Yale School of Medicine and Slavery

Black Students at Yale School of Medicine

By the end of the Civil War in 1865, a small handful of Black students had attended medical school at Yale. One, Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed, was a local man, while two others came from Liberia for school. Creed is widely recognized as the medical school’s first Black graduate, and he remained in the area and continued his relationship with the school. One of the Liberian students attended the medical school for one session before completing his MD degree at Bowdoin College in Maine, while the other completed his MD degree at Yale and was living in New Haven in 1870. The limited number of Black students and the lack of sources about their lives reflect both who Yale allowed to enroll and the limited role of the school in their later lives.

Yale School of Medicine did not admit Creed as its first Black student until 1854. Increasing tension over the political future of slavery in the United States and the outbreak of violence over the issue contributed to Yale admitting Black medical students, but most of the students it finally enrolled were either a local like Creed or Liberians, connected to the project of “returning” people of African descent in the United States to Africa. Yale faculty opened the institution to students of color slowly, in line with contemporary conservative antislavery views, and, in doing so, lagged behind other New England medical schools at Dartmouth and Bowdoin Colleges.

In September 1831, a group of Black and white abolitionists publicized a plan to create a “College for Colored Youths” in New Haven. The city’s mayor, Dennis Kimberly, upon hearing the plan immediately called for a city meeting, and on Saturday, September 10, over 700 voters, all property-owning white males, gathered at the City Hall and voted almost unanimously against allowing the college to be established in their city. [1] Then in 1833 when headmistress Prudence Crandall admitted Black students to her Canterbury Female Boarding School in Canterbury, Connecticut, the state legislature enacted a law to prevent future attempts to educate Black people in the state. [2] The “Black Law” outlawed schools from teaching Black students from outside of the state unless local officials explicitly approved the plans, and that law would remain in force until 1838. [3]

By 1804, all states north of Maryland had ratified constitutional prohibitions against slavery or enacted laws gradually abolishing slavery. In the following decades, however, most of these northern states passed laws restricting Black people’s civil rights. [4] In Pennsylvania, for instance, efforts to promote racial harmony and uplift Blacks in the late eighteenth century were followed by increasing racial discrimination in the 1820s and 1830s. The Pennsylvania legislature considered, but ultimately did not pass, a bill to outlaw free African Americans from living in the state, while racial violence increased and Black people’s access to public education and other institutions was reduced. [5] In Connecticut, the Black Law was passed under the 1818 state constitution that had limited voting to white people. Black people living in Connecticut only regained the right to vote in 1870, with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which banned states from denying men the right to vote based on their race. [6]

Free Black people in the North were subjected to financial racism as well as legal racism. The hardships of living in the North led William Grimes, a former slave who had run away from Georgia and then lived in Connecticut, to write in his 1825 autobiography, “I would advise no slave to leave his master. . . . I have had to work hard; I have been often cheated, insulted, abused and injured; yet a black man, if he will be industrious and honest, can get along here [in the northern states] as well as anyone who is poor and in a situation to be imposed on." [7] Grimes wrote his autobiography, the first U.S. fugitive slave narrative, in order to raise money after his former enslaver had tracked Grimes down and forced him to pay $500 to keep his freedom, and Grimes’s comments about slavery reflect his despair at trying to eke out a living in the North after paying for his freedom left him destitute. [8] Still, his comments are a testimony to how the North’s racial order made earning money difficult for free people of color.

Between 1831 and 1838, Connecticut law prevented schools from enrolling Black students from outside the state, but that did not prevent Yale from enrolling local students. [9] The medical faculty appears to have supported the prohibition. The year after New Haveners voted to quash the Black college, professor of chemistry, pharmacy, mineralogy, and geology Benjamin Silliman gave a speech at the Center Church in New Haven supporting the suppression of the college and in favor of colonization. In his speech, Silliman professed support for Black education but claimed that the timing for the college was poor and that colonizing people of color out of the United States was necessary in order to convince the South to end slavery. [10] We have not yet uncovered direct evidence of other nineteenth-century medical faculty members’ positions on slavery and emancipation, but Yale faculty members outside of the medical school and New Haven’s white elite generally favored colonization as a “gradualist” strategy that avoided conflict with enslavers while removing from the United States Black people they perceived as inferior. [11]

Yale’s school of medicine did not, as far as we know, admit any Black students or allow Black students to attend lectures until 1854, even though antislavery opinion had strengthened in Connecticut in the late 1830s. The Black Law was repealed in 1838 and that year the Connecticut legislature passed symbolic measures against admitting new slave states and in favor of ending slavery in the District of Columbia. [12] In 1839, the landing of the slave ship La Amistad in New Haven further spurred local antislavery activism. The enslaved human cargo of La Amistad had successfully revolted and demanded that the surviving sailors return them to Africa. The sailors instead steered the ship north, where it was captured by a U.S. revenue cutter and brought into New Haven harbor. The capture of La Amistad led to competing court cases over the freedom and ownership of the previously enslaved people onboard, ultimately leading to an 1841 Supreme Court case granting the Africans their freedom.

Once the case was settled, however, white opinion in New Haven about slavery had changed little. [13] The outbreak of violence in Kansas over slavery may have helped to change local opinion, including that of the medical faculty. North-South antagonism over slavery had been growing since the 1820 Missouri Crisis, when southern members of Congress refused to admit Maine as a state unless Missouri was admitted as a slave state. The compromise that resulted admitted both states but included a prohibition on slavery in other western lands north of 36°30′ north latitude, Missouri’s southern border. Violence erupted beginning in 1854 when the Missouri Compromise was broken after the U.S. Congress passed the Kansas–Nebraska Act, organizing the Kansas and Nebraska Territories and allowing a popular vote to determine whether slavery would be legal in them. In Kansas, widespread electoral fraud by proslavery Missourians crossing into Kansas to vote led to the establishment of two competing legislatures and extensive violence between pro- and antislavery activists over which was the true government. This outbreak of violence, popularly called “Bleeding Kansas,” continued into the 1860s and enflamed New England abolitionists, even those who had previously taken a conservative antislavery approach. [14] Bleeding Kansas directly contributed to the collapse of the Whig party and a North-South split among members of the Democratic party, paving the way for the emergence of the Republican party, the election of Abraham Lincoln as president, the secession of the southern states, and the Civil War. [15]

More immediately, Bleeding Kansas drove John Brown to antislavery violence. Brown, who grew up in Torrington, Connecticut, and already held radical antislavery views, moved to Kansas in 1855 in response to the Kansas–Nebraska Act. He became the face of violent abolitionist action when in 1856 he and his family murdered five proslavery men. The murders were triggered by the beating of antislavery Senator Charles Sumner in the Senate chamber by Representative Preston Brooks from South Carolina who attacked Sumner in retaliation for a speech he had made. [16] At the time, Brown was reported to have said, “I have only a short time to live—only one death to die, and I will die fighting for this cause. There will be no peace in this land until slavery is done for. . . . I will carry the war into Africa [meaning the South].” [17] Three years later, Brown and his supporters attacked the U.S. arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, as the beginning of a foiled plot to arm enslaved people in the South for open revolt. The assault at Harpers Ferry helped to consolidate anti-Union sentiment in the South, reinforcing sectional identity much as Bleeding Kansas had in the North. [18]

Some white New Haveners decided to emigrate to Kansas, like Brown had done, in support of keeping slavery out of the territory by increasing the antislavery vote and preventing proslavery Missourians from interfering. In March 1856, a fundraising event was held in the North Church on the New Haven Green to support a group of sixty men planning to emigrate, and attendees pledged rifles to arm them, though whether these weapons were intended to be used offensively or defensively was left unstated. The formerly hesitant Professor Silliman pledged the first rifle. After a Yale junior pledged one on behalf of his class, Silliman challenged the other classes to follow suit, leading the senior class to pledge a rifle as well. Future Yale medical professors Charles Ives and Stephen G. Hubbard also made contributions, pledging three and one rifles respectively. [19]

The explosive antislavery reaction to Bleeding Kansas that affected even conservative abolitionists like Silliman also likely contributed to the Medical Institution of Yale College accepting its first Black medical student, Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed, for the fall of 1854. Creed’s mother, Vashti Duplex Creed, was New Haven’s first Black school teacher.  His father, John Creed, was a janitor and caterer whose employers included Yale’s Calliopean Society (Figure 1). [20] The Calliopean Society was a debate society that had a heavily southern membership, formed in 1819 after splitting from Yale’s Linonian Society over the election of a northern student as president. (For more on the Calliopean Society and its membership, which included at least one slave-holding Yale medical student, see the essay “Student Financial Connections to Slavery.”) [21] Starting in 1827, the Calliopean Society paid John Creed $4.75 per semester for “attending” the society, and, by 1846, paid him $15 per semester or for three months of “services.” [22] “Attending” and providing “services” may have meant that he looked after society members as a servant would, minding the door, taking their coats and hats, and seeing to all of their needs during meetings. He may have prepared food for meetings, served drinks, and cleaned up afterwards. But whatever the work actually entailed, this employment relationship proved to be a long-term one. John continued to work for the society until it disbanded due to overwhelming debt in 1853.

Receipt of payment to John W. Creed from Calliopean Society

Figure 1. Receipt of payment to John W. Creed from Calliopean Society, January 22, 1849. In Receipt books, 1819-1828, 1839-1852, box 9, folder 39, Calliopean Society, Yale College, Records (RU 857), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

On at least one occasion in February, 1850, it appears that Cortlandt either accepted payment from the Calliopean Society on behalf of his father, or that Cortlandt himself worked for the society for the same amount of time and pay that his father usually did (Figure 2). Our project was only able to sample the receipts that survive in the Calliopean Society records, and further research might reveal other payments to Cortlandt Creed. At the very least, this specific transaction suggests that Cortlandt knew about his father’s work for the society and that John trusted his son to accept payment on his behalf. But it could also be evidence that Cortlandt worked for the Calliopean Society, just three years before he enrolled in medical school.

Receipt of payment to Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed from Calliopean Society

Figure 2. Receipt of payment for “$15.00 in full for services” accepted by Cortlandt Creed on February 8, 1850. In Receipt books, 1819-1828, 1839-1852. box 9, folder 39, Calliopean Society, Yale College, records (RU 857), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

While Cortlandt Creed was enrolled, one year of medical school tuition cost $73.50, and the total cost of attending medical school at Yale for two years plus the graduation and the licensing and diploma fee amounted to $166.50, over ten times what John was paid per semester by the Calliopean Society. [23]

Figure 3. Title page of Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed's 1857 thesis, “Dissertation on the Blood.” Yale Medicine Thesis Digital Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine.

Cost, however, was not Cortlandt Creed’s greatest concern about enrolling at Yale. “I had my fears and doubts as to whether I would be admitted at ‘Yale.’ Knowing that prejudice against color was somewhat apparent, in time past,” Creed wrote in a letter to famed Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, describing the apprehensions he felt before he applied. Despite his fears, Creed continued, “both in college and out of its walls . . . I never experienced any other than the most polite treatment from my fellow class-mates.” [24] Harvard had admitted three Black students in 1850, but white student outcry forced the faculty to not reenroll the Black students after their first session, preventing them from completing their education at Harvard. [25] Creed may have been contrasting his experience with those first Black medical students at Harvard; or he may have been drawing on his experiences growing up in New Haven; or perhaps his doubts about being about being admitted to Yale included a bit of both. Whatever the root of Creed’s fears, apparently the other Yale medical students received him politely. At this point it is not clear whether white Yale students were simply more welcoming than their Harvard counterparts had been or whether Bleeding Kansas had changed white medical student opinion in general. Creed would go on to write his thesis “On the Blood” and earn his MD degree in 1857 (Figure 3). [26]

Figure 4. Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed memorial marker. Find a Grave. “Dr Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed (1833-1900).” Accessed May 20, 2023.

Creed later joined the Connecticut Volunteer Regiment as an assistant surgeon during the Civil War, and after the war he practiced medicine in New York and Connecticut. According to a recently placed commemorative marker, U.S. President James Garfield’s doctors contacted Creed for his medical expertise about how to find the bullet when the president was shot in 1881. Creed was admitted to the Connecticut Medical Society in 1885 and died in New Haven in 1900. He is buried in Grove Street Cemetery (Figure 4). [27]

Figure 5. Richard Henry Greene. “History, Found.” Accessed February 23, 2023.

While Creed was taking courses at the medical school, another Black resident of New Haven was earning his bachelor’s degree at Yale College. Richard Henry Greene (sometimes spelled “Green”), whose father was a New Haven bootmaker, matriculated in 1853, one year before Creed. (Figure 5) [28] Greene and Creed both graduated with their respective degrees in 1857. Greene would also go on to practice medicine, but rather than continue his education in his hometown at Yale, Greene attended Dartmouth Medical School, where he earned his MD degree in 1864. [29] While earning his degree during the Civil War, he also entered the Navy as an acting assistant surgeon. We have not found any explanation from Greene about why he left New Haven for Dartmouth, but his life’s trajectory can give us some clues. Greene married a woman from Vermont during his stint in the Navy, and after the war they settled in Hoosick, New York. The 1870 census lists them both as white, and Greene may have left New Haven where his family was well known in order to pass for white. [30] We cannot know this for sure, given that the census workers often recorded what they assumed was a person’s race. However, at least one of Greene’s surviving descendants did not know until recently that she had a Black ancestor. [31] Alternatively, Greene may have also gone to Dartmouth because it had a reputation for educating Black students. The first Black student enrolled at the college in 1775, and Edward Mitchell earned his AB degree at Dartmouth in 1828, becoming its first Black graduate. In 1839, American-born Liberian Samuel Ford McGill earned at Dartmouth the first MD degree granted by a U.S. medical school to a Black student, and by the time Greene enrolled Dartmouth had awarded at least four AB degrees and eight MD degrees to Black students. [32]

In 1856, while Creed and Greene were taking classes at Yale, the American Colonization Society newspaper, The African Repository, printed a request from “Dr. J. S. Smith of Buchanan,” Liberia. Smith requested “that two medical students, Henry W. Foster and Wm. Henry Ealbeck, now with him, may have the opportunity to attend upon medical lectures in the United States during the next year.” [33] It would take a few years, but those students would enroll at Yale in the fall of 1859 as two of the school’s first Black medical students.

James Skirving Smith, who made the request for Foster and Ealbeck’s education, had migrated to Liberia from South Carolina as a child in 1833 before returning to the United States to earn his medical degree from Berkshire Medical Institute in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In 1856, he became the Liberian secretary of state and in the 1870s would go on to serve briefly as the country’s president. [34] U.S. medical schools including Rush Medical College in Chicago and Bowdoin College in Maine as well as Berkshire generally only enrolled Black students before the Civil War if they stated that they intended to emigrate to Liberia after graduation, so Smith had been allowed to attend medical school in the United States because he was already living in Liberia. [35] Most of the Black Dartmouth graduates emigrated, and at least two of the first three Black students Harvard Medical School enrolled for one session in 1850, before scorning them, had agreed with the Massachusetts Colonization Society to practice in Liberia after graduation. [36] Smith hoped his two students might be accepted into a U.S. medical school because they were Liberians, and the increased activism of Yale faculty in response to Bleeding Kansas may have contributed to the medical school enrolling Black Liberians as well as a Black American.

Figure 6. Title page of William Henry Ealbeck's thesis. “A Dissertation on Lethargus or the Sleepy Disease.” Maine Medical School at Bowdoin College, 1860. Medical School of Maine: Historical Records and Files, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine (Series 2: Theses [Dissertations], 1821-1921).

Smith’s two Liberian proteges, Ealbeck and Foster, both enrolled at Yale in 1859, but only Foster graduated. Foster took classes in 1859 and 1860, before earning his MD degree with a thesis entitled “Dissertation on Intermittent Fever of West Africa” in 1861. [37] His graduation marked perhaps just the third time the medical school granted a degree to a Black student. After a winter session at Yale, Ealbeck instead enrolled for the Spring 1860 session at the Medical School of Maine at Bowdoin College before earning his MD degree there in 1860 with a thesis on “Lethargus or the Sleepy Disease,” which was “Known in West Africa.” (Figure 6) [38] As with Greene’s choice to attend medical school at Dartmouth rather than to continue his education at Yale, we do not know for certain why Ealbeck transferred to Bowdoin after only one term at Yale. He may have been simply in a hurry to return home to Liberia, and moving to Bowdoin where he could attend a second course of lectures in the spring, almost immediately after finishing his first at Yale, allowed him to earn his MD degree a year earlier than Foster. Alternatively, Ealbeck may have felt more comfortable at Bowdoin, where two Black Americans had earned their medical degrees in 1849. [39]

Both Ealbeck and Foster wrote theses about diseases associated with the Liberian climate, but rather than simply repeat the common medical trope that the African climate was itself irredeemably insalubrious, they both focused on specific behaviors and local conditions that contributed to disease causation. [40] Their descriptions of these diseases balanced understandings of health as dependent on broad categorizations of climate with an individual’s behaviors and specific location, and they, like other eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century physicians, were influenced by their personal experiences and politics in choosing what elements to stress. [41] Ealbeck, for instance, began his thesis on Lethargus by commenting on how different climates and conditions caused different diseases, and he specifically pointed out diseases that were more common in cooler climates that were often considered healthier than equatorial Africa. “Phtyses, Scirrhus, and the more dangerous fevers is [sic] by far more frequent in the Temperate climate,” he asserted. At the same time, Ealbeck maintained that “diseases of the liver Kidneys Leprosy and Lethargus, more frequently make their appearance in warm or hot climates.” However, he also drew a distinction between Liberians and their neighboring indigenous Africans, adding the caveat that Lethargus “more frequently Makes its appearance among the aboriginal portion of the African population, but is also seen occasionally in the more civilized Negro districts as for example the Liberian Settlements.” Ealbeck went on to describe the “the predisposing causes” of Lethargus as “sedentary habits, unwholesome and indigestible vegetable food peculiar influences of the climate, and the prolonged action of Malaria acting upon constitutions thus disposed.” Focusing on personal habits and local differences helped Ealbeck make the case that Liberia was not entirely unhealthy, and he again associated Lethargus with the native Africans more than the Liberians. “The small thatched huts, of the African, from their want of capacity and free ventilation,” he hypothesized, “accounts for its more frequent appearance in the uncivilized Negro districts.” [42]

Figure 7. Excerpt from Henry Williams Foster's thesis describing predisposing causes to intermittent fever: “as Predisposing causes maybe mentioned. Sedentary habits, intemperance, a change of residence, constipation, and in females that condition of the system that attends upon the menstrual flow.” “Dissertation on Intermittent Fever of West Africa.” (1861). Yale Medicine Thesis Digital Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine.

Foster, writing on intermittent fever, attributed differential susceptibility to the disease to individual behavior rather than to race. He admitted that “the face of the country [West Africa] is of a nature generally found to be productive of [?] disease” and that the Liberian settlement was located “upon tolerably rich land” where the disease that immigrants to Liberia experienced was “delayed but not materally [sic] lessened in its severity and duration.” Foster, however, went on to argue that personal behavior could help protect people from the diseases of the climate, explaining that fever “occurs after an exposure to the direct rays of the sun, sitting in wet clothes after a rain, the weting [sic] not proving as injurious if the person is able to obtain shelter and dry clothes, severe and long continued exertion, great mental excitement.” Additionally, Foster described “sedentary habits, intemperance, a change of residence, constipation, and in females that condition of the system that attends upon the menstrual flow” as “Predisposing causes.” [43] While perhaps less optimistic than Ealbeck about the Liberian climate, Foster joined him in describing how personal behaviors could protect people, rendering the climate a bit less threatening. These arguments that specific behaviors could overcome the dangers of the West African climate fit with those made by British and U.S. supporters of colonization who admitted that the African continent was generally unhealthy but also argued that the danger could be mitigated by temperate living, especially for Black people believed to be naturally more suited for hot climates. [44]

We know little about Ealbeck and Foster after they completed their degrees. According to the December 1860 edition of The African Repository, Ealbeck returned to Liberia after giving a speech to the annual meeting of the Vermont Colonization Society, praising the colonization project. According to the Repository, Ealbeck “said, he was thankful that there is one place on earth where the colored man may have peace, and that for that place under providence, he believed the race were indebted to the friends of Colonization. God made Africa for the black man, and the black man for Africa.” [45] The next trace we have of Ealbeck is the 1889 General Catalogue of Bowdoin College and the Medical School of Maine, which reported him as deceased but did not include the date, place of residence, or place of death. [46] In 1870, Foster was listed in the federal census as a physician in New Haven; he may have died in 1875. [47]

While a handful of Black students attended Yale in the 1850s and 1860s, only Creed and Ealbeck continued to live locally. Whether this was because of local discrimination, better opportunities elsewhere, or simply personal choice, Yale’s other early Black students quickly moved away. Yale College graduate Greene opted to attend Dartmouth medical school rather than stay in New Haven. Ealbeck finished his degree at Bowdoin after one session at Yale before returning to Liberia. The Medical Institution would go on to graduate a small number of other Black medical students—including Bayard T. Smith, from the Turks and Caicos Islands, and George R. Henderson in the 1870s—through the end of the nineteenth century. Sometime in the early twentieth century, Yale adopted a strict, unwritten policy against admitting Black students, which lasted until the 1940s, and the medical school forgot about its early Black graduates until Daryl Keith Daniels, himself a Black Yale medical student, began recovering their stories in his own 1991 MD thesis on the history of Black students at Yale School of Medicine. [48]

Endnotes

1. There were only four votes in favor of allowing the college. Robert Austin Warner, New Haven Negroes, a Social History (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 53–59, vote totals on 56. For a contemporary account from the proposers of the college, see College for Colored Youth: An Account of the New-Haven City Meeting and Resolutions, with Recommendations of the College, and Strictures upon the Doings of New-Haven (New York: The Committee, 1831), https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2053945.
    
2. Diana Moraco, “Prudence Crandall Fights for Equal Access to Education,” Connecticut History | a CT Humanities Project, September 9, 2021, https://connecticuthistory.org/prudence-crandall-fights-for-equal-access-to-education/.
    
3. Warner, New Haven Negroes, a Social History, 59. For the larger historical context, see Hilary J. Moss, “Education’s Inequity: Opposition to Black Higher Education in Antebellum Connecticut,” History of Education Quarterly 46, no. 1 (2006): 16–35. The text of the law is available here: “Connecticut’s ‘Black Law,’” 1833, Citizens ALL: African Americans in Connecticut 1700-1850, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University, https://glc.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/The%20Black%20Law%20of%20Connecticut(1).pdf.
    
4. Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
    
5. Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). James Brewer Stewart has argued that this culmination of violence created “racial modernity” in the North by the late 1830s. See Stewart, “The Emergence of Racial Modernity and the Rise of the White North, 1790-1840,” Journal of the Early Republic 18, no. 2 (1998): 181–217.
    
6. 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/.
    
7. William Grimes, Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, ed. William L. Andrews and Regina E. Mason (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 101–2.
    
8. William L. Andrews, “Introduction,” in Life of William Grimes, 3.
    
9. James W. C. Pennington took classes at the Yale Divinity School from 1834 to 1836. He had been born enslaved in Maryland before running away to Pennsylvania and then New York, liberating himself. At Yale, he was allowed to take classes but not to enroll, speak in class, or use the library. Mike Cummings, “In the Shadows No More: YDS Honors Minister James W.C. Pennington,” YaleNews, September 30, 2016, https://news.yale.edu/2016/09/30/shadows-no-more-divinity-school-honors-minister-james-wc-pennington.
    
10. Warner, New Haven Negroes, a Social History, 58–61. The speech was printed in American Colonization Society, The African Repository and Colonial Journal, vol. 8 (Washington: James C. Dunn, 1833), 161–82.
     
11. Perhaps New England’s greatest defender of colonization and gradual emancipation was Yale graduate Leonard Bacon, the pastor of New Haven’s Center Church where Silliman gave his speech. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 260–61. See also David W. Blight with the Yale and Slavery Research Project, Yale and Slavery: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), chap. 5.
     
12. Warner, New Haven Negroes, a Social History, 66.
     
13. Warner, New Haven Negroes, a Social History, 68. David Brion Davis agrees that a large-scale shift in northern public opinion did not occur until later, but Marcus Rediker believes that the Amistad incident led to more widespread and more radical abolitionist sentiment while admitting it had its roots earlier in the 1830s. Compare Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, 262, and Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York: Viking, 2012), 231–36, 236n25.
     
14. The Yale and Slavery Research Project similarly noted a shift in opinion at Yale at the time of Bleeding Kansas followed by a drop in southern enrollment (Blight, Yale and Slavery, 203, 205, 213; and see also 182 on theology professor Nathaniel William Taylor’s change of opinion). Such shifts may have also contributed to the medical school subsequently enrolling Black students. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, 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.
     
15. Morrison, Slavery and the American West, 220–21. See also Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire, revised edition (1985; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 130–31.
     
16. .David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), chap. 7.
     
17. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 202.
     
18. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, 382–83.
     
19. Warner, New Haven Negroes, a Social History, 111; Henry Peck, The New Haven State House with Some Account of the Green; and Various Matters of Historical and Local Interest, Gathered from Many Sources (New Haven, Conn.: Henry Peck & George H. Coe, 1889), 80–84, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009573361.
     
20. Daryl Keith Daniels, “African-Americans at the Yale University School of Medicine: 1810-1960” (MD thesis, Yale School of Medicine, 1991), 25–28, https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/ymtdl/45/.
     
21. “Collection: Calliopean Society, Yale College, Records,” Archives at Yale, accessed July 19, 2022, https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/2518.
     
22. Receipts dated July 11, 1827, June 6, 1845, August 29, 1848, and January 22, 1849 in Receipt books, 1819-1828, 1839-1852, box 9, folder 39, Calliopean Society, Yale College, Records (RU 857), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, accessed May 5, 2023, https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/2518.
     
23. Yale University, Catalogue of the Officers and Students in Yale College, 1857-58, Yale University Catalogue 57 (New Haven: E. Hayes, 1857), 42, https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yale_catalogue/57.
     
24. Quoted in Kerry L. Falvey, Medicine at Yale: The First 200 Years (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University in association with Yale University Press, 2010), 46–47.
     
25. One of these students, James McCune Smith, would instead earn his MD degree from the University of Glasgow in Scotland and return to the United States to have an esteemed career. Christopher Willoughby, Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2022), 101, 216n25; Thomas M. Morgan, “The Education and Medical Practice of Dr. James McCune Smith (1813-1865), First Black American to Hold a Medical Degree,” Journal of the National Medical Association 95, no. 7 (July 2003): 603–14.
     
26. Creed’s thesis discusses the properties of the blood, its circulation, and differences between hot- and coldblooded animals, but it makes no reference to racial differences or to slavery. “Yale Celebrates 150th Anniversary of First African American Graduate,” YaleNews, May 30, 2007, https://news.yale.edu/2007/05/30/yale-celebrates-150th-anniversary-first-african-american-graduate; Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed, “Dissertation on the Blood,” Yale Medicine Thesis Digital Library (1857), https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/ymtdl/3785.
     
27. “First African American Graduate of Yale School Of Medicine Honored With New Scholarship and Remembered During Black History Month,” February 8, 2001, https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/first-african-american-graduate-of-yale-school-of-medicine-honored-with-new-scholarship-and-remembered-during-black-history-month/; Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University, Deceased during the Academical Year Ending in June, 1901 (New Haven, 1901), 91–92, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000525767; Falvey, Medicine at Yale, 47.
     
28. James M. Patten, Patten’s New Haven Directory, for the Years 1841-2 (New Haven: James M. Patten, 1841), 51, http://archive.org/details/1841NewHavenCTDirectory; Yale University, Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Yale College, 1853-54, Yale University Catalogue 39 (New Haven: B. L. Hamlen, 1853), 26, https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yale_catalogue/39. The Yale archives include materials related to Greene’s life that have not yet been consulted for this project. See Richard Henry Greene papers (MS 2005), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
     
29. Dartmouth College, General Catalogue of Dartmouth College and the Associated Schools 1769-1925 (Hanover, N. H.: Rumford Press, 1925), 654, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001975023.
     
30. Judith Schiff, “The Life of Richard Henry Green,” Yale Alumni Magazine, June 2014, https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/3875-the-life-of-richard-henry-green.
     
31. Mark Alden Branch, “History, Found,” Yale Alumni Magazine, April 2023, https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/5622-history-found.
     
32. Susan Green, “Grit and Determination,” Dartmouth Medicine Magazine, 2020, https://dartmed.dartmouth.edu/spring20/html/features_grit-and-determination/; “Dartmouth Historical Black Alumni Database,” Blacks@Dartmouth 1775 to 1960, accessed May 2, 2023, https://badahistory.net/DBlist.php.
     
33.  Yale University, Catalogue of the Officers and Students in Yale College . . . 1859-1860, Yale University Catalogue 50 (New Haven: E. Hayes, 1859), 9, https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yale_catalogue/50/. American Colonization Society, The African Repository (American colonization society, 1856), 225, http://archive.org/details/africanreposito06socigoog.
     
34. “Smith, James Skirving, Sr.” in Elwood D. Dunn, Amos J. Beyan, and Carl Patrick Burrowes, Historical Dictionary of Liberia, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001), 305; “James Skivring Smith,” A Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypist – National Portrait Gallery, accessed April 28, 2023, https://npg.si.edu/exh/awash/skirvsmth.htm.
     
35. More than a few Black medical school graduates did not end up emigrating after earning their MD degrees. Leonard W. Johnson Jr., “History of the Education of Negro Physicians,” Journal of Medical Education 42, no. 5 (1967): 440.
     
36.  Willoughby, Masters of Health, 101, 216n25.
     
37. Henry Williams Foster, “Dissertation on Intermittent Fever of West Africa,” Yale Medicine Thesis Digital Library (1861), https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/ymtdl/3829.
     
38. William Henry Ealbeck, “A Dissertation on Lethargus or the Sleepy Disease” (Brunswick, ME: Maine Medical School at Bowdoin College, 1860), Medical School of Maine: Historical Records and Files, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine (Series 2: Theses [Dissertations], 1821-1921).
     
39. “History,” Africana Studies, Bowdoin College, accessed May 18, 2023, https://www.bowdoin.edu/africana-studies/history/index.html.
     
40. For the history of these beliefs among Europeans and Euro-Americans, see Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964).
     
41. Sean Morey Smith, “Seasoning and Abolition: Humoural Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic,” Slavery & Abolition 36, no. 4 (October 2015): 684–703. See also Katherine Johnston, The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022); Suman Seth, Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Mark Harrison, “‘The Tender Frame of Man’: Disease, Climate and Racial Difference in India and the West Indies, 1760-1860,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70, no. 1 (1996): 68–93.
     
42. Ealbeck, “A Dissertation on Lethargus or the Sleepy Disease.”
     
43. Foster, “Dissertation on Intermittent Fever of West Africa.”
     
44. Sean Morey Smith, “Race and Abolition in the Anglophone Atlantic, c. 1730 – 1840” (PhD diss., Rice University, 2020), esp. chap. 6.
     
45. American Colonization Society, The African Repository (American Colonization Society, 1860), 396, 403, http://archive.org/details/africanreposito47socigoog.
     
46. Bowdoin College, General Catalogue of Bowdoin College and the Medical School of Maine (Lewiston, ME: Journal Office, 1889), 111. On Ealbeck and his relationship with Creed, see also Jill L. Newmark, Without Concealment, Without Compromise: The Courageous Lives of Black Civil War Surgeons (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2023), 185.
     
47. Year: 1870; Census Place: New Haven Ward 1, New Haven, Connecticut; Roll: M593_109; Page: 40A, ancestry.com; a “Henry Foster, esq.” of New York was, however, elected as a vice president of the American Colonization Society in both years, but this is almost certainly a different and likely white Henry Foster. See American Colonization Society, The African Repository, vol. 37 (Washington: C. Alexander, 1861), esp. 40, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.hwrccc; American Colonization Society, The African Repository, vol. 38 (Washington: William H. Moore, 1862), esp. 58, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.hwrccd.
     
48. Daniels, “African-Americans at the Yale University School of Medicine: 1810-1960,” esp. chap. 6. Since research for the Yale School of Medicine and Slavery project ended in August 2023, researchers from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library have identified additional Black medical students that were unknown during the writing of this essay.  This research is being presented in the exhibition, “Shining Light on Truth: New Haven, Yale, and Slavery,” at the New Haven Museum from 2024 to 2025..  See Hope McGrath, “Introducing the Constellations Project: Early Black Lives at Yale, 1830-1940,” https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/article/introducing-constellations-project-early-black-lives-yale-1830-1940. On Smith, see Catalogue of the Officers and Students in Yale College . . . 1859-1860 (New Haven: E. Hayes, 1859), 10. On Williams, see Alumni Records Office, Yale University, records of alumni from the Classes of 1701-1978 (RU 830), box 918 (included in the “1859-1861 Med.” Folder); John Burns Williams, “Dissertation on Injuries of the Head” (1860), Yale Medicine Thesis Digital Library, https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/ymtdl/3813; [death notice], New York Age, Oct. 12, 1905.