In Folha, Viana delves into the career of James McCune Smith
Reproduction of Marcelo Viana’s column in Folha de S. Paulo
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), who would later become the third president of the United States, wrote in 1785: “I advance, merely as a hypothesis, that blacks are inferior to whites in physical and mental endowments. This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculties, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.” It didn’t differ much from the racist speeches of other whites who questioned whether “the Negro can ever be elevated to the same level as the white citizen of this great Republic”.
For many, the hole was even deeper. Reverend Orville Dewey (1794-1882) pondered that “in Massachusetts we have had emancipation, and yet the negroes are worse off than the slaves of the South, who are well clothed, well fed, and happy”. And John Calhoun (1782-1850), Secretary of State, used data from the 1840 Census to conclude that freed blacks had worse mortality and insanity rates than enslaved people.
No one was better qualified to answer than James McCune Smith (1813-1865), the first black American doctor and the leading intellectual of the abolitionist movement, with his extensive knowledge of medicine and statistics. Smith drew up statistical tables to prove that free blacks in the North had school performance comparable to that of whites and that they lived longer and had fewer mental illnesses than their enslaved counterparts in the South.
“A Dissertation on the Influence of Climate on Longevity”, published in 1846, is his most refined statistical work. In it, Smith lucidly exposes the fallacies in Calhoun’s arguments: the mortality and disease rates of freed blacks have nothing to do with their living conditions, but rather with the fact that they are older than enslaved blacks, on average, since freedom was achieved late in life. The correct comparison, he insists, is between the life expectancy at birth of freed and enslaved people, and this is where the slavery arguments fall apart.
In his reply to Jefferson, “On Jefferson’s Fourteenth Question”, published in 1859, Smith begins by gently suggesting that the subject of “elevation” be left aside, as it is poorly formulated: “Who is higher? The master – learned, shrewd, ingenious, builder of splendid machines, legislator, successful financier, perspicacious philosopher – with a whip in his hand? Or the poor Christian slave – chest heaving, eyes filled with tears, flesh torn – trembling under the whip as he prays to God to soften the heart of his experienced torturer?”.
Instead, he proposes that the question should be: “Can blacks and whites live together in harmony, all contributing to the peace and prosperity of the country?”. And he goes on to methodically debunk the supposed differences between the races that would lead to their incompatibility. His text is concise, precise, relentless without ever losing its softness. It was a surprisingly enjoyable read, I recommend it.