Yale School of Medicine and Slavery

Student Financial Ties to Slavery

Carlos Fernando Ribeiro (1816-1889) was not the first Brazilian to attend the Medical Institute of Yale College. That was most likely Felippe Franco de Sá, who, like Ribeiro, came from the northern Province of Maranhão. Franco de Sá started taking anatomy classes at Yale in 1835 and finished his degree in 1839. His preceptor, who supervised his clinical work and care of patients, was Dr. Henry Abraham Tomlinson. Tomlinson also served as preceptor to Ribeiro and another Brazilian medical student named João Francisco Lima, also from Maranhão, who attended medical school in 1837-1839. Given their shared origins, and the fact that all three men attended Yale around the same time, it seems likely that they knew each other before they came to New Haven. In addition to Tomlinson, Dr. William Tully, professor of materia medica and therapeutics, served as preceptor for all three students. [1] We do not know exactly why Tomlinson and Tully took on the Brazilian students. We also do not know why these students decided to study medicine at Yale. For much of the nineteenth century, the Province of Maranhão was somewhat geographically and politically isolated from the rest of Brazil because ocean currents and winds made travel to the South difficult. People who lived there often had more contact with the rest of the Atlantic world, including the United States, especially when it came to matters of trade, travel, and cultural exchange. [2] However, this still does not explain why the students chose Yale, specifically, when it was not necessarily more famous than other medical schools in the United States. Even in the mid-1830s, after it had been open for more than two decades, Yale was still less notable than institutions like the medical college attached to the University of Pennsylvania and the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City (predecessor of Columbia’s medical school).

In Carlos Ribeiro’s case, it is possible that he decided to study medicine at Yale because he had already earned a master’s degree in agronomy at Yale’s graduate school. Ribeiro earned his master’s in 1838 and then returned to Yale in the fall of that year to start his medical education. After receiving his MD degree, he continued his medical studies in Philadelphia for about a year before he returned to Maranhão. There, he studied law at Olinda Law School (which was later moved to Recife and renamed Recife Law School) and earned a law degree in 1846. [3]

This much education was no small expense, but Ribeiro’s family had the money. His older brother, Antônio Onofre Ribeiro, was the owner and administrator of at least one engenho, or sugar plantation (Figure 1). Having lost their parents while they were young, Antônio had long been a parental figure to Carlos and was deeply invested in his success. It does not appear that the family had any other major business interests, which suggests that profits from sugar slavery paid for some, if not all, of Carlos Ribeiro’s educational expenses. [4]

Carlos became more directly involved in sugar production after receiving his Yale degrees. In the mid-1840s, he established an engenho called “Jirijó.” Within a few years, Jirijó was one of the largest and most profitable sugar plantations in Maranhão. More than 100 enslaved people worked there, and perhaps even more during harvest time. After starting a plantation, Ribeiro decided he wanted a political career, too. Beginning in 1846, he served in the cabinet of the President of Maranhão Province. From there, he became Vice President of the Province (1847-1854); Secretary of Government of the Province of Amazonas (1857-1858); and Deputy of the Provincial Assembly and the General Assembly of Brazil (1863-1865). Ribeiro was also a leading member of the Liberal Party in Brazil for nearly forty years. [5]

Moulin à Sucre ("Sugar Mill")

Figure 1. Drawing of a mill yard and water-powered sugar mill in Brazil with enslaved people unloading freshly cut cane (1830s). By Johann Mortiz Ruengas. Source: Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed August 16, 2023.

As he became a notable political figure, Ribeiro became even further entrenched in slavery. In 1853, he married Ana Rosa Lamagner, the daughter of another rich planter who owned several sugar mills and cattle ranches in Maranhão. Ribeiro also acquired enslaved people for his household. At some point in the 1870s, he purchased two enslaved boys, Innocencio and his brother Jacintho, intending them to be servants for his wife. The story of these two boys is well known to Brazilian historians due to the gruesome fate that befell one of the boys. In 1877, Ana Rosa was put on trial for the murder of eleven-year-old Innocencio, who had allegedly died as a result of severe punishment. At the time of Innocencio’s burial, the cemetery chaplain noticed that the boy’s body showed very recent signs of beating and torture, leading the chaplain to suspect that the injuries had caused his death. A post-mortem examination of Innocencio’s corpse largely confirmed the chaplain’s suspicions. The police conducted an investigation and eventually concluded that Ana Rosa had carried out the punishment. Discipline of enslaved people was normally carried out by the head of household, who would have been Carlos Ribeiro, but he had been away on political business at the time of the incident. Despite the substantial body of evidence against her, Ana Rosa was acquitted of the crime. One Brazilian historian has noted that witness testimonies, which came from the cemetery chaplain and funeral home workers but also local slave traders and business partners of the Ribeiros, suggest the existence of a “network of complicity and concealment of the defendant.” [6]

This specific incident shows how Carlos Ribeiro and his family were intimately involved in some of the most violent aspects of slavery. More broadly, though, Ribeiro’s life illustrates a movement of slave capital into Yale School of Medicine, and also how the school contributed – at least passively – to the continuation of slavery. First of all, it does not seem that Ribeiro’s time at Yale did anything to dissuade him from pursuing a career in sugar slavery, marrying another enslaver, and climbing the ranks of plantocratic society. Second, Ribeiro earned two Yale degrees – one in agronomy and one in medicine – which were considered useful for the business of slavery. By the nineteenth century, it was not uncommon for plantation enslavers all over the Atlantic world to hire white agronomists and physicians on a regular basis, believing that these experts could improve the productive capacities of their land and enslaved labor. [7]  Although we have no way of determining if, let alone to what extent, Ribeiro’s education actually enabled him to make his plantations more profitable, it seems likely that he was under the impression that it would.

Edward Brown Sprowl (1824-d. approx. 1850-1859) was the scion of a wealthy Louisiana-based planter family that had a long history of settler colonialism and slavery. His mother, Mahala Brown (1791-1859) was one several children born to John Brown (1764-1830), a merchant originally from Virginia who maintained trade and financial connections to London throughout his life. The Brown family was one of the first English-speaking families in Red River Parish in northwest Louisiana, and subsequently they became one of the first to be involved in plantation slavery there. At the time of John Brown’s death, his estates (and the enslaved people who were forced to work there) were left to his two daughters who had remained in the region, Mary and Mahala. [8] Mahala was already the owner and administrator of a cotton plantation with at least five enslaved people, which she had inherited from her first husband when he died in 1820. She married her second husband, John Paul Sprowl (1802-1843) of nearby Natchitoches Parish, in 1823. They had five children, but only one, Edward, born in 1824, survived until adulthood. [9]

Within a few years, the Sprowl family became one of the most successful cotton planting families in Natchitoches. At its height, the John P. Sprowl Plantation consisted of more than 1,100 acres extending along both sides of the Red River (Figure 2). John Sprowl died at 1843 and left the plantation to his surviving family, Mahala and Edward. By that point, the property itself was valued at $8,900 and Sprowl’s estate included moveable property worth $1,481.50 (which most likely referred to livestock, machinery, tools, boats and other vehicles, household furnishings, jewelry, cash, etc.) and twenty-one enslaved people, who were together valued at $9,305. The enslaved property alone would be worth $383,653 today. [10] It was determined that Edward Sprowl, then nineteen years old, would take over plantation administration. At the court hearing for his father’s succession, Edward supposedly stated that he was “anxious to engage in agriculture and to make all the contacts which a man of lawful age could make.” [11]

Louisiana cotton plantation

Figure 2. Painting of a large cotton plantation in antebellum Louisiana (Bois de Flèche Plantation in St. Landry Parish) similar to Sprowl Plantation, showing the slave quarters, cotton press, and main house in the background and vegetable gardens in the foreground. By Marie Adrien Persac (1861). Source: Louisiana State Museum, accessed August 16, 2023.

Yet, just one year later in 1844, Edward sold off some portions of the Sprowl estate, including parcels of land and enslaved people, and he used that money to fund his medical education at Yale. Edward began his studies in 1845 and received his MD degree in 1848, producing a dissertation on necrosis. He met Brooklyn native Verona Gaskin while at Yale and married her in 1848. They had one child before returning to his family plantation in Natchitoches. Edward shows up in the 1850 census with the occupation of “doctor,” but he did not live long after moving back to Louisiana. After his death, his wife and two children moved to New York, and Mahala once again took over the administration of the Sprowl plantation. [12] Mahala funded her grandson’s education at private schools in New York. When she died in 1859, she left them the estate, which consisted of 780 acres on the north bank of the Red River, valued at $15,600; moveable property valued at $1,942.75; and nineteen enslaved people valued at $18,300. [13] Edward Sprowl had died, but his mother made sure to continue the family tradition of using slave-generated funds for schooling at northern institutions.

Edward Henry Bartlett’s family also had a strong tradition of using money from slavery to pay for educational expenses. Out of these slaveholding students, Bartlett (1831-1913) probably had the most direct experience with plantations. On July 8, 1831, he was born on a cafetal (coffee plantation) called “La Carolina” in the jurisdiction of Matanzas, Cuba (Figure 3).

Vista de una vega de tabaco

Figure 3. Painting of tobacco fields, enslaved quarters, and horse-mounted overseers similar to those that would have existed on “La Carolina.” Source: Frédéric Mialhe, “Vista de una vega de tabaco,” “Plate XXVII” in Album pintoresco de la Isla de Cuba (Havana: B. May y Ca., 1851).

Coffee and sugar plantations dominated the landscape of Matanzas during this time, making it one of the most profitable slavery-based economic zones in the Atlantic world. Matanzas was relatively unique compared to other Cuban plantation jurisdictions due to the great number of plantations that belonged to (or took investments from) foreigners, especially Americanos, and most especially New Englanders. [14] The Bartletts were one such New England family. Edward’s father, George Bartlett (1792-1849), was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts and created a successful merchant business that spanned from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania before he decided to purchase land in Matanzas to build plantations. George, along with his brothers Samuel and Henry, built two coffee plantations during the early-to-mid 1820s, La Carolina and La Isabela. By 1823, La Carolina had fifty-two enslaved people and was one of the largest coffee plantations in the area. [15] In 1825, a group of African-born enslaved men led a massive revolt in the Cuban countryside. Rebels attacked both Bartlett-owned plantations, killing Samuel Bartlett. According to one historian, Samuel “was fiercely hacked to death with machetes until his head and hand were cut off.” [16] Although planters and the Spanish colonial military were eventually able to suppress the revolt, the event terrified the island’s enslavers. However, it did not scare off George Bartlett, who moved his entire family to Matanzas in 1827. By the time Edward was born in 1831, the 1825 uprising (and his uncle’s murder) was surely a core aspect of family lore and local history. Memory of it likely shaped how the Bartletts ran their plantations and how Edward himself viewed slavery and enslaved people. [17]

Edward Bartlett lived in Matanzas for the first eighteen years of his life, until 1849, when his father died and his mother moved the family to her native Garrett County, Maryland, leaving one son in Cuba to manage the family’s plantations. Edward attended schools in Boston and Baltimore before he began his medical education at Yale in 1853. [18] According to the Yale Banner, the university’s yearbook, Bartlett lived at 92 George Street in New Haven. [19] He received his MD degree in 1855 and returned to Maryland where he opened a medical practice. He continued to practice medicine while also serving as superintendent of public schools of Garrett County until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. [20]

In 1863, Bartlett joined the “Maryland Line” in the Army of the Confederate States of America, serving as a surgeon. The Maryland Line was an all-volunteer force made up of Maryland residents who, despite their home state remaining in the Union, decided to fight for the Confederacy (Figure 4). As was the case in other border states, such as Kentucky and Missouri, public opinion in Maryland during the Civil War was divided, with many residents in the northern and western parts of the state favoring the Union, while residents in the southern portion of the state, especially the Chesapeake Bay area, tended to support the southern cause. Maryland remained a Union state throughout the Civil War, but that did not stop some Marylanders – including Bartlett – from joining the Confederacy even though he lived in Garrett County, which was the northern and western-most county in the state. [21]

Crossland Banner

Figure 4. The Crossland Banner, which was the state flag of Maryland secessionists who joined the joined the Confederacy during the Civil War. Source: Wikimedia Commons, accessed August 10, 2023.

Bartlett survived the Civil War, but once it was over, he went to Cuba, where slavery would remain legal until 1886. It is not clear why Bartlett went to Cuba at this time, but we can assume he lived at his childhood home, La Carolina, which the family still owned. Perhaps he was considering a career in plantation agriculture, or he simply desired to escape to a world where slavery was still possible. In any case, he was not in Cuba for long. He returned to Maryland in 1867, where he remained for most of his remaining years. He practiced medicine there until his death in 1913. [22]

As is the case with Carlos Ribeiro of Brazil and Edward Sprowl of Louisiana, we do not know why Edward Bartlett of Cuba chose Yale, specifically, as the place where he would study medicine. By the antebellum period, Yale College had a nation-wide reputation, but the medical school did not. Although there were many students from far-flung places, the vast majority of Yale medical students came from Connecticut and New York, which suggests that that school’s reputation was primarily regional. Bartlett’s father was from New England, so it is possible that he had heard of the school and had encouraged his son to study medicine there. Yet, George Bartlett also had connections to Pennsylvania, which begs the question of why, if he had indeed encouraged his son to attend medical school, did he not suggest the much-better-known medical college in Philadelphia, which was a leading center in the education of southern medical students? Ultimately, this question of “why Yale?” pervades much of our work at the Yale School of Medicine and Slavery Project, and it remains largely unanswered. What we do know about these three men is that their time at Yale School of Medicine did nothing to significantly change their views on slavery. None of them emancipated enslaved people or turned down money from slavery. Eventually, all of them returned to plantations.

Figure 5. Emblem of the Calliopean Society (ca. 1819). Source: Wikimedia Commons, accessed August 10, 2023.

Their persistent allegiance to slavery may have been aided by the fact that it was acceptable to hold such views while studying at Yale. In fact, there were societies that students could join if they wished to discuss those views openly. One such society was the Calliopean Society (Figure 5), which formed in 1819 when several members of Yale’s primary debating society, the Linonian Society, grew dissatisfied and decided to form their own debating group. The Calliopean Society, which had a southern identity, disbanded in 1853, likely due to declining membership and mounting debt issues. However, an organization bearing the same name was revived as a “conservative political society” in 1950. [23]

It was not unusual for the Calliopean Society to take up debate questions pertaining to the politics of slavery and race. For example, during a meeting on April 5, 1820, members discussed “would it be beneficial to the United States to colonize the blacks?” On that, the group “decided in the negative.” On January 7, 1829, they asked “should the tarif [sic] be abolished?” and “decided in the affirmative.” This question may have been a reference to the federal tariff of 1828, which levied a thirty-eight to forty-five percent tax on imported goods. It was vehemently denounced in the South, where its detractors called it the “Tariff of Abominations,” claiming it would stifle the southern (slavery-based) economy. [24] The society also devoted several meetings in the 1820s and 1830s to the question of “ought negroes be permitted to vote?” Every time, the results were “decided unanimously in the negative." A large proportion of Calliopean Society members hailed from southern states, but a fair number of members came from New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. There is no mention of Edward Bartlett or Edward Sprowl on membership lists, but there is an entry for “Carlos Ferdinand Ribeiro,” who joined the society in 1835. [25]

List of the 1835 Calliopean Society members, including Carlos Ribeiro, in the Catalogue of the Calliopean Society : Yale College, 1839

Figure 6. Calliopean Society (Yale University). Catalogue of the Calliopean Society: Yale College, 1839. (New Haven:  B.L. Hamlin, 1839), 23.

Another aspect of the Medical Institution of Yale College that may have appealed to slave-holding students was the school’s student body. Although the vast majority of students came from New England and New York, there were many other students from the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Brazil during the antebellum period and in the decades that followed. Some Cuban students, such as William Dolz of Havana, Cuba, and Arthur Rodolfo Groso of Villaclara, Cuba, attended in the early 1870s, when slavery was still legal in Cuba. There were also students who came from British colonies such as Trinidad, Barbados, and New Brunswick, Canada, before slavery was finally phased out in those territories in the 1830s. One student, Manuel Canales of San Juan, Puerto Rico, attended in 1837-1839, well before slavery was outlawed there in 1873. [26] Any of these students may have had financial, familial, personal, and political connections to slavery that resembled those of Ribero, Sprowl, and Bartlett.

Much more research remains to be done investigating other enslaving students who came to the Medical Institution of Yale College.  These exemplars are suggestive of a larger group of students who likely benefited from, or were directly financed by, enslaved capital. Moreover, all three enslaving students discussed in this essay attended medical lecture sessions at Yale over a full three-year period. Faculty were willing to teach enslavers, and enslaving students did not feel alienated from Yale culture, which could have led them to finish their educations elsewhere. Perhaps, for some enslaving students, the question of “why Yale?” had a relatively simple answer: they felt they belonged.

Endnotes

1. Matriculation information, course registration information, preceptor assignments, and place of origin for Ribeiro, Franco de Sá, and Lima can be found in Folder 1: Student Affairs: Register (1835-49), box 1 in School of Medicine, Yale University, Matriculation Books, Registers, and Grade Books (RU 455), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
    
2. We would like to thank Ian Read for these insights on nineteenth-century Maranhão’s connections to the United States and the Atlantic world more broadly.
    
3. For biographic details see Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Notes of Graduates of Yale College (New Haven: 1913), 292-93.
    
4. On Ribeiro’s family see Lena Castello Branco Ferreira de Freitas, “Mulheres: Sombras Tênues da História?” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de Goiás, no. 28 (Goiânia: Editora Kelps, 2017): 55-84. pp. 63-64; more on the Ribeiro family and its role in the political economy of Maranhão can be found in Jerônimo de Viveiros, História do Comércio do Maranhão, 1612-1895, 2 vols. (São Luís: Associação Comercial do Maranhão, 1954).
    
5. On Ribeiro’s ownership of plantations and enslaved people, and his political career, see Ferreira de Freitas, “Mulheres: Sombras Tênues da História?” 63-64.
    
6. Ferreira de Freitas, “Mulheres: Sombras Tênues da História?,” 64-66; and again, we would like to thank Ian Read for leading us to this case.
    
7. On the role of agronomists and other agricultural scientists in nineteenth-century slavery, see for example Rafael Marquese and Dale Tomich, “Slavery in the Paraíba Valley and the Formation of the World Coffee Market in the Nineteenth Century” in Atlantic Transformations: Empire, Politics, and Slavery during the Nineteenth Century, ed. Dale Tomich (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020), 193-224; Cathal Smith, “Second Slavery, Second Landlordism, and Modernity: A Comparison of Antebellum Mississippi and Nineteenth-Century Ireland,” Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 2 (2015): 204–30; Stuart McCook, States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760-1760 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); on physicians see for example Steven Palmer, “From Plantation to Academy: Slavery and the Production of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century,” in Health and Medicine in the Circum-Caribbean, 1800–1968, eds. Juanita de Barros, Steven Palmer, and David Wright (London: Routledge, 2010) and Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
    
8. Background on the Brown family can be found in Ricky L. Sherrod, “Strong Southern Women: Female Leadership on the Northwest Louisiana Frontier,” Louisiana History 52, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 5-34. pp. 6-9.
    
9. Sherrod, “Strong Southern Women,” 19-21.
    
10. Sherrod, “Strong Southern Women,” 21.
     
11. Succession of John P. Sprowl (March 1, 1843) in Book 18, p. 191, Natchitoches Parish County Clerk’s Office (as quoted in Sherrod, “Strong Southern Women,” 24).
     
12. Sherrod, “Strong Southern Women,” 23-25.
     
13. Sherrod, “Strong Southern Women,” 25.
     
14. For more on the economic significance of Matanzas and its high number of New England planter families during this period see Stephen M. Chambers, No God but Gain: The Untold Story of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Making of the United States (New York: Verso, 2015).
     
15. Manuel Barcia, The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825: Cuba and the Fight for Freedom in Matanzas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 81.
     
16.  Barcia, The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825, 112.
     
17. Biographical details on George Bartlett can be found in Vital Records of Haverhill, Massachusetts to the End of the Year 1849, 2 vols. (Topsfield, Mass.: Topsfield Historical Society, 1910-1911), 1: 30; biographical details on Edward Bartlett can be found in Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Yale's Confederates: A Biographical Dictionary (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008), 12.
     
18. Hughes, Yale's Confederates, 12.
     
19. Yale Banner 12, no. 1 (September 26, 1855) in Accession-2015-M-025, box 1, folder 3, Silliman Family Papers (MS 450), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
     
20. Supplement to the Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University, 1910-1911 to 1914-1915 (New Haven: Yale University, 1916), 947-948.
     
21. Hughes, Yale's Confederates, 12; for more on the Maryland Line and Maryland history during the Civil War see David K. Graham, Loyalty on the Line: Civil War Maryland in American Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018).
     
22. Hughes, Yale's Confederates, 12.
     
23. See the finding aid for the collection “Calliopean Society, Yale College, Records,” Archives at Yale, https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/2518, accessed August 10, 2023; see also David Alan Richards, Skulls and Keys: The Hidden History of Yale's Secret Societies (New York: Pegasus Books, 2017).
     
24. For more on this tariff and other federal-level political conflicts leading up to the Civil War see Matthew J. Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016); and William J. Cooper, The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828–1856 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978). All debate topics mentioned here can be found in box 2, folder 11, Calliopean Society Records, Yale College Records (RU 857), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
     
25. Catalogues of members for the first three decades can be found in box 1, folders 2 and 3, RU 857, Calliopean Society Records, Yale College Records (RU 857), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; and for Ribeiro’s name see the membership list for 1835 in box 1, folder 3.
     
26. All of these students can be found in the catalogues from 1813-1880. See Yale University, University Catalogue (1813-1977). EliScholar Digital Collections, Yale University Libraries, https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yale_catalogue/, accessed August 10, 2023.