict House (1760) at 256 Main Street South in Woodbury, CT. Source: Historic Buildings of Connecticut, https://historicbuildingsct.com/rev-noah-benedict-house-1760/, accessed June 10, 2023.

Yale medical alumni contributed to the trauma of slavery and its painful afterlives in other ways. We have found one Connecticut-born physician who, after receiving his MD degree at Yale, moved to the slaveholding South, where he played a prominent role in promoting medical racism and using his medical training to shore up pro-slavery arguments. Noah Bennett Benedict was born in Woodbury, Connecticut in 1809 and received his MD degree from Yale in 1833. [25] He came from a large, well-established family that included ministers, lawyers, and local politicians, many of whom attended Yale College in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His grandfather, Reverend Noah Benedict (1737-1813), was minister of the First Congregational Church in Woodbury and a prominent figure in the town. His home, which he built in 1760, is now on the list of historic buildings in Connecticut (Figure 8). [26]

While attending Yale, Noah Benedict was a student and great admirer of William Tully, professor of materia medica and therapeutics at the medical school from 1824 to 1842. Benedict and Tully kept in contact for decades after Benedict graduated. [27] After earning his medical degree, for several years Benedict practiced in Buffalo, New York before he moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, a city to which he had no obvious personal or family connections. He opened a practice on the corner of Camp Street and Race Street, in the area of town that is now known as the Lower Garden District. His practice was located less than two miles from Touro Infirmary, a private hospital that opened in 1852, and did a large business in the treatment of enslaved people. [28]

At some point in the late 1840s, Benedict’s brother, Thomas Bridgum Benedict, joined him in New Orleans. Thomas began his own medical studies at the Medical Department of the University of Louisiana, which would later become Tulane Medical School. Like Yale and other medical schools in the antebellum period, especially those located in port cities, this institution went to great lengths to advertise its access to patient bodies. The founding faculty of the Medical College of Louisiana touted New Orleans as the ideal location for a medical school because the city’s hospitals – promoted as the “largest in the Southern and Western States” and “always filled with patients,” many of them Black – would be open to students and faculty “for the purpose of instruction.” [29] In 1847, the Louisiana state legislature granted the college “free access” to the Charity Hospital of New Orleans for the “purpose of affording their students practical illustrations of the subjects they teach.” Charity Hospital had been the main hospital for the treatment of enslaved people, poor people, and sailors since its founding in 1736. It is clear that the faculty at the medical school saw this as a business advantage. According to the school’s alumni magazine, when it came to “the study of disease of the Southwest and also of the negro race,” there was “no field comparable to that furnished by the Charity Hospital of New Orleans.” [30]

After earning his MD degree in 1850, Thomas Benedict entered into practice with his brother Noah in New Orleans, where he made use of his extensive experience learning medicine on enslaved and poor Black people. Indeed, given its location in New Orleans, and Thomas Benedict’s medical training, it would not be surprising if the Benedicts’ practice did significant and lucrative business in the medical treatment of enslaved people, specifically. This in turn may have inspired Thomas to strike out on his own. After working with his brother for several years, Thomas moved up the Mississippi River to Tensas Parish, Louisiana, where he opened his own medical practice in the midst of a thriving cotton plantation economy. [31]

Although we cannot say for certain that Noah Benedict practiced medicine on enslaved people, we do know that he was a prominent figure in the proslavery medical intelligentsia based in antebellum New Orleans. Benedict had leadership roles in two major Louisiana intellectual societies which largely supported slavery: the Louisiana State Medical Society and the New Orleans Academy of Science. In 1852, for example, Benedict was appointed chairman of the Louisiana State Medical Society’s Committee on Midwifery and the Diseases of Women and Children. [32] In 1853, he became a founding member and the first secretary of the New Orleans Academy of Science. Letters to his Yale faculty mentor, William Tully, show that Benedict eventually convinced Tully to become a corresponding member of the society in 1858. [33]

Benedict also published extensively in two proslavery medical journals based in New Orleans: the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal and the New Orleans Medical News and Hospital Gazette. In 1853, Benedict published his first article, titled “On the Operation of Transfusion-Being the Report of a Committee,” in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal. [34] The subject of Benedict’s essay was analysis of several blood transfusion cases, which did not appear to contain racialized language, support of slavery, or explicit mentions to any enslaved patient cases. However, his subsequent medical journal articles on yellow fever in New Orleans, published between 1853 and 1857, reveal that he believed the disease occurred “spontaneously” due to disturbances in the soil, unusual high humidity levels, elevated temperatures, and stagnant water, among other environmental factors. [35] This argument ultimately supported the slavery economy in New Orleans. The same line of medical thinking was taken up by plantation owners, slave traders, businessmen, and pro-commerce municipal officials who adamantly opposed the use of quarantines to control epidemics of yellow fever in the city. From their perspectives, quarantines were far too disruptive to the shipping of enslaved people, cotton, and other resources and commodities upon which the wealth of Louisiana’s slave society depended. [36]

Benedict’s support of racial science and medicine was most evident in his role during the 1840s and 1850s as contributing editor to the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, the South’s premier medical journal. The Journal published the work of Josiah C. Nott and Samuel Cartwright, two of the most prolific and influential racial medical thinkers in the antebellum South. Benedict’s name is listed as a contributor in the Journal issues containing Nott’s essays “Yellow Fever Contrasted with Bilious Fever” (1848) and “Geographical Distribution of Animals and the Races of Men” (1853). [37] These essays discussed ideas of race, geography, climate, and disease that would become foundational to Nott’s most famous works, An Essay on the Natural History of Mankind: Viewed in Connection with Negro Slavery (1850) and Types of Mankind (1854). Both of these publications promoted the idea that Black people were intellectually inferior to whites and achieved their “greatest perfection” – in terms of their physical and moral character and their life expectancy – in the “state of slavery.” Benedict clearly agreed with such ideas, and he was mentioned as a “subscriber to the Types of Mankind” in its first edition. [38]

During Benedict’s tenure, the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal also published several of Samuel Cartwright’s essays, including “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race” (1851-2) and “Philosophy of the Negro Constitution” (1852). [39] Like Nott, Cartwright believed Black people were physically and mentally inferior to white people. For example, he believed that Black people had smaller brains and lungs, and that these deficiencies meant that Black people experienced the world through their senses, “at the expense of intellectuality.” To Cartwright, this not only explained differences in culture and character but also their supposed “love” of slavery. The idea that Black people thrived under enslavement was central to Cartwright’s theory of “drapetomania,” which he described as a mental illness that caused Black people to flee slavery. To Cartwright, slavery was such an improvement upon the lives of Black people that only those suffering from some form of mental illness would wish to escape. [40] As a contributing editor for the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, Noah Benedict helped promote such medical ideas, which were taken up by southern politicians to defend the institution and would be used in the production of racialized medical knowledge long after the abolition of slavery. [41]

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Benedict joined the fight on the side of the Confederates. In 1850, he had married Harriet Sophia Battelle, daughter of a wealthy slaveholding family from Montgomery, Alabama. Thus, Benedict had professional, intellectual, and personal (and personal economic) reasons to defend the institution of racial slavery. Together with his brother, Thomas, he enlisted in the Continental Regiment of the Louisiana Militia in 1861. Thomas Benedict died at the battle of Vicksburg in 1863. Shortly after, Noah returned to New Orleans to serve as a surgeon with the Confederate States of America Home Guard until his own death, which happened a few months later. [42] Despite being born and raised in Connecticut, the Benedict brothers were willing to take up arms, and ultimately sacrifice their lives, to protect the enslaving society they had come to call home.

What Noah Benedict and Ashbel Smith have in common, in addition to their Connecticut roots and their involvement in slavery, is that both men used their Yale credentials to get ahead in an enslaving society. Benedict displayed his Yale MD on the business cards that he printed for his practice in New Orleans, which implies that he believed the school’s reputation would be boost his own reputation as a doctor. (Figure 9).

Noah Benedict's business card listing his Yale education

Figure 9. Noah Benedict's business card listing his education: “Med. Inst. of Yale; Classes of 1831-2 + 1832-3.” Box 1, folder 19, William Tully Papers (GEN MSS 1403), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Ashbel Smith, who had been anointed with a Yale degree two times over, was likely no different than the many other Ivy League graduates who used their elite credentials and connections to insert themselves into positions of power all around the United States. According to one historian of race and education, antebellum Ivy Leaguers proved to be especially successful in ascending the heights of politics, education, religion, science, and medicine. [43] Smith had been successful in not just one but three of those institutions. Long after his death, Smith’s Yale MD still figures prominently in his public memorialization in Texas, often appearing as one of the first details in his biography on historical markers (Figure 10). Although this likely reflects the reputation that Yale School of Medicine has gained in the many decades since Smith attended, it is evidence that Smith himself made sure to continually mention his alma mater as he moved across the country, up the ranks of slaveholding society, and into the canon of Texas medical history.

Ashbel Smith historical marker

Figure 10. Historical marker for Ashbel Smith in Baytown, Texas, noting Yale medical degree. Source: Historical Marker Database, accessed August 16, 2023.

True then as it is today, Ivy League pedigrees opened doors for people like Smith and Benedict, helping them to establish their respective medical careers and acquire positions of power, influence, and prosperity. We hope that this research will encourage current medical students, alumni, and faculty – at Yale and at other elite medical schools – to reflect on their status and influence in the field, and the ways in which such power could be used to unravel the kinds of systemic racism that Smith and Benedict helped entrench.

Endnotes

1. Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale College No. 45 (New Haven: Yale University, 1886), 284-85.
    
2. On Smith’s role in the Anglo-American colonization of Texas see Andrew J. Torget, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
    
3. For more on Smith’s connections to the University of Texas, where he was instrumental in appointing several former slaveholders to the administration and faculty, see Daina Ramey Berry, “The Texas Domestic Slave Trading Project and the Founding of ‘A University of the First Class,’” Annual Conference: Yale and Slavery in Historical Perspective (October 28-29, 2021), The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2FtnXyReQo, accessed January 19, 2023; and for general biographical details on Smith see Elizabeth Silverthorne, Ashbel Smith of Texas: Pioneer, Patriot, Statesman 1805-1886 (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1982).
    
4. For the number of enslaved people at Evergreen and Headquarters see John D. Márquez, Black-Brown Solidarity: Racial Politics in the New Gulf South (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 70; for more on Smith’s plantations see Berry, “The Texas Domestic Slave Trading Project and the Founding of ‘A University of the First Class.’”
    
5. Bill of sale for three enslaved children (April 14, 1838), Bills of Sale, Ashbel Smith Papers, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin. Quote and discussion of family separation can be found in Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 165.
    
6. Letter from Benjamin Roper (Baytown, Texas) to Ashbel Smith (Houston), May 3, 1852. As quoted in Candice D. Lyons, “Rage and Resistance at Ashbel Smith’s Evergreen Plantation,” Not Even Past (January 22, 2020), https://notevenpast.org/rage-and-resistance-at-ashbel-smiths-evergreen-plantation/, accessed January 31, 2023; see also Berry, “The Texas Domestic Slave Trading Project and the Founding of ‘A University of the First Class.’”
    
7. Márquez, Black-Brown Solidarity, 72.
    
8. “The Bayland Guards,” The Historical Marker Database, https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=53617, accessed January 31, 2023.
    
9. On the cultural, economic, and geographic dimensions of the antebellum “fancy” trade and its place in the “domestic” slave trade see for example Alexandra J. Finley, An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020);  Alexandra J. Finley, “‘Cash to Corinna’: Domestic Labor and Sexual Economy in the ‘Fancy Trade,’” Journal of American History, 104, (September, 2017): 410–430; Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, “Rethinking Sexual Violence and the Marketplace of Slavery: White Women, the Slave Market and Enslaved People’s Sexualized Bodies in the Nineteenth-Century South,” in Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas, eds. Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018): 109-123; Tiye A. Gordon, “The Fancy Trade and the Commodification of Rape in the Sexual Economy of 19th Century U.S. Slavery” (MA thesis, University of South Carolina, 2015); and Edward E. Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men’: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States,” American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 1619–50.
    
10. On the domestic slave trade see Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). On the financing of the domestic slave trade see for example Sharon Ann Murphy, Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), and Jack Lawrence Schermerhorn and Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); and for the domestic slave trade in Texas and its role in U.S. colonization of the region see Torget, Seeds of Empire.
     
11. For the history of this particular firm see Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men.’”
     
12. Durant H. Davis (Greensboro, Alabama) to Ashbel Smith (Houston), 24 November 1839. WA MSS S-3142 D2919, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University.
     
13.  On numerical and other ratings assigned to enslaved people in the New Orleans slave market see Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life in the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); and for the history of valuations of enslaved people more generally see Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from the Womb to the Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017).
     
14. Davis to Smith.
     
15.  On the specific code words used to describe sex slaves and sexual violence done to enslaved people see Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men.’"
     
16. Davis to Smith.
     
17. Davis to Smith.
     
18. Davis to Smith.
     
19. As Brenda E. Stevenson puts it, “sexual contact between slave masters and their bonded female ‘property’ was a common experience in the Atlantic World. These relations ran the gamut from rape and sodomy to romance, from chance encounters to obsession, concubinage, and even ‘marriage’” and they shaped and were shaped by social dynamics in slave society at large as well as those within enslaved families and communities. See “What’s Love Got to Do with It? Concubinage and Enslaved Women and Girls in the Antebellum South,” Journal of African American History 98, no. 1 (2013): 99–125. For quote see 100.
     
20.  In an 1855 Missouri court case, an enslaved women named Celia was accused of first-degree murder for killing her enslaver, Robert Newsom, as he was trying to rape her. Celia’s defense team argued that she had killed in accident while trying to defend herself from Newsom, but ultimately, she was found guilty and hanged. See Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, A Slave (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991).
     
21. Scholarship discussing Black women’s experiences of and resistance to sexual enslavement and violence includes Finley, An Intimate Economy; Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) and “Rethinking Sexual Violence and the Marketplace of Slavery”; Wilma King, "‘Prematurely Knowing of Evil Things’: The Sexual Abuse of African-American Girls and Young Women in Slavery and Freedom,” Journal of African American History 99, no. 33 (Nov. 2017): 173–196; Rachel A. Feinstein, When Rape Was Legal: The Untold History of Sexual Violence during Slavery (London: Routledge, 2018); Stevenson, “What’s Love Got to Do with It?”; Diane Miller Sommerville, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Saidiya Hartmann, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Thelma Jennings, “‘Us Colored Women Had to Go Through a Plenty’: Sexual Exploitation of African-American Slave Women,” Journal of Women’s History 1, no. 3 (Winter 1990): 45-74; and Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985).
     
22. Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (Boston, 1861); for an historical analysis of this text and its place in historical memory see Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
     
23. Lynn Cowles Wartberg, “‘They Was Things Past the Tellin’: A Reconsideration of Sexuality and Memory in the Ex-Slave Narratives of the Federal Writers’ Project” (M.A. Thesis, University of New Orleans, 2012).
     
24. Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956), see esp. 33-54; other twentieth-century African-American writers and historians who explicitly challenged the then-dominant academic consensus on the rarity of rape and sexual violence under enslavement include John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 154-56, 172-73; Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981), 3-29; White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, esp. 27-46; Hortense Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17 (Summer 1987): 65-81; and Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” Signs 14 (Summer 1989): 912-20.
     
25. Benedict appears in the list of medical graduates for 1833 in the Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Yale College, 1833-1834 (New Haven: Yale University, 1833). Available through EliScholar: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yale_catalogue/19, accessed March 30, 2023.
     
26. On the early history of the Benedict family in Connecticut see Henry Marvin Benedict, The Genealogy of the Benedicts in America (Albany: J. Munsell, 1870).
     
27. Letters from Benedict to Tully can be found in box 1, folder 19, William Tully Papers (GEN MSS 1403), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
     
28. On the history of Touro and its relationship to slavery see Stephen C. Kenny, “‘A Dictate of Both Interest and Mercy’? Slave Hospitals in the Antebellum South,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 65, no. 1 (2010): 1–47; and Katherine Olukemi Bankole, “A Critical Inquiry of Enslaved African Females and the Antebellum Hospital Experience,” Journal of Black Studies 31, no. 5 (2001): 517–38.
     
29. The First Circular or Prospectus of the Medical College of Louisiana (September 23, 1834), University Archives, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans; and for more on how the practice of medicine on enslaved people at New Orleans hospitals benefitted the slavery economy see Kenny, “‘A Dictate of Both Interest and Mercy’?”
     
30.  The text of the state law, including “free access” and “for the purpose”, is quoted in the history section of the school’s alumni catalogue. This section also describes the incomparability of Charity Hospital for “the study of disease of the Southwest and also of the negro race.” See Catalogue of the Alumni from 1834 to 1901, Inclusive, of the Medical Department of the Tulane University of Louisiana (New Orleans: L. Graham and Sons, 1901), Rudolph Matas Library of the Health Sciences, Tulane University School of Medicine.
     
31. Benedict, The Genealogy of the Benedicts in America, 372.
     
32. “List of Committees,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 9 (1853), 564.
     
33. See letters from Benedict to Tully (dated 1856-1858) and Tully’s certificate of membership (dated 1858) in box 1, folder 19, William Tully Papers (GEN MSS 1403).
     
34.  N. B. Benedict, “On the Operation of Transfusion—Being the Report of a Committee,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 10 (1853): 191-205.
     
35. A summary of Benedict’s findings on yellow fever, published in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal and the New Orleans Medical News and Hospital Gazette between 1853 and 1857, can be found in Edward H. Barton, “Report on the Sanitary Condition of New Orleans,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 14 (1857): 608-872; for quotations see 781.
     
36. Kathryn Olivarius, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022); Urmi Engineer Willoughby, Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017); and Margaret Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
     
37. Josiah C. Nott, “Yellow Fever Contrasted with Bilious Fever,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 4 (1848): 563-601, and  “Geographical Distribution of Animals and the Races of Men,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 9 (1853): 727–746.
     
38. Josiah C. Nott and George Robins Gliddon, Types of Mankind: Or, Ethnological Researches: Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and Upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, Grambo & Company, 1854), 733.
     
39. Samuel A. Cartwright, “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 8-9 (1851-1852): 187-94; 369-73, and “Philosophy of the Negro Constitution,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 9 (1852): 195-208.
     
40. Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” DeBow's Review 11 (1851), 66.
     
41.  For more on Nott's and Cartwright’s theories of Black inferiority and their relationship to pro-slavery arguments and medical racism long after slavery see 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; Rana A. Hogarth, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1997); and James Denny Guillory, “The Pro-Slavery Arguments of Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright,” Louisiana History 9, no. 3 (1968): 209–27.
     
42. Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Yale's Confederates: A Biographical Dictionary (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008), 21.
     
43. Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013).