Fugitive Science
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Fugitive Science

Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture

Britt Rusert

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Fugitive Science

Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture

Britt Rusert

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About This Book

Exposes the influential work of a group of black artists to confront and refute scientific racism. Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Britt Rusert uncovers the dynamic experiments of a group of black writers, artists, and performers. Fugitive Science chronicles a little-known story about race and science in America. While the history of scientific racism in the nineteenth century has been well-documented, there was also a counter-movement of African Americans who worked to refute its claims. Far from rejecting science, these figures were careful readers of antebellum science who linked diverse fields—from astronomy to physiology—to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of knowledge creation. Routinely excluded from institutions of scientific learning and training, they transformed cultural spaces like the page, the stage, the parlor, and even the pulpit into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation. From the recovery of neglected figures like Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to new accounts of Martin Delany, Henry Box Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Fugitive Science makes natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature and culture. This distinct and pioneering book will spark interest from anyone wishing to learn more on race and society.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2017
ISBN
9781479805723

1

The Banneker Age

Black Afterlives of Early National Science

In many ways, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785, 1787) is the ur-text against which fugitive science defined itself in the early national and antebellum periods. Jefferson’s Notes served as the touchstone for anti-racist science stretching from Benjamin Banneker’s correspondence with Jefferson in 1791 to James McCune Smith’s formative essay “On the Fourteenth Query of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia” in 1859.1 Gene Andrew Jarrett argues that Notes is the founding text of a rich political genealogy of African American literature.2 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has long argued that early African American writing took shape as a refutation of Jefferson’s claims about African inferiority and that Notes also loomed large over the criticism of early black writing.3 This chapter shows that Notes also served as the “founding text” for a vibrant genealogy of black scientific discourse in the United States, which, like the political history of early African American literature, sought to wrench science and philosophy from white supremacists and slavery apologists in order to “represent the race”4 on different terms. I place this genealogy of black writing on Notes in an extended early national period to bring attention to a history of black engagements with Jefferson and Jeffersonian science that persisted from the 1790s until the eve of the Civil War. Indeed, from its continued engagement with Jeffersonian science to its ongoing commitments to climatic, monogenetic theories of evolution in the face of the rise of American polygenesis, early national science was kept alive in a somewhat surprising place—namely, antebellum black culture.5 Eighteenth-century theories about the flexible and changeable nature of race—what Katy Chiles calls “transformable race”—while not without their own problems, were clearly superior to polygenetic theories that sought to, in Frederick Douglass’s words, echoing David Walker, “read the negro out of the human family.”6 The perceived need among African Americans to continue fighting against Notes long after its publication speaks to both the cultural power of this text and the ways that Jefferson’s theories, while somewhat idiosyncratic in the 1780s, found an ally in the American school of ethnology’s enthusiasm for polygenesis and the pro-colonization debates of the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, Jefferson’s black interlocutors were also at least partly responsible for keeping Notes alive into the antebellum period. But rather than preserving Notes as a sacrosanct founding document, black writers mobilized Notes as an object of critique and as a continual impetus to engage in what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call “black study.”7
This chapter draws attention to black writing that took aim at Jeffersonian science across several decades, particularly the sophisticated and sometimes surprising interventions of James McCune Smith. McCune Smith’s stunningly artful writing on science and medicine also stands as an exemplar of the consistent creativity and occasional eccentricity of fugitive science. While some African American responses to Notes took the form of essays, letters, and pamphlets, black writers also turned to the genre of ethnology itself to rewrite Jefferson’s ethnological theories of race in his natural history of Virginia. This chapter thus begins a two-chapter focus on the complex ways that black intellectuals responded to American ethnology and crafted their own ethnological texts. In broad terms, ethnology is the natural history of the human race, a subfield of natural history devoted to the classification of humans rather than nonhuman fauna and flora. Nineteenth-century ethnology was connected to the origins of anthropology, but it did not rely on the sustained empirical observation of specific groups and cultures to ground its claims. In this way, ethnology is much more theoretical—discussing the groupings of people in various climates in broad strokes—than the ethnographic mode found, for example, in Darwin’s detailed description of various peoples and tribes in Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific in Voyage of the Beagle (1839).8 This first chapter includes treatment of black ethnologies whenever they explicitly responded to Jefferson’s Notes. In the next chapter, I delve into ethnology more deeply to explore how this hybrid genre enabled rich speculative theorizations of kinship as well as a means through which black writers challenged the visual evidence of race science. The discussion below of James W. C. Pennington’s efforts to reconstruct the lines of kinship denied by Jefferson, who linked Africans to apes rather than to other humans, also serves as a bridge to Chapter 2’s more sustained focus on speculative kinship in black ethnology.
Jefferson’s Notes holds a complicated place in early African American culture. While antebellum black newspapers routinely lambasted Jefferson for his damaging comments on African inferiority, contributors were just as likely to cull Notes for remarks on the despotism of slavery and the eventual inevitability of “total emancipation” for the enslaved, thus making Jefferson an unlikely prophet for the coming of abolition.9 More broadly, Jefferson was an important figure for black activists and writers because he embodied the contradictions that lay at the heart of the American republic: the author of the Declaration of Independence, a document that insisted on the injustices of American “enslavement” to the British crown, he was at the same time among the founding fathers who maintained their positions as slaveholders. A fierce critic of black equality, he took one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, as a concubine and manumitted the children she had for/with him. In this way, Jefferson stood in for the hypocrisy of American democracy, of a freedom-loving nation that kept people in chains.
At the same time as black intellectuals like David Walker, James W. C. Pennington, and James McCune Smith crafted critiques of Notes on the State of Virginia, they also presented themselves as heirs to Jefferson’s scientific legacy. While the Jefferson as “father” trope is hard to shake in the history of fugitive science, this chapter suggests that the black afterlives of early national science might be also understood as a rich inheritance from Benjamin Banneker, who was also being widely cited and memorialized by African Americans in the antebellum period. In an 1837 issue of the Colored American that reprinted Banneker’s famous letter to Jefferson under the title “Slander Refuted,” a subsequent editorial note celebrates Banneker’s contributions, saying that his letter is “worthy the age of Washington, of Jefferson, of Adams and of Franklin—AND WE ADD OF BANNEKER.”10 From the many recirculations of Banneker’s letter to a rich genealogy of black responses to Notes that built on and extended Banneker’s critique of Jefferson, African Americans in the antebellum period imagined a new scientific era: the Banneker Age.
Beginning in the early nineteenth century, African Americans took Banneker’s limited archive and began contributing to it. Such nineteenth-century contributions to the Banneker archive—a type of retrospective, but also supplemental archive—might be understood as a form of archival redress that also inaugurated a vibrant history of black science writing in the antebellum period.11 The diachronic approach to the Banneker archive in this chapter, one that is attentive to the black afterlives of early national science as well as the robust antebellum memorializations of Banneker, also invites new stories about Banneker himself, both within and beyond the Banneker-Jefferson exchange.

Jefferson, Banneker, and the Origins of Fugitive Science

The history of African American science before the Civil War often begins and ends with Benjamin Banneker. And yet, documentation surrounding the life and work of the most important black American man of science in the eighteenth century is quite scarce: he is, at this point, a well-known figure about whom we know relatively little. Existing artifacts and documents, including Banneker’s famous almanacs, the wooden clock he constructed, and his carefully crafted letter to Jefferson, all remain important and rich resources, but the lack of additional original sources points to the fact that the silences and gaps that define the archive of slavery are also constitutive of the archives of nominal freedom. The slimness of the Banneker archive further points to the elusiveness of African American science in the eighteenth century, a science that clearly existed in many vernacular forms, ranging from the practice of enslaved healers on Southern plantations to the maritime science practiced by black sailors, but had not yet been captured by an emerging print sphere.
Some of what is known amounts to this: Banneker, the Baltimore County, Maryland, freeman, tobacco farmer, astronomer, surveyor, and polymath answered Thomas Jefferson’s skepticism about the intellectual capabilities of the African race in Notes by sending Jefferson a copy of his recently prepared almanac in manuscript, accompanied by a letter.12 The letter also petitions Jefferson, then Secretary of State, to end his silence on the slavery question and to take up the cause of the country’s black population in earnest. Banneker addresses Jefferson as a friend to “those of my complexion,” a comrade to the cause against the censure and abuse of black people, but then proceeds to boldly embed his own response to Jefferson’s Query XIV within the niceties and formalities of the eighteenth-century letter. In Query XIV of Notes, that most incendiary section of an otherwise uncontroversial text of natural history, Jefferson famously argued that blacks were inferior to whites in reason and seemed to completely lack imagination. Citing the poetry of “Phyllis Whately” and the letters of Ignatius Sancho, he notes that while Native Americans naturally produce works of art that display their capacity for reason and imagination, the Africans have shown no such examples. He writes, “But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.” According to Jefferson, peoples of African descent lacked the ability to elevate sensation into sentiment and to sublimate desire into love: “They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation.”13 These views are presented in order to forward Jefferson’s primary hypothesis in this section of the text: as beings of sensation, not sense and reason, the enslaved masses were unfit for self-government and could not be trusted to bear the responsibilities of freedom. This, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the central argument against which African American interlocutors built evidence and crafted their own arguments.
In response to Jefferson’s comments on the “distinctions” of nature that seemed to define the human race, as they did in the entire animal kingdom, Banneker’s letter reminds Jefferson of something with which he, as a Christian, must certainly agree: that our “one universal Father hath given being to us all, and that he hath not only made us all of one flesh, but that he hath also without partiality afforded us all the same sensations, and end[ow]ed us all with the same faculties, and that however variable we may be in society or religion, however diversifyed in situation or colour, we are all of the same family, and stand in the same relation to him.”14 Undercutting his opening address of Jefferson as a “friend,” a later clause asks Jefferson to “wean” himself from his anti-black prejudice. Banneker also answered Jefferson’s comments on black difference and inferiority. In Query XIV, Jefferson famously requested further evidence of black intelligence, and Banneker sent the almanac as such a “proof.” It is further likely that Banneker was responding specifically to Jefferson’s comment in Notes that “one [African] could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.”15 Here, Banneker suggested, and the almanac proved, was one who could. In response to Jefferson’s glib comment that he simply could not find an African endowed with the capacities for reason and imagination, Banneker urged him to look harder.
Since scholars have often returned to the same set of documents to recover Banneker’s contributions, the archive seems to reproduce the same story about Banneker, again and again. The Banneker archive, in this way, fits with Michel Foucault’s understanding of the archive as first, a “law” that determines and limits what can be said, a discursive system that establishes its own rules of enunciability.16 For Foucault, the possibility of the archive is the fact that its discourses have just “ceased to be ours”: “its threshold of existence is established by the discontinuity that separates us from what we can no longer say, and from that which falls outside our discursive practice; it begins with the outside of our own language.”17 As an encounter with difference rather than identity, discontinuity rather than continuity, this is where the possibility of the archive resides. The Banneker-Jefferson encounter has been rehearsed and restaged, often at the expense of other narratives. “At once close to us, and different from our present existence,”18 the task here is to see what other stories might be told beyond the archive’s already authorized statements and how antebellum black interlocutors themselves approached the Banneker archive from their own historical position, just on the other side of that archive’s discursive practice and language.
In her biographical sketch of Banneker from 1854, Martha Ellicott Tyson, the daughter of Banneker’s Quaker benefactor and collaborator Andrew Ellicott, notes that Banneker would frequently receive mathematical problems from scholars across the country who wanted to test his intellectual capacities.19 According to Tyson, Banneker would never fail to return a correct solution, and his answers were often accompanied by additional “questions of his own composition composed in rhyme.” Tyson includes one such rhyme drawn from the memory of one of the “first agriculturalists in our state,” a man who “enjoyed many opportunities of seeing Banneker” in his youth: “Now, my worthy friend, find out if you can / The vessel’s dimensions, and comfort the man.”20 Tyson also refers to a “poetical letter,” in rhymed verse, that Banneker received from a woman named Susanna Mason. The poem circulated through local newspapers and in response to Mason’s encomium, Banneker penned an apologetic letter a year later stating that he was sorry he had been too ill to “gratify your curiosity” with one his poems.21 These elliptical, yet provocative comments from Tyson’s biographical sketch reveal that Banneker’s scientific writing was embedded in a network of poetic composition and letter exchange with white women, as well as the circulation of mathematical problems and answers in verse with white men.22 A 1791 letter from Andrew Ellicott’s son Elias to James Pemberton, president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Slavery, also includes a set of “Lines by B. Banneker”:
Behold ye Christians! And in pity see
Those Afric sons which nature formed free
Behold them in a fruitful country blest,
Of nature’s bounties see them rich possest.
Behold them here from torn by cruel force,
And doomed to slavery without remorse.
This act America, thy sons have known–
This cruel act re...

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