Read Online Ebony and Ivy by Craig Steven Wilder - Free Book Online Page A

the Civil War accelerated the politicization of science and the institutionalization of race.
    Whistelo
’s spectacle came largely from the hubris of science, law, and modernity, but the evidence explained more about the life of Lucy Williams, described as a “mulattress” and a “yellow woman,” than about her child’s paternity. In April 1806 Alexander Whistelo propositioned Williams, telling her that he was divorced and never intended to return to his wife. “I refused,” she recalled, “for I did not choose to have him—I did not love him.” Cast by the defense as a whore, a woman of low character, questionable morals, and a liar, Williams provided a reluctant and poignant account of the violent events that led to her pregnancy. Under the guise of going to visit his female cousin, Whistelo took Lucy Williams to a “bad house,” where he locked her in and forced himself upon her. Under cross-examination, Williams also admitted that a white man later “turned the black man out [of bed] with a pistol” and took his place. She fought this attacker too, but was overpowered and again raped. Later that spring, when Whistelo returned to New York City from a tour at sea, Williams told him that she was pregnant. She was certain that he was the father because she believed the sexual connection with the white attacker insufficient for conception. On January 23, 1807, Lucy Williams gave birth to a girl. 1
    Troubled by the baby’s complexion—lighter than those of LucyWilliams and Alexander Whistelo—the commissioners of the almshouse, where Williams and the child were being supported, turned to the magistrate’s court to rule on paternity under a new state bastardy law. Reproduction and fertility within and between the varied branches of humankind, however categorized, were a core fascination of race research. The court could access more than a century of compiled knowledge on this subject. European encounters with and observations of the colored world quickly worked their way into the academy. Such exchanges—both scientific and those that amounted to little more than global gossip—fed a historic intellectual engagement with the anthropology of the Americas, Africa, and Asia.
    During June and July 1808 the judges took sworn statements from the region’s leading physicians and researchers. Dr. Joshua Secor, who delivered the child, testified to the infant’s appearance at birth. George Anthon, a professor and trustee at Columbia College, was the first outside expert to address the court. Dr. Anthon pointed to Williams’s and Whistelo’s “woolly” hair as proof the defendant could not have fathered the child, whose hair “has every appearance of its being the offspring of a white person.” David Hosack, who had employed Whistelo as a coachman, also determined that the father had to be a white man or light mulatto man. Dr. Hosack had attended the College of New Jersey (Princeton), earned a medical degree in 1791 from the University of Pennsylvania, and then finished his training at the University of Edinburgh. At the time of the trial he taught surgery, clinical medicine, physic, obstetrics, and midwifery at Columbia and at Queen’s College (Rutgers). Wright Post, professor of surgery at Columbia, explained the science behind the seeming consensus that Whistelo was not the father: “When persons of different colors have connection together,” he instructed, “their offspring is generally of a color approaching to a mixture of both the father and the mother.” 2
    The case might have ended there if not for the court’s predisposition to hold Alexander Whistelo accountable and for the statements of two nonconforming doctors: Samuel L. Mitchill and Edward Miller. Professor of physic and clinical medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, Milleroffered something of a